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After the Pogrom, with Brendan O'Neill
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In some respects, October 7 and the events that have followed is the continuation of a story that is almost as old as time itself. But in many others, the conflict, and the response to it, has been a reflection of our times.
Identity politics, the loss of confidence in western civilisation, the ideological capture of our institutions, the corruption of the media, and the self-flagellating instinct to atone for the sins of the past can all be seen in the response to October 7.
There has been no one better in the world at analysing this conflict through the prism of our contemporary culture than Brendan O’Neill. His new book is titled, “After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel, and the Crisis of Western Civilisation.”
Follow Will Kingston and Fire at Will on social media here.
Read The Spectator Australia here.
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Transcript
Introduction and Context Setting
00:00:19
Speaker
G'day and welcome to Fire at Will, a safe space for dangerous conversations. I'm Will Kingston. If for some reason you are not already following the show on a streaming service, you can find us everywhere from Spotify to Apple Podcasts to YouTube. If you like what you hear here, please consider giving us a glowing five star review. If you don't like what you hear here, please forget I said anything.
00:00:46
Speaker
In some respects, October 7 and the events that have followed is the continuation of a story that is almost as old as time itself. But in many others, the conflict and the responses to it have been a reflection of our times. More than that, it has been a test of our societal morality in 2024. It's a test that the West has failed.
00:01:11
Speaker
This is the story that has gone, if not unsaid, underappreciated over the last 12 months.
Brendan O'Neill on 'After the Pogrom'
00:01:17
Speaker
Identity politics, the loss of confidence in Western civilization, the ideological capture of our institutions, the corruption of the media, and the self-flagellating instinct to atone for the sins of the past can all be seen in the response to October 7.
00:01:34
Speaker
has been no one better in the world at analysing this conflict through the prism of our contemporary culture than Brendan O'Neill. Luckily for us, he has organised his thoughts in a new book, which has just been released. It is titled After the Pogrom, 7 October, Israel, and The Crisis of Western Civilization.
Reactions to October 7 Events
00:01:54
Speaker
Brendan, welcome back to Fire at Will. Hi, Will. How are you doing?
00:01:58
Speaker
I'm doing well, mate. Congratulations on the book. It is a cracking read. Thank you. Let me start with the obvious question, perhaps. Why did you write it? You know, people have asked me that question a few times and I so i haven't come up with a good answer yet, except to say that of the pogrom which is the title of the book but after 7th of October I remember thinking very early on the response to this is going to be bad. In fact I wrote something on the day itself. I wrote something when the known death toll was 20. We only knew that 20 people in Israel had died and of course that went up to more than a thousand eventually but when the death toll was at 20 I was asked to write something so I wrote a piece and I said in that piece the response to this is going to be bad, people are going to be blame israel people are going to take to the streets and protest against the victims of this pogrom rather than against the pogromists themselves so i had an inkling that all that stuff was going to happen but it was a million times worse than even i expected and people forget what happened after 7th of october people forget that there were celebrations on the streets of london
00:03:01
Speaker
and the streets of Sydney and the streets of New York City. People forget that on the 9th of October, people gathered outside the Sydney Opera House to burn the Israeli flag and say fuck the Jews. People forget that in outside the Israeli embassy in London, hundreds and hundreds of people had a party They played pop music and they danced and they sang. These were pro-Pogrom celebrations in civilized cities in 2023. It was, I make the point in my book, it was as insane and disgusting as if people had poured onto the streets of London to celebrate Kristallnacht or to celebrate the news that Jews were being gassed by the Nazis.
Societal Decay and Identity Politics
00:03:41
Speaker
it was It was at that level, I thought. So when I saw those celebrations about thirty six or forty eight hours after the pogrom and then when i saw the posters of the kidnap victims being torn down almost everywhere they were put up when i saw young so called progressives.
00:03:59
Speaker
primarily from privileged backgrounds, marching shoulder to shoulder with radical Islamists who were chanting for more deaths to Jewish people. I just knew that all this rot in Western society was about to come to the surface of society. And that's what that is, what's happened. And so that's why I sat down and thought, right, I've got to write a short, fierce, polemical book looking at this, reminding people what happened and trying to put forward an explanation for why it happened.
00:04:27
Speaker
so You've said you wanted to remind people what happened, but I wonder about the next step, which is around persuasion. so I have been involved in arguments, much like you have, much like probably most people have in the last year around this conflict. I'm yet to persuade a single person who hasn't come into it with a differing view to me. If if I'm being honest with myself,
00:04:48
Speaker
I probably haven't been persuaded from from my position, which is is supportive of Israel. Are we as a society so entrenched in our views on both sides that persuasion is futile? I think persuasion is probably futile with some people. I think one of the things that's happened with the Palestine issue is that it has become bound up with a certain section of society with their sense of personality, with their sense of who they are, with their sense of virtue. This is why they wear the kafir. You know, they actually wear an item of Palestinian clothing. ah Funnily enough, no one accuses them of cultural appropriation. You remember for the past 10 years, if you if a woman wore a white woman had braids in her hair or a white man put on some kind of supposedly black clothing, they would be instantly accused of cultural appropriation. But these people are never accused of that.
00:05:40
Speaker
because the kafir has become the way in which they signify their caring attitude how pro-palestine they are how anti-israel they are what good people they are so it's it's that perennial problem with identity politics the real problem with identity politics is that when you When your political views get entirely wrapped up with your own personal identity, then it becomes very difficult to dissuade you from your position or to even to have an argument. People will feel under attack because their whole sense of self is bound up in their political belief system. And that that's what's happened with the Palestine issue as well.
00:06:16
Speaker
I'm sure there are some people on the other side who have a similar relationship to their pro-Israel position, but in my experience at least, people who are pro-Israel tend to have thought things through a little bit more. I'm saying that as someone who his is himself pro-Israel, so this might just might be biased towards myself and people like me.
00:06:36
Speaker
But I do think that people who are pro-Israel have thought it through more. They've certainly had to cut through a lot of the Israelophobic nonsense that is, I think, pretty mainstream these days in the media, ah certainly on social media, in chattering class circles. You know, for entry into the dinner party scene in European society, you need to hate Israel. I mean, it has become one of the fundamental requirements of being a member of that class, a member of political high society.
00:07:05
Speaker
And if you don't, and I know this from personal experience, I know that I've said this over the past year when I've been at events or at parties or meeting friends or whatever, where I've said, well, you know, I think Israel has a case here, you know, it has the right to fight back and people go nuts.
00:07:22
Speaker
they go nuts. they they They've never heard it before because they're in such little bubbles and they cannot handle the alternative point of view. So I think in relation to the question of persuasion, I think probably a lot of the pro-Palestine people are beyond persuasion because for them this is an issue through which they now present themselves to the world. They have co-opted the so-called Palestine cause and made it part of their own moral armory. It's not just cultural appropriation, which by the way I think is a bullshit term, it's wholesale moral appropriation of the entire issue of Palestine so that members of high society in America and Britain and Australia have a means through which to demonstrate their moral
Complexities of Israel-Palestine Debate
00:08:06
Speaker
brilliance.
00:08:06
Speaker
So they are, I think, very difficult to persuade. The other side, our side, I think there are definitely discussions that we can be having. ah We can definitely talk about, has Israel made some mistakes? Are there certain actions it took over the past year that it may be shouldn't have taken or that it has should have taken in a different way. You know, when you are offering solidarity to a people and to a nation, it does as I am to Israel. It doesn't mean being uncritical. It doesn't mean nodding along to everything. Of course there's room for criticism. Of course there's room for asking questions. But at the same time,
00:08:43
Speaker
This is a pretty life and death situation for the Jewish state. This is a this is about as black and white as politics ever gets. And I don't like the idea of politics being black and white. I welcome nuance. I welcome complexity. I think it's always good to dig down and find the truth of an issue. But this is probably the most black and white issue that I can remember, which is do you support the existence of a Jewish homeland?
00:09:10
Speaker
Or are you on the side of the fascistic militia who want to destroy that Jewish homeland? It really is that fundamental. And once you take the side of Israel, as I have done, I think it's important to continue to make the case for Israel against all the kind of Israelophobic nonsense we see every day.
00:09:28
Speaker
I'm glad that you opened the door to criticism and counter-argument there. We are in lockstep in our view on this conflict and it's aftermath, but allow me to put my Owen Jones hat on for a second, which admittedly doesn't doesn't fit easily on me. I've got a few counter-arguments that people may put forward to to some of your arguments in the book, and I want to use those as jumping off points for discussion.
00:09:54
Speaker
so You start the book by looking at what you frame as the continuation of the pogrom, which is the valorization of Hamas by Western radicals in the media on university campuses across our institutions. Some would say that that's has but all Those opinions have been limited to fringe nutters. and Most people who don't support Israel would be able to separate the plight of the Palestinians with the terrorist actions of Hamas. In other words, they would view the Palestinian people and Hamas as separate entities entirely. and As a result, the plight of the Palestinian people in the wake of October 7 is not justified. How do you respond to that line of thinking?
00:10:38
Speaker
I would say I agree that the plight of the Palestinian people in the wake of 7th October is not justified. Where I would differ with those people is who is responsible for their plight. And in my mind, the responsibility entirely lies with Hamas. And you know, there is a naivety amongst certain pro-Palestinian people, and and i I'll come back to the fringe issue in a minute, but um I think there's a naivety amongst almost all of them. And this goes for the hardcore pro-Hamas people who've been on the streets. And there are a fringe element who are pro-Hamas. And it also goes for the members of the upper middle classes who've been marching shoulder to shoulder with them and very rarely calling out their anti-Semitism. You know, the point I make to the supposedly respectable side of the pro-Palestine argument, I say to them, well, you've attended marches at which people made fun of dead Jewish people.
00:11:31
Speaker
openly made fun of dead Jews. You've attended marches at which relatively significant numbers of people compared Jews to Nazis. You've attended marches at which radical Islamists called for the mass murder of more Jews. Now, if I had gone if i was going along protests every weekend, say I was going on protests that were in favor of Brexit because I'm very pro-Brexit or in favor of freedom of speech, I'm very pro-freedom of speech, if I was going on a demonstration every weekend for one of those two issues that are important to me, and every weekend There were racists on those protests with placards saying, screw black people or comparing Africa to some kind of backward fascist entity or celebrating lynchings of black people in the 1800s and the 1900s.
00:12:17
Speaker
I would rethink going on those demonstrations. I would say, you know, this isn't for me. This is not where I want to be. I don't want to be associated with those kinds of people, with those kinds of views. So even the soft so-called respectable pro-Palestine set has not done the self-reflection it ought to be doing. It has not asked itself some basic questions, which is why does Israel whip up more animus than any other state on earth?
00:12:41
Speaker
why are these supposed anti-war demonstrations actually often quite pro-war, you know, quite in favor of destroying one state in particular, i
Cultural Signals and Anti-Humanism
00:12:51
Speaker
.e. the Jewish state. They haven't asked themselves those questions and every member of a civilized society owes it to himself to ask questions like that when he sees things like that. So I think there's been a moral failure on their part. In relation to the fringe element, I agree that, you know, the people who will say, well, you know, Hamas has got a right to do this and Hamas is the resistance. That that is still primarily a fringe view, but I think there is there's a relationship between that fringe view and the mainstream view of anti-Israel hysteria. I do think hysterical loathing for Israel is now quite mainstream, certainly in Europe.
00:13:28
Speaker
America might be slightly different. There's a longer history of um America siding with Israel. But in Europe, in the UK, and certainly in continental Europe, hatred hatred for Israel is mainstream. It's in the press. it's You can hear it amongst the political class. You'll hear it amongst the chattering class. i mean you know One of the interesting images for me over the past few weeks was when the irish the celebrated Irish novelist um Sally Rooney She did a speech at somewhere on the South Bank in some literary gathering. or You know, there were hundreds of people there to see her. they the The literary set loves her. And she opened her speech by saying, you know, let's all support Palestine. We've got to stop Israel. And they were whooping and cheering and rattling their jewelry and clinking their champagne glasses. And I just thought that was such a perfect image.
00:14:14
Speaker
of what being pro-Palestine has become. It has become a means through which the influential sections of society, the privileged sections of society, the opinion form in sections of society, has become the means through which they define their sense of moral worth and their sense of public prestige. It has become the issue through which they do that. And that In flames I would say the more fringe elements who go a step further and say well Israel is not only evil
00:14:45
Speaker
and Nazi-like, but it also deserves to be attacked. So there is a kind of inflammation relationship, I would say, between the mainstreaming of Israelophobia and then the growth, like a pox, of this pro-Hamasque sentiment, this pro-Hezbollah sentiment, amongst certain activists and certain sections of the Muslim community and certain sections of the middle-class left community. I think there's a relationship between that. And and if a society go to goes further down the road of obsessive hatred for Israel, we can't be surprised that there will be the emergence of fringe elements who will take that obsessive hatred even a step further. There was a really powerful line towards the end of the book I think that speaks to this sentiment and that was there is a connection at some level between an intellectual anti-humanism in the West and the militant anti-humanism of Hamas. What did you mean by that specifically?
00:15:43
Speaker
Yeah, so that's a chapter on decolonization and everyone will, be well, your listeners anyway, will will willll be familiar with the idea of decolonization, which is one of those fashionable woke ideologies that has taken hold on Western universities and in libraries and museums. Everyone is decolonizing, you know, they they're lowering the number of white books that they read and they're increasing the number of books written by Black authors or Indigenous authors and so on. So that's been happening on in Western institutions for some time. I think it's largely an expression of civilizational self-loathing, you know, to turn against the gains of Western civilization through this very performative embrace of minority writers. Now,
00:16:27
Speaker
I'm not saying, by the way, that minority writers are not part of the Western canon or not contributors to Western civilization. Of course they are. One of my favorite writers is ah Toni Morrison, the first black woman to win the Nobel Prize. She's a great writer. I don't care what.
00:16:42
Speaker
color her skin is. So I'm not saying that, but there is this very performative attempt to erase the dead white males of European civilization and replace them with other writers, other thinkers, other philosophers. So that's been going on for some time. And what was really interesting and really, really scary is that on the 8th of October, the day after the pogrom, loads of academics and students and lots of people online said, this is decolonization in action.
00:17:13
Speaker
This is what it looks like. And there were people online, saying and you know literal professors, literal academics were writing this. They were saying if you just thought decolonization meant changing your syllabus,
00:17:26
Speaker
You were wrong. It also means this. It also means Hamas's right to resist or the Palestinian people's right to resist. And that went on for some time. And you would see placards, especially on university campuses in America, you would see placards where people would hold up placards saying decolonization is not just a slogan. um And what they meant was we're decolonizing our institutions. And while at the same time Hamas over there is decolonizing Palestine, which is how they understand it. And I just thought,
00:17:56
Speaker
to myself if you look at the worst mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust and your first thought is that is my own political theory in action then you have strayed so far from the path of reason that there's no coming back and these were you know academics were saying this they were saying this is they were essentially saying what Hamas did on 7th of October is my theories made flesh That's essentially what they were saying. They saw the dead bodies. they they knew We all knew by that stage, by the 8th and the 9th of October, we all knew what had happened. And they said, this is decolonization. So in that chapter, which i the chapter is titled The Purge, because I make the argument that where where we are purging our institutions off the gains of civilization, Hamas is trying to purge the Middle East of its Jews. And i I argue that there's at some level, there's a commonality between these two events.
Debate on Israel's Response
00:18:55
Speaker
because both represent a violent rejection of modernity, both represent a turn against the West, both represent an embrace of a kind of animus towards certain identity groups, primarily Jews, but also white men, cis-het men, etc, etc. On both sides, there is on both the kind of polite decolonization pursued over here and the fascistic so-called decolonization pursued by Hamas, both of them speak to a complete and utter rejection of civilization and a move towards something that's a bit more barbaric.
00:19:33
Speaker
So yeah, I trace the common connections between those two things. They can be hard to see, but they are there. And in in the immediate aftermath of 7th of October, it was really clear that there was a connection here. This is the link in the chain that connects so-called liberal progressives with barbaric reactionary terrorists, which if you're not au fait with identity politics, is a very unusual thing to try and get your head around. and We will get back to that relationship a bit later, but I want to throw another counter argument at you. and That goes to the proportionality of the response. so Some people would agree that Israel had the right to respond to the barbaric attacks of October 7,
00:20:15
Speaker
But the severity of the response that we have seen in Gaza is not justified. There's a quote that I read from Diana Butu, Canadian human rights lawyer, and this sums up this sentiment. She said that the world tells us that nothing can justify October 7.
00:20:32
Speaker
And yet everything Israel has done can be justified by October 7. What do you say to people who say that Israel were well within their rights to respond, but the severity of the responding guy of the response in Gaza is unconscionable? I could not disagree more. And um I've heard that line from people, the the line that you read out where um nothing justifies 7th of October, but 7th of October justifies everything. Nothing does justify 7th of October.
00:21:01
Speaker
That's just a statement of fact, as far as I'm concerned. And and we've what we've seen over the past year, we've seen this incredibly concerning situation where lots of people have outright said or certainly hinted that there is a justification for 7th of October. So people will often say it didn't start on 7th of October. It started 76 years ago and it's been going on for decades and it's all Israel's fault for persecuting the Palestinians, et cetera, et cetera. So they will either say 7th of October is a reasonable response to that if they're pro Hamas, or they will say it's an understandable response if they want to distance themselves from Hamas. They will say it's something that it was inevitable. It was inevitable that this would blow up at some point because of how Israel behaves. That is bullshit. And not only is it bullshit, it's evil because slitting the throats of Jewish women is not a legitimate response to anything.
00:21:57
Speaker
It's not a legitimate response to being oppressed, as Palestinians claim to be. It's not a legitimate response to not having your own homeland. It's not a legitimate response to any known grievance. It just isn't. Throwing a hand grenade into a bomb shelter that has Jewish children in it is not a legitimate response to anything.
00:22:15
Speaker
It is not a legitimate response to one single thing israel has ever done so this moral inability this collapse of moral decency which means that people say well you know it's inevitable that this would happen it's not inevitable number one.
00:22:32
Speaker
And it's not legitimate or understandable or reasonable in any way whatsoever. And you know the last people who said that killing Jews was a legitimate response to political or economic grievance, we all know who they were. They were the Nazis. That's what the Nazis said.
00:22:47
Speaker
They said, well, you know, look what you've done to Germany. Our economy is in the toilet. We have been really sidelined by the post First World War international settlement. We're really hemmed in. We don't know what to do. Let's go and kill some Jews.
00:23:03
Speaker
because it's all their fault. And we would never accept that the extermination of the Jews was in any way a legitimate or understandable response to whatever grievances Germany was suffering between the two world wars. No one would ever say that. They would never make that case. And yet people are saying that now about 7th of October. They're saying it's an understandable or inevitable response. I think, you know, and then in relation to Israel's response to Hamas,
00:23:32
Speaker
yeah People will say Israel has now killed many more people than Hamas killed and um lots of women and children have died, far more than died and in 7th of October. The point I would make to that is there is no moral equivalence here. There simply is no moral equivalence between the conscious, determined, organized execution of people on the basis of their race and a war-like response to an enemy that threatens your existence. There is no moral equivalence between those two things. There is no moral equivalence between what Hamas did and what Israel is doing. What Hamas did was, it wasn't even mass murder. It wasn't, there's a ah German novelist, Herr Ter Müller, who said this wasn't even terrorism. This was a complete break with civilization.
00:24:22
Speaker
They filmed their barbarism, they celebrated it, they phoned their parents and boasted about how many Jews they had killed, they beheaded people, they raped women. It was barbarism of the like we've not seen in a very, very long time. What Israel is doing in response is the kind of thing we see all the time. It's called war.
00:24:42
Speaker
and people die in war. That's why most people, most reasonable people don't like war because it's horrible and people die and civilians die as well as enemy combatants. This is one of the reasons I am so entirely opposed to Hamas because I knew, when 7th of October was happening, I knew number one, lots of Israelis were going to die and number two, lots of Palestinians were going to die.
00:25:05
Speaker
because it Hamas started a war with a more powerful foe and one that they know fights for the right its right to exist. So all of this was unleashed by Hamas. All of it is dragging on because Hamas refuses to surrender and return the hostages.
Media Narratives and Biases
00:25:21
Speaker
And furthermore, I would argue that it's inflamed by the post-moral stupidity of the West which is certainly not doing anything to dampen down this war by inflaming hatred for Israel and whipping up sympathy for Hamas. So yes, the war should come to an end, but it should never have started in the first place.
00:25:40
Speaker
I agree with you. And I think that there's it's also unfortunate that Israel have struggled with the information war that sits behind the real war. And I spoke to Elon Levy about this the other day. In some respects, that's inevitable given the bias that the mainstream media has against Israel. But if you read people like John Spencer, an expert in civilian warfare or warfare in in heavily populated civilian areas, my understanding is that no army in human history has done more to predict civilian life than Israel has done in this war. And if you look at the numbers, the ratio of combatant deaths to civilian deaths is actually historically low. We don't hear that, or perhaps people don't want to hear that, and it is very easy just to get the more visceral response that you can see from seeing buildings that are blown up or alternatively seeing you know kids who who have passed away.
00:26:38
Speaker
But, you know, i I really agree. And this is where the media is failing as well because, and it's partly Hamas's fault because Hamas only puts out certain information. But then the media over here is too fast to believe Hamas. You know, if you were only to read certain newspapers or you were to only follow certain big social media accounts, you would think that not one member of Hamas has been killed in this war. you You really could think that because we never hear about it.
00:27:08
Speaker
You know, we are we are always told that 22 people killed were killed in an apartment block that was bombed. we We are never told who they are. We are never told which leaders of Hamas were there. Many, many leaders of Hamas have been killed, which combatants were there. And, you know, there is this impression people get that this is just a one sided onslaught on Gaza by Israel. but Israel is doing hand-to-hand combat in Gaza well it was in the in the early days there's less of it now hand-to-hand combat shooting firing tanks who's it firing against now of course what the israelophobic left would say is that it's just massacring civilians in the streets which ah is not true it's firing guns against Hamas who are firing their guns at Israel so it's a war between a democratic state and a fascist militia
00:27:58
Speaker
Now, to see all these so-called anti-fascists online who've got anti-far fists in their social media bios saying, well, you know, it's just a massacre. it's so In fact, they they engage in complete moral inversion. And they will say that the real fascism is coming from Israel against the civilians of Hamas, when in fact, it's a fascist militia in Gaza who refuses to surrender to the larger foe against whom it started this war.
00:28:26
Speaker
So there is so much moral inversion. There is so much information distortion that I think it's probably quite hard for some people to work out the truth of this situation, which is that this is a war. It's a relatively normal war. It's absolutely not a genocide. It's nothing like that. It's a war and people die in wars. And as you say, in fact, the ratio of um civilian to enemy combatants is historically ah Low, you know, it is enemy combatants are making up a significant number of deaths. Whereas in most wars, enemy combatants tend to be a a minority of the deaths and loads and loads of civilians die. That's the tragedy of war. But then, you know, what was really striking to me was when Israel carried out the pagers attack on Hezbollah in Lebanon, which to my mind was one of the most extraordinary acts in the whole history of warfare.
00:29:17
Speaker
it's incredible and if we lived in more reasonable times people would really be writing in depth and analyzing how this was done what what this took but of course everyone's just calling it an evil act it was like three thousand mini trojan horses put right into the pockets of the enemy ah You know, in the old days you had to build ater thousands of years ago a literal massive Trojan horse and hide inside to sneak into the enemy compound. ah Israel made thousands of tiny Trojan horses and put them directly into the hands of the people it wanted to wound or kill. Unprecedented. But then even that even that
00:29:55
Speaker
the the most targeted act against terrorists terrorists in history. Even that was damned as unacceptable, inexcusable, barbaric, genocidal, et cetera, et cetera. And essentially what what these people are saying is that everything Israel does is a war crime.
00:30:12
Speaker
It's not war. we We do wars, civilized people, we do wars. Everything they do is a war crime. So it's just a bigoted double standard. And it boils down to them saying that Israel should just sit back and take it on the chin. Don't fight back. Let yourselves be killed. When you really boil it down, that is what these people are saying. Let's look back to where you started that answer, which was on the failures of the media.
00:30:39
Speaker
We saw the report come out on bias in the BBC, for example, in recent weeks to remind listeners the BBC over the period of reporting on this conflict. Israel was associated with war crimes four times more than Hamas.
00:30:55
Speaker
with genocide 14 times more than Hamas, and with breaching international law six times more than Hamas, which is patently ridiculous. BBC is obviously not alone. How has the media got to this point, is the question.
00:31:10
Speaker
It's you know the media coverage of this war. It's the worst media coverage I've ever seen of anything. and We've seen some bad media commentary and reporting over the past few years and decades, you know from COVID ah through to Wokeness, especially at the BBC, climate change, their coverage of climate change is often just borderline hysterical. you know The media has not done a good job on reporting the various issues afflicting humankind in the early 21st century. I think that's ah pretty much a given. But on this, they've been even worse than normal. It really is atrocious. And if you watch the BBC,
00:31:49
Speaker
You know, sometimes I have pretty much stopped watching it, but every now and then I'll watch the news at 10 just and it's the same thing every single night. They will have all a girl in or someone in Gaza or not in Gaza in Lebanon. Recently, they've been in Lebanon or they might go to the West Bank and they just walk through the rubble of someone's house and they say this was a house. This is a teddy bear.
00:32:14
Speaker
The family has moved over there. It's just this relentless, emotionalist manipulation. It's not reporting in any sense whatsoever. If people, if suddenly if we were suddenly thrown back in time 50 years and we were watching news reports from Vietnam, our minds would be blown because I'm sure the media had many problems back then as well, but it they would have been on the ground reporting who's fighting in this war.
00:32:43
Speaker
How many soldiers did that side lose? What's the Viet Cong up to recently? They would have interviewed people. They would have shown conflict. They would have shown footage. They would have taken risks to shown all that stuff. they You would have watched the news and you would have known what was going on. You don't get that anymore. They've gone from providing us with information to providing us with these cheap moral thrills.
00:33:03
Speaker
You know, the aim of the news now, it seems to me, is to whip up a sense of grotesque moral titillation amongst the public, to really pull our grief strings to make us feel something rather than to make us understand something. And so that kind of very emotionalist media coverage, I think, is really repulsive. Firstly, because it exploits the undoubted suffering of various people in the Middle East in order to make ah you know, the middle-class viewers of the BBC feel something. It's exploitative, it's manipulative, but also it never tells us the truth of what's going on in a war between a democratic state and an army, that ah a terrorist army that attacked it on 7th of October. It doesn't tell us about losses, casualties, um what part of Gaza is Israel completely in charge of, what part of Gaza does ah Hamas still have some control in. All those things you would have learned from war coverage in the past, we are not learning
00:33:57
Speaker
any of it, not a bit of it. and I think there's an important clarifying point here as well, in that a lot of journalists have forgotten the distinction between opinion journalism and reporting. so Your writing is very powerful, your rhetoric is very strong, but you're not reporting on this conflict as much as you are providing your opinion on this conflict, and you're very clear in that distinction. I was watching CNN as Iran dropped 181 bombs on on Tel Aviv the other night,
00:34:28
Speaker
and Christiane Amanpour, it was the instinct to side with Iran that I think in the past, potentially if you're in that position as a reporter, you at least try to mask. and There was no effort really to try and basically mask that instinct to side with the Iranian regime. and I just wonder, why do you think in media there has been this blurring of the lines between traditional reporting and social commentary or or opinion commentary? you know It's been a long time coming, actually. um
00:35:03
Speaker
Going back to the 90s, well before your time, Will, you know during the Bosnia War, for example, there was a lot of discussion about what journalists refer to as the journalism of attachment. This was an open phrase used by journalists. They talked about, we need a new journalism, a journalism that feels as well as explains. And there was huge debates in the 90s about you know, the problem, the supposed problems of objectivity, the supposed problems of neutrality. And people were openly making the case that a journalist role is not just to provide objective information, but also to provide an emotional narrative. So it was really been gathering pace since the 90s. And if you look at some of the coverage of the Bosnian War, which is when this really started, there was a lot of manipulative and, and
00:35:50
Speaker
I would say a lot of misinformation about that war. Journalists took sides and as a consequence of taking sides, they didn't tell us the whole story. And since then, it's got worse and worse. And on every issue now, journalists take a fearful or emotionless or self-obsessed line rather than that kind of quite cold, forensic neutral position that journalists were expected to take for decades and decades before. And in fact, if a journalist were to do that now, if a journalist were to go to Lebanon or the West Bank or maybe even Gaza and if they were to give very cool calm Analysis of where things stand they'd probably be accused of being a cold-hearted bastard. I mean that's what would happen Why aren't you walking through the rubble and picking up teddy bears like the the people at the BBC? So it's um I think it's bound up with
00:36:39
Speaker
The collapse, it's bound up with all the kind of woke ideology in a way. It's bound up with the collapse of Western values. And one of those Western values is the idea of truth. The idea that there is such a thing as truth, that that objectivity is a difficult thing to achieve, but it's a good thing to aspire to if you're a journalist. Objective measurement of events, of reality, all those things have fallen out of fashion.
00:37:01
Speaker
And we're all now supposed to tell my truth. you know you don't tell You don't tell the truth anymore. You tell my truth. And and I suppose all a girl's truth is that she felt sad when she went to some um apartment block in South Beirut. Well, I'm sorry about that. And I'm sure all of us would feel sad if we went there. But that's not your job.
00:37:21
Speaker
Your job is not to communicate your sadness to the world. Your job is to tell us, as people who are forced by law to pay your wages, your job is to tell us what is going on. Where is Hezbollah? Have they been forced back? How many missiles have they fired? Where are the Israeli troops? How how many miles have they got across the border? You're supposed to give us that information. That's what we pay you for.
00:37:45
Speaker
And if we refuse to pay you because you're doing such a bad job, we can be arrested. So this is very serious. This is very, very serious. So it's, you know, the crisis of journalism that I think we've been living through for some time is really bound up with the crisis of civilization and the crisis of objectivity. And you can't really have serious grown up journalism in a world that has stopped believing in truth.
00:38:09
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's well said. I also think on an an and perhaps more simplistic level, it's just sexier to be an activist than it is to be a journalist, and it's also easier to be an activist than it is to be a proper journalist as
Feminism and Moral Inconsistencies
00:38:20
Speaker
well. Let's turn to a few of the the chapters within the book and and some of the specific arguments that you make as an intriguing little line in the chapter, Lying Jews.
00:38:29
Speaker
The thinness, the sheer moral paucity of fashionable feminism has rarely been so starkly exposed as it has been in the aftermath of October 7. What did you mean by that? Yeah, so that's yeah the chapter called called Lying Jews. I made the mistake one day of working on that chapter in ah Starbucks and someone looked over my shoulder and they just saw in big letters of the top lying Jews. I felt like explaining this to a very pro-Jewish book, don't worry. Yeah, so that chapter is about how the denialism that crept up very quickly after 7th of October, where we saw people saying, well, it wasn't that bad. And maybe Israel let it happen for cynical reasons. And maybe Israel did a lot of the killing on that day by firing bombs, etc, etc. There was a lot of
00:39:14
Speaker
pogrom denialism. and And one form that that denialism took was to question the idea that women in Israel was subjected to sexual degradation and assault by Hamas. People just refused to believe it. Lots and lots of people refused to believe it. And and they said, well, where's the evidence? Show us the evidence. And and when the IDF released that film, I think it was a 47 minute film, which was a collection of all Hamas's own footage of its massacre. The IDF released that film and showed it to certain journalists and so on. And some journalists said, well, we don't see any rape. So, you know, maybe it didn't happen. Owen Jones, for example, he he did a video response to that video film. And he said, we see a woman who's dead
00:40:01
Speaker
and her underwear are removed, but we don't know if she was raped. And I just, and he's not the only one. I'm not, I don't want to pick on him, but there are other people who said similar. And I just thought to myself, I'm sorry, but if you are seeing the first, the world's first live streamed pogrom.
00:40:19
Speaker
the first the first ever ah video recorded massacre of Jews and you're seeing women who've been murdered and in some cases burnt to death and their bottom ah area clothing has been removed and your first thought is, well, we don't see the actual rape. I mean, that's messed up. That is seriously, seriously messed up. And we saw a lot of that in the aftermath of 7th of October. And and feminists The betrayal feminism's betrayal of the women of Israel is was incalculable. I think it is one of the greatest betrayals of womankind that we've seen in a long time because feminist groups over here in the West said nothing. Jewish Women's Aid, which is a UK-based movement that combats domestic violence, Jewish Women's Aid is the only organization women's organization in the UK that commented on Hamas's sexual degradation of women.
00:41:19
Speaker
The only one. The rest of them said nothing. And in fact, some feminist organizers and feminist groups, they openly said, well, we don't believe that this happened. And we think it's Islamophobic and Arabophobic to say that men from Palestine are rapists. And so these are the women who for the past 10 years have said, believe women.
00:41:41
Speaker
They've pushed the me too ideology, which says that we must instantly believe every accusation of sexual assault or rape. Now I actually have a problem with this idea of instant belief because I'm old fashioned. I have an attachment to the idea of innocent until proven guilty and legal process, et cetera. So I was not a fan of me too, but I was, it's so intriguing to me that those principles of me too collapsed overnight.
00:42:06
Speaker
on the 8th of October, they no longer applied. They just disappeared. and And that I think was a real indication of how, I mean, I've never been a fan of feminism. I'm a huge fan of sexual equality and women's rights and women's right to to live and choose and do what they want to do. I'm a big fan of that, but I've not been a fan of modern feminism for a long time. But after 7th of October,
00:42:29
Speaker
the failures of feminism were legion. And the example I give in my book is some of your listeners will remember that there was a campaign by some pretty well-to-do, well-known feminists to gain access to the Garret Club in London. So the Garret Club is one of those very old-fashioned, men-only clubs for very rich, influential men to sit around coughing wine and smoking cigars. Well, they're probably not allowed to smoke, but, you know, doing whatever they do. And I fully support that. and I think if men want to have their own club and women want to have their own club and gay people want to have their own club, knock yourselves out. I don't have a problem with that at all. But these feminists wanted access into that club so they could be part of the highest echelons of society in the same week that they did that.
00:43:12
Speaker
The United Nations finally, at last after months of dithering, the United Nations finally published this report saying, yes, women were subjected to sexual dehumanization on 7th of October. So you had this dystopian vision of rich feminists in London demanding the right to sit down to high court judges and princes and actors, et cetera, while in Gaza,
00:43:34
Speaker
Jewish women were still chained to radiators while you know months after Jewish women had been subjected to rape and murder just such just traitors Actually, you know traitors to their sex That's the only way to put it traitors to humanity that they would say nothing about that and instead just carry on pursuing their own petty Self-enriching interests. I thought it was just horrible Well, help me understand the psychology of of a feminist like that. So let's say someone who saw Harvey Weinstein allegations and instantly went, yep, this guy's a rapist, and at the same time had a suspicion when they heard of allegations of rape committed by terrorists towards Jewish women. Is this a conscious abrogation of their principles in pursuit of a different cause?
00:44:27
Speaker
Is there a cognitive dissonance going on here that they're not aware of? What do you actually put that double standard down to? I think it's racism and you know, well, I don't use that term lightly and I think it's overused these days. Everything's racist now, criticise Islam and you're Islamaphobic, you know, wonder out loud if immigration is too high and you're racist, et cetera, et cetera. So I don't like the overuse of the term racist, but how else are we meant to explain the fact that it's me too, unless you're a Jew?
Anti-Zionism and Antisemitism
00:45:01
Speaker
How else are we meant to explain that all of every woman in the world
00:45:06
Speaker
was given the benefit of the doubt for a period of time, but then suddenly that benefit of the donna of the doubt was denied to Jewish women. that it was denied to women in the south of Israel who were attacked and raped and murdered on the basis of their race. It was a double crime. It was misogynistic ah and it was also anti-Semitic. But they were, those women, singled out amongst all the women of the world, were denied the resources that other women are given. In this case, the resources of belief, the resources of the benefit of the doubt when they say that sexual crimes occurred on that day.
00:45:42
Speaker
I think it's a racial double standard and I think it was actually confirmation or at least it suggested that the Israelophobia that we see all around and this kind of myopic hatred for Israel or this myopic distrust of Israel is a uniquely deceitful state, a state that um is so deceitful it will lie about rape in order that it can justify its genocidal wars in Gaza. You know this notion that the Jewish state is the most deceitful state. I mean you don't have to be the kind of person who sees racism everywhere and I certainly am not to to think that that might be racist. And I do think there's a racial double standard in a lot of this. I think probably unwittingly people have allowed their hatred of Israel to grow to such a
00:46:33
Speaker
extraordinary degree to become such an overpowering part of their lives and their personalities that it has inevitably crossed the line I think into a suspicion at least of Jewish people. So hatred for the Jewish state it seems to me pretty logical that that might bleed out into hatred for jewish people and i do think ah one of the reasons i'm not saying that any individual feminists are anti-semitic i'm sure a lot of them absolutely are not but i think the ones who failed to speak out about 7th of october they are either cowards
00:47:10
Speaker
Or they are applying a double standard that it's difficult to see as anything other than a racial double standard. but But they need to explain themselves. They need to come out and explain to us why for a whole year they've said nothing about the rape and murder of huge numbers of young women at a music festival in Israel. They need to explain why they've said nothing about that.
00:47:32
Speaker
This is a good segue into the discussion on anti-seminism and anti-Zionism. Throughout this conflict and before this conflict, we've heard in it is it is acceptable in polite circles to be anti-Zionist, but it is unacceptable to be anti-Semitic.
00:47:52
Speaker
You think that the lines now between those two concepts are perhaps so blurred as to be indistinguishable. Tell me about how you reflect on that term anti-Zionism and now whether or not that does just have a racial component. Yeah, you know, I used to be one of those people who would say there's a difference between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. And there was a difference for a while. You know, lots of Jewish people over in the 20th century, lots of Jewish people were critical of the idea of Zionism.
00:48:20
Speaker
Both religious Jews and um Marxist Jews, you know religious Jews weren't keen on the idea of Zionism because they thought you should only create a jewish a theocratic state once the Messiah had come. um And then radical Jews like Leon Trotsky, for example, and Rosa Luxemburg, they were critical of Zionism because they thought they saw it as an accommodation with antisemitism.
00:48:44
Speaker
So they said, look, if we respond to antisemitism in Europe by running away and making our own country, then we're letting the antisemites win. So there was all sorts of discussions about it. Of course, I would say that that kind of Trotskyist argument fell apart in the 1930s and 40s.
00:49:01
Speaker
because the Jews were enslaved and exterminated and the small matter of them rebuilding their ancient homeland took on an extraordinary urgency because if they hadn't done that or planned that or aspired to that then they possibly would no longer exist. So there's always there's always been criticism of Zionism including from Jews but I think what's happened over the past I'd say five or ten years, is that anti-Zionism, it seems to me, is is is just the mask that anti-Semitism now wears. And the way I see it is, you know, people say it's not racist to criticize Israel. And of course that's true. If someone said to me, oh, I went to Israel and it was it was just too hot, I didn't like the food, I'm not going to call them an anti-Semite. Even if someone said to me, I'm a real pacifist, I oppose all wars and therefore I can't support what Israel is doing. Fine.
00:49:51
Speaker
That's fine, I get that. That that person's not anti-Semitic. But we're not talking about criticism of Israel. We're talking about boiling, burning, obsessive hatred for Israel. We're not talking about people taking to the streets and saying, hands off Gaza, which is what people said, you know, hands off Vietnam, hands off India, hands off Ireland. Those were the slogans of the past. We're talking about people taking to the streets and saying Zionism as a cancer.
00:50:18
Speaker
Zionists control the BBC. That's what it says on placards. The Jewish state is a fascist state. 2468, we don't want no Jew state. That's what they chanted on American campuses. These are movements for the destruction of the Jewish state. That's what they are. From ah the river to the sea, Palestine will be free. that every ah Everyone knows what that means. That means that in that whole part of the Middle East, there would be no Jewish nation.
00:50:48
Speaker
which means there'd be no Jews because if that whole part of the world were to become Palestine overnight, Hamas would be in charge and Hamas is a virulently anti-Semitic movement. So when people make that chant, they're chanting for the destruction of the Jewish state. So the point I make in my book is that, you know, I'm an anti-imperialist kind of guy. I opposed All of the West's wars of the past 20 years, I think they were great, expensive, horrible follies. The Iraq war, the Hillary Clinton-led bombardment of Libya in 2011, the interventions into Syria, which I think made that situation worse, the Afghan intervention, which I think was wrong because 9-11 was not carried out by Afghani peasants, it was carried out by Saudi rich boys. So I've been critical of all of those wars. I think they were all very destructive. But every time I saw anti-Israel protests, the culture was so different. It was so much more guttural and ugly and venomous and hateful. So you you went from saying, you know, America stopped bombing Iraq to saying Israel is evil and I want it to disappear.
00:51:59
Speaker
and So over time I started to think why is this hatred for Israel so intense? why is the opposition to Why would anyone define themselves in opposition to Zionism? Why not define yourself in opposition to Turkish nationalism or Lithuanian nationalism or British nationalism? Why would people define their whole political personality through opposition to one form of nationalism, the Zionist form. It started to make no sense to me other than that this was a kind of increasingly bigoted, increasingly hysterical, fact free hatred for one state and one state alone.
Resisting Indifference and Defending Values
00:52:40
Speaker
And then that
00:52:41
Speaker
grew in time into hostility not only to the Jewish nation, but to Jewish people. And and so we we arrive at a situation where I can no longer tell the difference between people who hate Zionism and people who hate Jews.
00:52:56
Speaker
Final chapter of the book is titled Jewish Lives Matter. In it, you say, a fight back is needed against the indifference of our elites to the difficulties facing Jewish people and against their excuse making for pogroms and against their inflection on our societies of a politics of jealousy and division that they falsely call progressive. My final question, Brendan, what should that fight back look like?
00:53:22
Speaker
yeah You'll notice I didn't say in the book because I don't really know, but it's a good question and it is something we should all think about. Yeah, that final chapter, Jewish Lives Matter, that's that's really about the Battle of Cable Street of 1936, which some of your listeners will be familiar with, which is when um Oswald Mosley's fascists threatened to march through East London, which at that time had a very large number of Jews. And the Jews gathered together with other working class organizations and people and they fought back and and eventually the fascists ran away. It's a very famous battle of cable street. And the reason I wrote that chapter, the reason that's the closing chapter is because a few days after 7th of October,
00:54:01
Speaker
I had cause to cycle down Cable Street. I was going to East London and I was on my bike and I thought I'll take Cable Street and it's always an interesting historical street to cycle down anyway and from every lamppost on Cable Street in October 2023 there was the Palestine flag and that's understandable because it's mainly a Muslim area now, the Jews left long ago but I just felt so crushingly depressed that on this street that is famous in British history as as really the the the first street that Brits stood up to fascism which in 1936 we'd then go on to do it much more of course in our war with Nazi Germany but really the the street where we first did it. On that street now people were waving the flag of the side that had just carried out a fascist attack.
00:54:48
Speaker
rather than the flag of the side that had just suffered that fascist attack. And it really was a kind of transformative moment in my mind where I thought this is really, this is getting out of hand. And so that's why I wrote the book. And in relation to the question of solutions, I mean, that's the really hard part. I don't think there are any neat solutions. I don't think we can write a ah Jordan Peterson 12 point guide to fixing these problems because they're so profound and they impact on every facet of society and every area of learning and schools and universities and popular culture and media culture. All of that kind of woke ideology for want of a far better phrase. All of it impacts on all of those different areas of life. I i really think
00:55:33
Speaker
The thing I think people should do is number one, call out antisemitism wherever you see it. And you would be amazed how many people don't do that. you would be amazed how many so-called anti-racists are content to march shoulder to shoulder with anti-Semites. So call out racism and in particular anti-Semitism all the time, wherever you see it, stand up to it. And then the second thing, Will, is just to do the kind of thing people like you have been doing and people like us at Spike have been trying to do is just to push back intellectually against the anti-civilizational rot in our societies and to stand up for
00:56:10
Speaker
Western enlightenment, Western civilization, the greatness of Britain, the greatness of the American Republic, just to remind people that the countries they come from are not hellholes that were born from slavery, colonlines colonialism and empire. They are great countries that have done great things. And bit by bit through doing that, I think we could potentially win back the younger generation from the dark path they're going down and let them know that they've are the luckiest generation in history because they've been born largely in a time of peace into countries that are very civilized and very wonderful. And reminding people of that I think is probably the first step to having a change in culture.
Conclusion and Call to Action
00:56:53
Speaker
I'll add to that list, of course, go out and get Brendan's book after the pogrom, which is a brilliant book, mate. And of course I'd add, go out and get Heretic's Manifesto, which in many ways is a companion piece to this book. Thank you very much for writing both of them and thank you for coming on the show today. Thanks Will.
00:57:12
Speaker
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00:57:27
Speaker
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