The West is abandoning the Jewish idea that made it free.

The West’s greatest moral innovation came from Judaism — and its amnesia is proving dangerous.

History shows the mob is almost never right. (photo: Ian Hutchinson/Unsplash)

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This is a guest essay by Lucy Tabrizi, who writes about politics, philosophy, religion, ethics, and history.

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

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Many of us grew up asking, “How could they let it happen?”

I’m talking about the ghettos, the yellow stars, the camps, the silence.

We saw the grainy footage, the hollow faces behind the barbed wire, and reassured ourselves we would’ve done better. We would’ve hidden Anne Frank. We would’ve refused the salute.

I don’t think that anymore.

For years I believed conviction guaranteed virtue. It took me a long time to learn that good intentions guarantee nothing, and that righteousness can be its own kind of blindness.

I also believed progress moved in a straight line, that the moral arc bent toward justice. But civilisation rises and falls, and the peace we’ve known was only a pause between storms. The decades after World War II were not proof of enlightenment, but a pause bought by exhaustion. Tyranny and antisemitism are not deviations from history; they’re recurring chapters in it. We are drifting back toward the norm, and the ones most fixated on “human rights” are leading the descent.

When I look at my friends and former allies in activism, I see history replaying itself in real time, though most cannot see it. They believe the past is settled, that barbarism happens elsewhere, to other people, in other times.

We live in what Polish philosopher and politician Ryszard Legutko dubbed “comfort democracies,” societies so safe and prosperous that we forget how fragile freedom is.¹ We inhabit the freest, most tolerant era in history, yet it teems with people who despise the civilisation that made it possible and use its privileges to “liberate” others from it. As Somali-born writer, activist, and former politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali observed, “You grew up in freedom, and you can spit on freedom because you don’t know what it is not to have freedom.”²

Having lost contact with real oppression, we invent new tyrannies to fight or project our outrage onto distant conflicts, often getting them backwards. Comfort dulls our defences and leaves us open to manipulation; we mistake feeling for thinking and moralise whatever flatters our egos. Too much freedom breeds restlessness. We begin to crave limits, order, and meaning. When we cannot find them in faith or tradition, we construct them out of ideology instead. The same creeds return, promising purity and redemption, and we fall for them again, convinced this time will be different.

We tell ourselves we’ve learned from the past, but we haven’t. The horrors of the past rarely return in the same form. They come disguised as moral crusaders, convinced they are fighting fascism while echoing it.

Across history, every utopian doctrine, religious or secular, has followed the same fatal logic: that purity can redeem the world through destruction. Each begins with a dream of renewal and ends by making cruelty a virtue. The Nazis believed they were saving civilisation. The Communists believed they were freeing the worker. Joseph Stalin, once hailed as a secular champion of equality, turned his revolution into one of history’s great engines of repression and pioneered modern “anti-Zionism.”

Once harm is sanctified, there are no limits. As English writer and philosopher Aldous Huxley wrote in 1952, “To be able to destroy with a good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behaviour ‘righteous indignation’ — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.”³

That is how the 20th century happened: Jews slaughtered in the name of civilisation, “class enemies” worked to death in the gulags, Ukrainian farmers starved in the Holodomor, and Chinese villagers denounced and beaten to death during the Cultural Revolution, all purged for the sake of progress. Today’s moral crusaders claim to save the world from “hate,” driven by the same inner engine that turns idealism into a licence to harm.

Over the past two years we’ve watched crowds fill Western streets under the banner of “Palestine,” calling for a global intifada. Beyond the spectacle are millions of quiet betrayals, relationships fracturing, and lifelong friendships abandoned over a war most understand only through memes and viral seconds-long video clips. Antisemitism does this to societies; it drives them mad. They decay slowly, through ordinary acts of cowardice multiplied by millions, each one committed in the name of good. Evil’s greatest trick is to make itself feel like moral courage.

If we study how empires fall, we are in the early stages of collapse. Acts of bloodshed and even assassination attempts are no longer seen as aberrations, but celebrated as “justice.” The applause that follows reveals the sickness spreading through once tolerant societies. The growing appetite for vengeance suggests we are turning inward, sociopolitical tribe against tribe, losing the ability to speak across the lines we once called democracy.

Across Europe, synagogues and Jewish businesses are being targeted, and Jewish schools face threats. In city after city, it has become normal to see Jews harassed or attacked in the street simply for looking Jewish, and it is they who are told to stay home “for their safety,” not the mobs who threaten them. Governments preach tolerance while choosing appeasement over action, overseeing a downward spiral they seem unwilling to stop. The same fever that once set the world on fire is rising again, and this time there can be no ignorance, no innocence. We know where this road ends.

The most dangerous people in any era are those convinced they are fighting for good. Once moral certainty takes hold, individuals disappear and only categories and enemies remain. The “Stanford Prison Experiment” demonstrated how little it takes for decent people to become cruel when morality yields to obedience. Most do not crave hatred; they crave belonging and the thrill of feeling virtuous. When a culture begins to mistake cruelty for compassion, the descent is swift.

History shows the mob is almost never right. It cheered as heretics burned, applauded segregation, and looked away as Jews were forced into ghettos. The Nazis didn’t win power because every German was evil, but because everyone wanted to belong, and ordinary teachers, journalists, and artists convinced themselves they were defending the oppressed. They were not monsters, which is what makes it terrifying.

A decade ago, I read “Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland.” It is about the author Christopher Browning’s account of middle-aged German policemen, not fanatics or ideologues, but shopkeepers and fathers who became mass murderers. They were told they could opt out. Almost none did. The chilling lesson was not that the Nazis were uniquely evil, but that they were not. They were “just like us.”

When I see people reposting propaganda, justifying murder, and calling for “resistance” against Jewish existence, I see the same moral fever that has infected humanity again and again.

Antisemitism isn’t just another prejudice; it is the world’s oldest hatred, mutating endlessly to survive, adapting itself to every ideology that hosts it. The Nazis dressed it in race science, the Communists in class struggle, the Islamists in religion, and the modern West in the language of “decolonisation” and “resistance.” Each insists its version is different. None of them are. And history shows that wherever antisemitism takes root, it poisons and ultimately destroys the civilisation that harbours it.

What predicts antisemitism is not whether someone is on the Right or the Left, but their proneness to conspiratorial thinking. Now I watch friends and family, the same people who once shared animal-rights petitions and anti-racism slogans, posting claims that Jewish DNA drives the killing of children, sharing theories that Israel staged the October 7th attacks, or that Jews secretly control the media and global finance. They believe they’ve uncovered the sinister truth about the Jews. So did the Nazis. So did the Soviets.

That is how history repeats. Anyone who believes Jews are hated because Israel exists misunderstands history. Israel exists because Jews were hated, because centuries of exile, pogroms, and genocide made a homeland not a privilege, but a necessity. To invert that truth is to blame survival for persecution, the same moral reversal that has always sustained antisemitism.

Many still believe the conflict in Gaza is about land or borders, but Muslim antisemitism has never been about territory; it is about the existence of Jews. For those who preach jihad, Israel comes first, and Europe and North America follow. The war against the Jewish state is only the opening act in a wider war against the culture and moral order that sustain it.

Think this is new? It isn’t. From the 7th century onward, Muslim empires swept through North Africa and into Spain, stretching from the Atlantic to India. Persian Zoroastrians, Coptic Christians, Assyrians, Kurds, Yazidis, Berbers, and countless others were subjugated or obliterated. Many of these ancient communities survive only in fragments today.

To acknowledge this history is not to be “Islamophobic,” but to recognise that the oppressive strains of Islamism now visible in Tehran, Gaza, and beyond are revivals of older imperial traditions. The tragedy is that millions of Muslims are their first victims. Of the roughly 250,000 people killed in terrorist attacks over the past four decades, most have been Muslims. When we invoke “racism” or “Islamophobia” to silence criticism, we abandon these individuals and embolden their oppressors.

For centuries, Europe held the line through faith and the conviction that its civilisation was worth defending. Today that faith has vanished. Europe, consumed by guilt over its colonial past, forgets the far older imperial history of Islam. It flattens complex realities into a single moral tale that casts Muslims as eternal victims of Western power. In its eagerness to atone, it no longer distinguishes between those seeking refuge and the ideologies that seek dominance.

Under the banners of tolerance, diversity, and inclusion, Europe has opened its doors to movements that despise its freedoms. If these groups were only building mosques for prayer, few would object.

But much of this expansion serves a political and ideological agenda of conquest. Persian Gulf money funds religious centres and universities that spread Islamist ideology rather than faith, turning tolerance into a weapon of influence. The Muslim Brotherhood — banned in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Russia — thrives in the free West, embedding itself in institutions, lobbying policymakers, and cheered on by “progressives” who mistake it for diversity. Once, Europe fought to preserve its civilisation; now it dismantles it in the name of virtue.

The continent that once resisted conquest now subsidises it, insisting all cultures are equal, even those that call for its destruction. Karl Marx called religion the opiate of the masses; now secular Europe has made relativism its drug of choice.

While external ideologies pose real dangers, the most profound threat to Western civilisation lies within itself: a society cannot defend what it no longer believes is worth defending.

The pattern did not end with the fall of the Reich or the collapse of the Soviet Union. It found new hosts and lay dormant for decades. Stalin’s Soviet Union rebranded antisemitism as “anti-Zionism” and exported it through propaganda across Eastern Europe and the Middle East. The ideology spread through Arab regimes and revolutionary movements, changing words but not intent.

The West was built on the memory of what happens when good people stay silent. Those who would have resisted in the 1930s are resisting now, but far fewer than I once imagined. We like to think of ourselves as rational beings who learn from history, but we are not. We are creatures of faith and fear, drawn to conspiracy and myth, forever dividing the world into good and evil. Whatever many people are doing now — ignoring rising antisemitism, blaming Jews for a war far from home, denying or minimising October 7th, or repeating old lines about Jewish power — is exactly what they would have done back then.

Instead of watching aghast as history’s darkest chapters repeat, we should ask why they always do. The answer is simple: Human beings are wired to worship. When genuine faith collapses, counterfeit faiths rush to fill the void.

As a long-time atheist and defender of secular values, I never expected to find myself here, acknowledging that what I once dismissed as superstition might have been the only thing strong enough to hold us together. My logical mind led me, sometimes reluctantly, to the transcendent. Because without something higher than ourselves, we end up worshipping ourselves: our feelings, our politics, our tribes.

We are a society no longer held together by anything greater than the self. We have forgotten our roots, our story, and the principles that once gave our civilisation meaning. We preach human rights while forgetting that the idea of individual worth was born from the Jewish belief that every human being is created b’tzelem Elokim (in the image of God) and therefore possesses an unbreakable, non-negotiable dignity. Catholicism and Christianity followed that with the belief that every individual carries divine value. Severed from the past, we drift toward tribalism and chaos.

Every ideology becomes a kind of religion, complete with its martyrs, heretics, and commandments. It is not belief that corrupts us, but the loss of humility that should come with it. In the absence of redemption, we demand purity; in the absence of grace, we turn to punishment. The result is always the same: righteousness without restraint.

This is why the pattern repeats. Not because we have forgotten religion, but because we cannot escape it. Until we remember what once bound us and why it was worth defending, history will keep repeating.

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1. Ryszard Legutko, “The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies” (Encounter Books, 2016).

2. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, “Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now” (HarperCollins, 2015).

3. Aldous Huxley, “The Devils of Loudun” (1952).