Michael Krampner, a retired American trial lawyer, who also earned a Ph.D. In Jewish history, lives in Jerusalem where he is improving his Hebrew, learning traditional Jewish texts, reading widely on historical and political subjects and is engaged with family.
After the October 7 massacre in southern Israel that included rape, torture, kidnapping, maiming and murder, a segment of the West’s chattering class of reporters, columnists, academics, politicians and other would-be opinion leaders and their followers sided with the Arab perpetrators and not with their Israeli victims.
Many of the terrorism supporters claimed to be “progressive,” “anti-fascist,” in favor of peace, equality and freedom, supporting women’s rights, gay rights and checking all the other boxes for supposedly modern and enlightened ideas. Yet here they were cheering for an openly fascist and Jihadi movement, Hamas, and calling for the destruction of the little democratic Jewish State of Israel.
In After the Pogrom: October 7, Israel and the Crisis of Civilization (Brendan O’Neill, Spiked Books, Ltd. 2024) the ideologically eclectic British journalist and intellectual, Brendan O’Neill examines the ideas and processes that led to such a bizarre result. He finds that support of terrorism and hatred of Israel by supposed intellectuals is based not only on Jew-hatred and ignorance but is also based on a toxic stew of bad ideas that have been circulating in the West in recent decades: ideas that reject modernity, western civilization, and modern social values.
For O’Neill, as for many of us, Enlightenment ideas about governance and politics, such as the ideas of democracy, free speech, freedom of religion, tolerance of others and fair and free elections, ideas that are the product of seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe are important ideas still worth implementing even though only a small part of the world’s population has ever lived under governments that practiced them.
Those ideas never penetrated the Islamic world broadly or deeply. But the chattering classes have become filled with shame and guilt about the past, about racial inequality, colonialism, gender inequality and about all manner of things which are neither the fault of people now living nor of the little Jewish state. Their shame and guilt for the behavior of their ancestors comes at the same time that it is fashionable to extol the oppressed, so that the he who is most oppressed is the most worthy. At the same time they seek to signal their own status as fitting into the post-Enlightenement intellectual world.
O’Neill recognizes Jew-hatred in the language the haters use to describe Israel’s defense of itself against Hamas. The accusations that Israel is conducting a “bloody” campaign, is conducting a “bloodletting” and is particularly happy to kill Arab children all hark back to the blood libel that Jews murdered Christian (and Arab) children to use their blood in Passover matzoh. Like in the blood libels, the Israel-haters and Jew-haters are happy to repeat those words loudly and often. They also casually deploy words associated with the Shoah against Jews and Israel, calling Israel and Jews “Nazis” and falsely accusing Israel of genocide intending to be especially hurtful by their false accusations. Their obsessive hatred and denunciation of Israel suggest that their problem is not Israel’s policies or behavior, but Israel’s existence as a democratic Jewish state.
O’Neill also makes short work of the haters’ frequent claim that they are supporting an oppressed dark-skinned people, the Arabs of Gaza, against the white colonialists of Israel. These supposedly educated westerners are so ignorant that they do not know that there have always been Jews in Israel, that at least half of Israelis’ ancestors are from the Middle East and North Africa, having been expelled from Arab countries in the 1940s through the 1970s for being Jews and that most Israelis do not have ancestors who ever lived in Europe.
Ethiopian, Yemenite, Moroccan, Iraqi, Egyptian, Indian and other Jews find it laughable that anyone thinks they are “white colonialists” when they are in fact Middle Eastern and North African refugees from Arab-majority lands. The haters are also so ignorant, or perhaps so dishonest, that they claim not to know that the Jewish struggle for independence against Britain was one of the most successful anti-colonial movements, throwing off European control and obtaining self-governance for Jews in their ancient homeland. It was also the only anti-colonial struggle in the Middle East or North Africa that ended with a stable democratic government.
The most surprising thing to O’Neill is that these westerners who claim to value freedom and autonomy are allied with an openly fascist and Jihadi movement and that this alliance has become mainstream on the left. Hamas and Hezbollah are clear that they will not tolerate gays, women’s rights, religions other than Islam, nor will they tolerate free speech or fair elections. Yet feminists who otherwise insist that we “Believe all women!” who say they have been sexually assaulted don’t believe Israeli women. Gays who would be imprisoned, tortured and murdered by Hamas in Gaza, by the P.A. in Jenin and the government of Iran but would be welcomed in Tel Aviv, openly support Islamofascists and oppose the little democratic state of Israel, cheering for its extinction.
One of the academic stars of the “Hate Israel” movement, the crackpot California academic Judith Butler, idiotically stated at a conference that Hamas and Hezbollah want democracy. Another third-rate academic at Cornell named Rickford said he found the October 7 Hamas attack that killed, raped, kidnapped and maimed Jews “exhilarating.”
O’Neill puts it as clearly as this, ”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 ‘our struggle against the Jews[not the Zionists, the Jews]is very great and very serious.’ Self-styled anti-fascists had become ‘friends’ with fascists.”
The toxic stew of bad ideas includes, identity politics, theories about ‘settler-colonialism,’ outright Jew-hatred which O’Neill categorizes as a kind of racism, and the desire of Israel haters to divest themselves of the burden of western ideas, to ‘de-colonize’ their minds, their politics and their university curricula. That is the crisis of civilization O’Neill refers to in his title. The western supporters of the Islamofascists have lost touch with western values. That loss, is what causes third rate academics to take Jane Austen off university reading lists and replace her with Toni Morrison. It is the same loss that causes pampered university students to play-act at being oppressed people by wearing a keffiyah to virtue-signal their adoption of the ‘proper’ anti-Israel views and to pretend to be oppressed Palestinian Arabs in tent encampments.
“A yearning for holy war on Israel and everything it is seen to represent- Western ideals, post-colonial confidence, Jewish pride-is what unites the Islamist extremist and the genderfluid leftist in this strange unstable century.” The left has thus been put to work “dutifully doing Hamas’ and Hezbollah’s bidding on the streets of our cities.” The people who would have been Marxists but for the spectacular failures of Marxism have now substituted identity politics for class politics.
O’Neill’s short (170 pages) book is written in a crisp, direct style that demonstrates clear thinking and also disdain for the stunningly bad and often malicious and dishonest ideas that cause so many in the West to side with murderous Islamofascists. It is a book which is definitely worth the reader’s time. One ought to add that although the ideas O’Neill exposes and examines are too common in the universities and among the chattering classes, those ideas are so far held by only a minority, although it is a loud, influential and determined minority.
Recent polls in the United States, for instance, show that a majority of Americans think that Israel has valid reasons for fighting Hamas and that America should aid Israel. A majority also disapprove of Hamas. Unfortunately, the youngest group of American adults are more supportive of Hamas and more critical of Israel than their elders, indicating that bad ideas are continuing to spread. It gives some cause to worry about the future unless clear thinkers like O’Neill prevail.