After the Pogrom | Israel, Hamas, and the West's Crisis of Civilization
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All of this very trendy anti-civilizational thinking has been fostered and driven into the minds of young people for a long time. And I think what it's done is it's turned them against the values of civilization and as a consequence it's tempted them into the arms of barbarism. Hello and welcome to State of a Nation, I'm Elon Levy. When civilization itself is tested, how do we respond

And what does our reaction say about us? On today's episode of State of a Nation, we explore the aftermath of the October 7th massacre, or what author Brendan O'Neill calls the October 7th pogrom and a crisis of civilization in the West. Brendan is the author of the recently published After the Pogrom: October 7th, Israel and the Crisis of Civilization.

And in his thought-provoking book, he examines how the intellectual and cultural elites in the West ended up rationalizing barbarism, glorifying violence, and abandoning the foundational values that make civilized states possible.

Brendan is the chief political writer at Spiked. I've been on his podcast before. He's a keen observer of the fault lines in modern society, and his latest work dissects not only the events of October 7th, but also how they laid bare the West's moral failures and cultural contradictions. It's a book about October 8th, October 9th, when streets in the West erupted in celebration.

In this thought-provoking conversation, we cover why the West's response to October 7th reflects a deep-seated loss of confidence in itself and its own values and what that means for the future of the West. We talk about the troubling alliance between radical ideologies in the West and Islamist extremism.

We talk about the urgent need to reform institutions that people in the West rely on for accurate information, for moral clarity, but that have been ideologically captured by people who share a twisted and toxic anti-Western ideology.

So if you care about where our societies are headed and how we rebuild our moral compass in the aftermath of October 7th, the date that changed everything, you won't want to miss this conversation with Brendan O'Neill. Let's dive between the lines.

and beyond the headlines. Breaking news out of Israel this morning. Shocking hostage. Hundreds of Israelis are dead. I want to bring in Israeli government spokesman. What happens when a four-day court. Have you resolved this? Where does this go? Brendan O'Neill, welcome to State of the Nation.

Hey, Alan, how are you doing? I'm all right, thank you. A little bit sleep deprived because we had another Iranian ballistic missile attack from Yemen overnight. But at three o'clock in the morning, half the country had to run up,

run out of bed and run to a bomb shelter. But never mind. I've had a couple of coffees and I'm ready to discuss with you. We talk about it as if it's no big deal. Unfortunately, these attacks from Yemen have become commonplace here. We can't let them be normalized. Nor can we allow to be normalized the glorification of violence that we've seen around the world since October 7th.

which you frame as a moral test that the world failed in your book, After the Pogrom, the 7th of October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilization. That's what I want to unpack with you in the podcast today and understand not October 7th here, but what October 7th meant in the West, what it showed about the intellectual climate in the West, about politics in the West, about what's gone wrong there and how we fix it because none of us can afford for it to continue like this. So to start us off,

You frame October 7th as a moral test and say the West failed it. What was that test and why did the West fail? In what way? Yeah, so I was shocked by two things towards the end of 2023. Firstly, of course, 7th of October, the worst mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust and an army of anti-Semites invading Israel to kill civilians. One of the most horrific acts of my lifetime, I think.

Um, so I was deeply disturbed by that, like most good normal people were, but then I was also shocked by the reaction in the West. And in fact, probably the wake up call for me, the real wake up call was not 7th of October itself, but the 9th of October. Because on that day, there was a gathering outside the Israeli embassy in London.

We're talking around 36 hours after the pogrom. There were gatherings on the streets of London pretty quickly as soon as Hamas did what it did. But there was this big gathering outside the Israeli embassy in

You thought to yourself, why are they there? You know, Israel hasn't really responded at the moment. It certainly hasn't launched its ground invasion of Gaza, which didn't come for another couple of weeks. And what are they doing there? What are they protesting about? And you realize that they were there to celebrate

the murder of Jews. This was a gathering of people, affluent leftists on one side and radical Islamists on the other, who had come together to celebrate the fascistic slaughter of Jewish people. This was the celebration of a pogrom on the streets of London in 2023. And I thought to myself,

You know, we would remember if people had poured onto the streets of London to celebrate Kristallnacht. So we need to remember and we need to talk about the fact that they said they poured onto the streets to celebrate the 7th of October. And that's when I really started to think that the response to this barbarism is going to be really bad.

bad. And it's going to tell us something important about the West itself. And that is what's happened. It's told us, I think, that the West has lost its moral bearings, has turned its back on the values of civilization, has turned its back on the Jewish state and the Jewish people, and is lost in this kind of counter-enlightenment. And that's what's come to light, I think, over the past year and a half.

What specifically is it that makes you say that the West has lost its moral compass and bearings? Is it the fact that a minority of extremists take to the streets celebrating this? Is it the lack of hushback to the celebrations, a denial that that is what is happening on the streets of London? Or is it a question of the...

you know, diplomatic decisions that are being made at the top level by national leaders who, at the beginning of the war, understand that this has to end with all the hostages home and Hamas removed from power, and very quickly are backtracking into a belief that actually Hamas should be allowed to remain in power and calling for an unconditional ceasefire that would abandon the hostages in Gaza. What was the failing?

It was a mix of all of those things. That's very well laid out. It was a kind of combination of all of those post-7th of October factors. You know, I've been worried about the future of the West for quite some time. I've been writing about it for a long time. I think the West is disappearing gradually.

down the well of moral relativism. It's turned its back on its own values. There's a lot of anti-Westernism in the academy, in popular culture, in political circles. So the West has been having a crisis of confidence for some time. I think it was really exacerbated by 7th of October. That was the moment at which we almost had an opportunity to get our bearings back and to say, no, we stand against this form of evil, but we failed even to do that.

And you're right, it was a combination of all those factors in the aftermath of the pogrom that really illustrated how lost the West now is. So on the one hand, we had the pretty fringe elements who were openly celebrating Hamas, who were on the streets wearing green bandanas and, you know, printouts of paragliders to celebrate the anti-Semites who paraglided into Israel on 7th of October. You know, that was a pretty fringe element who were doing things like that.

But more broadly, people were turning a blind eye to such behavior. They were making excuses for it. I often think of those hate marches, the so-called peace marches, which were in fact hate marches that took place in London.

every other weekend for a long period of time and everyone will say well, you know Most of them were just decent middle-class people who were there to protest about the war in Gaza But I'm sorry if I went on a protest and every single one every single protest had Racists on it who were holding up placards demanding the death of a certain racial group or the destruction of a certain nation or

or making fun of a racial minority, calling them Christ killers or calling them barbarians or describing them as bloodthirsty. If every time I went on a demonstration, there was that kind of racism.

I would have a word with myself. I would have a rethink. I would stop going on those demonstrations. So I think those hate marches summed up the problem. Yes, it was a fringe element who were demanding the return of the army of Muhammad to slaughter Jewish people. But the tens of thousands of middle classes who turned a blind eye to that kind of behavior and made excuses for it

They were in some ways the bigger problem. And that was repeated across the board after 7th of October. There were fringe elements, but there was excuse making in polite society. I'm intrigued by this analysis where you say that what we witnessed after October 7th

was reflective of a crisis of confidence within the West. Because I find that though often the debate about Israel, the argument about Israel is not really about what is happening here. It is in some ways symptomatic, reflective of

other cultural debates and wars that are happening in other countries. And then the Israel story ends up being a sounding board against which they describe their own realities and brings to the fore problems within their own culture. And you say this crisis of confidence within the West means that they weren't able to stand up against what President Biden called sheer, pure, unadulterated evil and made excuses for the people celebrating it.

What really disturbed me and you as well from reading your book is that it wasn't just people taking to the streets angry about the war. You have a right to be angry about the war. I think you should direct that anger at the psychopathic jihadists who launched the war and refused to surrender, but that's just me. But it's that there was genuine idolizing and glorifying of Hamas and its violence. Stenoir became, especially after his elimination, a cult figure.

Help me understand within the fringes, but also within the broader part of society, making excuses for these fringes. How did we end up with Hamas becoming a cult leader? How did we end up with Sinua becoming a cult leader? How did we end up with the upside down red triangle that Hamas uses in its videos to mark out targets and has been used in graffiti around the world?

How did this become like an iconography of its own? How did evil become cool in the West? Well, you know, that's the million dollar question. How? I mean, because it's definitely happened. And anyone who denies that that has happened is just lying to themselves. And the question is, how has it happened? And one of the things I wanted to do with my book was to remind people of what happened, because I do think there's a danger of amnesia in relation to what happened in the West after 7th of October. So you're right. People glorified Hamas.

At George Washington University in Washington, DC, there was a projection onto one of the campus buildings that said, glory to our martyrs. This was just a few days after 7th of October. They were saying glory to the rapists of Jewish women, glory to the murderers of Jewish children. That's essentially what they were saying at George Washington University.

and then of course at the gaza encampments that other yeah i remember there was a time when saying glory to the rapists could get you cancelled and expelled from campus but we're no longer there apparently well exactly and you know these are campuses which have been overrun with political correctness over the past 10 years or so where you know white students have got into trouble for eating sushi apparently that's cultural appropriation or where everything is rape culture you know that if a drunken jock at the student bar makes a

clumsy pass at a woman that was described as rape culture for years and years these kinds of radical students have seen rape culture and racism everywhere but then when Hamas launched its barbaric rape rapacious assault on the people of Israel they turned a blind eye or even worse they celebrated it so the hypocrisy why why why why so I think

I think it's been a long time coming. And one of the points I make in my book is that if you educate a new generation to turn its back on the values of civilization, to hate Western society, to see America as a nation born from the sin of slavery rather than a nation born from a democratic revolution, to see Britain as just this horrible state that is institutionally racist and has been committing crimes against humanity for the entirety of its existence,

To see European civilization as just a bunch of dead white males who talked a load of nonsense and now we should read other authors from around the world. All of this very trendy anti-civilizational thinking has been fostered and driven into the minds of young people for a long time.

And I think what it's done is it's turned them against the values of civilization. And as a consequence, it's tempted them into the arms of barbarism. So when they see Hamas, what they see is,

in their words, is a glorious assault on a Western-style nation, a glorious assault on Israel, the Jewish state, which they see as an embodiment of the old values of the West. It's a plucky nation. It's concerned with defending its sovereignty. It's democratic. It's confident. They see it as embodying what they consider to be the sins and transgressions of Western modernity itself.

So in many ways, Israel has become the whipping boy of self-loathing leftists and elitists in Western society. And they welcomed Hamas's assault on Israel as a kind of historic payback for all of what they see as those sins. So it's been a long time coming and it really exploded on 7th of October, that self-loathing that is now so central to Western radical thought.

That's fascinating because I guess in some ways Israel has been a victim of its own success because it tells people, "We're a modern Western state." And these hate marches say, "Yes, we agree and we hate modern Western states, therefore we hate you." And it puts Israel in a very tricky position when it tries to explain itself to the world because I just don't understand why

what language I can use to cut through to these people. You're talking about people who are ostensibly secular, ostensibly on the left, and they've become cheering squads for the most retrograde, regressive, barbaric, religious, jihadist, right-wing, homophobic, misogynistic lunatics. And Prime Minister Netanyahu used in his speech in Congress that said that queers for Palestine were like chickens for KFC.

But this is one of the things that many people in Israel struggle to understand. I hope maybe you can help me understand this. How people end up protesting against their own basic interests. How they can protest for people who would gladly see them dead. How they rationalize within their own minds this alliance of the oppressed. And instead of saying, hey, of all the countries in the Middle East, you know,

Israel is the one that I'd rather live in if I had to, they end up protesting in favor of people who stand against all of their values. Or maybe I'm reading it wrong and they're not protesting for people who stand against their values. Actually, they share values in a much more fundamental sense, and that's what's disturbing.

That is what's disturbing. You know, I flip between considering it, it's kind of a suicidal form of political campaigning because it contains within it the element of its own self-destruction because they are cheering on a bunch of, as you say, hard right, far right, fascistic, jihadist, mass murderers who are misogynistic, homophobic, and of course, anti-Semitic and racist. They're cheering them on. That's essentially what they are doing. And you know, Queers for Palestine is the

Everyone loves to make fun of Queers for Palestine, including me, because they are crazy. And the point I make in my book is that- And Douglas Murray called them, here on the podcast, the Gayness of Ray Carter. Yeah, right. Exactly. And I made the point in my book that they seem blissfully unaware that if they ever went to Gaza, their pronouns would be, was, were pretty quickly. They'd be thrown off the top of the nearest building or thrown in jail.

It's a suicidal form of politics. This alliance between the Western left and radical Islam is a form of cultural, political, moral suicide. We've been talking in the West for a long time about the suicide of the West, the West's own self-destruction of its values and its embrace of

alien cultures that are actually quite hostile to Western values. And this is the embodiment of that. These protesters are the physical manifestation of that suicidal view that the West has embraced. And, you know, this, um,

Islamo-left alliance has been growing for some time. I write in my book about a pamphlet produced by the Socialist Workers Party in Britain back in 1994, and it was called The Prophet and the Proletariat, which gives you a sense of what it's about. It's really about, is it ever good for the left to make alliances with radical Islamists? And what's interesting about that pamphlet is that it had lots of caveats.

It said, look, you know, we have to be careful because radical Islamists are a bit fascistic and they're crazy and they hate Jews and they hate women and they hate gay people. So there was some self-awareness 30 years ago, but that has been completely and utterly lost. And now radical leftists jump into bed with jihadists. And we've seen people on the streets of London chanting, we are all Hezbollah now and pray

praising Hamas and waving the Hezbollah flag. I think it is another symptom of their turn against their own nations and their turn against the West itself that they would embrace such hostile, radical, hateful elements as Hezbollah, Hamas, and even the Houthis. They've chanted in favor of the Houthis as well. You know, Yemen, Yemen, make us proud, turn another ship around. That's a direct phrase. Right, in favor of the Houthi pirates who've been attacking British ships. Brendan, I have a theory about

how to explain this connection between the modern radical left and the Islamists. And I want to get your thoughts on it. It was an insight that came to me when meeting students in Canada, actually, of all places. And I understood that when people divide the world into oppressor and oppressed through that very dichotomous split, you have to place yourself as being either oppressor or oppressed.

Either you put yourself on the side of the oppressed and therefore say you have no agency, you have no responsibility. Anything you do in pursuit of the cause of liberation is justified. Or you put yourself on the side of the oppressor. And the only thing you can do to make the world a better place is minimize yourself.

Self-effacement, self-degradation. You can make yourself smaller because your problem is that you as you are too privileged. You take up too much privilege and the problem is you. So there should be less of you. And I realized that that culture of self-effacement, that the only way you can make the world a better place is by negating yourself, explains a lot of the sympathy for jihadists and those who consider themselves martyrs.

Because there you have people who think that by making the ultimate sacrifice, negating yourself,

You're making the world a better place. And suddenly I realized the connection between what the Islamists in Gaza think and what the Western radicals on the streets of London think. They both think that to make the world a better place, you have to make ultimate sacrifices by canceling yourself. And that explains the ideological affinity between them. It's a half-baked thought. Does that make sense to you?

That does make sense. And I do think that identity politics plays a key role in a lot of this, which is precisely this new ideology, well, newish ideology, which sorts everyone according to whether they are victim or oppressor. And under this very infantile form of thinking, white people are seen as oppressors and brown people are seen as victims. And because these people are historically illiterate and sometimes misguided,

kind of mentally unstable, they look at Israel and they just see it as a white nation, which is obviously not true. You know that better than most. And they look at Palestine and see that it's a brown nation and they think, well, Israel is the oppressor in this and Palestine is the victim and there's no other discussion to be had. I mean, that really is how they approach these things. And it's so... I refer to it as the double racism of the new left because there's the racism of their absolutely...

horrific loathing for the Jewish state above all other states. They hold the Jewish state responsible for all of the world's ills, essentially. They see it as a uniquely bloodthirsty nation. So there's the racism of their Israelophobia.

But there's also their racism of infantilizing Palestinians and treating Palestinians as bereft of agency, incapable of moral judgment, and bearing no responsibility whatsoever for what they do. So even 7th of October was presented as almost an instinctive reaction to things that Israel has done in the past, as if the men who carried out that barbarism bear no responsibility for it because they're not like us.

They're inferior creatures. They have less capacity for moral judgment compared to Western leftists. That's how they see it. So there's the racism of their blind hatred for Israel, but there's also the racism of their absolving of the Palestinian people and the Arab people more broadly of any responsibility for the crimes that they commit. So it really demonstrates how identity politics drives this movement.

in fact, a kind of new form of racism. And as you say, it gives rise even to this notion amongst white Western leftists that they are the problem too, that they should have faced themselves as much as Hamas wants to efface the Jewish state. And it really, they play into each other and create this horrible suicidal culture.

The infantilization of Palestinians that we see on the modern left is, one, incredibly racist because it presents them as if they don't have agency, they don't have responsibility, they can't make choices. But worse than that, it really traps us into a cycle of never-ending conflict because as long as you treat one side as being incapable of making choices,

And you can never hold anyone accountable for their choices. You just treat them as automata. Well, what do you expect them to do? We see it, for example, in the fact that Hamas is not just an armed group. Hamas, before October 7th, was the government of Gaza. And it built a network of military tunnels longer than the London Underground under Gaza. It proved that they were perfectly capable of running an economy, raising taxes, and

marshalling the engineering effort that you need and diverting huge amounts of concrete into building one of the most megalanomaniacal building projects the world has ever seen. This 350 mile long network of tunnels under Gaza. They proved that they are perfectly capable. And yet the world keeps infantilizing them. We see this now with the discussion about UNRWA, for example, saying,

you know, we need British taxpayers to continue paying for the schools that produced the October 7th terrorists because otherwise who else is going to provide healthcare and education to the people of Gaza? When the fact is,

You know, it's not that if Israel bans UNRWA, then a whole bunch of Swedish volunteers are going to disappear. The staff are all Palestinian. They'll remain there. The only question is who's going to fund it, whether it's going to be, you know, white saviors who need to come and save them so that they can continue diverting their resources into the terror tunnels, or whether the Palestinians can take responsibility for whether they want to invest in schools or they want to invest in tunnels. So you see that thinking is...

condemning us to conflict. And it's condemning us to conflict because the thinking you're describing, seeing Israel as the source of all evil, rationalizing this evil, is a question of the ideological capture of elites. And one of the most difficult things for me to explain

Someone will rattle off a list. Mehdi Hassan likes to do this a lot. Well, the UN said and Amnesty said and Human Rights Watch said and the Red Cross said and all these organizations said, are you saying they're all wrong? And I want to say, yes, I do think they're all wrong because I think these organizations have been hijacked by an ideological agenda that absolves the Palestinians of any responsibility that the

The Israel is the ultimate evil because they see it as an extension of the West and they hate the West. But that's very difficult to explain. I mean, do you think that the failure of the moral test since October 7th has made it easier for ordinary people who aren't watching too closely

to see how universities, newspapers, human rights organizations have been captured by this very toxic ideology. Or do people not see it yet? And these organizations have the same cachet and reputation they've always had, and that's just not going to change.

I think some people do see it. And I think they've seen it more clearly since 7th of October. They've seen that there has been this ideological capture, precisely as you describe it. I fear that a lot of other people are probably switching off or might be a bit confused because, you know, this is a very good example of how there are both fringe elements, but then there are mainstream elements that make excuses for the fringe elements. Because there are people out there who absolve Hamas of responsibility

responsibility for everything. And I think that's racist and paternalistic and patrician and really obnoxious in fact. But then that's reflected in the mainstream media. So if you watch the BBC, if you watch any coverage on the BBC news, and I do watch a lot of it for my sins, in relation to the conflict in Gaza, they always invisibilize Hamas.

They just never talk about what they are doing. So they will report on IDF troops moving into a town or moving into what are still referred to as refugee camps, even though they're not refugee camps, or going into a city. And they will never really explain why the IDF is doing this. They will never explain, you know, when IDF... As if it's fighting ghosts.

Exactly. As if it's ghosts and you just, you feel like you're going mad. You feel completely like you are being gaslit. And that's the experience of watching the BBC these days. And

Even when IDF troops fall, and sadly many of them have fallen in this battle to save the Jewish state, it's never explained why that happened. Who killed them? Who's shooting at them? Who's throwing hand grenades at them? It's this mysterious kind of ghost-like presence that they don't refer to.

So that infantilization of the Palestinian side goes across the board and it leads to some of the most dishonest war coverage I have ever

ever seen, where we get this impression, we're left with this impression that the IDF is just marauding through Gaza because it's a demented genocidal army. And no reference is made to the jihadists who started this war, who are still fighting this war, who are still murdering IDF troops, who are still holding Israeli hostages. No mention of that is made, very rarely anyway, and they are absolved of responsibility. It's actually really gross.

Fascinating. So what I'm seeing here is actually a direct connection between the ideology that absolves Palestinians of responsibility, dishonest media coverage that invisibilizes Hamas, pretends it's not there as if the IDF is a bunch of marauding genocidal zombies who are fighting ghosts. And that leads to diplomatic decisions like the UN General Assembly calling for an unconditional ceasefire that would leave

the rapists of October 7th, still in power in Gaza, still holding hostages, still plotting the next October 7th and the next moral test for the West. Brandon, I want to ask you about some of the terminology that you use in your book, because I do believe very much that words matter. And you've chosen to call the book After the Pogrom. And there are many ways that we can describe what happened on October 7th. Initially, it was described as a terror attack.

I actually didn't like referring to it as a terror attack because I felt it minimized it. This was an invasion by air, land, and sea. It was an invasion that had an almost barbarian Iron Age feel

raping, pillaging, killing spree. It was a massacre and I call it the October 7th massacre. You can call it an invasion. You can call it a terror attack. You can call it an act of war. You can call it glorious resistance if you like. You'll call it a pogrom. Why?

You know, I did think carefully about what to call it. And in fact, I wrote a piece on 7th of October itself for Spiked, the magazine I work at in London. And this was when the known death toll was 20. So this was very early on during the pogrom, as I have referred to it. And the editor of Spiked asked me to write about it. And I wrote a piece and the headline to the piece was a pogrom against Israel.

So quite early on, even when the death toll was low, I thought to myself, this is something new. This is something different. And this is going to be an act of barbarism that will be recorded in the history books. And that is what happened. And I remember thinking over the following days and weeks, I remember thinking to myself very clearly, exactly like you, I thought to myself, it's not sufficient to call this terrorism.

I also thought, I agree that it's an invasion, but even the language of invasion didn't really capture it, I thought. And I remember thinking to myself, this is more than murder. This is more than a massacre. This is more than terrorism. This is a break with civilization itself. This has direct echoes of the collapse of civilization that we witnessed in Europe in the mid, in the late thirties and the 1940s.

And I am one, I am someone who is very reluctant to draw comparisons between the Nazi era and what's happening in the 2020s. I think people do that far too often. They compare Donald Trump to Hitler or they say the vote for Brexit was just like Kristallnacht or whatever. They overuse the Nazi analogy all the time.

Although people stopped doing that after 7th of October. And there's a chapter in my book about why they suddenly stopped comparing everything to the Nazis when there was this attack on the Jewish people.

But in this instance, it felt to me that this had echoes of the fascist era. It had echoes of the pogroms that we've seen in history. And it had echoes of a medieval assault on the Jewish people for being Jewish people. And I just thought it was important to draw that out and make it clear to people that what we've witnessed here is not resistance. It's not an act of war. It's medieval barbarism against the people on the basis of their race. And that's the argument I've been making since.

I understand that. Another of the words that you use a lot in your book is civilization. And specifically, many people have framed what we're seeing as a clash of civilizations.

Prime Minister Netanyahu said in his speech to Congress, it's not a clash of civilizations. It's a clash between civilization and barbarism. You actually make an interesting case that it's a crisis of civilization, not between civilizations, not between civilized people and barbarians, but within civilization. Why has October 7th brought forth a crisis of civilization? What does that mean?

Yeah. So, you know, I'm not opposed to the language of the clash of civilizations. I know people think it's very politically incorrect to use that kind of terminology and so on and so forth. I'm not opposed to saying that. I do think Hamas is a barbaric army. I'm happy to call them barbarians. And what they did on 7th of October was certainly barbaric.

And in contrast, Israel is a civilized nation and a democratic nation and a just nation. So I'm happy to describe this as a war between civilization on one side and a barbaric movement on the other. But I do think that the main thing that I focus on in my book and the thing that I'm most grimly fascinated by is the crisis of civilization in the West and the way in which we failed to respond

respond in the way that we should have responded to what Hamas did and all of the things that flowed from that. I mean, one of the things I referred to in my book, and this happened, I think it was early 2024, you know, all those kidnap posters that people put up around London and other cities around the world. You will remember that almost all of them were attacked. They were covered in graffiti. They were ripped down. In New York, someone put feces on one of these kidnap posters. I

And then in Finchley Road in North London, which is a part of London that has a large Jewish population, someone put up a kidnap posters for the three-year-old twins who had been kidnapped and someone drew Hitler mustaches on them. And I remember this got a little bit of coverage. It was covered in the local paper and it made some of the national press. And I remember seeing that and thinking,

Okay, I live in a city in which people think it's someone, whether it's a group of people or one person, thinks it's appropriate to draw Hitler moustaches on Jewish kids, to make fun of Jewish kids, to taunt Jewish children.

And you think to yourself, when was the last time Jewish children were seen as legitimate targets for bigotry and violence? That was the Nazi era. That's the last time prior to 7th of October that even the children of Jews were seen as legitimate targets for invective and oppression. The fact that that happened in the East, I mean, children have been, there have been massacres of Israeli children by Palestinian terrorists before, but you're saying in terms of how it was deceived in the West.

Very true. But in the West itself, in the city where I live, in London, how is this happening? And that's the moment at which I thought that this is the crisis of civilization that has been growing for some time, which is reflected in the universities, in left-wing discussion, and even amongst the political class itself, which is very bad at defending the ideals and the gains and the wonders of Western society. That crisis of civilization that has been growing for some time has now exploded onto the street.

in the form of graffiti against the images of Jewish kids, praising for Hamas, and this complete failure to stand with the Jewish nation in its darkest hour. So all of those trends just rose to the surface of society like scum on water. And that was something that I think is incredibly important to push back against. It's clear that this crisis of confidence, crisis of civilization, is a threat to the West when...

ideological elites despise the basic infrastructure of the state and think that it's evil and don't think that it has anything good to stand up for other than to negate itself. But there is another threat to the West, particularly from the form of political Islam, Islamism, Islamic terrorism. And I want to get your thoughts about what you think the nature of that threat is to the West that's being underplayed.

To me, it's clear Israel is fighting a war not on seven fronts, but on eight. And the eighth is attacks on Jews and Israelis around the diaspora.

Palestinian terrorist groups like Hamas have built a vast infrastructure around Europe, including money networks, including weapons that they can activate at some point. The derangement about Israel is importing political violence into Europe that wasn't there before. That's what happens when you frame Israel as being evil. And October 7th,

radicalize people. People came out celebrating. Recently, there was the interview of the former State Department official on 60 Minutes.

full of a lot of nonsense. But one of the silliest statements he made was that after October 7th, it was a wave of worldwide solidarity with Israel. No, there wasn't. It was a wave of worldwide celebrations of the violence against Israel. And sometimes when people ask, don't you think that the war is only going to create a new generation of terrorists? I say, I understand the threat of further radicalization as a result of the bitterness from the war. But I think that if

Sinoir had held a victory parade at the end of this war. That's what would have inspired more jihadism and more terrorism against the West. But there's no doubt that they feel energized as a result of October 7th. And I'm wondering, what do you think is the threat that radical Islam poses?

poses the West? Is it a threat of a terror, not to minimize, but a terror attack here and there, even barbaric graphic ones like the Bataclan massacre? Is it a threat of sporadic terrorism? Or does radical Islam pose a much deeper structural threat to the West and the future of Western civilization?

I think radical Islam poses a great threat. And I think it's twofold. Firstly, there's the violence, the direct violence that it imposes on people around the world, but including people in Europe. You mentioned the Bataclan, there was the Manchester Arena bombing, of course, the Charlie Hebdo massacre. We just had the 10th anniversary of that. This year will be the 10th anniversary of the 7-7 bombings in London. There have been massacres in Barcelona, even in Finland, and of course in Germany.

Hundreds and hundreds of people in Europe have been slaughtered by radical Islamists over the past 10 to 20 years, and that is too often not talked about or focused on. So there's that direct threat that radical Islam poses. But the other threat, the more insidious threat that it poses, is that I think it is very good at exploiting the institutionalized cowardice of the West itself.

So, one of the things that most freaks me out about the problem of radical Islam is our own society's reluctance to talk about it honestly. And that really came home to me after the Manchester Arena bombing in 2017 when 21 young people were slaughtered by a suicide bomber while they were watching Ariana Grande play a concert.

Straight away after that, the slogan was, don't look back in anger. Don't get too het up about it. Don't get too angry. You might stir up Islamophobia. You know, lay a flower, shed a tear, put up a message on your social media and move on. We were actively discouraged from thinking about it. We were actively discouraged from getting angry about it. And that was actually a really important turning point for me because I thought to myself, where is the anger that this

man who devoted himself to a foreign ideology, a poisonous ideology, had just slaughtered 21 of our own children. Where is the anger about that? And the society that doesn't get angry about that is a society that is already dead. And so that reluctance to be honest about the radical Islamist threat, that this creation of an entire new grammar of censorship where it's called Islamophobia to worry about such a threat,

And if you look at something like the grooming gang scandal in the UK, for example, which went on for years because people were so fearful of being called Islamophobic, it really does demonstrate that institutionalized cowardice makes us not only reluctant to talk about radical Islam, but it worsens and emboldens the Islamists themselves because they clock our weakness and they exploit it. So that, I think, is the longer term, more insidious threat that radical Islam poses.

It's really surreal to think of people singing Don't Look Back in Anger after a suicide bombing that killed dozens of people.

young people, girls, I think people should be angry. Anger can sometimes be healthy. The question is how you direct it. Do you take that energy and direct it towards a resolve to fight for the things you care about? Or do you become blinded by anger, right? No one needs to become blinded by anger. But there are certain things you can't afford to be apathetic about as if, you know, it was lightning struck and it was random and oh, it was a tragedy. But

but don't be angry about that. I'm intrigued that you described the Manchester Arena bombing in 2017 as a turning point for you in understanding the threat, in understanding the crisis of civilization. I want to ask you about another turning point for you. You've been ferociously critical of the left. That's what this book is about. But that is where you had your political origins. Now, on this podcast, we don't want to take sides on other countries'

domestic politics and their internal disputes, but we do care about the Israel issue. And your book is about how the left failed on the Israel issue. So let us know a little bit about your journey and how you had that quote unquote awakening on this issue.

Yeah, so I come from the left. I was involved in radical left politics when I was younger. I used to go on anti-war marches all the time. I was against the invasion of Iraq. I was against the incursions, the Western incursion into Afghanistan. I was critical of those kinds of military ventures.

And one thing that struck me, in fact, when I was doing all this stuff in the early 2000s and the late 90s, early 2000s, is that whenever I went on an anti-Israel march, which I stopped doing pretty quickly, they were always so different. So on the anti-war marches, people would say, hands off Iraq or hands off Afghanistan or keep your noses out of other people's nations, etc. But on the anti-Israel ones, people would say, destroy Israel.

bring Zionism to an end. This state is evil. And it always had a very different vibe. So quite early on, I remember thinking, there's something off about this. This doesn't feel right. And I need to think about it a bit more carefully. But I think what happened is that, I know it's a real cliche and your listeners will be bored when I say it, but I feel like

I didn't leave the left. I feel like the left left me. And I know loads of people say that, and it has become a bit of a pat answer to this question. But I do think that over the years, particularly over the past two decades,

the left completely lost its bearings and went off the rails and abandoned all its old principles. I remember a left that was interested in improving the living conditions of working class people and a left that was very much in favor of sexual equality and racial equality and a left that was in favor of economic growth because it wanted people to be wealthier and more comfortable.

What we have now is a left that has complete disdain for working class people and looks upon them as low information riffraff who are probably racist and stupid. It doesn't believe in sexual equality or racial equality. And in fact, it's often quite misogynistic. It's very, very racist towards the Jews. What do you mean it doesn't believe in sexual or racial equality?

Well, I think there's a real streak of misogyny on the modern left. And if you look at the way in which they push something like the transgender ideology, for example, which does have a direct impact on women's safety and women's sex-based rights. And they will often say incredibly misogynistic things about women who disagree with them, like J.K. Rowling or Julie Bindel or Kathleen Stock. They will refer to them in the most sexist way imaginable. And this is coming from people who call themselves left-wing.

I think the identity politics thing that they've embraced has made them racist rather than anti-racist. And that's really reflected in their embrace of the socialism of fools, where they see Jews as the cause of all the world's ills, as hyper white, hyper privileged, in need of reprimand and rebuke and so on.

And they've given up on the ideal of economic growth. They now think we need degrowth. We need to slow things down. We can't have too much stuff. People have to learn to live with what they've got. So over time, the left just abandoned all the things that made it pretty interesting in the past.

And that's another thing that just really came to the surface after 7th of October. When I see leftists now praising a far right fascist movement like Hamas, an army of anti-Semites that kills women and children, I look at them and I think, what?

happened to you? Where did you go wrong? What is this all about? And it makes me happy that over time I found myself drifting away from the left or they drifted away from me. And I'm glad I have nothing whatsoever to do with these people anymore. I don't want to give away too many spoilers from your book because I do want to encourage people to read it. It is thought provoking. It's clear that a lot of painful thought has gone into analyzing how the West is

failed this test, but you do discuss in the book what we might do to ensure that we never fail a test like this again. And I'm wondering, let's talk solutions. What do you think needs to happen in the West so that we don't get the same result the next time

God forbid there are these barbaric atrocities that we don't see the same excuses and rationalization of violence. How do we get the intellectual elites that glorify Hamas as a resistance movement to unrationalize that violence? And how hopeful you are that this can happen? Because

On the one hand, I'm not very confident that these institutions will reform themselves. I think there is going to need to be a backlash. But I am scared by that backlash because I know that for us, for the Jewish community at least, it's never been good to be caught between Islamists and crusaders. The pendulum swings.

too far and you have extremes taking chunks out of each other. That's terrible for the sensible, moderate people in the middle. But on the other hand, I just don't have confidence that the institutions that see Hamas as glorious resistance and are making excuses for drawing Hitler mustaches and a little baby hostage poster can reform themselves. So tell me what you think needs to happen to make sure that the West

puts itself back on firmer footing and how confident you are that that will happen. You make a really important point there, which is that who wants to be caught between the woke Islamist sympathizers on one side and these kind of newfangled crusaders on the other? I mean, Jewish people certainly don't want to be caught between those two camps. And

you know, we all know the problems with the woke left and we all like to make fun of the problems with the woke left. And that's, that's always good, good stuff. But the reaction against woke is starting to worry me in certain ways. And I think some of the,

right-wing backlash against so-called wokeness or the right-wing backlash against the left is equally worrying now. And if you go online, you will see not only left-wing antisemitism, but loads and loads of right-wing antisemitism. It really is gaining ground amongst the

cranky, crazy people in the US and also in Europe on the right, on the far right, who now hold Jews responsible for all the ills in the world. And the difference between them and the left... Cranks of the world unite, to paraphrase. Exactly. Your old buddy Karl Marx. Right. And it's like you've got, you know, the thing about the far right

anti-Semites, and there are a growing number of them, is that at least they are more honest. They will say the Jews screwed up everything, whereas the left, the racist left, is dishonest. They will always use, say, the word Zionists or Zios or something to cover the fact that actually they hate Jews.

So we have to be very vigilant on both sides of that equation at the moment, incredibly vigilant. But in terms of the solution, you know, the solutions are the hard bit, of course, which is why I don't go into them in much detail in my book. I just say we need one and I don't really outline what it might be. But I think it has to be a twofold approach.

Yeah, the sequel. It has to be a twofold approach. So in the short term, we have to just defend Israel at every single turn. We have to say the Jewish state has a right to exist and a right to defend itself against these armies of anti-Semites. And we should defend it because it's fighting not only for itself, but also for us.

It's fighting for the values that we, our societies, should hold dear. So we have to push back against Israelophobic propaganda every single time we hear it, which is all the time.

That's the short term thing we need to do. More long term, and this will be much more difficult, is we do need to radically overhaul the institutions of the West. And I mean the schools and the universities and the civil service and the foreign office and right up to the top of the globalist institutions themselves, like the United Nations, the anti-Semitic institutions.

instant international courts and all these other institutions, which likewise have turned their backs on the values of civilization. We need to overhaul them, reform them and change them. That is going to be a much harder task. People are talking about a vibe shift when Donald Trump takes power, and I'm sure there will be a vibe shift, but it's not going to solve all the problems and reforming those institutions to make them more

civilized and less racist and more working in the interests of all people. That's the really tough task which we have to start thinking about. Yeah, and I've really been trying to make the case to people in the West that the institutions that are targeting Israel are a threat to them because they're just not doing the job that you expect.

from the institutions that Britain puts so much hope, attaches so much hope to them that they're key to the international order. You know, I've been saying the ICJ case against Israel is a sham. It's a show trial. It's a kangaroo court. What more evidence do you need than the fact that the president of the ICJ

was a former Lebanese diplomat. And hey, the evidence came along that anyone would need when he was elected prime minister of Lebanon. The president of the ICJ overseeing a sham trial against Israel was campaigning to be the prime minister of Lebanon.

from the chair of the presidency of the highest court in the world. And if that doesn't make people grab their heads in their hands and say, what on earth is this joke of an institution?

how can this represent the values of justice and equality before the law and due process, then I don't know what other evidence you need about how rotten and corrupt these institutions are. And I hope they can be reformed because I'm not from the school that says, tear everything down. I'm not a revolutionary. I think they have a role to play, but that cannot be a role if they're simply to do the bidding of justice.

of nasty regimes and of the worst radicals within the countries that are less nasty like yours. Brendan, how can people follow your work? Where are you writing? What are you up to? So I'm a chief political writer at Spiked and everyone should read Spiked. It's a brilliant online magazine. We celebrate our 25th anniversary this year. So we've been going for a long time. Congratulations.

Thank you. And I write for a few other outlets as well, like the Spectator and the Daily Mail and a few other places. I don't use X because I just don't have the stomach for it. But I am on Instagram under the name Burnt Oak Boy, because I come from a part of London called Burnt Oak. So people can follow me on there. And yeah, Google me and you'll find my stuff. It's all over the internet.

Okay, Brendan O'Neill, thank you very much for this fascinating conversation about your book, After the Pogrom, 7th of October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilization. Thank you for joining us on State of a Nation. Thank you so much, Elam.

And that brings us to the end of today's episode of State of a Nation with Brendan O'Neill joining us all the way from the UK. As always, if you enjoy these episodes, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or YouTube. Wherever you get your podcasts, give us a like on social media platforms, on Twitter, on Instagram, on TikTok, on everything. We're cutting these into clips to try to get the punchiest bits of our conversations out. I'm Elon Levy and thanks for joining us.

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