You have to be a paid Substack subscriber to read the entire column, but this excerpt expresses my own thoughts today and I'm sure the thoughts of most other Jews and Israelis on the third anniversary of the unforgiveably evil Hamas pogrom on Israel that left at least 1,200 souls dead.
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The West’s depraved reaction to the October 7 atrocities and the resulting war spells disaster not for Israel but for itself
Melanie Phillips, Substack, 10-7-26
This is the heartbreaking anniversary of a day of infamy. Three years ago today, the western world stared at the worst depravity of which human beings are capable and decided not to defend civilisation against barbarism.
It wasn’t merely that, on October 7 2023, terrible atrocities were perpetrated upon more than 1450 innocent souls in the State of Israel. On that day, a very great evil was unleashed throughout the west, an evil that three years later threatens to consume it altogether.
The obscenity of the demonstrations and other events taking place today in London and elsewhere to gloat at the slaughter of Jews and demand that the Islamists’ attempt to exterminate Israel must now be completed reflects the obscenity of the reaction to that onslaught throughout the west over the past three years.
On that dreadful day in 2023, some 1200 Israeli Jews, as well as some Israeli Muslim civilians and others who were in southern Israel at that time, were slaughtered by hundreds of Arabs from Gaza led by the storm-troopers of Hamas, all intent upon the destruction of Israel and the extermination of the Jews.
The victims were subjected to ritualistic, fanatical slaughter. They were raped, beheaded, mutilated, tortured and burned alive. Children were murdered in front of their parents. The bodies of Israeli women were raped after they had been killed.
And more than 250 Israelis, including babies and children, were abducted into Gaza, abused by local Gazans and incarcerated for months in the Hamas tunnels where they were tortured, starved and murdered.
According to hostages who survived, not one Gazan civilian they encountered treated them kindly. Not one Gazan civilian informed against their Hamas abductors or helped them escape.
Instead of rising to the support of the Israeli Jews targeted for such genocidal attack, the West turned against them. The atrocities were denied, even though the Hamas terrorists had filmed themselves on their Go-Pro cameras as they went about their infernal business.
On Western streets, posters depicting the babies and children, women and men kidnapped into Gaza were ripped down by western individuals whose faces were contorted with a hideous rage at the very idea that Israeli Jews could ever be victims.
Professing grotesquely to be standing for conscience and compassion, western liberals and their governments declared that Israel, engaged in a desperate war of self-defence against the genocidal war being perpetrated by Hamas and its sponsor Iran, was itself committing genocide and that the Israelis were guilty of war crimes.
Every single part of that libellous and preposterous inversion has been shown to be untrue. While Gazan civilians were killed during the war, along with the Hamas terrorists who were being targeted, the civilian population has continued to increase through babies continuing to be born.
It was Hamas and Iran that perpetrated war crimes by deliberately targeting Israel civilians for mass murder. In stark contrast, Israel went to lengths attempted by no other army in the world to save civilian lives by issuing systematic warnings to evacuate targeted buildings and regularly moving the civilian population out of harm’s way.
Despite the charges so disgracefully levelled by the UN and governments in Britain, Europe, Australia and Canada, there was no famine or starvation in Gaza. Even UN agencies have finally reported lower levels of malnutrition there than in other countries, and lower than they were in Gaza before the war.
Reporters and medical workers said to have been targeted by callous and reckless Israeli troops have steadily been shown to have been members of Hamas or other Islamic terrorist groups. No media outfit has owned up to the wicked thing they have done: systematically misrepresenting the war in Gaza and poisoning the western mind against Israel and the Jews by using “reporters” every one of whom was doing the bidding of Hamas.
Instead of dismissing the genocide libel as a preposterous inversion of reality, the West has actually absorbed it as a cultural meme mindlessly repeated by millions and that drives political discourse.
What has become ever more clear is that October 7 didn’t just spark an astounding repudiation of conscience and reason. It’s not just that so many millions in the West seem to have lost their minds.
More horrifying still is that, over these past three years, we have also witnessed a delirium, an ecstatic excitement throughout the West that Israel and the Jews are finally getting what they deserve.
On October 7 itself, even as Israelis continued to be slaughtered in those Hamas-led attacks and long before the Israelis launched their war in Gaza, the first Muslim-led demonstrations were staged on the streets of western cities.
Those marches and demonstrations that followed over the past three years were not principally protests against Israel, nor were they principally demonstrating support for the Palestinian Arabs of Gaza.
They were fundamentally inspired by an Islamic world delirious at what it thought was solid evidence that Israel was on the way to being destroyed — and that beyond that essential first stage now lay the prospect of destroying the West.
These were triumphalist demonstrations that Islam now ruled the streets of London and other Western cities. Buoyed by the support of Western “progressives” marching alongside them as they called for the destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews, the Islamists understood that the West was now their principal weapon against the Jewish people. And thus the West was also being suborned into signing its own civilisational death warrant.
With Western Jews under sustained and accelerating physical and verbal attack, with Zionism now being framed as an instrument of reputational death and with Jews and Israel singled out for demonisation, those “progressives” can barely contain their own excitement that at last the Jews are getting what was coming to them.
With Zionism, the self-determination of the Jewish people in their own ancestral homeland, being framed as demonic, antisemitism has been reframed as the attempt by Jews to use the claim of bigotry as a shield for their own misdeeds. What misdeeds, exactly? Well, controlling the world in their own interests and at the expense of everyone else, of course!
So Jews too, along with the Jewish state, have been framed as demonic. And exactly as Jews have experienced down through the generations, the deranged demonisation of Jews has once again been renamed as morality itself.
What we’ve been witnessing from such liberals singling out Israel for treatment they afford to no other nation or people on earth isn’t just racism or bigotry. By wiping the suffering of Israeli Jews out of the picture altogether, liberals who preach tolerance and respect for “the other” are actually in the business of dehumanising those they defame and despise.
The suffering and victimisation of Israeli Jews is literally being torn down from lamp-posts and walls in a frenzy of murderous rage. As they do to those pieces of paper that they claw down and shred, so these liberals would like to be done to the Jews themselves.
We have all been here before, many, many times.
Like ideological fanatics from the French revolution through both communism and Nazism, these frenzied Israel-haters are in effect members of a cult. Their brains have been so badly fried by indoctrination into the belief that their evil cause embodies virtue itself that they are only able to respond to appeals to truth, rationality and conscience by denying truth, rationality and conscience altogether and stamping venomously upon anyone who makes such an appeal.
Israel has emerged from October 7 deeply changed. The trauma it has endured will never be erased. But it has emerged stronger and more resilient than ever. The last illusions about the Palestinian Arabs were stripped away in the Go-Pro images of depraved slaughter and in the hellholes of the Gaza tunnels. It has also understood that to defend itself it can no longer rely on faithless allies.
Israel has rediscovered the deep love it has for itself as a Jewish nation, for the Jewish people and for their magnificent history. A new iron has entered into the already steely Israeli soul. Israel will survive and thrive because, faced with a cult of death, it embraces life.
The same cannot be said of the West. Its own depraved reaction to the October 7 atrocities and the most just of wars that has followed spells disaster not for Israel but for itself.
I explained this reaction in the book I published last year, The Builder’s Stone: How Jews and Christians built the West — and Why Only They Can Save It. In that book, I wrote that you can’t understand the West’s wild and unhinged response to October 7 and the war that has followed unless you understand what the West has been doing to itself for decades.
What follows here is an edited extract from the book’s first chapter.
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The remainder is for paid subscribers. But I'm sure you've gotten the general idea by now.
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