Daily Wire Editor Emeritus Ben Shapiro called on the West to “wake up” to the terrorist threat it faces from Hamas and its allies, writing that the existence of the Western world depends on it.
Shapiro appeared at Oxford University earlier this week for a Q&A and asked to give an address at the start of his appearance, but after a back-and-forth battle with the organizers, he was told he could not. So Shapiro turned his prepared remarks into an op-ed for The Telegraph, which was published Wednesday.
In the piece, the Daily Wire co-founder warned that the West is lying to itself about the evil Hamas openly parades. Shapiro condemned an academic union of faculty and lecturers at Oxford that proposed a motion earlier this week labeling Hamas’ attack on Israel a “consequence of decades of violent oppression” and calling for “a mass uprising” of Palestinians in the Middle East.
“This motion is Jew-hatred, pure and simple. Any moral equivalence drawn between Israel and Hamas is simple Jew-hatred,” wrote Shapiro. “When you support Hamas and its agenda, you are supporting the barbaric murder of babies in their cribs; you are supporting women being kidnapped, raped, and murdered.”
I appeared at Oxford Union this week and asked to give a brief address at the start of the appearance. I was told I could not. Here's the text as prepared.https://t.co/z5q77NsIAu
— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) November 1, 2023
While Shapiro couldn’t use his prepared address, he gave an extemporaneous speech at Oxford anyway, and a clip of his remarks went viral after he shredded the anti-Israel rhetoric of an activist at the university. The Daily Wire host said on Tuesday that he was told Oxford would release footage of the whole event within 48 hours, but the University has yet to release the full tape of Shapiro’s remarks.
We have been told that Oxford Union will release the tape of the full hour-long event within 48 hours. https://t.co/5vBAAkiJW9
— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) October 31, 2023
In Shapiro’s op-ed, he asked how anti-Semitic messages and mass demonstrations in “support for Hamas terrorists” could gain support “in the heart of the country that bore parliamentary democracy and classical liberalism.”
“The answer is simple: the West is embarrassed of its own values,” Shapiro added. “And this embarrassment has led it down the road of blindness. The West has decided that in order to avoid accusations of ethnocentricity, it must make a core assumption: everyone thinks like us.”
Many on the far-Left in Congress and the legacy media have attempted to add “context” to Hamas’ murderous campaign against Israel on October 7, arguing that Hamas’ brutal actions only came after facing years of “oppression.” But Israel and the Western world are not facing an enemy that holds to the same values or simply wants to negotiate peace, Shapiro wrote.
“Now, it is patently obvious that everyone does not think like us,” he continued. “People who kill babies for the crime of being Jews are not like us. People who paraglide into electronic dance music festivals and gleefully rape women, murder 260 people, and drag innocents back to their hellholes in Gaza are not like us.”
The Daily Wire host added that the fight against Hamas isn’t only about Israel defending itself against terrorists, but about the West defending itself — its values and way of life — against monsters.
“Today, the existence of the State of Israel means that Jews need not wait for anyone else to come to the realization that monsters exist and evil is real. But the West must too come to that realization,” Shapiro wrote. “Not for the Jews. Not for Israel. But because if the West does not defend itself, it will cease to exist. And the monsters will win.”