To the studio! Podcasts, if you ask me, are the one good thing to have come out of the digital revolution. My new one, The Brink, which I present with hulking former Parachute Regiment officer Andrew Fox, has hosted three guests so far: American media supremo Bari Weiss, former Israel defence minister Yoav Gallant and Mossad spymaster Yossi Cohen. What are we? Well, we’re not Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell.
The highlights? Weiss observing that society is not facing a crisis of trust but of trustworthiness: ‘You should not trust something that’s not worthy of your trust.’ Then there was Gallant’s message to the West: ‘We all think war is bad, only you have forgotten that sometimes it is necessary.’ Which brings me to Cohen, the most devious and moral man I know. He has claimed that when undercover, he would call himself ‘Andrew’ or ‘Neil’. I sent him a message on WhatsApp. Really? ‘Maybe,’ he replied, with a sceptical-face emoji. I will mention all this to the former Spectator chairman when I see him.
Speaking of WhatsApp, after our bovine Prime Minister won the adoration of Hamas by recognising the state of Palestine without conditions, then lamented the Hamas-style attack in Manchester, I pinged a message to each of the three people most likely to be Britain’s next leader. Would they disappoint the jihadis by reversing the decision? Two were non-committal, but the third pledged wholeheartedly to do so, and to move our embassy from its virtue-signalling position in Tel Aviv to morally sound Jerusalem. That meant something.
Will anybody read books any more? I am convinced that AI will eat us all. My latest, out this week, was written in a frenzied three-and-a-half months, partly because I wanted it out before the robots advanced for our souls. It may very well be my last. Grimly enough, it hit the shelves on the very day of the slaughter in Manchester. Not again: my last book, Israelophobia, was published just before 7 October 2023. I should close my laptop for all our sakes.
But how to save the West and the Jews? Sorry, but you can’t have one without the other. Sir Roger Scruton diagnosed our malaise as a bad case of ‘down with us’. In which case, the remedy is simple.
What is the West? Without upstaging Louis XIV, I’d humbly suggest l’Occident, c’est moi. My great-grandfather, Sir William Carr, one of nine children of a Lancaster cotton manufacturer and an evangelical Christian, was appointed assistant commissioner to Moulmein, Lower Burma, in 1893. He fell in love with Ma Khin Hnyaw, a matronly cheroot roller – hers were not like Kipling’s ‘whackin’ white’ ones but the brown, stumpy variety – and in 1906, outrageously, they married. The youngest of their eight half-caste children (to use the terminology of the time) was my grandmother, Dorothy. Her husband, Jack Wallis, was a descendant of the 17th-century mathematician and clergyman John Wallis, who invented the infinity symbol. On my mother’s side, the Simons family were pedlar Jews who worked their way up from barrow trading to become the largest fruit importers in Edwardian Britain. The only non-relative I know of with such a Burmese-Jewish-English thing going on is the musician Jamie Cullum. We are both men of the West. It is primarily cultural, not ethnic. That is our miracle. Let’s not lose it.
To the studio again, this time for Moral Maze on Radio 4. I wheeled up to Broadcasting House on my Brompton, feeling like Hugh Bonneville in W1A. I wonder what those satirists would make of the BBC’s apparent soft spot for Hamas? Mona Siddiqui opened her interrogation by asserting that a Palestinian state should not be ‘a prize for good behaviour’, which rather implied that the rape, butchery, mutilation, kidnap and necrophilia of 7 October was simply Palestinians Behaving Badly, played by Martin Clunes in a green headband. Truly, the West is submerged in what Alexandre Kojève called le dimanche éternel. Which is to say, it’s not Siddiqui’s children who would see their parents beheaded.
The second anniversary of the atrocities in southern Israel fell to the sound of the Gaza mobs. You may keep your sympathy. We have enough tears of our own. Those who would cry for us have wept already and the rest – including Keir Starmer – deserve only our defiance. After two millennia, it isn’t the Jews who are at risk of extinction. Rather, it’s the West’s future that is hanging in the balance. Which returns me to my point: up with us!
Jake Wallis Simons’s Never Again?: How the West Betrayed the Jews and Itself is out now.
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