I have a question about the events of the past few days: where is Antifa? Where are those self-styled anti-fascists who love to rage against anything that is even vaguely reminiscent of the 1930s?
Jews in Israel have been rounded up and murdered. Disgusting anti-Semites are on the streets of Sydney screaming, ‘Gas the Jews! Fuck the Jews!’ Mobs in London have taunted Israel, essentially laughing over its dead Jews. Britain’s Jewish schoolkids are taking off their blazers lest anyone recognise them as Jews and attack them. Across Europe security is being beefed up at Jewish establishments — schools, synagogues, museums — out of fear that Hamas-supporting mobs will invade and desecrate them.
And yet Antifa is nowhere to be seen. The thing these lefties fearmonger about all the time — the creeping return of the boiling hatreds of the 1930s — feels more real than ever and they’re saying nothing. It’s a strange anti-fascism that takes a break when something very much like fascism rears its repulsive head.
Following the slaughter in Israel the Western left stands exposed like never before
To the modern left, everything is fascism except actual fascism. Everything is ‘like the 1930s’ except the slaughter of Jewish youths, the kidnapping of Jewish grandmothers, the rise of mobs demanding a second Holocaust.
‘Fascist!’, they cry at everyone they disagree with, like real-life versions of Rick from The Young Ones. Yet when real Nazi scum show up, like that mob in Sydney crying ‘Gas the Jews!’, they turn coy.
Back Brexit and they’ll call you far right. Say a man can never become a woman and they’ll brand you a fellow traveller of fascism. Wonder out loud if we should try to do something about illegal immigration and they’ll say, ‘This is starting to feel a bit 1930s’.
But wipe out entire Jewish families? Gun down Jewish festivalgoers? Kidnap an elderly woman who survived the Holocaust? Mock Jews on the streets of our cities? Then they’ll erm and ahh. That’s ‘resistance’ apparently, not racism. It’s a rebellion, not fascism. It’s a ‘day of celebration’, as Novara Media’s commissioning editor said of Hamas’s invasion of Israel on Saturday, not a return of the bigotries of the 1930s.
Surely nothing better captures the moral disorientation of the radical left than the fact that they are more likely to use the word ‘fascist’ about their own fellow citizens who voted Leave or who defend women-only spaces than they are about a radical Islamist in Gaza who spits on the dead body of a woman who was murdered on the presumption that she was Jewish.
The surrealism of the ‘fascism’ issue is best summed up by events in Australia. Something genuinely horrific happened outside the Sydney Opera House yesterday, as mobs of Hamas backers hollered for the mass murder of Jews.
The opera house was lit up in the colours of the Israeli flag but Australia’s Jews could not go there to mourn or to connect with one another because a baying mob was there calling for them to be shoved back in the ovens. This requires serious self-reflection on Australia’s part. Any nation in which such a sick thing can happen has a duty to reckon with itself.
And yet I remember there being far more online fury, especially from Antifa, when Kellie-Jay Keen, aka Posie Parker, was in Australia earlier this year. Her Let Women Speak events Down Under, at which women agitate against the idea that blokes can become women, were furiously counterprotested by the masked anti-fascists of the modern left.
Where were these people yesterday? Why were they not counterprotesting the radical Islamists who were calling for another genocide of the Jews?
It is a curious anti-fascism that gets more riled up by a diminutive British lady whose only crime is to understand biology than it does by a baying mob that wants to eliminate the Jewish people.
Following the slaughter in Israel the Western left stands exposed like never before. I don’t think they realise how hard it will be for them to come back from this. Jews murdered by a virulently anti-Semitic movement, Jews taunted on our streets, Jews living in fear across our continent, and they said: ‘Well…you know…what did Israel expect?’
They’ve been fighting fantasy fascism for years, yet when real fascism came, they hid, they looked the other way, they made excuses. If they think this isn’t being clocked by people around the country, by the decent majority who abhor radical Islamist bigotry against Jews, women and others, then they’re even dimmer than I thought.
Here’s the thing: today’s Jew haters are even targeting the same people that yesterday’s Jew haters did. It is reported that the wheelchair-bound grandmother snatched by Hamas and spirited into Gaza is a survivor of the Holocaust. If you want to know how you would have reacted the first time this lady’s life was turned upside down by a movement of violent anti-Semites, just look at how you’ve responded the second time it happened.
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