# After the Pogrom  ## Metadata - Author: Brendan O'Neill - Full Title: After the Pogrom - Category: #books ## Highlights - Hamas had fulfilled the promise of its founding covenant, which was to kill Jews. ([Location 27](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=27)) - Hamas had not only tested Israel’s territorial security, but also mankind’s moral conscience. It laid down a gauntlet alongside its grenades. It dared us to pit our civilisation against its barbarism. It dared us to be decisive. And we failed. ([Location 33](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=33)) - ‘Long live 7 October’, said a banner in New York City. Sympathy for Hamas exploded on our campuses, admiration for its terror was hollered on our streets. A dawning, chilling realisation came: too many had taken up the cause not of the Jews, but of their persecutors. ([Location 40](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=40)) - The Chicago chapter of Black Lives Matter tweeted an image of a paraglider alongside the slogan: ‘I stand with Palestine.’5 Here was a movement that had spent the past 10 years protesting against racism now slyly gloating over one of the worst acts of racist violence of modern times. ([Location 61](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=61)) - In December 2023, a Harvard / Harris poll found that 60 per cent of American 18- to 24-year-olds believed Hamas’s attack was justified by Palestinian grievances. An alarming 50 per cent said they sided with Hamas against Israel. And 51 per cent said they favoured a one-state solution in which the Jewish State would be brought to an end and the land handed to Hamas and the Palestinians.10 There’s a phrase for that: ethnic cleansing. ([Location 72](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=72)) - In the warped moral universe of what now passes for the left, a white person eating sushi is racial arrogance, while an army of bigots slaughtering a thousand Jews is glorious martyrdom. Putting your hand on a woman’s knee is a #MeToo outrage – violating women en masse in the Negev desert is resistance.17 ([Location 119](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=119)) - An Islamic scholar at the University of California, Irvine described 7 October as ‘a gift from Allah’. It was a just attack on the ‘bloodthirsty animals’ of Zionism, he said.23 A lecturer at the City University of New York called for further resistance against the ‘Babylon swine’ that are Zionists.24 A professor at Columbia University, just a day after the pogrom, wrote of the ‘jubilation and awe’ inspired by the ‘storming [of] Israeli checkpoints’ by Hamas’s ‘resistance fighters’. He cheered ‘the resistance’s remarkable takeover’ of facilities in southern Israel. ([Location 136](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=136)) - In short, it provided a much-needed shot in the arm to depressed Western radicals. It made Marxists like Ms Dean feel a ‘sense of the possible’ again. It gave their unloved theories about decolonisation and systems of oppression the frisson of real-world violence. ([Location 148](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=148)) - At a London protest at the end of October, the slaughter of Israelis still fresh in Jewish Brits’ minds, a group of keffiyeh-wearing Islamists chanted the Arabic war cry: ‘Khaybar, Khaybar, oh Jews, the army of Muhammad will return!’30 That’s a reference to the 7th-century Battle of Khaybar that took place in what is now Saudi Arabia, when Muhammad and his henchmen slaughtered Jews, including women and children, for their ‘treachery’. ([Location 171](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=171)) - Students at Columbia University organised an event titled ‘Resistance 101’ at which speakers praised Hamas. One referred to our ‘friends and brothers in Hamas [and] Islamic Jihad’. ([Location 179](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=179)) - The flag of the Houthis contains the words ‘Death to Israel’ and ‘A Curse Upon the Jews’.33 And yet here we had the self-styled anti-racists of the Western left giving moral succour to the anti-Semites of the Houthi set. It was as mad as if the civil-rights movement had cheered the KKK. ([Location 183](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=183)) - Some posters were defiled with the word ‘coloniser’ – a clear attempt to rob the hostages of their humanity, to turn them from the victims of violence into the perpetrators of it, from racism’s quarry to racism’s architects. ([Location 191](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=191)) - In the US, anti-Semitic attacks rose by 400 per cent. In Germany it was 240 per cent. In France, almost 100 per cent.36 Jewish shops were attacked, Jewish schools, Jewish people. The word ‘Gaza’ was scrawled at the entrance to the Wiener Historical Holocaust Library in central London, the world’s oldest such library. A teenage Jewish boy was pelted with stones on his way to synagogue in north London. A Berlin synagogue was firebombed. A man set fire to a synagogue in the French city of Rouen. A synagogue in Melbourne was evacuated following the arrival of ‘pro-Palestine’ activists. Students at the Jewish Free School in London were permitted to remove their blazers while travelling to and from school, lest their school insignia reveal them as Jews to hateful members of society. Young Jews reported hiding their kippahs under baseball caps. It was relentless. ([Location 200](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=200)) - This was more than a spike in hate crime – it was a continuation of the pogrom. It was the globalisation of 7 October. It was the internationalisation of the Hamas ideology. ([Location 207](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=207)) - all were amplifiers of the pogrom; all were doing Hamas’s bidding; all were the useful ‘progressive’ idiots of one of the most regressive movements on Earth. ([Location 212](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=212)) - the anti-Jewish hate crimes and the anti-Israel protests – rise and fall together like clockwork every time’.37 ([Location 218](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=218)) - Why did self-styled anti-fascists cosy up to the fascists of Hamas? Why did anti-racists make excuses for racist violence? Why did feminists whose mantra is ‘Believe women’ refuse to believe that women were raped on 7 October? ([Location 227](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=227)) - It seems to me that the post-October hysteria was the rotten fruit of the West’s turn against civilisation. Of our creeping abandonment of reason. Of our trading of the Enlightenment ideals of rational thought and democratic deliberation for the dead end of identity politics and competitive grievance. ([Location 231](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=231)) - The barbarous dearth of sympathy for the dead and raped of Israel is the logical inhumane conclusion to a pseudo-progressive politics that judges people’s moral worth by their skin colour, their presumed privilege and their placement on a racial hierarchy fashioned by the unaccountable overlords of Western opinion. ([Location 243](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=243)) - ‘The hostility heaped on the Middle East’s only democratic state, and the only Jewish country on Earth, dwarfs that directed at the cruellest autocracies’, ([Location 337](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=337)) - Progressives feverishly boycott Israeli wares and culture, taking great care to forcefield their homes and lives from the output of this most unholy of nations. And yet they will happily imbibe American cinema and wear British-made clothes, even though America and Britain’s war-making in the Middle East over the past 20 years has caused more deaths than every Israeli war combined.2 ([Location 344](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=344)) - Hamas is an openly anti-Semitic movement whose founding covenant commits it to a genocidal ‘struggle against the Jews’. ([Location 369](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=369)) - Where were the feminists? Hamas is a notoriously misogynistic movement. It had just kidnapped, raped and killed huge numbers of women. Yet feminists, too, certainly those of the intersectional persuasion, were likewise prepping their Palestine flags in the immediate aftermath of 7 October.9 As for the LGBTQ activists who would later blow up over Israel’s inclusion in Eurovision – could they not find one word of condemnation on 7 October for the homophobes of Hamas whose incursion into Israel involved the mass murder of young Israelis of all sexualities at a music festival in the desert? Apparently not. The ‘Queers for Palestine’ set also responded to the pogrom by protesting against the nation it was inflicted on. ([Location 375](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=375)) - It seems to me that Israel has become a kind of sin-bearer for the woke of the West. A totem of everything they find objectionable in Western society, Western culture and Western history. And they rage against it less for political ends than for personal salvation, as a means of absolving themselves of these supposed sins of modernity. If the hatred for this one state feels irrational, as it so often does, that’s because this is not anti-war protest as we once knew it, but something darker, more elemental and entirely regressive. ([Location 386](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=386)) - There were so many friendly fire incidents during the NATO intervention in Libya in 2011 that our anti-Gaddafi allies took to painting the roofs of their vehicles bright pink to try to dodge our misaimed missiles.14 Yet when Israel erroneously fired on aid workers from World Central Kitchen, killing seven, it couldn’t possibly have been accidental. No, ‘Israel murders aid workers’, decreed the Guardian’s Owen Jones. ‘This is what genocide looks like’, he said.15 We make errors, Israel does genocide. ([Location 399](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=399)) - ‘Turning the clock back to 1948 means wiping Israel off the map’. ([Location 485](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=485)) - A US poll found that 51 per cent of American youths think Israel should be ended and the land given to the Palestinians.46 A UK poll found that 54 per cent of British 18- to 24-year-olds agreed with the statement, ‘the State of Israel should not exist’.47 Just 21 per cent disagreed. ([Location 492](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=492)) - What’s happened, it seems to me, is that the cultural elites have projected the sins of the world on to Israel. ([Location 501](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=501)) - Feminists who have spent the past few years loudly denouncing men like British Tory MP Damian Green for ‘fleetingly’ touching a woman’s knee, and calling on women to think carefully about such profound moral questions as ‘who pays for the date’, seemingly had nothing to say about the bundling of young, bloodied Jewish women into the backs of trucks by a tooled-up army of misogynists.8 Far be it from me to mansplain, but if the thought of a hand brushing a knee unsettles you more than the sight of Shani Louk’s battered body being spat on and hit with sticks by a mob of violent racists, it’s possible you are doing feminism wrong. ([Location 681](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=681)) - Remarkably, not one British charity that focuses on the issue of violence against women condemned Hamas’s sexual crimes – apart from Jewish Women’s Aid, that is.13 It took UN Women 57 days just to mention Hamas’s violence against women. ([Location 694](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=694)) - The head of the sexual-assault centre at the University of Alberta in Canada put her name to an open letter that slammed Canadian politicians for repeating ‘the unverified accusation that Palestinians were guilty of sexual violence’.15 This is a centre whose manifesto says: ‘We believe… all individuals who have faced sexual or gender-based violence.’ ([Location 701](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=701)) - ‘If there was rape and sexual violence committed, we don’t see that on camera.’19 Since when did we need to see footage of a rape, a rape snuff movie, essentially, before accepting that a rape had occurred? Others, too, questioned the lack of rape footage in Bearing Witness, leading Hadley Freeman to remind them that the IDF expressly said it only included footage that ‘preserved the dignity’ of the murdered.20 How ‘disgusting’, said Spectator columnist Bridget Phetasy, that we have gone from saying ‘Believe women’ to saying ‘Rape videos or it didn’t happen’. ([Location 714](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=714)) - The notion that this mob of misogynistic Jew-haters carrying out one of the worst acts of sadism of modern times suddenly became gentlemen when face to face with the young women they encountered on 7 October is clearly nothing short of a delusional lie. ([Location 752](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=752)) - That this organisation founded for the express purpose of murdering Jews would never do anything as terrible as rape a Jew. ([Location 756](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=756)) - Remarkably, Stephens said, the self-styled virtuous of the West have pivoted from saying ‘Believe women’ to ‘Believe Hamas’. ([Location 763](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=763)) - progressives’ new slogan, never said out loud, of course, is essentially this: ‘Believe fascists.’ ([Location 765](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=765)) - In the minds of the modern left, and of the cultural elites more broadly, it simply does not compute that Jews could suffer persecution and thus require our sympathy and solidarity. After all, they’re white, right? In fact, they’re ‘hyper-white’.46 They enjoy ‘white privilege’, as the left says, or ‘Jewish privilege’, as the far right says. ([Location 838](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=838)) - Or Whoopi Goldberg’s historically illiterate insistence that the Holocaust was ‘not about race’ because it involved ‘two groups of white people’.52 That is, the Nazis and the Jews: whites, all of them. ([Location 854](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=854)) - It seems that to a certain kind of liberal, everything is fascism except fascism. ([Location 969](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=969)) - There was a time when you couldn’t open a newspaper or peruse social media without seeing some pained liberal hold forth on how populism will drag us back to the death camps. Fascism panic was the fashion of the day. And then it stopped. In the wake of the 7 October pogrom – the worst act of slaughter against the Jews since that period of the mid-20th century these people love talking about – their fascism chatter evaporated. In fact, they started warning people not to use Nazi analogies. Not to compare 7 October to the 1930s. Not to engage in the very fascism fretting that had been the bread and butter of their own political commentary for years. Just two weeks after the pogrom, the Guardian published a piece denouncing Israel for ‘weaponising the Holocaust’ in its response to Hamas’s assault. ([Location 982](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=982)) - It is fine, it seems, to ponder on ‘the reich stuff’ of Trumpism and Brexit.7 But it is terrible – ‘dangerous’, in fact – for the Jewish State to say the Jew-killers who invaded its lands on 7 October echoed the evils of Nazi Germany.8 Do Guardianistas not think that Hamas has ‘the reich stuff’? ([Location 994](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=994)) - A writer for Time magazine thundered on the ‘danger’ of ‘using Holocaust analogies right now’. We are witnessing the ‘Holocausting’ of the ‘Israeli psyche’, he said, where Israeli leaders are ‘using historical trauma to advance their agendas’.11 He criticised Israel’s envoy to the UN for wearing a yellow star while speaking to the Security Council three weeks after the pogrom – this is ‘not a proportionate historical comparison’, we were told. ([Location 1003](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=1003)) - This arrogant hoarding of Holocaust comparisons for the liberal establishment alone. This reprimanding of the Jewish State for having the temerity to talk about recent Jewish history. ([Location 1044](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=1044)) - The cultural elites’ finger-wagging at the Jewish nation for mentioning the Holocaust in its condemnations of Hamas, even as they themselves throw around Nazi analogies like confetti, is fundamentally a calling into question of the Jews’ moral ownership of the Holocaust. It essentially says: ‘This isn’t your historical reference point anymore. It’s ours.’ ([Location 1047](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=1047)) - Western liberals’ covetous seizing of the right to use Holocaust analogies speaks to a wrenching of the Holocaust from its true context. It speaks to the removal of the Holocaust from its historical specificity, and from the people it was visited on, and its transformation instead into a free-floating symbol of general human wickedness that the privileged of the West can conjure up to add weight to their angst about political life in the 21st century. It speaks to the dejudification of the Holocaust: an unnerving intellectual trend that has profoundly troubling implications for historical memory, truth and freedom itself. ([Location 1049](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=1049)) - What was most notable about the post-October explosion of concern for the historical sanctity of the Holocaust was how new it was, what a break it represented from the attitudes of the very recent past. For we live in an era of wilful Holocaust exploitation. Actual ‘hijacking’ of the Holocaust to make a political point or boost a social-justice campaign has been all the rage for decades. ([Location 1082](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=1082)) - And now we have the activist class on the streets, forbidding the Jewish State from mentioning the Holocaust while also accusing it of carrying out a new Holocaust in Gaza. ([Location 1165](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=1165)) - Novara Media, the left media outlet beloved of Britain’s well-heeled radical millennials, once published a gushing profile of Mohammed Deif, the then head of the Al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas. Deif is suspected of masterminding the 7 October atrocity from his hideout in Gaza.2 He ‘embodies the uncompromising and shrewd “freedom fighter” figure’, gushed Novara in 2014. He enjoys ‘wide popularity’ among Palestinians, it fawned, on account of the ‘innovative skills’ he has deployed to great effect to bring about an ‘impressive evolution’ of the Palestinian ‘resistance’. And he later deployed those ‘skills’ to organise the largest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust. ([Location 1287](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=1287)) - Note: Enjoy wide popularity as admitted by hamas sympathizers means Gaza stands with Hamas, they aren’t oppressors - Where was all the Hamas praise coming from? The left. From the radical wing of the Labour Party, the anti-war movement, and the new ‘woke’ left as embodied by the media-savvy socialists at Novara. A left that poses as anti-war had been praising a warmongering terror outfit. A left that claims to be anti-racist had gushed over brazen racists whose founding charter states that ‘our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious’.5 Self-styled anti-fascists had become ‘friends’ with fascists. ([Location 1305](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=1305)) - Note: Because antifa is fascist - In 2021, the Williams Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles conducted a survey of 175 nations and their acceptance of gay and gender non-conforming people. Palestine, covering both Gaza and the West Bank, was at No130. Behind Yemen, Saudi Arabia and the Democratic Republic of Congo.8 In 2010, just a year after Corbyn exalted Hamas for its devotion to social justice, leading Hamas strategist Mahmoud al-Zahar told Reuters: ‘You [in the West] do not live like human beings. You do not even live like animals. You accept homosexuality.’ ([Location 1320](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=1320)) - A study a few years ago found that Gazan women’s participation in the labour force is among the lowest in the world – only 22 per cent of women there work, in comparison with a global average of 50 per cent.10 There is no law in Gaza prohibiting violence against women in the home, including sexual violence. ([Location 1327](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=1327)) - A Human Rights Watch report published in April 2009 documented Hamas’s use of savage violence against members of Fatah, the political party mainly based in the West Bank but with supporters in Gaza, too. It condemned Hamas’s ‘widespread practice of maiming people by shooting them in the legs’, its ‘abductions and severe beatings’ of its opponents, and its ‘extrajudicial executions’ of those ‘accused of collaborating with Israel’. ([Location 1333](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=1333)) - A left movement supposedly devoted to ending war was linking arms with the associates of a movement devoted to waging war, in particular on Jews. ([Location 1368](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=1368)) - But non-whites must never be criticised. Even when they’re likening gays to beasts or Jews to cancer or forcing women to cover their sinful hair and sinful faces with veils and cloaks. ([Location 1392](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=1392)) - To judge non-whites by a lower moral standard than the one you use for whites is the very definition of racism. ([Location 1396](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=1396)) - Soon radical leftists were even cheering the ‘Iraqi insurgency’, a sinister movement of Sunni extremists and al-Qaeda affiliates that was engaged in sectarian warfare, planting bombs in marketplaces and blowing up groups of children. ([Location 1429](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=1429)) - As Jürgen Habermas has argued, much of what passes for political thought in the modern era is really ‘counter-Enlightenment in the garb of post-Enlightenment’.42 And it was indeed the left’s descent into the unlighted caverns of ‘counter-Enlightenment’, into a new post-class, post-reason politics of identity and division, that led it to the doorstep of radical Islam’s radical anti-humanism. ([Location 1481](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=1481)) - Fascism, wherever it comes from, must be forcefully opposed, every time. ([Location 1490](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=1490)) - The keffiyeh classes ‘seem eager to make excuses for Hamas’, but they are ‘conspicuously uninformed about exactly what or who this terrorist group represents’. He gives the example of Queers for Palestine, who ‘flirt with justifying Hamas’s atrocities’, which is ‘bewildering’ given that Hamas’s Islamist ideology is ‘clearly antithetical to the rights and values these groups claim to champion’. Hamas’s ‘reactionary agenda’, says Azarmehr, is ‘profoundly hostile to women’s rights and LGBT individuals’. ([Location 1675](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=1675)) - For instance, only 47 per cent of the students who regularly chant the infamous slogan, ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’, were able to name the river and the sea it references. Some thought it referred to the Nile and the Euphrates. Others to the Caribbean. Some thought ‘the sea’ was a reference to the Dead Sea, which is a lake. Less than a quarter of the students knew who Yasser Arafat was. More than 10 per cent thought he was the first prime minister of Israel. Mercifully, when shown a map of the Middle East, and informed that having a Palestinian state stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea would leave ‘no room for Israel’, many of the students downgraded their support for the ‘river to the sea’ slogan from ‘would chant’ to ‘probably not’. ([Location 1682](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=1682)) - There is only one Palestinian weavery left that makes keffiyehs. The keffiyehs we see in the coffee shops, campuses and art galleries of the West are ‘mass-produced’ items ‘from China’. The last remaining keffiyeh-maker in the Palestinian territories says it has become ‘increasingly difficult to compete with the low prices of the imported counterfeits’.30 That the keffiyeh craze of the Western bourgeoisie has hurt keffiyeh-makers in Palestine is a dark irony that will not be lost on those of us who know that the virtue-signalling of the powerful often has unintended consequences. ([Location 1701](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=1701)) - Nothing better captures the moral unworldliness of the pro-Palestine set than the fact that their sartorial signifiers of status were likely made by hyper-exploited workers in the world’s largest unfree state. That the scarves they put on to show how much they care for Palestine were likely weaved by people who lack the fundamental rights of freedom of speech and democratic enfranchisement. ([Location 1707](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=1707)) - Western youths signifying their pain for the oppressed state of Palestine with garments made by genuinely oppressed Uyghurs is surely the most late-stage capitalism thing that has ever happened. ([Location 1713](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=1713)) - Wolfe mused on how, at certain points in history, the self-styled enlightened elite develops an intense resentment for the ‘striving’ working class and instead finds itself drawn towards a ‘romanticised identification with the seemingly primitive lower classes’.34 That is, they distinguish themselves from the working masses through adopting a refined concern for the hyper-oppressed. ([Location 1732](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=1732)) - As British art writer Michael Bracewell put it in his 2004 essay, ‘Molotov Cocktails’, Wolfe had diagnosed a trend whereby the ‘patrician classes’ seek to ‘luxuriate in both a vicarious glamour and a monopoly on virtue through their public espousal of street politics: a politics, moreover, of minorities so removed from their sphere of experience and so absurdly, diametrically opposed to the islands of privilege on which the cultural aristocracy maintain their isolation, that the whole basis of their relationship is wildly out of kilter from the start’. ([Location 1738](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=1738)) - Here we had privileged youths on an Ivy League campus cosplaying as victims of a humanitarian crisis; comfortably off Ivy Leaguers masquerading as the wretched of the Earth. ([Location 1754](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=1754)) - In draping the keffiyeh around their shoulders, they get to be someone else for a while. Someone less bourgeois, less white. Someone a little more exotic, a little more interesting. It’s less politics than therapy. They seek to wash away the ‘sin’ of their privilege through mimicking what they consider to be the least privileged people on Earth. That’s what the keffiyeh has become: the cloth with which the rich seek to scrub away their white guilt. ([Location 1760](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=1760)) - These images might ‘provide thrills’ to outside observers, and nurture ‘more “likes” and “shares”’ online, but they can be devastating to ‘public morale’ in the Palestinian territories, Jabr wrote.40 It was a fruitless plea. Imagery of Palestinian suffering is too valuable to the keffiyeh classes to be sacrificed to trifling concerns about Palestinian dignity. Your pain is ours now, just like your headwear. ([Location 1774](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=1774)) - Witness Yahya Sinwar’s insistence, in the summarising words of CNN, that the ‘spiralling civilian death toll in Gaza’ will likely ‘work in [Hamas’s] favour’. Sinwar, the military leader of Hamas in Gaza, callously describes the deaths of Palestinians as ‘necessary sacrifices’ to get the Israelis ‘right where we want them’. ([Location 1779](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=1779)) - So, we live in an era when you can be banished from a university for saying women don’t have penises, but you’ll be fine if you say ‘kill all Jews’. We live in a time when asking someone where they’re from is considered a ‘racial microaggression’, but hollering ‘Globalise the intifada’ in the aftermath of an ‘intifada’ in which a thousand Jews were slaughtered is apparently okay. We live in a culture in which students will demand access to ‘safe spaces’, complete with colouring books and bean bags, if a speaker they hate turns up on campus. And yet these same students who fear words like the rest of us fear death will happily cheer the invasion of Israel and the murder of hundreds of its citizens. No safe space for Jews, it seems. ([Location 1892](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=1892)) - That student activists who wail about being ‘erased’ if you fail to use their preferred pronouns don’t seem to have much of a problem with the literal erasure of the citizens of the Jewish State. ([Location 1898](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=1898)) - Being badly flirted with by a drunken jock in the student bar is an intolerable instance of ‘rape culture’,7 apparently, but the collective brutalisation of Jewish women by the misogynists of Hamas is something to be ‘honoured’. ([Location 1920](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=1920)) - Students at the University of Pennsylvania invited to their campus a ‘solidarity activist’ who had tweeted ‘Glad Hamas killed that bitch’ in response to a photo of a 22-year-old woman who was murdered at the Nova music festival during the pogrom.13 The kind of activists who’d once taken such fright at a man’s hand on their shoulder were now rubbing shoulders with a man who had saluted the murder of a Jewish woman. ([Location 1936](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=1936)) - The dark irony of ‘Hamas University’ is that it was the handiwork of an activist class that has spent recent years fretting over the ‘alt-right’. Every time a Proud Boy or a Milo Yiannopoulos arrived on a campus, student radicals would say: ‘There is no room for fascism.’38 Yet just years later this same station of self-styled ‘anti-fascists’ had nurtured a truly fascistic climate. One in which Jews were told to go back to Europe, swastikas were painted on walls, and there was dreaming everywhere one looked of the coming destruction of the Jewish nation. ([Location 2005](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=2005)) - And there you had it. University officials who in recent years had sat back as cancel culture ran riot on their campuses, as feminist believers in biology were harassed and black critics of identity politics were sidelined, were suddenly interested in ‘context’, in the importance of weighing things up, even if the thing being weighed up is Hitlerite dreaming of a Jewish genocide. Suddenly, wrote Anthony L Fisher at the Daily Beast, there was a ‘new appreciation’ for ‘nuance’. ([Location 2021](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=2021)) - The best pushback against this carnival of bigotry is a full-throated defence of the thing that both the pogromists and their Western sympathisers hate: freedom. Freedom of conscience, freedom of thought and freedom of speech. That might mean a world where people are free to say ‘Kill all Jews’, but it also means a world where many more of us are free to say: ‘No. Never again.’ ([Location 2095](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=2095)) - ‘Decolonisation’ was the word on the lips and tweeting fingertips of many academics and students in the hours and days after Hamas’s savagery. ([Location 2198](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=2198)) - If this vogue theory beloved of the West’s professors, teachers, museums, art galleries and activist classes means not only replacing Geoffrey Chaucer with Alice Walker, but also murdering Jewish people, then we have a very serious problem. ([Location 2241](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=2241)) - What it all adds up to is an assault on the gains of Western civilisation itself. The founding principles of Western philosophy, the discovery of the scientific method, the Enlightened thought of Kant and Hume, even the music of Beethoven (his Fifth Symphony is an offensive symbol of ‘white male superiority and importance’, apparently30) – all the ideas and culture that are the building blocks of our civilisation are feverishly targeted by the decolonisers. They co-opt the progressive language of 20th-century anti-colonialism to dress up an agenda that is entirely regressive. They appropriate past wars for liberation to add a veneer of radicalism to their own wars against culture and truth. As Christopher McGovern of the UK’s Campaign for Real Education says, ‘decolonisation’ is fundamentally a ‘code for erasing the identity and extraordinary achievements of Western civilisation’. ([Location 2311](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=2311)) - Like many other nations itching for freedom from the Empire in the wake of the Second World War, Israel fought for its national independence and was ‘established legitimately under international law after the withdrawal of Imperial Britain’.37 The irony of the ‘decolonise’ set’s loathing for Israel above all other nations is that Israel is a decolonised nation. ([Location 2346](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=2346)) - In truth, Israel has a significant population of Ethiopian Jews. What’s more, as Montefiore points out, around half of Israelis, close to five million people, are Mizrahi: ‘descendants of Jews from Arab and Persian lands, people of the Middle East.’ Why did the Mizrahi Jews end up in the Jewish State? Because after 1948 they were driven out of their homes in Baghdad, Cairo and Beirut where they had lived for ‘many centuries, even millennia’.39 ([Location 2356](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=2356)) - Radical Islam has more and more resonated ‘with the European and American left precisely because it claims to have the same targets’: the ‘universalist claims of a Eurocentric and humanist modernity’.46 A ‘left’, in particular in academia, that had lost faith in the virtues and truths of the Enlightenment felt ever more enticed by Islamist groups that likewise view the modern West as a false god. ([Location 2400](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=2400)) - This new ‘confluence’ was captured in the elation of philosopher Michel Foucault following Iran’s Islamic Revolution of 1979. Foucault’s work is hugely influential in ‘decolonisation’ circles. He is described as ‘one of the patron saints of critical theory’.47 He visited Tehran twice during the revolution and felt ‘dazzled’ by this ‘revolt of the subaltern’. He hailed its deliverance to the world of a new ‘political spirituality’.48 Rather less was said about the revolution’s disastrous consequences, for political freedom, regional peace and women. ([Location 2404](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=2404)) - Today’s war on Jews is a war on humanity. It is a war on civilisation. It is a violent manifestation of our societies’ turn against the values of modernity and the wisdom of Enlightenment. It is a war that the ‘decolonisers’, of both the West and the Middle East, absolutely must lose. ([Location 2425](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=2425)) - The word Zionism, the name given to the movement for Jewish national self-determination, did not emerge until the 1890s, when Theodor Herzl, the father of political Zionism, injected the project of Jewish statehood with real moral and political momentum. ([Location 2615](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=2615)) - So the extreme right adopted two tactics in the postwar decades. First, they denied the Holocaust had happened. And second, they embraced ‘anti-Zionism’ as a means of expressing their anti-Semitism. Anti-Zionism became, in Bland’s words, ‘a mask for their Nazi sympathies’.33 If your ‘criticism of Israel’ gives life to fascistic extremists, then you need a reckoning with your ‘criticism of Israel’. ([Location 2684](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=2684)) - The opinion-forming set, which for years denounced every populist movement it disliked as ‘far right’, has now brought the actual far right back into public life. There they are on the internet, on our streets, lurking in areas with large Jewish populations, saying ‘Death to Zionism’, when what they really mean, and we all know it, is ‘Death to Jews’. ([Location 2695](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=2695)) - We’ve all seen the footage of a police officer in Scotland advising a Jewish man to hide his Star of David necklace lest it make pro-Palestine protesters ‘very, very angry’.1 We all remember when Gideon Falter of the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism walked by a pro-Palestine demo in London, in his kippah, and an officer advised him to move on. We all remember what the crowd chanted at Falter when he did move on: ‘Zionist scum, Zionist scum, Zionist scum...’2 ([Location 2843](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DH94N8TK&location=2843))