The madness since October 7
I delivered a talk this week to the Jewish Community Centre in Aspen, Colorado, where I am spending the weekend. It was entitled The world on the brink: the madness since October 7. You can watch a recording by clicking the arrow below. A lightly edited transcript of the talk follows the video.
There’s one question on all our minds. Has everyone else simply lost their mind?
How on earth can we make sense of what we’ve been living through these past 10 months? How is it going to develop? What’s going to happen next? What does it mean for us Jews, both in the diaspora and in Israel?
War is raging against Israel. At this very moment, we are on tenterhooks about whether Iran is about to unleash, whether Hezbollah is about to unleash; we don’t know. But what we do know is that the war against Israel is being fought in what I would call a looking-glass world.
This war is being waged by Iran through its proxies — in its own words — to wipe Israel off the map. Yet the Biden administration here insists that the way to stop this war to wipe Israel off the map is through the establishment of a state for the Palestinians.
Hamas has said it will perpetrate October 7-style attacks again and again until Israel is finally destroyed. The response of the Biden administration, the British government, the UN and Uncle Tom Cobley and all is to pressure Israel into an immediate ceasefire — which would mean victory for Hamas.
America says, however, that its support for Israel’s defence is “ironclad”. The British government says it entirely supports Israel’s right to self-defence. This “ironclad” support for Israel by both America and Britain apparently does not mean Israel defeating its genocidal enemies.
Iran is waging this war through a seven-front ring of fire trapping Israel inside it. Immediately after the October 7 pogrom, the Biden administration told Israel that it must not pre-emptively attack Hezbollah — which has something like 150,000 rockets and missiles pointing at Israel — as it was intending to do, because that would mean a dangerous escalation.
The result has been rocket and missile bombardments against Israel every day for ten months, with swathes of northern Israel burned to the ground and the displacement from their homes of tens of thousands of Israelis who cannot go back. Last month, Hezbollah sent a missile over that massacred 12 Druze children playing soccer in Majdal Shams. But apparently, to the Biden administration, to the British government, to the UN, this is not escalation. Escalation is only when Israel responds. That is escalation.
When Israel assassinated Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas leader who was responsible for the slaughter of untold thousands of Jews and was part of the Hamas leadership responsible for the October 7 pogrom, Mr Biden was apparently absolutely furious and tore Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, off a strip because the assassination of Haniyeh in Tehran was “escalation”.
Now Israel is being told — with everybody there waiting for the threatened attack by Iran, with everybody equipping their homes with water to last for three days and with canned food, dried food, stocks of candles and making sure the missile shelter is ready, with everyone living on their nerves — Israel is being told by the Biden administration: “If Iran attacks you, don’t push it in your response”.
“Don’t push it”! This is effectively an invitation to Iran to attack an open goal.
It would appear that Israel’s “ironclad” allies expect it to wait until missiles start raining down on Tel Aviv, Haifa or Jerusalem before it responds at all — and then if it responds,“not too much”.
Militarily, this is absolutely imbecilic. In military terms, it’s essential that Israel strikes pre-emptively not just to prevent Iranian escalation but to enable Israel to defeat Iran.
So how on earth are we to interpret these very confused signals from America — this enormous show of strength which is being assembled with a fleet of warships and other measures in order to defend Israel, and yet the refusal by the Biden administration to allow Israel to attack Iran and thus defeat its mortal enemy? How are we to explain this very confusing talk out of both sides of America’s mouth?
Of course, many people can and do point to political agendas or anti-Jewish prejudice by members of the Biden administration. There’s a lot of truth in some of those points. But I would suggest that, in order to fully understand this very strange conundrum, we need to broaden our focus to a looking-glass world that’s much wider and much deeper.
Let’s look for a start at the reaction in the western world to the October 7 pogrom. One might have thought that there would be sympathy and understanding following what was the single biggest and most barbaric atrocity against the Jewish people since the Holocaust, perpetuated by Islamists who channel genocidal, maniacal Islamo-Nazism. One would have expected people to be horrified in the west and to express sympathy and support for Israel.
Not a bit of it. Sympathy and support lasted a few hours. What then happened was the arrival of an absolute tsunami of open, brazen, often murderous antisemitism throughout the west.
It was as if a signal had been given. Enormous demonstrations which we’ve all seen taking place on the streets — still going on in Britain — with calls by demonstrators for the destruction of Israel, calls for the murder of Jews, going on all the time. We saw on campus the widespread intimidation of Jewish students, still going on. In Britain, we’ve had white-skinned demonstrators chanting in the last few days: “We hate Zionists! We hate Zionists!”
Hello? Why do they hate Zionists? Do they know any Zionists? Have they ever met any Zionists? Do they even know what the term means?
In Belgium, a writer in a Flemish magazine wrote he wants to “ram a knife down every Jew’s throat”. Why? What have the Jews ever done to him? I would suggest absolutely nothing.
In Britain, and perhaps here too, doctors, teachers, lawyers, charity workers, actors, film directors, novelists, politicians and of course the media, are all recycling blood libels against Israel with patently ludicrous accusations of genocide and war crimes.
Most bizarre of all was the phenomenon we all saw soon after October 7 when posters of hostages were put up and then were torn down. They were torn down week after week: they were put up, they were torn down, they were put back up, they were torn down. And we saw the faces of the people tearing them down which were convulsed with hatred and rage. What kind of pathological mental disorder lies behind the frenzied tearing down of pictures of innocent people including children and babies who have been kidnapped by murderers and torturers? Is this not absolutely bizarre?
No other country or people is ever treated like this. This is a level of hysteria, of obsessional hatred that is applied to no other country or cause in the world however terrible they truly are. Nobody is holding demonstrations calling for the destruction of Syria, Russia or North Korea on the grounds of their all-too real crimes against humanity. No-one even thinks about that. What is so uniquely terrible about Israel?
Now, we’ve all focused on the reaction to October 7 which was, as I’ve said, bizarre. We’ve seen the mass demonstrations calling for jihad and for globalising the intifada, we’ve seen the eruptions on campus, we’ve seen the very well-known cases of university principals unable or unwilling to tackle anti-Jewish incitement and Jew-hatred. We’ve seen all that, we’ve discussed it, we say, “How can we explain this?” and we say “Well, it’s antisemitism”.
Well, I think this is to miss an important point. The point we really have to bear in mind is that these demonstrations started in London on October 7. The Israelis not only had not yet attacked Gaza; they hadn’t finished trying to prevent Israelis being murdered in southern Israel. It was still going on. And the first demonstration then started in London, I think it was outside the Israel embassy. And the point was that it was a Muslim demonstration, and they were ecstatic. It was a demonstration of ecstasy.
And I think this is a very important point. Because although a lot of non-Muslims have been joining in these demonstrations, with the antisemitism and all the rest of it, the demonstrations and the whole anti-Israel movement that started on October 7 has been led by Hamas-supporting Muslims in the west.
And I think it’s because what happened on October 7 was, as I’ve said, a kind of starting-gun. They believed that a starting-gun had been fired for their apocalyptic war to destroy the west. They thought: “We’ve broken the Israeli defence, they are no longer impervious to us, they are no longer secure against us, we’ve murdered them, we’ve take them hostage, they never thought we would do that, nobody thought we’d do that, we didn’t think we’d do it, we’ve done it, this is a fantastic victory, we’re on our way now to destroy Israel, we’re on our way now to destroy the Jewish people, and behind the destruction of Israel and the Jewish people lies the west; the west is now open for us”.
And so out they poured, and have continued to pour. Because this is what is being incited all the time: “We’re on a roll. This is our moment.”
Now, this is not spontaneous. These demonstrations were organised. We know for a fact that there are Hamas operatives in Britain and elsewhere who were helping organise these demonstrations in concert with anti-Israel groups. We know that the Muslim Brotherhood, the organisation of Islamists whose aim is to attack and eventually take over the west, was behind them. We know that the Iranians were behind them. And we know that Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran, which are on different wings of the Islamic world — Hamas is Sunni, Iran is Shia — we know that they have cells in place across Europe and in America.
So these people were all in place to organise these amazing demonstrations, this amazing movement, on the back of the October 7 pogrom. But at the same time, something closely related has been taking place for a number of years, in Britain, in Europe and to a certain extent in America.
This is the massive growth of Muslim minorities in France, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, Sweden and in Britain of whom large proportions refuse to assimilate or fit in, who intimidate or attack the host population and who demand that their host societies adapt instead to Islamic precepts.
Now in Britain it’s important to acknowledge that the majority of Muslims are not like that at all. They simply want, just like you and me, to have a job, raise a family, live quietly and enjoy the human rights of the west. However, there’s a very large proportion who do not want to adhere to that. And what we’ve seen very recently in Britain, which has horrified very large numbers of people who didn’t see this coming, is the rise of a political Muslim bloc and the arrival of sectarian Muslim ethnic politics.
Before the general election last month, a Muslim political caucus emerged making a list of demands as the price for the support of the Muslim community. Those demands included a variety of measures to turn Israel into a pariah state and a variety of measures to adapt British society to a number of Islamic precepts. At the election itself, five candidates were elected as independent MPs on a platform of — in a British general election — Gaza/Palestine, an issue of zero concern to the British electorate. Suddenly, sectarian ethnic politics has emerged in Britain: never seen before, and very, very concerning.
For all these people whom I would call Islamic supremacists — Muslims who don’t want to fit in and who want Britain instead to fit into Islamic society — white liberals are their useful idiots. For years, they have been fed the line about suffering Palestinians — based on a complete set of falsehoods about Middle Eastern and Jewish, Arab and Muslim history — in order to recruit them to Nazi-style, genocidal Jew hatred, which is what infuses the Palestinian community, I’m afraid to say, going far beyond Hamas. And this has gone into overdrive since the war in Gaza started.
This narrative of Palestinian victimisation by Israel has been going on for years with no public pushback. The Palestinian cause is the cause of causes for all western liberals. You cannot speak against it; in Britain there’s no platform where you can speak against it.
In addition, liberals have subscribed overwhelmingly to the doctrine of “Islamophobia”. This is supposed to mean prejudice against Muslims; it is not.
Prejudice against Muslims is anti-Muslim prejudice. “Islamophobia” is a term of art that was invented by the Muslim Brotherhood to make prejudice into a pathology, so that if you’re guilty of “Islamophobia” there can’t be a shred of truth in what you are saying about the Muslim world. It has been used to suppress any reference whatsoever to Muslim aggression or any threatening aspects of the Islamic religion whatsoever. And these are the articles of faith in the liberal world: support for “Palestine”, Israel is the colonial oppressor, and “Islamophobia” meaning you can’t speak against the Muslim world or Islam.
Some of these liberals are merely ignorant and stupid. Some of this ignorance and stupidity is the result of the collapse of education and higher education, over four decades at least, into the quicksands of social engineering and positive discrimination. You call this here DEI [Diversity, Equity and Inclusion]: that’s a fairly late addition to this doctrine which has been going on for decades. This has produced school students and university graduates who are no longer capable of independent thought: the education system has told them over decades what to think rather than how to think.
So this has been a general problem, to put it mildly, in the west for a long time. Nevertheless, my original question remains. Why has Israel become the most obsessive cause in the world? Why is there this tsunami of antisemitism?
If you were a visitor from Mars you would think, my goodness, everywhere you look it’s all about the Jews, it’s all about what they’re doing in Israel, it’s all about how dreadful they are in the west, how dreadful they are here and there, it’s all “Jew, Jew, Jew”. The Jews must be the most numerous people on earth! How else could they be so much on everyone’s minds?
Of course, as we know, we are amongst the tiniest of peoples on earth. So why is there so much obsessive interest and concern and hostility and all the rest of it about Israel and the Jewish people?
There are obviously reasons we can all talk about — how the left has been taken over by Marxism and post-colonialism and intersectionality which casts the Jews as enemies of humanity. These are perfectly valid reasons for us to talk about.
We could also note that the pogrom of October 7 got in the way of the narrative of the liberal world: the narrative of Palestinians oppressed by Israeli colonialism.
That narrative isn’t just a view that they hold. It defines the liberal’s moral personality as a person of conscience devoted to the cause of the oppressed. If that Palestinian narrative is destroyed, undermined, shown to be false, the liberal fears that his or her moral personality, his or her claim to be a moral being, will be destroyed.
That cannot happen. And so the Palestinian narrative has to be upheld. It cannot be negated or contradicted at all. And consequently, the Jew as victim has to be denied. Jews cannot be victims. If Jews are victims — and moreso, if Jews are the victims of Palestinian Arabs — then the liberals’ whole narrative goes smash and their moral personality goes smash. So the Jew cannot be a victim. And that’s one reason why those posters had to be literally torn down — to protect that person’s idea of him or herself as a moral being.
But there’s a deeper point still. The October 7 pogrom, I would suggest, was an inflection point for the west in general. It was the point at which the question was asked: would the west choose to support civilisation or would it choose to support barbarism? Unfortunately, in siding with Israel’s attackers it has chosen barbarism. Even though it may not think it’s chosen barbarism, that’s exactly what it has done.
How on earth has the west — the acme of reason, of intelligence, of modernity, progress, conscience — how can it have done this? I would suggest that the west no longer understands what civilisation is. It no longer understands in particular that civilisation is western; that the west invented it. Instead, our best and brightest have told all of us for decades that the west is terrible, that it was born in original sins of imperialism and racism and white privilege and colonialism. It doesn’t deserve to exist any longer.
Western elites have set out to destroy the west. That’s why the education system has been destroyed. Education is the transmission of a culture from one generation to the other. It’s the way that a culture survives: it propagates itself to the next generation. Instead of cultural survival, the west’s elites have told students that the west was born in racism and colonialism and original sin and has to be replaced by something completely different.
These elites took a sledgehammer to those institutions — in addition to education — that safeguard the transmission of culture, particularly the traditional family.
They wanted to create a brave new world — crucially, without biblical religion — which was constructed instead around the self. Everybody had the right to live as they wanted, to make their own reality. Nobody could say that their lifestyle was better or worse than anyone else’s; no-one had the right to say that their culture was better or worse than any other culture. The west no longer had the right to say it was better than any other culture. That was “racism”.
And at the heart of all this was the doctrine that there was no such thing as objective truth. Anyone who said there was objective reality, objective truth, was by definition an imbecile. It showed how unsophisticated they were. Anyone who was educated knew there was no objective truth; everything was relative, a matter of opinion.
And because there was no truth, feelings became more important than facts. “What I feel” trumped what was actually true. It doesn’t matter if that person hasn’t actually attacked me; I feel attacked, and therefore I am attacked.
And so because there was no such thing as objective truth, and no facts that could trump feelings, no facts could ever overcome the images that people see of Palestinian suffering in Gaza. There are no facts that can challenge that, because “what I see, what I feel, my emotion, my compassion” — that’s what matters. The suffering is what matters. What causes the suffering? “Don’t tell me what causes the suffering. It’s suffering. I emote. I’m a good person. Go away.”
So the west abandoned the codes of morality, conscience, truth and lies, personal responsibility, duty to others in favour of a culture of the self. And in junking them, it junked virtues that came from the Hebrew Bible — mediated through Christianity which is the basis for western civilisation.
Not only did it junk those values, but it also turned against the very idea of the nation state. The nation state, it said, is what has created prejudice and war. Hitler was a nationalist! He stood for a nation state! Abolish the nation state and you won’t get Hitler any more! It’s literally as stupid as that.
So they say that the laws passed by a nation state, well, they have a place but they have to give way to universal laws and institutions which embody the brotherhood of man, such as universal human rights law, the UN and international courts. This is the world of John Lennon’s “Imagine”. You know the lyrics? They should apparently be uppermost in our minds: imagine a world where there are no divisions, there’s no religion, no prejudice — there is “nothing to fight or die for”.
“Nothing to fight or die for;” that’s the mantra of the modern liberal.
And with nothing to fight or die for, the modern liberal refuses ever to accept the necessity of war. The idea that you go to war to achieve victory is anathema because there is nothing to fight or die for. Everything — everything — is instead a matter for negotiation and compromise.
And so between genocide and its victims, the liberal will split the difference.
That’s why we have the Biden administration’s strategy towards Israel. We can all talk about sinister motives behind it; that’s another argument. But I can hear something else that’s going on, something deeper than that — the preoccupation, the obsession, the belief of the modern liberal that every single conflict in the world is amenable to reason and to self-interest, and therefore you have to negotiate and you have to compromise.
This is why we have the west’s appeasement of Iran, because Iran has to be negotiated with. Iran is rational, goes this argument; Iran can be brought in from the cold. If we actually allow Iran to join the club of nuclear nations, to be embraced by us, it will no longer have a reason to hate us. And so there will be peace, and the lion will lie down with the lamb, and everyone will just have to get on with everyone else in the Middle East.
And so this is why America — amazingly — with its “ironclad” commitment to Israel, blames Israel for being the “obstacle to peace” by refusing to compromise to the point of surrender with the people who want to wipe it off the face of the earth. And similarly it’s why in Britain, the new Labour government headed by the prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer — who will ruthlessly enforce intersectionality codes on gender and race and do the bidding of the Islamists to a greater or lesser extent — has now turned quite viciously and suddenly against Israel. It’s the same concept.
But here’s the thing. The west tells itself that biblical religion is the source of all bad things: get rid of biblical religion and then you can have peace on earth and the brotherhood of man, you get rid of hatred, you get rid of the nation, you get rid of prejudice.
But the fact is that every single one of these values that the west so prizes, such as conscience and compassion, reason and rationality, freedom from oppression — they come from the Hebrew Bible. They were embedded in Christianity, but they come from the Jews.
Ancient Israel was the original paradigm nation-state. Ancient Israel was the template for the ancient British Crown. The British monarchy and coronation rites were patterned on the Davidic monarchy. And that Davidic monarchy was also the inspiration for the American republic, which is shot through with references to the Hebrew inheritance that America claims for itself.
So I would suggest it’s not surprising that a civilisation that has come to hate and despise itself and wants to replace itself also hates and despises the Jews, whose doctrines, precepts and beliefs lay at the very heart of western civilisation, and wants to replace the Jews and their doctrines.
And so now we can begin to understand why so many tore those hostage posters down. They weren’t just saying we can’t bear the idea of the Jew as victim. They weren’t just saying we can’t bear the idea that Israel may have been the victim of anything. They were tearing the Jews out of their lives, our of their heads, their conscience and their world. That’s what they were doing; that’s why their faces were convulsed with hatred and rage.
So — perhaps you may now think of shooting yourself having heard all this! I would suggest you don’t do that!
Is it all over for the west? Far from it.
As you may have noticed, a revolt is now under way in Britain and Europe and I would suggest also — tendentious as it is to say this — in America. This revolt takes different forms, but wherever it is taking place it involves the same basic thing. It involves millions of ordinary people who are no longer prepared to put up with the entire political establishment abandoning the core identity and values of their nation and its shared historic culture. The result in Britain and in Europe has been the rise of “populist” leaders and parties.
So for the west, the fight for its survival as a civilisation is very much on and everything is to play for.
Where does this leave the Jews of the diaspora? I think none of us needs telling that there are bad times ahead. When a civilisation starts to disintegrate, the Jews get it in the neck from all sides. We know that from our history, and this is going to be no exception.
So what can and should diaspora Jews do?
I would never tell anybody whether to stay or leave. But I can simply report that some will decide to move to Israel; some are already deciding to do so. Many if not most cannot or will not make that decision. That’s up to them. But those Jews who stay in the diaspora, in my view, need to do two things.
First of all, they need to stop echoing the destructive mantras of the left which are daggers at the heart of Judaism, Israel and western civilisation. The social justice agenda beloved of so many Jews in this country is not tikkun olam [the repair of the world] but the antithesis of Jewish values. They must recognise that.
Second, diaspora Jews must stand up for Israel much more robustly. They must start telling truths they’ve never told before. It’s not enough to say: “Why are you all being so horrible to us, we’re the victims”. Once you start defending yourself, you’ve lost. You’re arguing on the ground that the enemy has made for you.
Diaspora Jews should go onto the offensive, and start telling truths — about Palestinian rejectionism, about Muslim antisemitism, that the Palestine cause supported by so many well-meaning diaspora Jews is based in its essence on the theft and cultural appropriation of the Jews’ own history in the land of Israel. The Jews of the diaspora must start telling people: “You don’t like Zionism because you think Zionism is a colonialist enterprise? Let me tell you, Zionism is the liberation movement of the Jewish people against colonialism”. That’s the kind of thing the Jewish diaspora should be saying.
So to conclude. As I’ve said, this is an inflection point for western civilisation. It’s also the Jewish moment.
The Jews, as I’ve tried to say, gave the west its core values. The reason the west has turned so emphatically against the Jews is that basically the west has turned against itself.
Millions of ordinary people in the west either sense this or fully understand it. I would suggest that this is the moment when the Jewish people should make common cause with those millions of ordinary folk who want the west to survive and are desperate to find ways of doing so. This is the moment when the Jewish people can actually help the west to survive by showing that, if it treats the Jews not as nuisances to be removed because “we can’t be bothered with them any more” but as the west’s wise parents and most deeply felt allies, the Jewish people can show the west how to survive.
If you are intrigued by that rather gnomic remark, I should advertise the fact that I’ve written an entire book about this, which hopefully will be published towards the end of the year. I can’t give you the title because it’s still being discussed. But it’s about this — about the fact that this is the Jewish moment, when the Jewish people can show the west how to survive.
Judaism is in essence a culture of survival. We do survival; it’s what we’ve always done. Survival is our unique selling point. It’s why Israel will win this terrible war, whatever the cost and however terrible what may yet unfold.
Israel will win it because we’ve been here many, many times before. The Jews are the eternal people, because the Jews have survived every civilisation that’s tried to destroy us. Every single civilisation that’s tried to wipe us out has itself disintegrated and disappeared.
We have survived. We will continue to survive. We will survive this war. Now we must help the west survive as well.