Brendan O’Neill

We need to talk about what we witnessed in Gaza today. The sick ceremonial handover of the bodies of slain Israelis was a new low, even for Hamas. This was the theatre of death, a public spectacle of Jewish agony for the delectation of voyeuristic anti-Semites. If the world fails to speak out against this racist, morbid stunt, then we are in even bigger moral trouble than I thought. The bodies of four hostages were returned. Oded Lifschitz, an 84-year-old peace activist, and the three late members of the Bibas family. Mum Shiri and her two tiny sons: Ariel, who was four when he was kidnapped, and Kfir, who was just nine months old.

Some of us switch off when we hear a ‘loony left’ story. We might cock an eyebrow at the latest tale of progressive idiocy but that’s about it. They’re at it again, we think, and move on. But there are reports this morning of some truly perverse behaviour among the activist classes and we cannot afford to laugh it off or look the other way. It’s far too serious for that. It’s the revelation that the Palestine Solidarity Campaign applied for the right to protest against Israel on the very day Israelis were being butchered in their hundreds by the neo-fascists of Hamas. On 7 October 2023, Hamas’s pogrom still unfolding, PSC notified the Metropolitan Police of its intention to march against Israel on the streets of London the following Saturday: 14 October.

England ditched its blasphemy laws back in 2008. No longer would it be an offence to engage in ‘contemptuous, reviling, scurrilous or ludicrous’ speech concerning God. No longer would any poor soul be hauled off to jail, far less to the stocks, for the crime of profanity. So you can imagine my surprise when a man was arrested in Manchester on Saturday after desecrating a copy of the Quran. Was blasphemy snuck back on to the statute books without anyone noticing? Sadly, Manchester’s cops appear to take a different view Reading about Saturday’s arrest, I found myself wondering what century this is. The man allegedly live-streamed himself burning a Quran ‘page by page’.

Imagine talking about the transatlantic slave trade and not saying the word African. Or discussing the genocidal slaughter in Rwanda without saying ‘the Tutsis;. It would be unthinkable, right? Impossible, in fact. How could you talk about such grave crimes without mentioning the victims, without making at least a passing reference to those whose liberty and lives were ravaged in the barbarism? I worry that we are only half-remembering the Holocaust Well, quite a few people managed it yesterday. They talked about the Holocaust without naming its victims. They talked about this ‘sacrifice by fire’ – to give Holocaust its literal translation – without saying who it was that was burnt to death.

Every good reporter knows you never bury the lede. You never smother the key point of a story with fluff and verbiage. And yet that’s exactly what much of the media is doing in its coverage of the Battle of Kamal Adwan Hospital in Gaza. They’re burying, if not outright hiding, the most vital, most unsettling part of this tale – namely, that a neo-fascist militia is using a hospital as a base from which to plot the murder of Israel’s soldiers and citizens. When I watch news coverage of the clashes in and around Kamal Adawn, I feel like I’m losing my marbles. This is very clearly a fight between Hamas militants cynically holed up in a hospital and IDF troops who want to stop this army of anti-Semites from attacking their nation and their people.

Everything that has gone wrong in modern Ireland is summed up in the fact that it is winning praise from Hamas and criticism from Israel. Last week Ireland was gushed over by that army of anti-Semites that carried out the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, while being spurned by the Jewish homeland that was the target of that barbarous assault. Listen, if you’re getting love from racist terrorists, and rejection from their victims, it’s time for some self-reflection. Israel cited Ireland’s ‘extreme anti-Israeli policies’ for its decision It was the Irish government’s decision to join South Africa’s ‘genocide’ case against Israel at the International Court of Justice that saw it get love-bombed by Hamas and dumped by Israel.

I have a confession to make: when those Maccabi Tel Aviv fans tore down a Palestine flag in Amsterdam a few weeks back, I let out a little cheer. Yes, I know the boisterous lads did other things in the Dutch capital that were definitely bad. The left never tires of telling us what thugs and brutes these young Israelis allegedly are. But that one act, that tiny revolt against the omnipresence of the Palestine colours in the cities of Europe – that I welcomed. If you want to be radical, wave the Israel flag For two reasons. First, because it made perfect sense to me that Israelis might feel vexed and possibly even distressed by the sight of this flag flapping from the balcony of every smug residence in the capitals of this continent.

My first thought upon seeing today’s revolt of the farmers was just how gloriously normal it looked. For more than a year London has been besieged by wild-eyed plummy leftists and fuming Gen X’ers screaming blue murder about the Jewish State. Now, for sweet relief, we get men and women in waxed jackets and sensible winter headwear taking to the streets, not to rage against a faraway land but to defend their own land from the grubby taxing of the Labour government. Now that’s proper protesting. It made me want a warm beer. A malady has infected the influential classes – we might call it farmerphobia What happened today was extraordinary. It was a revolt of the sensibles.

We need to talk about Dawn Butler. Following the election of the first ever black leader of a major party in this country, Ms Butler took to X not to congratulate but to sneer. Not to cheer this final breakthrough for racial equality in the UK but to share a poisonous description of the person who made the breakthrough as the ‘black face’ of ‘white supremacy’. It is one of the worst things a member of the ruling party has done since they came to power four months ago. Labour’s Dawn Butler retweeted tips for 'surviving a Kemi Badenoch victory' Yes, when Kemi Badenoch was announced as the new leader of the Conservative Party, Labour’s Butler took potshots.

I have a question for Sally Rooney. Why are you perfectly happy to engage with cultural institutions in the UK, despite the various mad wars us Brits have waged in recent years, but you dodge like the plague cultural institutions in Israel because Israel is fighting a war in Gaza? Rooney, the celebrated Irish author of chick lit for people with PhDs, has reportedly put her name to a letter calling for a boycott of Israeli cultural institutions that are ‘complicit in genocide’. Hundreds of other writers with virtue to advertise have apparently signed too. Arundhati Roy, Percival Everett, Rachel Kushner and others all say they will forswear Israeli ‘publishers, festivals, literary agents and publications’ that are ‘complicit in violating Palestinian rights’.