The West’s Suicide Wish

By Madeleine Kearns

Sunday, October 29, 2023

 

Before the dead had been buried, before a single hostage had been returned, before Israel had launched its counteroffensive, protests sprang across the West in praise of the “Palestinian resistance,” or, as it’s also known, Hamas.

 

Anti-Israel demonstrators across Europe and the Western world weren’t merely protesting the endangerment of Palestinian lives in Gaza but the very existence of Israel “from the river to the sea.” Posters of Israeli hostages have been torn down or defaced, the word “colonizer” scrawled across pictures of abducted children. Cries of “One solution, intifada, revolution” and “Death to the Jews” have been shouted on public streets and on university campuses. In Britain, Muslim leaders have used Hamas’s attacks as an opportunity to deliver sermons on Islamic tales about killing Jews and the duty “to fulfill the command of jihad.”

 

All this may be disturbing, but is it surprising? Western countries have been creating the conditions in which this malignity can thrive for decades.

 

First, we have allowed sinister anti-Western ideologies, such as the tear-it-all-down nihilism of the Black Lives Matter movement, to take hold of academia. Evidently, this hatred of the West has currency among the young. A new Harvard–Harris poll found that 51 percent of Americans aged between 18 and 24 years of age believe that Hamas’s slaughter of Israeli civilians “can be justified.”

 

Second, in pursuing the ideal of “multiculturalism” — according to which opposing cultures can coexist happily without the need for a unifying narrative and patriotic commitment — we have allowed mass immigration from anti-Western cultures without prioritizing those immigrants’ assimilation or integration.

 

Unfortunately, both methods of civilizational self-destruction have been worsened by the pusillanimity of our political class.

 

Writing for the Critic, Ben Sixsmith compiled a list of “twelve things more arrestable than calling for jihad” in the U.K., which include silently praying near an abortion clinic, “misgendering” someone whether in public or online, publicly denying that gay marriage is biblical, and protesting the murder of women during a pandemic. In London, the Met police scrambled over itself to explain that “jihad means a lot of different things to many different people.” Meanwhile, two young men holding an English flag at an anti-Israel protest were given a warning by police that if they said anything even nearly racist they would be arrested.

 

The British media similarly appear eager to provide cover for Hamas. The BBC repeated Hamas’s bombed-hospital lie on air, acknowledging that Israel was investigating the incident but adding that “it is hard to see what else this could be, really, given the size of the explosion, other than an Israeli air strike, or several air strikes.” ITV News had to apologize after running a segment on the discrimination felt by a Palestinian-British woman living in London after it turned out that the woman, who lauded the atrocities on October 7 as a “triumph” against the “Zionist entity,” was an employee of the Iranian state propaganda program Palestine Declassified, which is banned from broadcasting in the U.K.

 

Politicians such as Humza Yousaf, Scotland’s first minister — a Muslim whose in-laws are in Gaza — have called for the U.K. to open the doors to Palestinian refugees. As with all those caught in the cross fire of war, the humanitarian plight of Palestinians is desperately serious. But the brunt of that responsibility falls on its Arab neighbors. The last thing Britain needs is another influx of migrants from a Muslim-majority country who are taught to hate us. Consider the scenes from London yesterday, where tens of thousands of anti-Israel protesters gathered in the British capital, many of whom deny the right of the Jewish homeland, and our ally in democracy, to exist.

 

Is it really “Islamophobia” to prefer our Judeo-Christian traditions, our constitutions, and our rule of law to the mores of the Arab world? The freedoms and liberties the West provides can be easily taken for granted. It has taken centuries of struggle and reform to get to where we are. It may not be perfect. There are many things to be ashamed about. Still, there is nowhere better to be than in a society in which fundamental freedoms, including those of speech, assembly, and religion, are valued and protected. And that’s especially true if you happen to be gay, a woman, or a member of a religious minority.

 

We can’t blame the suicide wish of the West on immigration alone. Not when Western elites promote the hatred of our cultural inheritance as a mark of moral and intellectual sophistication. Not when college students at top-tier schools, supposedly our best and brightest, justify flagrant antisemitism through a narrative of “decolonialization.” Not when people can be so easily swept up in a new cause that’s doing the rounds on TikTok. Why, for instance, were Palestinian flags being raised by Glasgow Celtic fans at a Scottish soccer match? The answer is both pathetic and depressing. Celtic supporters, many of whom are of Irish descent, project and superimpose their sectarian support for the IRA against the British government onto the Hamas–Israel conflict. It follows the logic that their enemy’s enemy is their friend, and that their enemy is their own country.

 

It would be nice to think that this has been a wake-up call. But things are likely about to get worse. The only political solution is to elect representatives who take preserving Western civilization seriously. Good luck with that.