Let’s remember what happened three years ago today. A 6,000-strong army of Islamofascists invaded the Jewish nation. They used guns, rocket launchers, knives, axes and shovels to slaughter 1,182 people. They wounded 4,000 more. The vast majority of their victims were Jews. That was the intention: to spill Jewish blood, the more the better.
Our young and our educated sympathised more with the Gazan death cult than they did with the Jews who were its victims
Their crimes defied moral comprehension. Mothers were murdered in front of their children. Women were raped and mutilated on the fields where they’d been dancing just an hour earlier. A 92-year-old Holocaust survivor was murdered with a rocket-propelled grenade. He survived European fascism but could not survive Islamofascism.
It was the sadism of Hamas’s militarised Jew hunt that truly chilled the soul. They gloried in their pogrom. They enjoyed it. They filmed it and distributed the footage for the titillation of other anti-Semites. One of the pogromists phoned home to brag to his parents about how many of the demons he had dispatched. “Look how many I killed with my own hands!”, he cried. “Your son killed Jews!”
This was the orgy of barbarism so many in the West called “resistance”. This was the carnival of Nazi-like violence that leftists called “a day of celebration”. The youngest victim of the racist carnage had not even been born when it started. A bullet went through her mother’s womb and lodged in her leg. She came into the world gravely injured and died 14 hours later. “Long live the resistance!”, cried the silver-spoon bigots of the Western left as that tiny baby drew her last breath.
Our political language is not up to the task of describing 7 October. “Terrorism”, “atrocity”, “war crime” – all normal descriptors shrivel in the face of this mass act of unbridled savagery. The German novelist Herta Muller said it best: 7 October was more than murder, she said – it was a “total derailment from civilisation”. There was an “archaic horror in this bloodlust”, she wrote, “that I no longer thought possible in this day and age”.
Here’s the thing; 7 October was not only an act of genocidal violence against the Jews of the Holy Land – it was also a moral test for the West. The Islamofascists were taunting Western civilisation as much as they were letting the blood of innocent Jews. And we failed the test. We’re failing it still. The Jewish homeland waits in vain for a full-throated defence of its existence and its flourishing from the supposedly enlightened West.
Our young and our educated sympathised more with the Gazan death cult than they did with the Jews who were its victims. They wore keffiyehs in fawning mimicry of the men who murdered Jews. They cried “Globalise the intifada” in the wake of this intifada that entailed the rape of Jewish women and the kidnapping of Jewish grandmothers.
They got their wish. It was globalised. From Australia to the UK to the US, Jews were mercilessly slain by men screaming “Free Palestine”. These were mini 7 Octobers, the obedient exporting of Hamas-style fascism around the world by people driven murderous by their demented loathing for the Jewish nation. Not only did we fail to stand with the Jews of Israel – we failed to stand with the Jews of our own societies.
Polite society gunned not for the monsters of Hamas but for Israel. Lie after lie was told about the Jewish state. They called its war of resistance against the Nazi-inspired gunmen of Gaza a “genocide”. It was moral inversion of the most perverse, unforgivable kind. The only genocidal violence that took place was on 7 October itself, when an army constitutionally committed to the annihilation of the Jewish state laid gleeful waste to Jewish life. Everything that followed was war.
Anyone who has watched the footage of Hamas’s pogrom will marvel not at Israel’s “barbarism” but at its restraint. It was an act of Herculean moral resolve that the Jewish state responded to the butchery of its citizens by doing everything in its power to avoid civilian casualties in Gaza and going after the monsters of Hamas only. It is a miracle of humanism that Israel fed and vaccinated the inhabitants of that benighted strip of land from which a marauding fascist army came just three years ago.
We will rue the empire of lies we allowed to rise up. We will regret our failure to stand with the Jewish nation in its darkest hour. Look at Paris, where schools and the streets burn as mobs wave the Palestine flag. This is the intifada. The West’s craven failure to hold the moral line after 7 October, its indulgence of the Islamo-left mobs who hailed Hamas and libelled Israel, has started a fire of anti-civilisational hysteria that it will be incredibly difficult to put out.
We told you to stand with Israel. We begged you to choose civilisation over savagery. You should have listened.
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