Hating Jews has become socially acceptable.

So long as you say you hate “Zionists.” As if adding a few syllables makes the hatred more righteous.

Tens of thousands of people at the famed Glastonbury Festival in southwestern England chanting “Death to the IDF!” this past weekend

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This is a guest essay written by Nachum Kaplan of the newsletter, “Moral Clarity.”

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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I believe in democracy, but there is one very strong argument against it: Democracy gives complete idiots a say over important matters that they are plainly incapable of understanding.

I do not want my fate in a dictator’s hands; but I also do not want it in the hands of idiots.

This past weekend, watching tens of thousands of people at the famed Glastonbury Festival in southwestern England who chanted “Death to the IDF!” and knowing that they get to vote in general elections fills me dismay. They were chanting along to English punk duo “Bob Vylan,” who you will never hear about for their muzak.

That these people were chanting this at a music festival — over Israel fighting against an enemy that murdered hundreds of people just like them at an Israeli music festival (Nova) much like Glastonbury — is surreal. The irony is lost on these clowns, as is the fact that the IDF is comprised of thousands of young people just like them doing national service.

Sorry, I take it back. Not “just like them.” Israel’s youth have been magnificent in the way they rose to the occasion after the October 7th attacks to defend their nation against an existential threat. Western youth, by contrast, are living on TikTok and chanting moronic slogans that they do not even know are genocidal.

The stark contrast explains why Israel is a regional superpower going from strength to strength despite constant war, while the West is in decline despite unprecedented decades of peace.

The idea that there is something wrong with today’s youth is usually dismissed as just an old person’s whine. After all, Socrates wrote some 2,500 years ago: “Our youth now love luxury, they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders, and they love to chatter instead of exercise. Children are now tyrants not servants of their household.”

Yet, the West has unquestionably produced at least a couple of generations of near-perfect idiots. Their knowledge of the world rests on a foundation of ignorance. They are like someone who has had part of their brain removed. Think of it as a virtual lobotomy: Instead of a physical part of their brain being cut out, knowledge has been taken out or, more accurately, never been put in.

Missing is several thousand years of history, so they have no idea that Jews are indigenous to Israel. Also missing are all references to the Bible, so this fact — along with the entire foundation of Western civilization — is absent. In its place, they have a stitched-together fantasy, built on lies, hashtags, influencers, and activists with the intellectual depth of a puddle.

This is not about religion; it is about education. Religion is a feature of the world, so it must be taught to help people understand the world, whether they are believers or not, or believers of something else entirely.

With this fundamental knowledge missing, young minds are open to fictional versions of history, such as that Jews come from Europe, or Poland, or somewhere — anywhere but Judea. Or that there is a people called the Palestinians, of which there is no historical evidence, who are somehow “indigenous” to Israel.

The fact that these so-called Palestinians have Arab genes, Arab culture, speak Arabic, and clearly come from the Arabian Peninsula and Egypt does not bother them. Critical thinking does not burden them.

These lies are much more plausible when you have no knowledge of history. When a properly educated person hears claims that Palestinians come from Israel, it should clash with their knowledge of reality. It should provoke the kind of instinctive doubt one has when hearing that the Earth is flat.

Do not fall for the postmodernist nonsense that there are many versions of history. Anyone who believes that has forfeited the right to be taken seriously. There are different perspectives on historical events, but the facts, such as that the UK won the Battle of Britain or that Jews come from Judea, are not up for debate.

Believing nonsense creates all sorts of problems. In this case, it has led to many Westerners supporting jihadists who murder, rape, and torture civilians and livestream it to the world.

It is a moral catastrophe that the Muslim world and many European states, whose leaders have also undergone virtual lobotomies, support the so-called “Palestinians” and their thousands of terror attacks on Israeli civilians over many decades.

Call me an oddball, but I think we should teach children history as it happened, rather than in a way that serves some people’s political agendas today. I am so off-the-charts crazy that I even think it is wrong to support jihadists who blow up buses and pizza shops, and fire missiles at civilians year after year.

Frankly, it is not that complicated. You push back hard against the bad guys, whether at home or abroad. It is difficult to identify the bad guys only when you know nothing about the Arab-Israeli conflict, or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (as it has been nefariously rebranded today) and nothing about Islamism.

Only someone whose brain has been sucked out through their nostrils like an Egyptian mummy could sincerely believe that Israel is committing genocide when the Palestinian population in Gaza is increasing. Or someone who simply does not like Jews or their country. Neither is something of which to be proud. Likewise for anyone who believes that Israel is a colonialist and apartheid state when, as a matter of fact, it is neither.

Jews are the indigenous people of Israel. You cannot colonize yourself. The Jews returning to the land of Judea is decolonization. The colonial powers were the Greeks, the Romans, the Arabs, the Byzantines, the Ottomans, and the British. What is more, colonialist states expand, whereas Israel has been shrinking in its pursuit of sovereignty and peace, even from the country was reborn in 1948.

Similarly, calling Israel an apartheid state is a grotesque lie. Apartheid in South Africa meant separation by law. In Israel, Arab citizens vote, sit in parliament, serve as judges, and enjoy full civil rights. Gaza, where Israel no longer rules having pulled out in 2005, is governed not by Jews, but by Hamas, an Iran-backed Caliphate-seeking theocratic terrorist dictatorship that oppresses its own people.

It is not apartheid to defend yourself from people trying to murder you and destroy your country. Nor is building walls to stop suicide bombers. It is called survival.

The intellectual laziness of those who chant slogans is matched only by their moral cowardice. They imagine themselves to be righteous rebels fighting against the powerful, when in fact they are members of a herd. It takes no courage to chant “Free Palestine!” at a British university or American college or at a hippie-inspired music festival; it takes courage to say “I stand with Israel.” in that same crowd.

And that, perhaps, is the saddest thing of all: the cowardice.

They are too cowardly to learn, too cowardly to confront facts, and too cowardly to stand apart from the mob. Their idea of bravery is posting an infographic on Instagram. They cannot explain what they believe because they do not know why they believe it. They are intellectual slaves who have have been programmed, not persuaded.

We are living in a time when intellectual clarity is an act of rebellion. It is rebellious to say that not all cultures are equal. That not all claims are valid. That not all sides have a point. Some are right, some are wrong. There is such a thing as truth, and we have a responsibility to tell it.

And here is another uncomfortable truth: Western elites are deeply complicit in this decline. From media to academia to politics, the institutions that once upheld reason have surrendered to ideology. Universities now reward conformity, not inquiry. News outlets publish narratives, not facts. Politicians virtue-signal instead of govern. They have failed to preserve the civilization they claim to lead.

This internal decay is how empires fall.

If you think I am being alarmist, think about why antisemitism has returned with such force. Not just the antisemitism of the Far-Right, but the fashionable antisemitism of the Far-Left. The kind that marches with keffiyehs in Western capitals, while Jewish schools and synagogues are under police guard.

It has become socially acceptable to hate Jews, so long as you say you hate “Zionists.” As if adding a few syllables makes the hatred more righteous. It does not. It makes it more cowardly.

I say this not only out of concern for Jews, but out of concern for the West. The West cannot survive if it weakens and ultimately destroys its own foundations. The Jewish people, and the Jewish state, are part of those foundations.

Judaism gave the West its moral grammar; its belief in human dignity, justice, the sanctity of life, and the duty to pursue peace. These ideas did not just spring out of the ether. They came from somewhere. They came from Zion.

So, when the West turns against Israel, it turns against itself. When it educates its youth in lies, it sows the seeds of its own undoing. Democracy requires informed citizens who know what they are voting for, and what they are voting against. None of those chanting at Glastonbury meet this requirement.

I believe in democracy, but I also believe in civilization. If democracy is to be preserved, it must be attached to something higher, something rooted in wisdom, truth, and moral clarity.

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