Cheerleaders for Hamas

First, the horror. No sooner had Hamas rolled into Israel on Saturday, murdering and kidnapping these they got here throughout, than pictures of their wicked exploits have been plastered throughout social media. Harmless folks executed on the streets. A pensioner kidnapped and pushed into Gaza on a golf buggy. A younger girl’s lifeless physique, stripped virtually bare, paraded on the again of a pick-up truck as males spat on her and chanted ‘Allahu Akbar’. Bizarre folks slaughtered and brought for no different crime than being Israeli, than being Jewish. Then, the sewer. Simply as social media had confronted us with such unspeakable evil, it then confronted us with these within the West who regarded upon these barbaric, blood-thirsty scenes – from the consolation of protected properties 2,000 miles away – and thought to themselves: Good.

We now have turn into accustomed to Hamas apologism from the woke left. They’ve lengthy responded to the atrocities of this Islamist outfit with a understanding ‘What do you anticipate?’. Their delusional, bigoted conviction that Israel is probably the most evil state on Earth, that not like each different nation underneath assault it has no proper to exist or defend itself, has again and again led them to make excuses for Hamas’ genocidal lunatics – whose founding constitution dedicated them to ‘battle towards the Jews’ and whose main lights name on Palestinians to ‘reduce off the heads of the Jews with knives’. There was loads of that apologism yesterday. ‘Reap what you sow’, tweeted Jackie Walker, former vice-chair of Momentum, who was expelled from the Labour Social gathering in 2019. However that quickly started to look tame by comparability. Apologism gave method to cheerleading. ‘As we speak ought to be a day of celebration for supporters of democracy and human rights worldwide’, tweeted Novara Media’s Rivkah Brown, ‘as Gazans get away of their open-air jail and Hamas fighters cross into their colonisers’ territory. The battle for freedom isn’t cold and we shouldn’t apologise for it.’ Sure, Hamas, these theocratic thugs, anti-Semitic killers, oppressors of ladies and homosexual folks, are apparently champions of freedom and democracy. To name this deranged is simply too beneficiant. That is psychopathic. However the mind rot wasn’t confined to Brown. ‘All eyes on Palestine in its heroic second of resistance towards the Zionist occupation’, tweeted Pawel Wargan, coordinator of the secretariat of Progressive Worldwide. (Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell sit on its council.) Disgraced ex-Labour MP Chris Williamson referred to as Hamas ‘freedom fighters’.

It was stunning, however wholly unsurprising. That the Labour left has misplaced the plot on the Israel-Palestine battle is a profound understatement. Corbyn’s Labour flushed out so many examples of alleged left-wingers making excuses for Hamas, or indulging Islamist anti-Semites, that we virtually grew to become numb to all of it. Certainly, {that a} man who as soon as referred to Hamas as his ‘associates’; who as soon as invited Raed Salah, a person convicted for repeating the blood libel, to have tea within the Home of Commons; who as soon as gave a speech at an illustration, yards away from an inflatable effigy of an anti-Semitic caricature – full with horns, hooked nostril and claws – remains to be thought-about the cuddly, grandfatherly standard-bearer of the left reveals how morally and politically bankrupt the left now could be. That extra of his fellow travellers have gone from making excuses for Hamas to brazenly cheering it on was maybe inevitable.

This isn’t about supporting Palestine. If it have been, these folks might need extra to say about how Hamas, as Daniel Ben-Ami has argued on spiked, has turned a national-liberation motion right into a genocidal jihad towards Israel. If it have been, they may spare a thought or a tweet for the harmless Palestinians who will inevitably pay the value for Hamas’ vicious act of conflict. No, that is about despising Israel, which has turn into a perverse supply of identification and delight for woke leftists. That they maintain this troubled liberal democracy, and the world’s solely Jewish State, to an ordinary they don’t apply to another state the world over – together with brutal, theocratic regimes – is greater than weird. It’s bigoted.

Now, they provide solely stony silence to British Jews who’re justifiably nervous {that a} carnival of Jew hatred may spill out on to our personal streets. Final evening, in west London, folks have been filmed waving Palestine flags and honking horns, celebrating Hamas’ blood-stained incursion into southern Israel. It was a stomach-turning reminder of the lads who have been noticed driving round closely Jewish components of north-west London in 2021, honking horns, flying Palestine flags and shouting from loud hailers: ‘Fuck the Jews… Fuck their moms… Rape their daughters.’ As we speak’s ‘anti-racist’ left – who on one other day would fortunately cancel you over a ‘microaggression’ – stared at its shoe laces again then. There have been no demonstrations or solidarity marches, going through down the most recent expression of the world’s oldest hatred. No matter tenuous declare the woke left nonetheless needed to the ethical excessive floor is now – certainly – mud. These cheerleaders for Hamas have lastly seen to that.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Observe him on Twitter: @Tom_Slater