From Mosaic:
The Onslaught against the Jews Is an Onslaught against the West; How the Palestinian narrative exploited a self-destructive weakness in Western society.
by Melanie Phillips, 12/26/24
You might have thought that after the October 7 onslaught the world would have shown sympathy to Israel. Instead, apparently triggered by the single biggest attack on Jews since the Holocaust, much of the so-called civilized world has turned against Israel and the Jewish people.
We’re witnessing scenes that none of us thought we’d ever see again. A few days ago, a synagogue in Melbourne was set on fire with people inside it. Last month, after a football match between Dutch and Israeli teams in Amsterdam, mobs of Muslims hunted down Jews in the streets—in their own words, hunting them as Jews. They beat and stabbed them and ran them over with cars. Some Jews jumped into the canals to escape.
Attacks on Jews worldwide are at record levels. In France there’s been a string of anti-Semitic murders of Jews and numerous violent attacks.
On campuses in Britain, North America, and Australia there have been hideous levels of anti-Semitism and intimidation of Jewish students. At an Oxford Union debate last week, on a motion branding Israel an “apartheid state responsible for genocide,” which was overwhelmingly passed, the pro-Israel side—which included the son of a Holocaust survivor and two Arabs, one born in Israel and other in the disputed territories of the West Bank—were shouted down and abused with obscenities while the opposing side praised the October 7 attacks as “heroic.”
In United Kingdom, there have been anti-Israel demonstrations week after week with calls to wage jihad, “globalize the intifada,” and destroy the Jewish state. Although such incitement is against British law, the police mostly just stand by.
The International Criminal Court has launched arrest warrants against Israel’s prime minister and former defense minister for war crimes and crimes against humanity, while the International Court of Justice has denounced Israel for “illegal occupation.” All these legal actions are based on grotesque lies provided by international actors who want Israel destroyed.
It’s as if both Stalin and Hitler are enjoying a posthumous propaganda victory. There appears to have been a total collapse of reason and rationality. Evidence is dismissed. Facts no longer have traction.
So how should we explain this? And what can we do about it?
There are three kinds of anti-Semites who matter: Muslims, liberals, and the hard left. There is a fourth group—the extreme right—but although this is a growing problem, it’s insignificant relative to the other three.
Once upon a time, the hard left wouldn’t have been given the time of day. Now, though, it’s on a roll because of the other two groups, Muslims and liberals. All three have created what’s known as the red-black alliance (black being the color of choice for Islamists). By liberals, I’m referring to traditional liberals and center-leftists—in other words the entire progressive world.
Muslims and liberal progressives are feeding off each other not just because they find common cause in attacking Israel and the Jewish people. Both are also finding common cause in attacking the West itself. We can only understand what’s happening if we realize that we’re looking at a worldwide war on both the Jews and the free world. The two are intimately connected. This is why.
The street demonstrations have been represented as either a protest for the Palestinian Arabs in Gaza or an attack on Israel. Both descriptions miss the point.
This was revealed by the very first such demonstration, which was mainly by Muslims and took place on October 7 itself while the attack in Israel was still going on. This demonstration wasn’t a protest about anything. It was instead an ecstatic celebration of the slaughter of Jews. The Islamists believed that their moment had come.
October 7 fired the starting gun for what they understood to be the final and victorious onslaught. Having broken through Israel’s ostensibly impregnable defenses, they thought that they were now on the way to destroying Israel altogether. Then the path would be open for the defeat of the West.
There’s been nothing spontaneous about these demonstrations. They’ve been organized from the start by an alliance composed of Hamas and other Muslim Brotherhood groups, the hard left, and Western Palestinian activists. This has followed years of softening up the West through a sustained and wildly successful campaign of manipulation, infiltration, and intimidation over both Israel and Islam.
Anti-Israel indoctrination has gone on for decades and long colonized the universities. Billions of dollars have been devoted to frying the minds of the Western intelligentsia. At the same time, there have been decades of Muslim subversion, intimidation, and violence in the West in addition to repeated terrorist attacks.
In France over the past few years, three men have been beheaded by radicalized Muslims. In Sweden, where in some areas violence is out of control and has overwhelmed the police, 85 percent of shooting suspects are first- or second-generation immigrants from countries such as Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
In Britain, a teacher at a school in West Yorkshire is still in hiding for his life three years after he displayed a cartoon of Islam’s founder, Mohammad, to a class discussing the limits of free speech.
In 2013 it was revealed that, in some schools in the Midlands city of Birmingham, Muslim parents were hounding school principals and manipulating appointments in order to adapt the curriculum and school practices to Islamic precepts. Despite the fact that an official report stated that not only had this happened in Birmingham, but the attempt to Islamize British schools was also likely happening up and down the country, the government buried the report and proceeded to ignore the problem. Anyone who talks about it is immediately branded Islamophobic.
During this year’s general election, no fewer than five parliamentary seats were won by “independents” running on a “Gaza Palestine” platform—of zero relevance to British voters—and a Muslim political bloc emerged making demands to treat Israel as a pariah and adapt Britain to Islamic precepts. Any criticism of this platform, or indeed warnings about anything associated with Islam or Muslims, is also classified as “Islamophobia.” Those issuing such warnings or criticism are denounced as racists, xenophobes, and Islamophobes.
The wider context for this is that the British establishment has long refused to believe it is facing a religious war mounted by the Islamic world. It views the anti-Israel demonstrations as a free-speech issue, whereas what’s taking place there is in fact the beating of jihadist war drums.
But then, faced with the thousands of radicalized Islamists in the country, the British establishment believes this is merely a generalized problem of “extremism.” It refuses to acknowledge it as a very specific problem of Islamist extremism rooted in Islamic theology.
As a report last year revealed, Britain’s anti-radicalization program, Prevent, focuses on the far right—even though at least 80 percent of people being watched by the MI5 security service are Islamists, the vast majority of terrorist plots are Islamist plots, and the threat from the far right, although growing, is relatively small.
In response to a campaign to criminalize criticism of Islam, the prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, said he would tackle “Islamophobia in all its forms,” although the government subsequently ruled out introducing a blasphemy law.
Government ministers also refuse to identify the problem of anti-Semitism unless it’s paired with Islamophobia. That’s made it impossible to deal with Muslim anti-Semitism, a principal driver of attacks on Jews in Britain and throughout the West.
Why are the authorities in the West behaving in such a craven manner?
One obvious reason is fear, given the number of Muslims in the population and the violence and intimidation emanating from that community. The proportion of Muslims in Britain is estimated to rise from about 6 percent today to more than 16 percent by 2050, in France from almost 9 percent to more than 17 percent and in Germany from 6 percent to more than 19 percent.
But that doesn’t explain why there’s been so little pushback and why this intimidation has been allowed to increase. It doesn’t explain why liberal governments in Britain, Australia, and Canada, and the Biden administration in the U.S., all condemn Israel for behavior on the battlefield of which it is blameless. It doesn’t explain why the grotesque accusation of genocide leveled against Israel isn’t just laughed out of court as utterly ridiculous.
The reason for all this goes far beyond mere fear. Western elites are in the grip of ideologies that have made it simply impossible for them to see what’s actually happening. We’re looking at an astounding reversal of reality. We’ve gone through the looking glass, where truths are lies and lies are truth. We’re dealing with a totally sealed system of thought.
Countless numbers of people really do think that Israel is behaving badly. They really do think that when Jews defend Israel they are using anti-Semitism as a shield to deflect acknowledgement of Israel’s alleged crimes. They really do think that Israel drives events in the Middle East; they don’t think that Russia, Syria, or Iran drive those events through their aggression, but instead that Israel drives them through defending itself against them.
And these Western Israel-haters really do think that they themselves represent the political center-ground—and that those defending Israel are therefore extremists.
What’s happened is that conscience itself has been turned inside out. International law, humanitarian organizations, and the human-rights establishment—the United Nations, the International Criminal Court, the International Court of Justice, the big NGOs like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch—have all taken the place of biblical religion as the arbiters of truth, justice, and morality. But in fact they have collapsed truth, justice, and morality. They are all merely propaganda outfits engaged in a war of delegitimization against Israel based on falsehoods and distortions.
How on earth did this happen?
The Palestinian narrative has exploited a self-destructive weakness in Western society. For several decades, Western elites have held that the West was born in the sins of racism and colonialism and that therefore national identity in the West is itself intrinsically evil.
These elites set out to create a new culture that would usher in the utopia of the brotherhood of man and eradicate hatred, prejudice, and war. The West no longer had the right to say it was better than any other culture. That was “racism.” The Western nation-state, they said, had created hatred, prejudice, and war.
The culture and laws of Western nations therefore had to be trumped by universalist institutions and laws such as the UN, international law, and “human rights” legislated by international courts.
This thinking was developed after the Holocaust by mostly Jewish lawyers, jurists, and other activists to make international human-rights law into a defense mechanism to protect Jews and other powerless minorities who were the victims of their own governments.
Right from the start, however, there were warnings that this was a trap for the Jewish people. Only a democratic nation would safeguard diaspora Jews, it was argued, because international tribunals would have no democratic roots and would become theaters of politics rather than courts of law. And universalist bodies like this were bound to be hostile to the very particularist Jewish nation-state.
So it has proved. The entire establishment of human-rights law, courts, tribunals, NGOs, and the UN itself has Israel in its sights and abuses it as it abuses no other nation.
Liberal progressives can’t ever admit, however, that international law and the humanitarian establishment are a source of evil because they’re hung up on the ideal of the brotherhood of man and the belief that the nation-state is the source of prejudice and war.
It follows from this utopian thinking that war is always wrong. As John Lennon sang, there’s nothing to fight or die for—because there’s no nation to value or defend. Everything must be resolved instead through negotiation and compromise.
But Israel—the paradigmatic nation-state—certainly believes there’s something to fight and die for. That something is its continued existence. So it gets in the way of Western progressive thinking because it refuses to negotiate its own demise.
As a result, whatever happens is deemed to be its own fault. If Israelis died on October 7, goes this thinking, that was Israel’s fault. If Palestinian Arabs are killed in Gaza, it is Israel’s fault. And to the Western liberal, it makes no difference if those Palestinian Arabs were killed in a just war fought to stop their own genocidal aggression. The only thing that matters to the Western progressive is if the result is dead Palestinian Arabs.
So why don’t such progressives care about dead Jews? The answer to that suggests something much darker still.
For decades, liberal progressives have been hollowing out Western society. They have mounted an onslaught on the traditional family, on education as the transmission of the culture, and on the idea of the nation itself. They have sought to destroy the building blocks of Western society. And the most fundamental of those building blocks is the moral code of the Jewish people.
Judaism gave the world its notion of individual conscience, the internalization of right and wrong, respect for human life, moral responsibility, and duty to others.
Today, duty to others has been replaced by putting yourself first. Moral responsibility has been replaced by victim groups claiming a free pass for their misdeeds on the basis that as victims they can do no wrong while their perceived oppressors can do no right. Objective truth has been abolished. Everything is instead relative, a matter of subjective opinion.
Without objective truth, however, reason and rationality go out the window. Evidence and facts become irrelevant. What matters instead is feelings. If people feel oppressed or offended, they are deemed to be actually oppressed and someone has to be held to account for causing them offence.
This nonsense derives from the Marxist idea that all relationships are expressions of power and powerlessness. One result has been that, while the Palestinian Arabs are viewed as helpless victims, the Jews are viewed as oppressors and never as victims because Jews are seen to wield disproportionate economic, political, and cultural power.
So it’s not surprising that a civilization that has come to hate and despise itself and wants to replace itself also hates and despises the Jews, whose doctrines, precepts, and beliefs lie at the very heart of that civilization.
Jews are the West’s conscience. But conscience is a nuisance. It gets in the way of self-interest. Worse, it works hand-in-hand with guilt. The West happens to be burdened with unbearable guilt over the Holocaust. To get rid of conscience, and to rid itself finally of the intolerable burden of guilt for the Nazi genocide, the West must accuse the Jews themselves of genocide and expel them from its mind and heart.
So is it all over for the West? Can it be saved from going over the edge of the cultural cliff? I believe it can, and I’ve written a book explaining how it can do so which will be published next month.
The essence of this crisis of civilization is the progressive abandonment by the West of the values of the Bible. In order to stop itself going over the edge of the cultural cliff, the West has to reconnect to those biblical values. This might seem a very tall order. After all, the West is increasingly secular and in some places virulently opposed to religion.
In fact, I would suggest that with the right leadership and approach this would be pushing at an open door. That’s because there’s a spiritual vacuum in the West that is actually causing a great deal of misery.
Islamism can also be pushed back, although this is becoming increasingly difficult. What’s required here is an emphatic reassertion of the West based on its culture, traditions, and values, an unapologetic attitude that prioritizes that traditional culture above all others and treasures its biblical core.
Muslims—and there are many in the West who are Muslim by birth and background but who are genuinely signed up to Western values—should be treated with respect like other minorities. But just like all other minorities, they must accept the overarching authority of core Western precepts.
To rescue the West, Jews and Christians must form a muscular alliance. Christians and others have much to learn from the Jewish people about the Jews’ unique selling point—cultural survival. The Jews have survived every attempt to destroy them as a people and as a religion, while every culture that has tried to get rid of them has itself disappeared.
For their part, diaspora Jews must change their own behavior. They must stop being “trembling Israelites” and junk their own accommodation with those liberal shibboleths that are leading the West to ruin.
They should start calling out Islamic anti-Semitism. They should dump the mantra used so appallingly by British Jews that Islamophobia is the same as anti-Semitism—a statement revealing that these British Jews understand neither concept.
They should start speaking home truths about the Middle East: that the Jews are the only people with a legal and moral right to the Land of Israel, and that Palestinian identity has been invented solely to write the Jews out of their own history in the land.
And they should renounce the liberal universalist precepts that are anti-Jewish and have undermined the West but which so many in America have told themselves are Jewish values.
If the West is to save its Jews and also save itself, it has to renounce those liberal universalist precepts. Most of today’s tsunami of anti-Semitism is taking place in countries with liberal governments: Britain, Canada, Australia, France, and Biden’s America. Governments like these with their anti-Israel attitudes are actively fanning the flames of anti-Semitism and attacks on Jews.
The safest place in Europe for Jews today is Hungary, where we’re told by received opinion that President Orban is a fascist and anti-Semite. As you say in America, go figure.
The unprecedented onslaught against the Jews has occurred because the Jews are central to Western civilization—a society against which the West itself has venomously and self-destructively turned. October 7 turbo-charged the West’s decades-long process of cultural suicide.
Can this be turned round? Can diaspora Jews be rescued? Only if the West decides to rescue itself.
Israel will survive because it has no alternative. Israel will prosper and grow because there the Jewish people know what they are, they love what they are, and as a result they want their nation to survive.
The Western culture that stands against the Jews is going down. The West will only survive if it decides to love us instead of disdaining us and trying to erase what makes the Jewish people special—which is what has made the West special too.
This is the Jewish moment. Israel understands this. Much of the Arab world has come to understand it. Now it’s time for the West and diaspora Jews to understand it too.
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