Excellent essay! The following paragraph shows keen insight and intelligence:
"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."
Excellent analysis of the current situation and how Jew Hate has morphed into virtue signaling dressed up as social justice. Now how about another essay on how to fight this contagion which is far more lethal than COVID.
Astute and eloquent account of the darkest of the realistic trajectories for where things could be heading for the West. I love the analysis and the writing. And lets hope it doesn't play out that way, though it really really could.
Thanks, Lucy - you hit the nail squarely on the head.
I’m old enough to remember - or educated enough to know - that the British Empire was a thing of which to be largely proud.
A reasonable knowledge of history would, I suggest, say the same of the Roman Empire.
Neither empire was perfect, but they brought civilisation and light into some rather dark places.
Yet somehow we appear to have accepted a contradiction and a perversion of these things.
I suggest the same is true of the history of the modern State of Israel.
People seem disinterested in facts, in real events, in what actually happened from - say - 1948 onwards; it’s easier to wave the flag of a non-existent State and shout slogans.
And for every ten people who know anything about 1948 onwards, there’s perhaps only one who knows anything about the various Aliyahs from the late 19th century onwards - people seem to be as deliberately ignorant of the reality of Israel as they are about the Slave Trade - and about who stopped it!
Please continue with your work writing these things - it’s one of the ways we can make a difference.
And we need to make a difference because the light of civilisation is flickering and is under threat.
Brutal truth and honesty; beautifully written. This essay revealed how I think and feel about the what is happening in the world, and inside myself as well.
Lucy is a brilliant writer, I’ve been following her and reading her pieces for a while. Her account is so underrated! She deserves more subscribers! She’s absolutely right! The Jewish people gave the West its morals and ethics. But we have abandoned them. Without religion to give us meaning and provide us structure, that vacuum has been filled by politics. This is very dangerous as people have become radicalized. Utopian ideologies and religions never end well.
Just look at Nazism, Fascism, Japanese Nationalism, Communism, Socialism, Islamism, and Anarchism just to name a few. Pro-Palestinianism is the latest example of this. These folks don’t understand that anti-Zionism is antisemitism just by a different name. You will never free Palestine by chanting “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” or “globalize the Intifada!”, rioting, vandalizing universities, attacking and harassing Jews, or calling for Israel’s destruction. Israel is no apartheid state nor is it committing ethnic cleansing or genocide.
If you want to free Palestine, protest Fatah, Hamas and the Arab countries. Don’t go after the only Jewish state in the world. You are not doing any good by doing that. The road to h*** is paved with good intentions. These radicalized young people need to learn that lesson. But yet they are falling into the same trap that human beings have fallen for for centuries if not a millennia-utopian ideologies that claim to fix everything and make the world perfect. It doesn’t occur to them that’s accomplishing the opposite. They are spreading antisemitism if anything. They are normalizing Jew hatred. The West accepts third world mass immigration and Jihadism in the name of “tolerance.” This just goes to show the moral hollowness of the West. The West needs to wake up and realize the malaise it finds itself in and get 100% behind the State of Israel.
Antisemitism doesn’t exist because of Israel. Israel exists because of antisemitism. This is a historical truth that cannot be denied. Anyone who thinks it’s the former, is a brainwashed idiot. The Jewish people needed a homeland because of the persecution, discrimination, expulsions, pogroms, violence, and mass murder they faced for several millennia. That is why a state for them HAD to be created. Not because of the Holocaust guilt of the West. Nor as some sort of act of western colonialism or imperialism. Also, we need to take an HONEST look at Middle Eastern history. Who was it went around conquering and subjugating the Indigenous peoples of the Middle East? Arab Muslims.
The Arabs conquered and oppressed the Jews, Kurds, Africans, Yazidis, Berbers, Bedouins, Maronites, Mandeans, Samaritans, Copts, Druze, and Assyrians. They forcibly converted them to Islam and Arabized their culture and language. Lucy is sadly right we have not learned the lessons of history. The same mental psychosis that gripped people into Nazism is now doing the same with the cause of “social justice.” The so-called social justice activists love every minority group-except Jews, they don’t count. Things need to change in the West. Organized religion and Judeo-Christian values need to make a comeback. Western nations need to forge close ties with Israel. Mass immigration needs to be brought to an end. Multiculturalism needs to have clearly defined limits. Israel has pretty much won the Gaza War. But for its future and the future of the West to be secured, people need to start waking up.
Whoa. Yes. This is the best thing I’ve read in a very long time. I will be forwarding it to the executive director of an organization currently practicing antisemitism. Thank you!
I write about things I see in the immediate future: Demographics is the new concern, and Europe has a rapidly growing foreign population of Non Europeans, when race is factored into the argument. This argument always makes Jews and Muslims on the same side, here in Europe. So, do Jews in Europe defend Muslims when they are attacked? If you accept the argument of Racial Demographics, then Jews’ place in the world, and our country, is Israel. The place of the Muslims is the countries they or their parents came from. For Demographics is the new Ideological battleground here in Europe. Note too: the only reason it became so is the high immigration rate, and the higher birth-rate of these new communities. America is slightly different, for the USA was always a country of (Judeo-Christian) Immigration. And President Trump has shown brilliantly how Demographics can be fixed without Nazism or violence. My Grandfather fought for Britain against Hitler. This time the Battlefield is more subtle. But the enemy, Nazism, is the same.
It seems Ancient Israel presented a high moral and ethical bar for which no one was ready, evolutionary-wise. The prophets decry Israel’s constant descent into idolatry and debased morals. Somewhat unfairly, as the prophets blame the abuses of foreign empires on Israel’s sins.
Israel’s self chosen status was a positive proof of very high self esteem and a balancing, healthy attitude dealing with Israel’s fragile geographic destiny and the price paid, misery that Israel could have easily
interpreted ,in a most demoralising fashion ,as God’s abandonment. This chosen status, no more arrogant than a sense of mission, was never forgiven, was always coveted and snatched with a vengeance by Christianity.
But the standard was lowered, allowing for a level of rage and vengeance that marked the entire history of Europe. It was further lowered by Islam, a murdering conqueror colonialist ideology in the guise of a religion. The backwards march continues.
Christianity lost much of its attraction as rationalism was allowed to flourish and the supernatural claims debunked , and whatever was left of moral, ethical, empathetic, or mindful concern about the group or nation was eroded by the assault on its collective mind by hostile anti-Western combined forces of the extreme left and Islam, bombarding and overwhelming through well orchestrated digital and educational campaigns financed by the likes of Qatar.
I personally don’t believe it is colonialism guilt which has debilitated the will of the West . That would be a mistaken acknowledging that colonialism is even a credible issue for the West. It is a hypocritical charge by those of murky intellectual conceit and by those Islamists who have the nerve of accusing others of colonialism. We should not even consider it, as it is laughable.
But two world wars where Christians killed 100millions of their own could have left them mistrustful of what it was that ever bound them. Religion means literally that, from the Latin religio, binding.
Jew-hatred is a hatred of the high bar Judaism proposed, which not being missionary, it shared with no one, a bar unachieved by the Christian self-declared new Israel- a measure of cultural theft that necessitated the elimination of the genuine claimants and their memory- and now in further moral decay. A bar never even aspired to by Islam, which remained far from their ineffable, magnificently imagined God, following an unintelligible text that threatens us with the loss of everything that is dear to us. A profoundly humanistic Jewish bar viscerally resented by the human beast still residing in the forcibly evolved West, now recoiling from it. Israel had had a previous one thousand years of practice in moral
internalisation .
Today, we are still persecuted by Jew-hating Westerners, who are now ready to submit to Islam by eradicating the West’s own core and roots , and by not reproducing. Which renders us, Jews , doubly persecuted , both by the West we still trusted, in spite of two thousand years of exilic suffering at their hands, and the Islam that was always sworn to our annihilation, and who feels its hour has come.
This is a great article but I think it loses its way at the end from what came before it. Religions have their own long histories of oppression built into ideology I think the modern world is at issue here the fracturing of communities and all the available cocooning from the chat room to the university. And free Palestine is an automatic community if you join. I have no aversion to religion I think man is a spiritual beast and it should be part of his domain for fulfillment but it was a bit of a wild turn at the end not really elaborating meaningfully on that old thesis (decline of religion leads to some other ideological worship) whereas the rest of the article has a strong thesis it went through powerfully
Humans crave a number of things. First and foremost safety and sustenance of course. But after that they crave community, acceptance, approval and meaning. Not necessarily in that order. Cults have always preyed on this fact to manipulate people and the Red Green Alliance is doing exactly that today. In point of fact the "red" part of the alliance is stupid, naive and is easily manipulated the "green" part. Islamism is a dynamic and deeply motivated cult with dozens of tentacles which have sunk deeply into Western society. Western Europe is likely lost without a very violent counter reaction. The United States still has a chance. We need strong effective and motivated leadership to push back. I'm afraid we dont have that right now.
Agree. And the roots of this current, pervasive antisemitism throughout the West? Some of it is due to the Muslim emigration waves. A lot of it is from massive blasting on the Internet and Wikipedia with antisemitic and anti-Israel narratives out of Qatar and Iran. And wall-to-wall Woke narratives on mainstream media, with staff long since educated on CAIR-supplied school curricula. What to do....
Well, we'd better do something, because annihilation is coming. How about a really BIG effort to break through on the internet, with state-level or major donor backing? I'm not seeing that. Why not?
Deafening silence on my part on the deaths of children in Gaza branded me a Zionist partisan—a hypocrite only claiming to defend universal values. Reputational damage aside, failing to equally condemn military action that results in innocent children being killed is to condone actions approaching war crimes by our modern era; and I prefer our modern era.
Of course, it makes all the difference between deliberately targeting children and civilians for slaughter which is Hamas terrorism, and making superhuman efforts to save children and civilians as is IDF policy. But we all must do better.
We live in an age of light; but light can blind as well as illuminate, and we have a sober warning for our enlightened age: “woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness.” Isaiah 5:20.
All ideologies may blind us to our duty to establish and defend morality in the civic sphere and state.
Excellent essay! The following paragraph shows keen insight and intelligence:
"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."
Excellent analysis of the current situation and how Jew Hate has morphed into virtue signaling dressed up as social justice. Now how about another essay on how to fight this contagion which is far more lethal than COVID.
Astute and eloquent account of the darkest of the realistic trajectories for where things could be heading for the West. I love the analysis and the writing. And lets hope it doesn't play out that way, though it really really could.
Thanks, Lucy - you hit the nail squarely on the head.
I’m old enough to remember - or educated enough to know - that the British Empire was a thing of which to be largely proud.
A reasonable knowledge of history would, I suggest, say the same of the Roman Empire.
Neither empire was perfect, but they brought civilisation and light into some rather dark places.
Yet somehow we appear to have accepted a contradiction and a perversion of these things.
I suggest the same is true of the history of the modern State of Israel.
People seem disinterested in facts, in real events, in what actually happened from - say - 1948 onwards; it’s easier to wave the flag of a non-existent State and shout slogans.
And for every ten people who know anything about 1948 onwards, there’s perhaps only one who knows anything about the various Aliyahs from the late 19th century onwards - people seem to be as deliberately ignorant of the reality of Israel as they are about the Slave Trade - and about who stopped it!
Please continue with your work writing these things - it’s one of the ways we can make a difference.
And we need to make a difference because the light of civilisation is flickering and is under threat.
Brutal truth and honesty; beautifully written. This essay revealed how I think and feel about the what is happening in the world, and inside myself as well.
Sorry to repeat, but this is just brilliant and exactly so. And, you know, terrifying. But what isn’t today… ? Thank you!
Lucy is a brilliant writer, I’ve been following her and reading her pieces for a while. Her account is so underrated! She deserves more subscribers! She’s absolutely right! The Jewish people gave the West its morals and ethics. But we have abandoned them. Without religion to give us meaning and provide us structure, that vacuum has been filled by politics. This is very dangerous as people have become radicalized. Utopian ideologies and religions never end well.
Just look at Nazism, Fascism, Japanese Nationalism, Communism, Socialism, Islamism, and Anarchism just to name a few. Pro-Palestinianism is the latest example of this. These folks don’t understand that anti-Zionism is antisemitism just by a different name. You will never free Palestine by chanting “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” or “globalize the Intifada!”, rioting, vandalizing universities, attacking and harassing Jews, or calling for Israel’s destruction. Israel is no apartheid state nor is it committing ethnic cleansing or genocide.
If you want to free Palestine, protest Fatah, Hamas and the Arab countries. Don’t go after the only Jewish state in the world. You are not doing any good by doing that. The road to h*** is paved with good intentions. These radicalized young people need to learn that lesson. But yet they are falling into the same trap that human beings have fallen for for centuries if not a millennia-utopian ideologies that claim to fix everything and make the world perfect. It doesn’t occur to them that’s accomplishing the opposite. They are spreading antisemitism if anything. They are normalizing Jew hatred. The West accepts third world mass immigration and Jihadism in the name of “tolerance.” This just goes to show the moral hollowness of the West. The West needs to wake up and realize the malaise it finds itself in and get 100% behind the State of Israel.
Antisemitism doesn’t exist because of Israel. Israel exists because of antisemitism. This is a historical truth that cannot be denied. Anyone who thinks it’s the former, is a brainwashed idiot. The Jewish people needed a homeland because of the persecution, discrimination, expulsions, pogroms, violence, and mass murder they faced for several millennia. That is why a state for them HAD to be created. Not because of the Holocaust guilt of the West. Nor as some sort of act of western colonialism or imperialism. Also, we need to take an HONEST look at Middle Eastern history. Who was it went around conquering and subjugating the Indigenous peoples of the Middle East? Arab Muslims.
The Arabs conquered and oppressed the Jews, Kurds, Africans, Yazidis, Berbers, Bedouins, Maronites, Mandeans, Samaritans, Copts, Druze, and Assyrians. They forcibly converted them to Islam and Arabized their culture and language. Lucy is sadly right we have not learned the lessons of history. The same mental psychosis that gripped people into Nazism is now doing the same with the cause of “social justice.” The so-called social justice activists love every minority group-except Jews, they don’t count. Things need to change in the West. Organized religion and Judeo-Christian values need to make a comeback. Western nations need to forge close ties with Israel. Mass immigration needs to be brought to an end. Multiculturalism needs to have clearly defined limits. Israel has pretty much won the Gaza War. But for its future and the future of the West to be secured, people need to start waking up.
Whoa. Yes. This is the best thing I’ve read in a very long time. I will be forwarding it to the executive director of an organization currently practicing antisemitism. Thank you!
Thoroughly enjoyed reading this essay, Lucy. Kol hakavod!
I write about things I see in the immediate future: Demographics is the new concern, and Europe has a rapidly growing foreign population of Non Europeans, when race is factored into the argument. This argument always makes Jews and Muslims on the same side, here in Europe. So, do Jews in Europe defend Muslims when they are attacked? If you accept the argument of Racial Demographics, then Jews’ place in the world, and our country, is Israel. The place of the Muslims is the countries they or their parents came from. For Demographics is the new Ideological battleground here in Europe. Note too: the only reason it became so is the high immigration rate, and the higher birth-rate of these new communities. America is slightly different, for the USA was always a country of (Judeo-Christian) Immigration. And President Trump has shown brilliantly how Demographics can be fixed without Nazism or violence. My Grandfather fought for Britain against Hitler. This time the Battlefield is more subtle. But the enemy, Nazism, is the same.
Great insights and writing.
It seems Ancient Israel presented a high moral and ethical bar for which no one was ready, evolutionary-wise. The prophets decry Israel’s constant descent into idolatry and debased morals. Somewhat unfairly, as the prophets blame the abuses of foreign empires on Israel’s sins.
Israel’s self chosen status was a positive proof of very high self esteem and a balancing, healthy attitude dealing with Israel’s fragile geographic destiny and the price paid, misery that Israel could have easily
interpreted ,in a most demoralising fashion ,as God’s abandonment. This chosen status, no more arrogant than a sense of mission, was never forgiven, was always coveted and snatched with a vengeance by Christianity.
But the standard was lowered, allowing for a level of rage and vengeance that marked the entire history of Europe. It was further lowered by Islam, a murdering conqueror colonialist ideology in the guise of a religion. The backwards march continues.
Christianity lost much of its attraction as rationalism was allowed to flourish and the supernatural claims debunked , and whatever was left of moral, ethical, empathetic, or mindful concern about the group or nation was eroded by the assault on its collective mind by hostile anti-Western combined forces of the extreme left and Islam, bombarding and overwhelming through well orchestrated digital and educational campaigns financed by the likes of Qatar.
I personally don’t believe it is colonialism guilt which has debilitated the will of the West . That would be a mistaken acknowledging that colonialism is even a credible issue for the West. It is a hypocritical charge by those of murky intellectual conceit and by those Islamists who have the nerve of accusing others of colonialism. We should not even consider it, as it is laughable.
But two world wars where Christians killed 100millions of their own could have left them mistrustful of what it was that ever bound them. Religion means literally that, from the Latin religio, binding.
Jew-hatred is a hatred of the high bar Judaism proposed, which not being missionary, it shared with no one, a bar unachieved by the Christian self-declared new Israel- a measure of cultural theft that necessitated the elimination of the genuine claimants and their memory- and now in further moral decay. A bar never even aspired to by Islam, which remained far from their ineffable, magnificently imagined God, following an unintelligible text that threatens us with the loss of everything that is dear to us. A profoundly humanistic Jewish bar viscerally resented by the human beast still residing in the forcibly evolved West, now recoiling from it. Israel had had a previous one thousand years of practice in moral
internalisation .
Today, we are still persecuted by Jew-hating Westerners, who are now ready to submit to Islam by eradicating the West’s own core and roots , and by not reproducing. Which renders us, Jews , doubly persecuted , both by the West we still trusted, in spite of two thousand years of exilic suffering at their hands, and the Islam that was always sworn to our annihilation, and who feels its hour has come.
Unintelligible? I don’t think so. They want to destroy us, very intelligible.
Funny. Those are the only parts I DO understand 😀 The whole rest of it , the " royal we" addressed mambo-jumbo is indeed unintelligible.
This is a great article but I think it loses its way at the end from what came before it. Religions have their own long histories of oppression built into ideology I think the modern world is at issue here the fracturing of communities and all the available cocooning from the chat room to the university. And free Palestine is an automatic community if you join. I have no aversion to religion I think man is a spiritual beast and it should be part of his domain for fulfillment but it was a bit of a wild turn at the end not really elaborating meaningfully on that old thesis (decline of religion leads to some other ideological worship) whereas the rest of the article has a strong thesis it went through powerfully
Humans crave a number of things. First and foremost safety and sustenance of course. But after that they crave community, acceptance, approval and meaning. Not necessarily in that order. Cults have always preyed on this fact to manipulate people and the Red Green Alliance is doing exactly that today. In point of fact the "red" part of the alliance is stupid, naive and is easily manipulated the "green" part. Islamism is a dynamic and deeply motivated cult with dozens of tentacles which have sunk deeply into Western society. Western Europe is likely lost without a very violent counter reaction. The United States still has a chance. We need strong effective and motivated leadership to push back. I'm afraid we dont have that right now.
Agree. And the roots of this current, pervasive antisemitism throughout the West? Some of it is due to the Muslim emigration waves. A lot of it is from massive blasting on the Internet and Wikipedia with antisemitic and anti-Israel narratives out of Qatar and Iran. And wall-to-wall Woke narratives on mainstream media, with staff long since educated on CAIR-supplied school curricula. What to do....
Well, we'd better do something, because annihilation is coming. How about a really BIG effort to break through on the internet, with state-level or major donor backing? I'm not seeing that. Why not?
Rhis is why the 10 commandments follow "I am your God" immediately with "thou shalt have no other God before me"
Inspired by Lucy’s tremendous piece, here are some great reads to help us learn those lessons of history we westerners can’t seem to retain:
• The Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany by Thomas Childers
• The Coming of the Third Reich by Richard J. Evans
• The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 by Saul Friedlander
• Stalin’s Genocides by Norman M. Naimark
• Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine by Anne Applebaum
• Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him by Donald Rayfield
• Red Star Over China: The Classic Account of the Birth of Chinese Communism by Edgar Snow
• The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution, 1945-1957 by Frank Dikotter
• Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-62 by Frank Dikotter
• The Knights of Bushido: A History of Japanese War Crimes During World War II by Lord Russell of Liverpool
• Hidden Horrors: Japanese War Crimes in World War II by Yuki Tanaka
• Judgement at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia by Gary J. Bass
• Blood and Power: The Rise and Fall of Italian Fascism by John Foot
• Mussolini: A Biography by Jasper Ridley
• Mussolini in Myth and Memory: The First Totalitarian Dictator by Paul Corner
Are we in the early stages of collapse? It feels late to me.
Deafening silence on my part on the deaths of children in Gaza branded me a Zionist partisan—a hypocrite only claiming to defend universal values. Reputational damage aside, failing to equally condemn military action that results in innocent children being killed is to condone actions approaching war crimes by our modern era; and I prefer our modern era.
Of course, it makes all the difference between deliberately targeting children and civilians for slaughter which is Hamas terrorism, and making superhuman efforts to save children and civilians as is IDF policy. But we all must do better.
We live in an age of light; but light can blind as well as illuminate, and we have a sober warning for our enlightened age: “woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness.” Isaiah 5:20.
All ideologies may blind us to our duty to establish and defend morality in the civic sphere and state.