A new book explores how an irrational hatred of Israel led the left to betray its most deeply held values following the October 7 massacre

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Hamas’s October 7 massacre was shocking, not just due to its barbarity, but the reaction it elicited on the streets of liberal democracies, with masses of westerners actively cheering on the slaughter of innocent civilians and siding with a genocidal terrorist organization. As the first anniversary of that horrific day approaches, a new book sheds light on the morally bankrupt ideology that has caused many of our elites to turn their backs on liberal values and forge an unholy alliance with religious extremists.

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“The Jewish nation found itself subjected to the very butchery it was built to withstand. The state to which Jews fled to escape the pogroms was now besieged by a pogrom. It felt like the most grave of violations, both of the sanctuary of the Jews and of the pact humankind made in the aftermath of the last great war: Never Again,” writes British author and commentator Brendan O’Neill in his new book, “After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation.”

“And yet that shining moral clarity never came.… Too many had taken up the cause not of the Jews, but of their persecutors.”

O’Neill believes that October 7 provided a “moral test” for western civilization, and we failed it miserably. He rightly places much of the blame for this on modern progressive ideology, which is a complete bastardization of the values that liberals once held dear.

“The barbarous dearth of sympathy for the dead and raped of Israel is the logical inhumane conclusion to a pseudo-progressive politics that judges people’s moral worth by their skin colour, their presumed privilege and their placement on a racial hierarchy fashioned by the unaccountable overlords of western opinion,” writes O’Neill.

The book deftly exposes the hypocrisy of the anti-Israel left, showing how progressives have betrayed the cultural mores they spent the better part of two decades trying to impose on the rest of society.

In a chapter about the response of many feminist organizations to the mass sexual violence that took place on October 7, for example, O’Neill laments how quickly........

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