Dr Anjuli Pandavar is a British writer and social critic who holds a PhD in political economy. She was born into a Muslim family in apartheid South Africa, where she left Islam in 1979. Anjuli is preparing to convert to Judaism. She is one of the staunchest defenders of Israel and a constructive critic of the Jewish state when she believes it is warranted. She owns and writes on Murtadd to Human, where she may be contacted.
It started as a trickle, a mass-murderer here, an evil mastermind there, then two within 24 hours, and within months it was a flood: 5,000 at once, an entire jihad-terror conference here, an entire iniquitous quorum there — if you are still unable to feel the slightest bit of satisfaction, let’s not talk about joy, at Israel taking another step at acting to rid the world of yet more extremely evil men, this time in glistening, opulent Doha, then it is a symptom of something rotten festering inside you.
October 7 might have horrified you, stunned you, shaken your knowledge of yourself, caused you to question your judgment, perhaps your actions, your values, even your life over the last several decades. Perhaps you experienced a traumatising, debilitating self-doubt. It was possible, just possible, at that moment, that you could get onto the road to recovery, to finding your soul again, your spirit of love for proclaiming truth over concern for “letting the side down”. But, alas, that was not to be.
You substituted allegiance for truth, and by the time the Parade of the Coffins came along, you were back in your proper place, comfortable in the mad crowd screaming about a genocide in Gaza that you did not care to witness yourself. What use are your eyes? You were with the side chanting the slogans of hatred and blood. Muslims call that kind of mind-enslavement to evil Al-Wala’ wal-Bara’. It is one of their undying obligatory virtues.
By the time news broke of grown men strangling the Bibas babies to death and of their pummelling the little bodies with rocks, you felt nothing. There’s a genocide going on. Did the babies cry? What does it matter? You have no use for ears. You were too upset about the starving children of Gaza, who you have neither seen nor heard, to pause, even for just a moment, lest you find out that it was not so, and that you had slipped right back into that state of mindlessness, of never letting the side down. Real, horrific savagery and you felt nothing.
So how could anyone expect, after the destruction of Hamas, Hezbollah, the Assad regime, the IRGC, the Houthis and whichever of the obscene, overfed Hamas emperors in Armani suits taken out in Doha, that you would be happy to see so much evil depart this world. You could not see that despite its being plainly obvious even to you, that there is no genocide in Doha, no starvation, no killing of women and children, yet your reaction is the same as if you are unshakeably convinced that there is genocide in that gilded palace, and all the other awful things.
Your heart is with the slain monster, your kind words are for his surviving kin, and your tears? They are for the nothingness left inside you. Does that not tell you that genocide is not required, that starving children are not needed, and that you just hate Jews anyway, excuse or no excuse? It tells me so, loud and clear.
So to you, dear Western liberal who finds it so hard to take delight in the securing of the civilisation to which you owe everything, I say you are a loss, a sad loss. With just a little self-respect you might have paused and thought, genocide is an extremely serious charge and I grew up in a culture that gave the world habeas corpus. Let me just check; it will only take a moment. But you could not bring yourself to spare even that moment, could you. No, you could not.