Melanie Phillips interviewed at Spiked on October 7th and its aftermath:
This was not just murdering Jews or murdering Israelis. This was the seeking out of Jews and Israelis. It was almost like a kind of ritual mutilation. Hamas militants beheaded some of them. They burned some of them alive. They tortured them. They raped them, both men and women. This was bestial and depraved behaviour and a level of sadism that Jews collectively remember from the Holocaust. And while we should not compare anything to the Holocaust, because it was sui generis in both scale and nature, this had very clear parallels and resonances.
The second terrible shock was simply the awfulness of what happened – the murders, the rapes, the beheadings, the burnings alive, the slaughter of children in front of their parents. Then, of course, there was the abduction of the hostages into Gaza. There was the sight of both militants and ordinary – if I can call them that – people exulting over all this and abusing the hostages, whether they were dead or alive.
The next terrible thing that happened was the aftermath. One would have expected, in a civilised world, that the West would have stood with Israel. But it turned on Israel. It represented everything Israel did to defend itself as aggressive, and completely ignored the fact that Israel was going to unprecedented lengths to preserve the lives of civilians. As if that wasn’t bad enough, an absolute tsunami of anti-Jewish hatred swept across Britain and the West.
That, for those of us watching from outside, in the UK and the west, was surely the most extraordinary thing. We knew about the vicious hatred against Israel and the Jews across the Muslim Middle East, and particularly in Gaza under Hamas, where the children are taught Jew-hate in UNRWA schools and the regime spends all its energy on the infrastructure for attacking and destroying the "Zionist entity". But to see the explosion of sheer naked antisemitism across the west, in marches for Free Palestine, across universities - that's been just shocking. Even supposedly serious organisations like Amnesty International joined in with the "genocide" accusation against Israel - an absurdity loaded with a calculated and profoundly offensive antisemitic insult against the people who experienced the Holocaust, where the term "genocide" was first coined. As though at last the guilt could be thrown off and hurled back at the Jews for their inexcusable role as victims in the worst crime in history.
There is also something much deeper and much darker behind anti-Zionism. One of the most troubling things, post-7 October, was the business of the Israeli hostages and the attitude of so many people in the West towards them. These hostages included mainly women and small children, but also some men and elderly people. In London and other cities across the West, posters depicting those hostages were posted up in various public places, and we saw that they were torn down. As fast as they were torn down, they were put up. And as fast as they were put up again, they were torn back down.
It was an astonishing thing to see that the faces of the people who were tearing the posters down were very often convulsed with hatred and rage. They were not protesting against Israel. They were tearing down images of innocents who were kidnapped and, in some cases, slaughtered, tortured or lost to a terrible, unknown fate. Why does that fill them with such murderous rage?
What were they tearing down? They weren’t just tearing down pictures of Israeli hostages. They were tearing out the Jews from their heads, from their conscience and from their world. They wanted the Jews gone.
That, to me, is what has been going on in the West in certain circles. I don’t wish to exaggerate it, but we’ve had these massive ‘pro-Palestine’ demonstrations going on all the time. Nobody, apart from Jews and supporters of Israel, has asked what abomination we are seeing here.
We’re seeing a mass movement against Jews, Judaism and Israel. I say all three of those together because of the nature of these protests – what’s being chanted, the banners, the relentlessness of it, the obsession. We’re seeing something very much darker and deeper. There is no other cause in history where the West has behaved like this.
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