The West is fighting for its life

If we cannot tell good from evil, the West will fall—not from without, but from within.

The response to the fate and treatment of Israel will determine if it can still tell good from evil and truth from lies.

It was the discovery of the death camps in Germany, and Auschwitz in particular, that persuaded me there must be a living, corrupting, murderous existence of evil that could overwhelm human beings so that they did diabolical things to one another.

What followed from this discovery was the realisation that if there was a devil, then there was probably a God – at least you had better hope there was!

As I grew older and read more, I began to feel that it was entirely possible that the phenomenon of the irrational hatred of the Jews, God’s ‘chosen people’, might even be an indication of barometric metaphysical weather; a warning of the extent to which evil had penetrated any particular society.

And if that did happen to be the case, we are in serious trouble today.

At the time of writing we have just passed the recent anniversary of the October 7th massacres, murders, rapes and hostage taking in Israel by Hamas.

The anniversary of those atrocities has produced a number of public conversations reflecting on the issues. One of the most powerful and illuminative was between Melanie Phillips and the hosts of Triggernometry.

I was glad that Konstantin Kissin set this up. I had been listening to him giving platforms to Palestinian apologists during the last 12 months and had been disturbed by the way he had seemed unable to challenge the distorted propaganda they had presented. The manipulations and mispresentations of historical fact were particularly egregious.

Melanie Phillips offered a sane, tightly informed forensic judgement:

“We are living through an inflection point for the West. Will it live or will it die?”
No one is talking about this. If nothing changes, the West will die. It has a choice between civilisation and barbarism.
It doesn’t understand that in attacking Israel it is attacking the roots of civilisation.”

To my relief, it seemed as though Konstantin Kisin, one of the hosts of the programme, had been on something of a journey over all this. He responded to the conversation with Melanie Phillips by releasing a 'piece to camera' confessing that he had got the Israeli conflict badly wrong during the last year, out of ignorance and because of the weight of secular woke propaganda.

Phillips was asked why the level of anti-Israel propaganda was so intense and so effective.

She suggested that Jews fell foul of the two cultural shibboleths that locked the western mind into a dogmatic straightjacket, and from which there was little escape. They both acted as platforms for hosting a virulent unquestioning anti-Semitism.

The first was the unthinking and unchallenged narrative of reverse racism.

It is a liberal bien-pensant conviction that all the injustices of the world are to be laid at the feet of the white supremacist West; and in particular its practice of colonialism. This affects the argument in two ways. Firstly that the state of Israel was created by illegitimate Western white colonialism; the second is that all darker skinned people are oppressed, have been oppressed and are therefore without guilt over any action they take to repudiate that oppression past and present.

Given that this is the guilt-ridden white liberal narrative that drives all our education and broadcasting, it makes it impossible for Israel either to justify its existence or to justify its acts of self-defence.

This dynamic is exacerbated further by the universal quest if not for virtue, perhaps to appear virtuous to oneself.

In a culture which has turned its back on mature vehicles of faith, in particular the Church, the search for virtue becomes one in which individuals conform to the wisdom and opinions of the majority. And the majority have already decided that Israel has no right to exist, no right to defend itself and that any Islamic violence towards Jews is justified as the outcome of a historic response to supremacist Islamophobic white colonial oppression that Israel seeks to hide behind.

It becomes therefore a highly virtuous position to take to celebrate the massacre of October 7th in which murder rape and hostage taking were inflicted on the Jews by the Muslim Palestinians.

Phillips shocks the listener by insisting that this constitutes the disastrous moral error of calling good evil and evil good.

And it is an extraordinary phenomenon that so many people celebrated the murder and rapes of October 7th as virtuous just acts.

In his post-Phillips reflections Kissin broadcast his revisiting of his assumptions.

He asks if the fact that the Western Nations provided access to ‘Palestine’ to the Jews, automatically de-legitimised Jews returning to Israel?

He compared similar colonial enterprises.

He pointed out that America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand were also colonised by white Western powers.

How would America have responded to Mexico if Mexicans had crossed the borders and slaughtered the equivalent number of Americans, 36,000 (and then carried large numbers away hostage)? Would they have done nothing? Would the rest of the world place America under an arms embargo and urge them not to retaliate? Probably not.

What of the argument that the actions of October 7th were the legitimate escape from the confines of a territorial prison? Except that the victims were not soldiers or the executive or infrastructure, but unarmed civilians. It is hard to claim legitimisation of terror against civilians.

A constant accusation heard was: perhaps it was justified because the media relentlessly presents a narrative of the IDF killing Gazan children?

The media rhetoric is that the Jews are careless with civilian lives in Gaza. But in fact the opposite is true. The Gazan authority are proud that they are using children as human shields, and often say so publicly. The established ratio of civilian to military collateral casualties is generally agreed to be 1 invading soldier to 9 civilians. The IDF have reduced this ratio from 1 soldier to 2 civilians, which is unheard of scrupulosity in theatres of war. So no carelessness there.

Another accusation: were not the pager bombing on Hezbollah indiscriminate attacks on civilians? No, these were terrorist fighters poised to take up arms against Jews at the beep of a text. And this was generally recognised as the most surgical strike of its kind in history.

What the conversation lacked however was any metaphysical or theological dimension.

Islam has been relentlessly antisemitic from its origins.

The origins of the hatred between Islam and the Jews are located in the moment when Mohammed presented his prophetic claims. Firstly, to the Arabic community in Mecca; where they repudiated and expelled him.

His early Koranic writings then presented his new religion in very similar terms to Judaism. But the Jews of Medina were unwilling to recognise that Allah had the same character as Yahweh, and did not accept that Mohammed’s prophetic credentials were equivalent to Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, Micah et al, and certainly not greater.

Mohammed, whose whole project was predicated on these claims, was infuriated, turned warlord, invaded Medina and began a campaign to punish, subjugate and sometimes exterminate Jews.

This spurned prophet turned warlord then produced additional koranic verses of energetic anti-Semitic hatred and enjoined his followers to kill Jews wherever they could find them.

Spiritually, many people would assess this as ‘evil’; politically it would appear to be mendacious, historically it poisoned the wells of the Middle East from that day to October 7th and beyond.

It may be that the average secular pro-Palestinian, virtue seeking, Guardian reading, BBC listening citizen is unaware of the early encounters between Mohammed and the Jews.

But in a culture in which Nazism and Hitler have become the new touchstone for all evil to the average European, the fact that Haj Amin al-Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, undertook on behalf of all Islam to promise Hitler that if he won, the Muslims would undertake the extermination of all Jews in the Middle East on the orders from Berlin, suggests that when commentators like Melanie Phillips use the term Islamo-fascists, they do so with some justification.

There appears to be a chasm fixed between the two views taken in response to October 7th 2023.

The progressive analysis that anti-colonialism and antiracism are the only two legitimate lenses to view what constitutes good and evil is set diametrically opposite to views forged in the shadow of Auschwitz, that anti-Semitism is the canary caged at the bottom of the coal mine upon which the whole of the civilisation is founded.

Our neighbours, in their reaction to October 7th, are choosing not so much between shame and virtue, as good and evil, civilisation and barbarism.

Melanie Phillips is right. The civilisation that we live in has come to a point of either rejuvenation or self-destruction. If it can no longer tell the difference between good and evil, it is simply and tragically doomed.

Christianity replaced a widespread paganism whose major characteristic was that ‘might was right.’ Force prevailed. The genius of Christianity was to unlock the secrets of the human heart to show people that they had been made to live differently to this. The deepest longings of the human heart were for love and forgiveness, compassion and truth.

If our culture and neighbours turn their backs on goodness and truth, in favour of revenge and power, we are going to be consigned to a new dark age from which the only escape will once again be the rule of Christ.

The church needs to take lessons from this particular intellectual secular Jew. Melanie Phillips has called it for what it is. But Christians need to step up with a renewed determination to defend truth, compassion and love, to defend the richness and beauty of Christendom, if they are to save the West from being lost, if not for ever, then for a very long time indeed.