RUTHFULLY YOURS

For me, there are two anniversaries this week. There’s 7 October, two years since a 7,000-strong army of anti-Semites invaded Israel to wage a genocidal campaign of rape and terror against the Jews there. And there’s 8 October, which will mark two years since the young and educated of the West sang the praises of that fascist abomination. Since people in our own cities hit the streets to dance with unalloyed glee over that Islamist Kristallnacht. And to call it a ‘day of celebration’. And to holler ‘Glory to our martyrs’, by which they meant the men who had just slit the throats of Jews.

We will do a disservice to Israel, to the dead and grieving of 7 October and to ourselves if we do not remember both of those atrocities this week. The physical atrocity of the slaughter of Jewish families by tooled-up Islamofascists. And the moral atrocity of the apologism and even festivity that greeted those horrors here in the West. For where the former ignited a war for the survival of the Jewish nation, the latter confirmed we are in a war for the soul of the West, too. Two years on from that fascist dagger in civilisation’s heart, the stakes are as high as ever, both for Israel and for humanity.

The most important thing to commemorate today is the dead, the injured, the kidnapped and the grieving. There is a tendency to downplay 7 October. It has come to be swaddled in euphemisms. Lowlifes of the left call it ‘resistance’, but even in ‘sensible’ society a kind of linguistic cowardice rules. There is a reluctance to confront the enormity of what occurred that day. ‘Attack’, people call it. ‘Terrorism’, they say. It is memorialised as the impulsive act of a desperate people – the ‘wall [came] down’ on this ‘giant open-air jail’ and a swarm of oppressed humanity rushed over the border, as Ta-Nehisi Coates says. It was organic, horrible, ‘a tragedy’.

This is a species of denialism. Weasel words that bury the history-shaking savagery of what was done to the Jews two years ago today. The truth is that 7 October was a well-planned, well-executed military pogrom driven by the genocidal intention of obliterating Jews. It was the match of the militarised pogroms that swept Eastern Europe under Nazi rule. Close to 7,000 Islamist militants took part. They invaded Israel by land, sea and air. This included 3,800 of Hamas elite Nukhba forces and its Al-Qassam Brigades and 2,200 individuals from other terror armies, like Palestinian Islamic Jihad. A further 1,000 pogromists stayed in Gaza to rain missiles on Israel. Hamas had been planning its invasion since 2018 – or ‘incursion’, as the media say, yet another slippery term of obfuscation.

Far from a spontaneous rush born of despair, 7 October was a highly disciplined act of fascistic terror. The death toll was 1,182. A further 4,000 were injured. Of the dead, 863 were civilians. 251 people were abducted, 210 of them alive, 41 of them dead. Picture it: 41 corpses, mostly Jews, dragged into enemy territory as trophies of the pogrom for mobs to mock and beat with sticks. When people call this an ‘attack’, they are to all intents and purposes lying. The butchery of Jews and the parading of their corpses for gleeful debasement by the mob is not an ‘attack’ – it is neo-Nazism, it is a pogrom.

But even the numbers fail to capture the depths of the depravity of 7 October. To understand the true nature of that savage rupture in our civilisation, you need to look at the stories from that day. The fact that the youngest victim was just 14 hours old. A girl shot while in her mother’s womb. She was born, lived for half a day, then perished. Or the fact that the oldest victim was a 92-year-old Holocaust survivor, Moshe Ridler, who died when a militant fired a rocket-propelled grenade into the safe room in which he had taken refuge. Mr Ridler survived the exterminationist hysteria of Nazism but could not survive Hamas’s anti-Semitic crusade. Or the fact that one elderly couple had to be identified by the one sliver of bone that remained of their bodies. Their house was set on fire by the invading fascists. They were reduced to ash. It took archaeologists three weeks of sifting through the soot to find something human that could be DNA-tested.

It was 2023 and they were burning Jews to death again. Once more, humanity found itself scouring the smoldering wreckage of a burnt-down building for some remnant of the Jews that once lived there. Those who call this day of barbarous racism an ‘attack’ have forfeited the right to be taken seriously. Those who call it ‘resistance’ have exposed to the world their own demented sympathy with Jew murder. As the German novelist Herta Müller said, even calling it ‘terrorism’ feels woefully insufficient. It was a ‘total derailment from civilisation’, she says. There was an ‘archaic horror in this bloodlust that I no longer thought possible in this day and age’.

This is what we should be commemorating today. Not an ‘attack’, not a ‘tragedy’ – an act of Nazi-like savagery. A genocidal burning of Jews. The violent intrusion of the crimes of history into our complacent century. The most fitting tribute we could pay to the grieving of 7 October on this second anniversary would be to give this atrocity its rightful place in the black pages of human history. To acknowledge, at last, that it was an epoch-defining crime against humanity, the raw heir to the era of the Holocaust. It compounds the grief of Israel to continue to deny this truth of 7 October.

Then we come to 8 October. That other dark day, two years ago, when mobs danced outside the Israeli Embassy in London in joy at the mass murder of Jews. When Islamists gathered at the Sydney Opera House to cry ‘Fuck the Jews’. When the righteous dusted down their Palestine flags and waved them with abandon, hours after women had been raped under that flag, hours after children had been murdered under it. When students in America cried ‘Glory to our martyrs’. When professors said they felt ‘exhilarated’ by what had happened. When leftists called it a ‘day of celebration’. When that suicidal alliance of genderfluid activists and Jew-hating Islamists took to the streets to call for further ‘jihad’ against the Jewish State. One pogrom was not enough. A thousand dead Jews was not enough. They wanted more.

This horror, this moral atrocity that followed the physical atrocity, continues to this day. On Saturday, a mere 48 hours after two Jews perished in an act of anti-Semitic terror in Manchester, the mob was back on the streets hollering ‘Long live the intifada’. We are not only in denial about the historic inhumanity of 7 October but also about the glee it ignited among those who call themselves ‘progressive’. We would remember if people had poured on to the streets of London to celebrate Kristallnacht – so we should remember that they did so for 7 October, a pogrom in which 10 times as many Jews were slaughtered.

7 October confirmed that Israel faces an existential threat on its borders. 8 October confirmed that the West faces an existential threat within its borders. From a cultural establishment, a liberal elite, a left and an Islamist mob who have turned their backs on the virtues of civilisation and fallen under the spell of barbarism. Israel is winning the war against the fascists that invaded its lands two years ago. We, alas, are not winning the war for the soul of the West. We struggle even to admit we are in such a war. Two years on, the good ship Israel has been steadied while the West still pitches on the high seas of counter-Enlightenment.

There’s one more thing I will recall today: the heroism of the young on 7 October. Alexander Lobanov, who helped evacuate people from the Nova music festival, leading to his capture and later his murder. Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who picked up the grenades that Hamas threw into a bomb shelter and threw them back out again, causing him to lose an arm. Almog Sarusi, who refused to leave his girlfriend’s side after she had been shot, leading to his own capture and his own murder. Shiri Bibas, who held her babies to her breast and comforted them as they were dragged into the hell of Hamas-ruled Gaza. And too many more to mention. There is an alternative universe, one where the West has not yet abandoned reason, where our young wear t-shirts with these people’s faces on them, and cry out their names, and agitate for the erection of statues to these valiant Jews who resisted fascist terror as best they could, just as their forebears in the ghettos did. Making that alternative universe a reality is the task of all of us two years on from 7 October.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy