Hamas’s October 7 massacre was shocking, not just due to its barbarity, but the reaction it elicited on the streets of liberal democracies, with masses of westerners actively cheering on the slaughter of innocent civilians and siding with a genocidal terrorist organization. As the first anniversary of that horrific day approaches, a new book sheds light on the morally bankrupt ideology that has caused many of our elites to turn their backs on liberal values and forge an unholy alliance with religious extremists.
“The Jewish nation found itself subjected to the very butchery it was built to withstand. The state to which Jews fled to escape the pogroms was now besieged by a pogrom. It felt like the most grave of violations, both of the sanctuary of the Jews and of the pact humankind made in the aftermath of the last great war: Never Again,” writes British author and commentator Brendan O’Neill in his new book, “After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation.”
“And yet that shining moral clarity never came.… Too many had taken up the cause not of the Jews, but of their persecutors.”
O’Neill believes that October 7 provided a “moral test” for western civilization, and we failed it miserably. He rightly places much of the blame for this on modern progressive ideology, which is a complete bastardization of the values that liberals once held dear.
“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,” writes O’Neill.
The book deftly exposes the hypocrisy of the anti-Israel left, showing how progressives have betrayed the cultural mores they spent the better part of two decades trying to impose on the rest of society.
In a chapter about the response of many feminist organizations to the mass sexual violence that took place on October 7, for example, O’Neill laments how quickly the #MeToo mantra of “believe all women” was thrown out the window when images of female hostages with bloodstained sweatpants and corpses with underwear around their ankles started appearing on our screens.
Not only did many feminists ignore or downplay the atrocities, some pretended the whole thing was fabricated to make Hamas look bad. And this is from a crowd that spent years telling us that something as innocuous as a flirtatious glance or a hug in the workplace was evidence of “rape culture” run amok.
“Far be it from me to mansplain,” writes O’Neill, “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.”
Elsewhere in the book, he wonders, “Whatever happened to the sin of cultural appropriation?” It wasn’t long ago when progressives were actively policing Halloween costumes, authors were being chastised for writing about the experiences of other races and left-wing media outlets were publishing “Dear white people” stories warning them not to wear dreadlocks or use Black slang.
Yet visit any campus nowadays and you’re likely to see hordes of white kids dressed as Arabs. “It is striking that the liberal establishment’s patrician ‘Dear White People’ missives dried up completely in the face of the latest keffiyeh craze,” writes O’Neill. Today, “Keffiyeh chic is all the rage.”
In another chapter on the irrational hatred that many have toward the Jewish state, O’Neill argues that the worst mass-murder of Jews since the Holocaust “seems like something the anti-racists of the West should condemn. And yet their first instinct in the wake of the pogrom was to protest against the victim of that violent orgy of bigotry, not its perpetrators.”
How did we get to a point where a supposed anti-war movement is preaching violence; where self-styled “anti-racists” are espousing antisemitism; where so-called anti-fascists are actively supporting Islamofascists; where feminists are turning a blind eye toward mass rape and defending some of the most misogynistic regimes on the planet; and where LGBTQ activists are advocating for governments that criminalize homosexuality?
O’Neill devotes an entire chapter to the “perverse political marriage between secular leftists and the religious extremists of radical Islam,” arguing that, “It was the left’s turn against the principles of Enlightenment that made it so lethally susceptible to the ‘charms’ of radical Islam.
“Having replaced class politics with identity politics, and its old anti-capitalism with a myopic anti-westernism, and its one-time commitment to civilizational ideals with a heavy-hearted angst over the ‘sins’ of our civilization, the left found itself drawn ever closer to those other haters of everything the West stands for: Islamists.”
He traces this unholy alliance to a 1994 pamphlet written by socialist thinker Chris Harman, who admitted, as O’Neill puts it, that “Islamism at times has the whiff of fascism to it,” but nevertheless argued that it could be “tapped for progressive purposes.”
Over time, Harman’s warnings about Islamism’s fascistic tendencies were forgotten, and replaced with a prohibition against criticizing other cultures, especially non-white ones, which protects Islam from progressive critique.
“It’s a lesson as old as time,” writes O’Neill, “make a deal with the devil and the devil will always win. A left that thought it could make just the occasional alliance with fascism now finds itself at the service of fascism, dutifully doing Hamas’s and Hezbollah’s bidding on the streets of our cities.”
One aspect of the book I particularly admire is that, while it is primarily focused on the scourge of antisemitism, O’Neill rarely uses the term in his writing. Instead, he systematically debunks the lies and misinformation being spread by the Israel-haters, and clearly illustrates why the only conclusion to draw from their singular focus on the Jewish state is that they are motivated by hate.
Take, for example, the left’s criticism of Zionism. O’Neill correctly notes that criticizing Israel is not inherently racist and that Zionism has been the subject of much historical debate, mainly among Jewish people themselves. But while past critiques of Zionism were wrapped up in broader critiques of nationalism, modern anti-Zionists are solely focused on Jewish nationalism.
“Why have they never gone out in public to demand death for Lithuanian nationalists, for instance? Or to damn Italian nationalists as ugly and cancerous?” asks O’Neill. “The very potency of the rage against Zionism, the singular, furious nature of it, is an indictment of its bigotry and irrationalism.…
“This is not criticism — it is hysteria. It is not opposition — it is hatred. It is not even denunciation — it is a death sentence for Jewish nationalism and Jewish nationalism alone.” This has led to the “re-emergence of old hatreds in new language,” with Islamists, progressives and neo-Nazis having replaced the word “Jews” with “Zionists,” but espousing the same bigoted tropes of centuries past.
“What has happened, it seems to me, is that the old dread and prejudice for Jews is now projected on to the Jewish state,” argues O’Neill. Anti-Zionism “is the form that Jew scapegoating takes in the 21st century. Where once people pinned their community’s every trouble on the Jews in their midst, now people hold Israel responsible for the ills not only of the Middle East, but of the West, of the world, too.”
The irony, O’Neill correctly states, is that anti-Zionism is “proof of why Zionism is necessary.… No more justification for Israel’s existence is necessary than the fact that so many wish to bring Israel crashing down.”
I would recommend “After the Pogrom” to anyone looking to get a fuller understanding of how woke progressivism has enabled the re-emergence and normalization of antisemitism and provided cover for western elites to side with theocratic mass murders.
It is also a great resource for anyone on the left who’s willing to challenge their worldview. It should be included among the mandatory reading material on university syllabuses, if only to force students, and their professors, to examine their belief systems and confront whether their hatred toward Israel has created a blind spot that has allowed them to violate all the values they claim to hold dear.
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