Tell me: who has done more for the cause of anti-fascism? Real anti-fascism? Those masked mummy’s boys of the Antifa movement for whom ‘fighting fascism’ means little more than hurling abuse at blue-collar oiks who voted for Donald Trump? Or Donald Trump himself, the man they love to loathe, who today accomplished the miraculous feat of liberating 20 Israelis from the anti-Semitic hell of Hamas captivity? It’s Trump, isn’t it?
Today should be the day that Trump Derangement Syndrome is laid to rest
As of today, following the soul-stirring emancipation of the last living Israeli hostages, whenever I hear the phrase ‘anti-fascist’ I will think of Trump. Forget those sun-starved digital radicals who bark ‘Fascist!’ at Nigel Farage or the snotty lefties whose ‘anti-fascism’ entails yelling at working-class mums in pink tracksuits as they protest outside migrant hotels. Those people have sullied the noble cause of anti-fascism by appropriating it as a mask for their bourgeois sneering.
No, it was Trump who took the fight to fascism. He has cornered – we hope – a brutal organisation that was founded with the express intention of killing Jews and destroying the Jewish state. He has freed 20 men whose only ‘crime’ is that they were Jews in the Holy Land. He has landed a spectacular blow against the forces of Islamo-fascism and helped to fortify the beleaguered Jewish nation. Give me that over the am-dram activism of Antifa’s balaclava bores any day of the week.
Today should be the day that Trump Derangement Syndrome is laid to rest. No one has to agree with everything the US President says or does – that would be weird. But we should acknowledge that he has achieved something extraordinary. He expertly deployed both threats and talks to drag Hamas to the table. And, in the process, he made good on the 20th-century cry of ‘Never Again’ by securing the release of Jews from the limbo of Islamist cruelty.
We have just lived through one of the most extraordinary moral inversions of modern times. Truth and reason have been entirely turned on their heads these past two years. Israel was unjustly assaulted by a genocidal terror group, and yet it was Israel that was branded ‘genocidal’. More than a thousand Jews were slaughtered by an army of anti-Semites, and yet it was the Jews who were called ‘racist’. Israel was ravaged by the war-making of a hostile neighbour, and yet it was Israel that was damned as warmonger.
Nowhere was this moral inversion more starkly, and more grossly, expressed than in relation to the hostages. These 251 men, women and children were the innocent victims of a fascistic rampage. And yet they were reimagined as ‘colonisers’ by activists in the West. Their posters were rabidly torn down. Their images were desecrated with slurs and insults. There was a time in late 2023 when many parts of London were papered with the flapping remnants of these posters following the frenzied clawing of anti-Israel activists.
The most shameful moment came in late October 2023, mere weeks after Hamas’s pogrom, when a poster in London featuring three-year-old twin girls, Emma and Yuli Cunio, was defiled in the most horrific way. Someone drew Hitler moustaches on these two children who’d been taken from their homes by Hamas. It was 2023 and Jewish kids were once more being treated as legitimate targets for bigoted invective. So much for ‘Never Again’.
Emma and Yuli were held in captivity with their mother, Sharon, for 52 days before being released in November 2023. Their father, David, was also kidnapped. The girls have asked after him every day for two years. Today they will be reunited with him: David is one of the 20 who has staggered back into the sunlight courtesy of Trump’s deal-making. Who has contributed more to the cause of humanity – the ‘Be Kind’ mob who desecrated posters of Emma and Yuli? Or the president who gave them their dad back?
Today is a day of celebration, tinged with sadness of course, given Israel is also due to receive the remains of 28 hostages who did not survive the Hamas hell. But tomorrow must be a day of reflection. We need to ask why so many in our own societies took the side not of the oppressed Jewish hostages but of their oppressors. Why so many chose to make excuses for Hamas while demonising the nation it invaded. Today we can share in Israel’s joy. Tomorrow we must interrogate the blackened Western soul that this infernal war has exposed.
Comments