It’s October 7. That means it’s 1 year since Palestinian jihadists entered Israel and shot, burned, beheaded, raped, tortured and kidnapped everyone they could find. 1 year since the terrorists recorded themselves doing this, then called home on video shrieking with joy, telling their parents to be so ‘proud’ that their son had just ‘killed’ 10 Jews. 1 year since their leaders vowed to do it over and over and over again. One year since entire Jewish families were burned alive, kids were ripped from their parents arms and taken to tunnels by a death cult, parents were slaughtered in front of their children, women were raped next to the corpses of their dead friends and then murdered themselves.

It’s 1 year since Islamists and Muslim antisemites responded in vast numbers around the world, across the west, and here in the UK by celebrating it, by justifying it, by burning down synagogues, drawing swastikas, parading in Hamas paraphernalia, calling for further ‘jihad’, and using it as a jumping off point not for reflection on the horrors of Islamic extremism and fanaticism but for angry vilification of the nation and the people who were victims of that attack.

And it’s 1 year since ‘anti-racists’ who see oppression in everything and everyone, and tell us the west is a horrific handmaid’s tale style dystopia…joined in with the Islamists and the antisemites. They released podcasts cheering on a group whose founding charter called for Muslims to kill all Jews. They called the worst antisemitic pogrom since the Holocaust a ‘day of celebration’, ‘exhilarating’. University professors praised it. BLM branches published gushing posts bigging up armed men who paraglided into a music festival and indiscriminately shot every Jew they could see. Hyper-privileged uni students flew the flags of the murderers. They took to the streets and began to rip down any poster they could find depicting the faces of missing Jewish women and children who are still, as we speak, being held captive by Hamas.

Never forget any of this. No amount of gaslighting and cry-bully victim politics should or can obscure from the fundamental corruption and hypocrisy of it. You do not need to think everything Israel does or has done or will do is whiter than white (I absolutely do not), or lack empathy of concern for the horrific loss of life in Gaza and elsewhere, to appreciate quite how cynical and obnoxious the game being played by these people is.

The ideas and ideologies they espouse pose a threat not just to Jews and Israelis but to the nature of western society, democracy, secularism and tolerance more broadly.

Time to wake up to that threat, if you haven’t already.

End note: I write notes and essays exploring political groupthink and Islamic extremism. Please consider becoming a paid sub if you’d like to support my work. Thanks.