I let thoughts percolate and events develop before writing each week. This week, there were so many ideas coming forward that it was at first difficult to choose. But three things came together to point me in the direction that these words follow today.
For murder has come to our shores, sponsored by a treacherous academic culture of hatred and of politicians building careers on that hatred.
The first event was purchasing a new book. I had just heard Douglas Murray and Jordan Peterson talk for close to two hours about Murray’s new book, On Democracies and Death Cults, which I rushed to order.
Murray is a Churchillian voice calling us to the defense of a civilization that is under deadly assault. We need Churchillian voices to rouse us from our opioid slumber.
For Hitler and his gang were not cemented into place as the apotheosis of tyrannical evil. In his day, many in the West thought him onto something and that those who immediately opposed Nazism, such as Fiorello LaGuardia, and slightly later, Churchill, political opportunists engaged in dangerous warmongering. Even as the extent of Hitler’s aggressive malignancy became more apparent, Britain and France were loath to resist. Lord Halifax, whose political clout in Britain briefly rivaled Churchill’s, was looking to make a craven peace with Hitler even after Churchill had taken the reins in 1940. It was a very close thing.
Around the world, many influential people pooh-poohed the danger he and his movement posed. So it was in America as well. Henry Ford sent the Nazis money when they were just getting started, and he accepted a gaudy medal from the German ambassador in July 1938, when Jews had already been evicted from professions, schools, and political rights, Dachau had been up and running for five years, the Rhineland had been reoccupied in violation of treaty, Hitler ended Austria’s independence, and Czechoslovakia was being threatened and was to be entirely swallowed up itself within a year. Even after Hitler had invaded Poland to start World War II, Charles Lindbergh, America’s darling after his pioneering trans-Atlantic solo flight, told Americans, “These wars in Europe are not wars in which our civilization is defending itself against some Asiatic intruder. There is no Genghis Khan nor Xerxes marching against our Western nations.”
It is even more fashionable in today’s Europe and in woke America to embrace the cause of Hitler’s heirs in the Middle East. As pusillanimous as Chamberlain, and as casually disdainful of Jews, Britain, France, et al., have never missed a chance to oppose Israel’s efforts to end forever the existential threat everyone knows Hamas, Hezbollah, et al., pose to the Jewish state — and, as with Hitler, to Jews everywhere.
Event number 2: the governments of Britain, France, and Canada, unwilling to adequately defend their own Jewish citizens from harassment and violence, publicly condemn Israel for attempting to defeat the people who seek their extermination.
Anyone who reads Murray will see how precisely he has delineated the problem. It is the test of our civilization and its values. Referring to the orgy of massacre, abduction, and rape that Hamas unleashed on Israel’s civilians in October of 2023, Murray wrote:
From the moment news of the massacre in Israel emerged, one thing in particular is worth noting: There was not a single major protest against Hamas in any Western city. Not one. The people who carried out the massacre and started a war did not find themselves the object of criticism on the streets of one Western city …
The governments of all these countries had been funding the Palestinians in Gaza for years. They had been giving billions of dollars in foreign aid direct to the Hamas government there, through UN organizations among many others. This money had been used by Hamas’ leaders to either enrich themselves (the group’s leaders became billionaires) or to build the infrastructure of terror inside Gaza that enabled the group to carry out the October 7 attack, steal Israelis, and hold them hostage inside Gaza.
Those governments funded a government, who, like the Nazis, made their violent intentions public, and who had verified those intentions by terrorizing its political opponents and by unleashing endless warfare against Israel. Hamas publicly commits to continue until Israel is eliminated and Jews everywhere terrorized.
As in the ’30s, Western democracies have chosen to ignore the challenge to the values that made them great. It is worse than the 30s in that the enemies of freedom, who wish for members of only one religion to be tolerated in the entire Middle East, wield large political clout in all these countries. Their love of coercion manifests not only in the Judenrein realms they control in the Middle East, but also in the violence and harassment that are a normal part of life now for Jews in London, Paris, and Montreal.
And it’s a close thing here, too. For murder has come to our shores, sponsored by a treacherous academic culture of hatred and of politicians building careers on that hatred. It’s not hard to imagine Ross Barnett, the Talmadges, and all those who got and kept power by the subjection of an entire race, smiling and applauding from their graves.
Like the segregationists, like the Nazis, they construct a mental world in which they see their hatred as love of justice and that murder is a necessary means to that justice. Like the segregationists, their vision of justice is absolutely exclusionary; and like the Nazis, their just world is completely absent of those whom they hate. (No Jews at all live in any place where either Hamas or the PA govern.)
Event number 3 — the murder in cold blood of a young couple just about to announce their engagement to their family. I read about it just today on the Chabad.org website, quoted here:
Two Israeli embassy employees were murdered in cold blood on Wednesday evening outside a gathering of young diplomats at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C.. The assailant shot and killed them at close range, leaving three others wounded …
Yaron Lischinsky, 30, and Sarah Lynn Milgrim, 26, were standing outside the museum for the event hosted by the American Jewish Committee (AJC), when Elias Rodriguez, a 30-year-old Chicago native, opened fire. Rodriguez then entered the building and, after sitting in the museum lobby amongst his victims, identified himself as the perpetrator. As he was removed from the scene, Rodriguez began chanting “Free, free Palestine.”
Rodriguez, a hero in his own eyes, who so courageously executed these young people from behind, has told that he was inspired to action by the pro-Hamas rioters on campuses. Hey, what’s the point of a revolution without rape and kidnapping? And when its defended by the supreme gaslighting perfected by this crew — they are fighting against a holocaust! Josef Goebbels, you’ve been outdone!
Hamas’s defenders here and abroad will no doubt do the same. This path is already well-worn. The acolytes of hatred are already busy portraying this cold-blooded assassination as a glorious act of resistance, and they are on the web crying out for more of the same (here is a fine example). An overlapping group of people has portrayed the cold-blooded assassination of insurance executive Brian Robert Thompson as similarly heroic.
This is the cult of death. Their only law is their imperious hate. They are intoxicated with death.
And that is a topic too big to even begin to tackle at the end of this article. I’m resolved to treat it further. The topic that Murray has addressed is of an importance as great as that which Churchill addressed. As Murray’s subtitle suggests, our response to the cult of death will determine the future not just of Israel but of civilization itself.
Pray for swift victory for its cause.
READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin:
Trump Tries a Different Approach to Arab Hitlerism