RUTHFULLY YOURS

Then he went on Piers Morgan Uncensored. And Morgan had a surprise for him. Do you ‘100 per cent’ believe, Morgan asked, that when Bob Vylan said ‘Death to the IDF’ he did not mean ‘death to individual soldiers’? ‘Yes’, Jones snapped with superb conceit. Then Morgan showed him a clip filmed in May, pre-Glasto, at Alexandra Palace. It showed Bob Vylan calling for ‘death to every single IDF soldier out there’. There it was, clear as it was vile: a punk and his mob whooping with deathly glee at the prospect of every soldier of the Jewish State being wiped out without mercy.

Jones’s face was a picture. He smiled awkwardly, though fuck knows what there is to smile about when you’ve just been rumbled on TV as someone who provides moral cover to mobs that clamour for the death of the Jewish nation’s soldiers. He went into panic mode. He tried some whataboutery. Israeli officials have said worse about Palestinians, he yelped in desperation. It was an extraordinary sight: a self-styled ‘anti-fascist’ floundering on TV after being exposed as excuse-maker-in-chief for one of the most fascistic cries we’ve heard in this country in years.

In the world of decency, the world not yet lost to the cranial pox of Israelophobia, everyone knew what ‘Death to the IDF’ meant. We knew that if the plummy bigots of Glasto got their way and the IDF ‘died’, then the Jewish homeland would be left to the mercy of the armies of anti-Semites that surround it. We knew that ‘Death to the IDF’ meant death to the Jewish youths who swell its ranks. And to the millions of Jews they are charged with protecting from the Islamofascists in their midst.

How did others not see this? Why did activists who wang on about ‘hate speech’ give a nod of approval to this truly hateful dream of death for Jews? Why did leftists who reach for the smelling salts when a feminist says women don’t have cocks cheer like loons when they saw a crowd call for the violent demise of foreigners? It’s because their hearts and minds have been corroded by Israelophobia. It’s because they are so firmly in the grip of this swirling bigotry that their capacity for reasoned thought, far less kindness, has been all but destroyed. It’s because society’s moral guardrails have collapsed under the weight of their raging animus for Israel, unleashing a neo-medieval delirium that should horrify us all.

That’s what Jones’s performance on Morgan’s show brought home to me: the sheer mania of the bourgeois hatred for Israel. There is much speculation about why Jones seemed so unstable. He appeared frenzied, tormented, almost smashing his glass at one point. This has led some, including JK Rowling, to wonder if he’d partaken of the white stuff before going on air. Actually, Jones has since tweeted, he was on amphetamines for my ADHD. Taking drugs in your 40s for that most middle-class of imaginary malaises? Mate, just pretend you did coke instead of admitting to that.

For those of us uninterested in the fashionable ailments and neuroses of the Oxbridge classes (ie, all normal people), the most striking thing about Jones’s performance was less its physical twitching than its moral frenzy. He came off like a man possessed, a mad preacher, come to cast out Zionism. It was giving millennarian vibes: a man in black barely able to sit still as he furiously held forth on the unholiness of Israel and all who support it. Just say Israel is committing genocide, he barked at Morgan at one point, and it sounded for all the world like a command to convert. ‘Renounce the devil and join the saved!’ – that’s what the pious loathers of Israel mean when they implore us lost souls to say the G-word.

Jones has form on this front. He embodies the neo-religious lunacy of the middle classes’ unhinged hatred for Israel. His commentary long ago left the realm of judicious analysis and now wails in agony in a forever purgatory of purple prose. He froths about Israel’s ‘genocidal mania’ and its ‘uniquely murderous’ wars. He damns the ‘depravity’ of its ‘cheerleaders’ who he hopes will be ‘haunted by the souls of the slaughtered Palestinians… until the end of time’. He foretells a ‘reckoning’ (Final Judgement) in which the ‘depraved monsters’ who support Israel (sinners) will be damned to a circle of torment where the ‘screams’ of Palestinian children will haunt them ‘for the rest of [their lives]’ (Hell).

It is moral pornography masquerading as commentary. It’s the lurid marshalling of other people’s suffering to give one’s own drab life some semblance of ethical purpose. That’s what I saw on Morgan’s show: a man so morally corrupted by a religious revulsion for one tiny country that he can barely speak in sentences anymore. If it was just Jones, I wouldn’t care. But the mania is rampant in influencer circles. Virtually the entire activist class now defines itself by its apocalyptic loathing for Israel. They dream, openly, of its death. ‘Israel needs to be destroyed’, said Australian writer Clementine Ford last week. Its army must suffer ‘death’, crowed the Glasto mob and leftists across the West. They’ve made the world’s only Jewish nation into a demonic entity whose destruction is the only thing that might save mankind.

These people share with the neo-fascists of Hamas the dream of Israel’s erasure. The events of the past week prove that beyond any sliver of doubt. On Friday evening, mobs in Melbourne firebombed a synagogue and then invaded a Jewish restaurant to harass the diners. Guess what they chanted as they carried out their gross acts of intimidation? ‘Death to the IDF.’ Congratulations Glastonbury, and Owen Jones and every other snivelling apologist for this hateful cry – you’ve given the scum of the Earth a new banner under which to torment Jews.

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 new 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