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As the six murdered hostages are being buried in Israel, Brendan O’Neill has some furious words for Western antisemites who have been cheerleading their murderers in Hamas. He rounds on them here: “The deaths of these hostages shame the Western conscience,” by Brendan O’Neill, Spiked, September 1, 2024:
…Now this is resistance. Unprepared, unarmed, these six young people did what they could to resist the anti-Semitic savagery of the invading army from Gaza. They repelled its grenades, rescued some of its intended targets, tended to the victims of its racist sadism. They didn’t ask for war, they didn’t expect war, they didn’t deserve war. But when it came, brutishly intruding on their kibbutzim and parties, they took action that helped to minimise the Jewish people’s suffering. It is a testament to Western radicals’ swirling moral disarray and their detachment from civilisational values that they referred to the racist invaders of Israel as the ‘resistance’, and the Jewish heroes who fought back as ‘colonisers’.
Here’s the only question that matters right now: are Jewish lives worth fighting for? Some of us think they are. Others, from the top of politics to the frenzied anti-Semites on the streets, seem to think otherwise. It is tempting to see the West’s moral disorder over Israel-Hamas as a consequence of that old problem, ‘the sleep of reason’, the sleep of our conscience. But in truth, the West’s conscience has been wide awake, and excitable, and noisy, and it has sided not with kidnapped Jews, but with their kidnappers. Let us hope the memory of the six slain will be a blessing – and let us hope their deaths will be a lesson for a West that seems utterly morally lost.
Brendan O’Neill is enraged at the “morally lost” in the West who have chosen to sympathize not with the six murdered Israelis, but with the Hamas killers who murdered them, just as for the last eleven months of the war in Gaza, so many in the increasingly antisemitic West have expressed their support not for the embattled Jewish state, but for those who would, if they could, wipe that state off the face of the earth. His savage indignation is exactly what is called for.