When Hamas cheers you on, you might be doing it wrong.
The truth is France, Canada, and the UK are so morally confused that Israel pays attention only as a political formality.
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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.
A good friend of mine, a heavyweight in American business journalism, has a gift.
He knows when financial markets have peaked and it is time to sell your stocks or bonds. I have watched him call the market peak correctly — in print for millions of people to read, no less — many times over the years. It is uncanny.
Yet, there is caveat to his market clairvoyance. Like a wizard who has lost his powers, he gets it wrong whenever he invests his own money. It is something of a running gag. I always joke that setting up a contraindication fund that took the opposite side of his trades would be a sure way to make money.
This contraindication model is also an excellent way to assess Israel’s actions, using Western policies towards the Jewish state as the gauge.
Most Western states are so lost, so morally confused, and so detached from their civilizational roots that, if they are condemning Israel, it is near certain that Israel is doing the right thing. If that makes you chuckle, then good. I laugh about it, too. That is because if I do not laugh, I will cry, and if I start crying, I will never stop.
The return of antisemitism in the West is a tragedy for Western civilization, whose historical treatment of Jews defines the West’s very concept of man’s inhumanity to man.
The latest betrayal of decency comes from France, Britain, and Canada, which have threatened sanctions on Israel if it does not allow aid into Gaza, and over Israeli settlements in Judea and Samaria (also known as the West Bank). Britain has even sanctioned some Israeli settlers.
Other Western leaders have made similar animal noises, such as Sweden, Australia, and Luxembourg. It is unclear why these countries consider themselves worthy to judge Israel. Sweden has let Muslim gangs overrun it, Australia remains a quarry two centuries after European colonization, and the tiny money laundering state of Luxembourg is the world’s postage stamp capital.
There is so much wrong with this, it makes my head spin. Hamas even praised France, Britain, and Canada for their actions. It must feel wonderful to have Caliphate-seeking murderers praise you.
Notably, they are not making threats towards genocidal Hamas, which started the war, still holds Israeli hostages, continues to use civilians as human shields, and steals most of the humanitarian aid. Nor are they demanding Hamas release the hostages and surrender, which would end the war immediately, something that has been true for 20 months.
Rather, the trio is threatening sanctions against a democratic state to make it fight a less effective war against ISIS-like Caliphate-seeking jihadists.
Antisemitism must be considered these countries’ prime motive unless they can explain credibly their lack of animation about other conflicts. They also need to explain why they demand Israel be the only country in the history of warfare required to deliver aid to its enemy in war, something this hypocritical trio has never done.
The anti-Israel brigade has never offered an explanation for their pathological fixation with Israel because they know even attempting to do so would show their naked Jew-hatred and submission to Islamist terror.
Entirely unconvincing is their assertion that they can be “pro-Palestinian” but anti-terror and anti-Hamas. This is less plausible than Sisyphus finally getting Zeus’ rock to the top of the hill.
The fraudulent Palestinian identity was invented precisely so they could conduct terror attacks against Israel. If these leaders do not know this, then they are even more ignorant than I thought. Given the contempt in which I hold them, that would be an extraordinary achievement.
Since France, Britain, and Canada are suffering an unprecedented resurgence in antisemitism, it is unsurprising that antisemitic leaders have come to power. These nations have foolishly opened their borders to large numbers of immigrants from Muslim-majority countries, where antisemitism and anti-Westernism are norms, often religiously justified ones.
Islamism is now a political force. Old political establishments are in retreat. Instead of standing up for Western values, France, Britain, Canada, and others have surrendered in the most craven and self-debasing way.
This antisemitism is not just among the ruling elites. Despite Jew-hatred being at its highest levels since World War Two, a staggering 82 percent of Europeans do not think combating antisemitism is a priority, according to a European Jewish Association poll.
The poll, which questioned people in France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Spain, the Netherlands, and Belgium, showed that more than 20 percent of people blame Jews in their own countries for the Israel-Hamas war. Only the simplest of simpletons could think European Jews are responsible the war in Gaza, yet 20 percent of Europeans do so. It is like thinking Chinese people in the West are responsible for what happens in China.
Fighting antisemitism might not be a priority, but education ought to be one because this poll shows a disturbingly large number of Europeans cannot think their way out of a wet paper bag.
Again, this is distressing, but unsurprising. Everything reverts to mean, and for Europe that means returning to its pre-World War Two antisemitic norms. On this matter, Western morality has regressed. It is the civilizational equivalent of a person decompensating.
Leading the moral retreat is France, the country whose thinkers inflicted postmodernism on the world and which granted its colonies independence only after the most sickening wars. The one think that unifies the Francophone world, beyond language, is a common disdain for France. It is another example of those who know them the best, like them the least.
French President Emmanuel Macron is the personification of Western decline. He has fawned to France’s large Muslim constituency and has described Israel’s Gaza policy — which is to kill jihadist Hamas terrorists while minimizing civilian casualties — as “shameful.”
Let me translate: He means that Israel should agree to a ceasefire and allow Hamas to regroup and prepare its next terror attack against Israel. He is supporting and endorsing terror. That is stupid, cowardly, and insane.
Macron cannot see that the Fifth Republic is all but finished. It is not quite dead, but it is in the stocks, waiting for the guillotine to drop. France will probably be the first major European state to fall to Islamism in just a few decades, though Belgium is a contender. He has the honor, morals, and foresight of Nero.
Britain will be the first English-speaking country to fall. Prime Minister Keir Starmer seems to be too busy increasing the national debt to levels that his great grandchildren will be paying off, to notice that his own parliamentary members include Islamists and even more Islamist sympathizers.
Either that, or he agrees with his party’s extremists. It is obviously the latter. Starmer is no idiot. He can multitask. He can destroy the economy and surrender to Islamism at the same time. Given that his extraordinary majority almost ensures he will serve two terms, and that Britain has long five-year terms, it is hard to understate the damage he will do to the British nation.
As for Canada, it has let in so many immigrants in recent years that no country could integrate them successfully. Judging by the government’s feeble reaction to violent antisemitism, it does not care if it integrates them or not. Prime Minister Mark Carney is continuing his predecessor Justin Trudeau’s legacy of being copacetic with Islamist hordes taking over streets.
These leaders are too arrogant to understand that their adoption and feeding of the Palestinian narrative — an Islamist narrative — is contributing majorly to their countries’ demises. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded that London, Paris, and Ottawa were “offering a huge prize for the genocidal attack on Israel on October 7th while inviting more such atrocities.”
Netanyahu is correct, but his comments are just a mandatory diplomatic rebuttal. The truth is France, Canada, and the UK are so morally confused that Israel pays attention only as a political formality. Not for a moment does anyone with a functioning moral sextant thinks these threats are in any way morally valid.
What the West refuses or cannot grasp is that Israel is fighting an existential war. Threats of sanctions are insignificant against the threat of annihilation. If Hamas has its way, there will not be an Israel or any Israelis for sanctimonious countries to sanction.
Many Western countries seem oblivious to how lost they now look to the rest of the world. In Asia, where most of the world’s people live, it is treated as a fact that Europe no longer matters.
The twin evils of Marxism and Islamism have eaten away at the West’s moral core.
Marxism has undermined the West’s once-solid commitments to individual freedoms, secular governance, human rights, and Judeo-Christian values. European states’ policies on issues such as immigration, integration, national identity, and their hostility towards Israel illustrate this.
This departure from Western values includes limiting freedom of expression, doing away with merit-based achievement, and frowning upon expressions of national pride and achievement. Britain now locks people up for Facebook posts, so the country can no longer be considered a full democracy.
The only traditional Western value these countries want to cling to is antisemitism. They have discarded the good, and kept the bad.
Children have been taught to view their national histories through the lens of guilt, focusing on colonialism, slavery, and systemic oppression, while downplaying the West’s contributions to human rights, science, democracy, and prosperity.
Many Westerners now believe they are responsible for all of the world’s problems. This is nonsense. It is also patronizing, since it affords no agency to the rest of the world’s people. This leads to absurd ideas such as that Hamas and Gaza-based Palestinians, which started the war with the unprovoked October 7th pogrom against Israel, are somehow the victims. It takes some serious mal-education for someone to reach such a conclusion.
The Western Left’s affiliation with Islamism stems from its postmodernist belief that all cultures are equal and that Islamism is just another of the world’s many cultures. They also view it as valid because it is anti-Western. They cannot see that it is the world’s most dangerous and odious ideology.
In turn, this thinking has bled into misguided immigration policies in which many Western countries have admitted too many immigrants too quickly, and from places whose values are discordant with Western ones.
Millions of migrants and refugees overwhelmed Europe’s capacity to integrate newcomers, especially after the 2015 migrant crisis from the devastating Syrian Civil War that no one protested about despite 500,000 people being killed.
Rapid large-scale immigration has reduced the need for these new immigrants to assimilate. This had led to many councils being under de facto Shariah law, an increase in no-go zones for non-Muslims, honor-based violence, Islamism, and social alienation among second- and third-generation migrants. European leaders have remained in denial about this threat despite terror attacks in Paris, Nice, Brussels, Vienna, and Manchester (to name but a few) over the past decade.
The Left just cannot seem to accept that while not all Muslims are extremists, which is a strawman argument because no one has ever claimed anything so silly, there is no Islamism without Islam. The Muslim world is vast, diverse, and splintered, but they are united in their antisemitism and their hatred of Israel. The West has imported the Middle East’s Medieval religious views.
This has normalized antisemitism and created a public sphere and political discourse in which Europe’s old-school Far-Right antisemites feel they can again participate. Europe is now a union of different kinds of antisemite: Far-Left lunatics, Islamist nuts, and Far-Right maniacs. It is laughable that Europe still sees itself as the center of some kind of civilization, unless it is Rome but with the barbarians inside the gates.
Many Diaspora Jews are moving to Israel or the U.S. and many more are considering it. A Jewish exodus is a giant moral failure for Europe and the West. It is a marker of decline. History shows unequivocally that Jews leaving or being forced out it is a sign of a sick society. This sickness is manifesting in other ways, such as Europe’s waning international influence.
France, Britain, and Canada’s support for Palestinian terrorist groups is a desperate attempt to remain relevant internationally amid a changing world order that has relegated them to fading middle power status, at best.
The U.S. is facing its own domestic upheavals and decoupling from Europe, meaning “the West” is no longer a united entity. U.S. President Donald Trump has made clear that he wants to focus on America’s near-peer rival China. Countries such as India, Indonesia, and Turkey are starting to assert themselves in a multipolar world, which marginalizes Europe.
This trio’s protestations against Israel are little more than the waving hands of a drowning man trying to get attention. The big question is whether the West, and Europe in particular, is too far gone to save.
There is little reason for optimism. The Islamists have completely out-maneuvered Europe’s moribund political classes. Anti-liberal forces are in the ascendency. Mass immigration and higher birth-rates in Muslim communities than in local ones has created a demographic time-bomb. If demographics are indeed destiny, then Islamists will soon be exercising political power beyond the local council level, where they have already entrenched themselves.
What Islamist immigrants fail to understand is that it is the West’s heritage which made it prosperous. The idea that Europe can be turned into a Caliphate (or, more probably a series of them built from municipalities up) and retain Western wealth is preposterous. Poverty follows Islamism, as a quick comparison of poverty-stricken Yemen and gleaming Dubai illustrate.
Unless the West reclaims its heritage of democratic values, and addresses its security needs with regard to border control, Islamism, and anti-Western extremism, then its days are numbered. Judging by levels of antisemitism, an excellent gauge of a societal health, Europe is mired deep in the you-know-what.
The sad and frightening fact is that Macron and the others know that ultimately, their respective countries are lost to growing Islamism and eventually Sharia will be the law of the land. Western Europe does not have the political will and moral fortitude to confront their growing Islamist minorities that refuse to integrate into the ambient culture, obey the laws, learn the language, educate their children in Western liberal values, etc. This is coupled with the scant birth rate of the actual native populations. The best that Macron et al hope to do is by throwing a few bones to the Islamists in their midst, such as pushing Israel under the bus, turning an almost blind eye to anti-Semitism, etc. is to delay the inevitable day of reconning by ten to twenty years.
Canadian author Mark Steyn persuasively demonstrated Western Europe’s likely future demise, based largely on demographic trends, in his 2006 book, “America Alone.” One wonders if America is fated to suffer—absent serious political will—the same catastrophe facing France, Britain, etc. Canada is dangerously close.
How ironic that most of Eastern Europe; e.g., Poland, Hungary, Croatia, where much of the 20th Century’s most vicious antisemitism occurred, seems to be carefully avoiding Western Europe’s ruinous immigration policies, and thus have proved (so far) somewhat less inhospitable to their small Jewish communities.