7 October: a war for the soul of the West
Two years on from Hamas’s fascist pogrom, the fight for civilisation has never felt more urgent.
It was 2023 and they were burning Jews to death again. Once more, humanity found itself scouring the smoldering wreckage of a burnt-down building for some remnant of the Jews that once lived there. Those who call this day of barbarous racism an ‘attack’ have forfeited the right to be taken seriously. Those who call it ‘resistance’ have exposed to the world their own demented sympathy with Jew murder. As the German novelist Herta Müller said, even calling it ‘terrorism’ feels woefully insufficient. It was a ‘total derailment from civilisation’, she says. There was an ‘archaic horror in this bloodlust that I no longer thought possible in this day and age’.
This is what we should be commemorating today. Not an ‘attack’, not a ‘tragedy’ – an act of Nazi-like savagery. A genocidal burning of Jews. The violent intrusion of the crimes of history into our complacent century. The most fitting tribute we could pay to the grieving of 7 October on this second anniversary would be to give this atrocity its rightful place in the black pages of human history. To acknowledge, at last, that it was an epoch-defining crime against humanity, the raw heir to the era of the Holocaust. It compounds the grief of Israel to continue to deny this truth of 7 October.