The horror in Israel has put the failure of Western multiculturalism on shocking display
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Several years ago, I was chairing a panel of writers talking about motherhood when an Orthodox Jewish author made an observation I have never forgotten. Twins were not viewed as a blessing in her community, Sally said.
“Why?”
“Because when they come for you, it’s too hard to pick up both of them and run.” The other mums on the panel were stunned into silence. When they come for you, the Jewish mother said, not if.
On Saturday October 7, Itay and Hadar Berdichevsky realised that “they” had come for them. Gunmen were breaking down the door of their house in a kibbutz not far from the border with Gaza.
The couple, both aged 30, placed their 10-month-old twins in a secure place. In their panic and dread, with seconds to spare, the parents locked away their treasures for safekeeping.
Itay and Hadar were murdered by Hamas thugs. Twelve hours later, Israeli soldiers (IDF) found the two babies in their hiding place. They were alive, but they were orphans; the mother and father, who spent their last minutes on earth protecting them, were gone.
In the five days since Hamas’s monstrous attack on Israel, we have heard many such devastating stories, flinched at graphic videos like the one of the battered young woman meekly being bundled into a Jeep, her jogging pants full of blood.
Such images make you feel physically sick. But watching the TV news, and listening to the radio, I notice how quickly certain broadcasters prefer to move the conversation on from these so-called “unimaginable” traumatic events to the plight of the Palestinians.
(In particular, Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s International Editor, has provoked the ire of some British Jews with his flinty lack of compassion for Israel’s sorrow).
With indecent haste, before the 900-plus victims have even been laid to rest, reporters seek the opinions of extremists who are permitted to explain that mass murder, rape and the abduction of children and ladies in their 80s are somehow justified because the Palestinians are oppressed.
One Hamas representative actually told Radio 4’s World at One that his side had not killed any civilians. Would presenter Sarah Montague have interviewed the head of an Einsatzgruppen Nazi death squad in 1943 to provide similar “balance”?
Just imagine: “Some critics claim you’re implementing a thing called the Final Solution, Commander?’ “Sorry, Sarah, I think you’ll find all our actions have been proportionate.”
To Montague’s credit, she responded to her interviewee’s grotesque falsehood with stony fury, but he should never have been given a platform to spew out his propaganda in the first place.
Does a nervous media want to move on quickly from the war crimes committed by Hamas to avoid riling those who, quite appallingly, have taken to the streets in London to show their support for those Islamist fiends? I definitely think that’s part of it, yes.
Which is why it’s vital that the atrocities are shared on social media, and go on being shared and talked about, so everyone understands why Jews feel as they do right now and why the action that the IDF is about to take in Gaza is justified. Some sins are so evil that they cry to Heaven for vengeance.
The fact that the atrocities in Israel are horrible to contemplate does not make them “unimaginable”. They are frighteningly easy to imagine actually. All we have to do is think of our own young adult children, or grandchildren, having the time of their lives at Supernova, an outdoor trance festival, when the milky, early-morning sky is suddenly speckled with black dots – a demonic squadron of paragliding Hamas terrorists.
It’s the start of a horror film, only the kids at Supernova (“a journey of unity and love”) don’t know it yet. Lovely girls lift their hands above their heads, long dark hair and willowy bodies swaying dreamily under twinkling fairy lights. The drone of the invaders is drowned out by the thump of the music so they keep on dancing and laughing. The slaughter that is about to be unleashed upon them will enter the history books.
Never forget. The Supernova Massacre saw the murder of at least 260 young Israelis. They were hunted down and shot like game, stumbling across the desert in their clubbing gear, bullets felling their friends, clinging to the roofs of speeding cars, hiding for six hours in a forest. Those who weren’t dead played dead.
One shaken guy said he covered himself in blood from the bodies around him; a ruse his great-grandparents’ generation used if one happened to survive after an entire village in Poland was machine-gunned into a pit by the SS. Are survival tactics, like hatred, hereditary?
One survivor who returned to the festival site to look for his girlfriend found defiled, half-naked corpses, many shot at point-blank range. Body bags containing those dreamy young dancers are piled high on top of each other in a party marquee. Parents have sent hairbrushes and toothbrushes so their mutilated darlings can be identified by their DNA. For some reason, that particular detail wrecks me.
Never forget. Another festival-goer, Shani Louk, a 23-year-old German-Israeli, was identified by her dreadlocks. A Hamas victory video featured Shani’s almost-naked body, flung like a carcass on the back of a pick-up truck, the boot of one of her machine-gun-toting tormentors resting on her flank.
Another brute pulled Shani’s head up by her hair and spat on her. Proudly they drove to Gaza to show off the spoils of war. “Allahu Akbar!” the gang chanted jubilantly.
If God is great,would he really give his blessing to the violation of helpless young females?
Whatever the apologists may say, this was not a case of soldiers engaging the enemy with some regrettable civilian casualties. Hamas targeted women and children, in one case live-streaming the killing of a grandmother on Facebook so her horrified family could see her lying in her own blood.
Another video shows a bewildered little girl (she can’t be more than two or three) with a mop of curls and eyes like chocolate buttons, staring at the Arab who has taken her hostage. Her beseeching eyes seem to say, “You’re not my Daddy.” Any civilised country must surely recoil at such cruelty.
At least you would hope so, but unfortunately the Barbarians dwell among us and our country is grown so weak and pathetic that the Barbarians must be appeased in the name of diversity and cultural sensitivity.
On Monday night, while Rishi Sunak was taking a robust and much-appreciated stand at Finchley United Synagogue, alongside the Chief Rabbi, with a plain-speaking approach the BBC would do well to emulate (“They are not militants. They are not freedom fighters. They are terrorists!”), thousands of pro-Palestine demonstrators staged a rally outside the Israeli embassy.
It was a dismaying sight, repellent in its callousness. A young Jewish woman I know attempted to reach the embassy to show her solidarity, but she was terrified and driven away. Guidance from the Metropolitan Police on this matter was so bland it amounted to a surrender IOU.
“We are engaging with protesters in Kensington High Street We encourage those taking part to do so safely and responsibly,” burbled our capital’s police force, “Do not put yourself or others at risk of injury by climbing street furniture or buildings. Officers will take action if any criminal activity occurs.”
Well, as Hamas is a proscribed organisation under the Terror Act 2000, and it is a criminal offence to support them, the coppers should have been busy making hundreds of arrests, but they largely hung back.
(Personally, I’d have the offenders deported immediately to Gaza where some of the progressive, purple-haired student element could entertain Hamas with their LGBTQ ideas: see how that goes down with their Stone Age heroes).
Bear in mind that, only a week ago, six members of the Met – yes, six – turned up at the house of Reclaim Party leader Laurence Fox to arrest him for allegedly posting support for vandalising Ulez cameras on social media.
I think we know which of those threats to public order the vast majority of us are concerned about, but the law is increasingly a politicised affair. After all, the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has a Muslim constituency to keep sweet for the forthcoming election.
When Suella Braverman claimed recently that multiculturalism has failed “because it allowed people to come to our society and live parallel lives in it… And, in extreme cases, they could pursue lives aimed at undermining the stability and threatening the security of society,” she was heavily criticised.
She was right, though, wasn’t she? Since the invasion of Israel, the failure of multiculturalism has been on shameless and shocking display in Western capitals.
In Sydney, Hamas sympathisers chillingly chanted, “Gas the Jews!” Outside the Labour Party Conference, one lone, very brave Jewish gentleman tried to explain to a rabble of Palestine flag-wavers that Hamas terrorists had murdered people.
As Dr Rakib Ehsan, an expert on social cohesion and race relations, put it yesterday: “The importation of foreign geopolitical grievances and aggressive tribal loyalties from the Middle East (and the Indian sub continent) is quite the problem for modern Britain.”
It certainly is. Specifically, right now, it’s a problem for our Jewish community, a model for how you retain distinctive traditions, worship and language while pledging yourself wholeheartedly to British values.
It’s a dark day when the headmaster of the Jewish Free School in north London has to tell pupils that wearing the school blazer is optional if they’re worried about their safety. Anti-Semitism has not been taken seriously enough. The CPS did not prosecute four men who drove through north London in cars draped in Palestine flags in May 2022, shouting anti-Semitic abuse and threats to rape Jewish women. Why ever not? Or can you only commit a “hate crime” against Muslims and black people?
There comes a time when taking care not to offend one community, at the expense of another, becomes morally indefensible appeasement. That time is now. And we know how appeasement worked out for European Jews the last time, don’t we?
As I write, early reports are coming in of 40 babies murdered, and some of them beheaded, at the Kfar Aza kibbutz, which was stormed by 70 Hamas terrorists. (So much for no civilians being killed.)
We must stand against such savagery, or what has this country become? This is not a Jewish problem; it’s a question of humanity. Civilisation stands at a historic crossroads; in one direction there are deluded progressives cheering on nihilistic mass murderers, in the other is everything we hold dear: decency, innocence, family, the right of beautiful young people to dance.
Itay and Hadar Berdichevsky hid their babies from Hamas psychopaths so they could grow up and have a future without them.
I stand with Israel for the Berdichevsky twins, for Shani Louk, for all the hostages, for Ezra Yachin, 95 years old, who just put on a uniform to join Israel’s reserves, for the dead yet unburied and for those who grieve for them.
Because, if we don’t, one day they may come for us.
