RUTHFULLY YOURS

Remember the Westboro Baptist Church? They were the fundamentalist fruitcakes who would picket vigils for slain American soldiers with technicolour placards declaring ‘God Hates Fags’ and ‘Thank God for Dead Soldiers’. Well, there’s a new mob of grief-intruders in town. There’s a new gang of hateful trespassers on other people’s sorrow. They’re not quite as God-bothering, not so homophobic, but they’re every bit as ghoulish. It’s the ‘pro-Palestine’ set on university campuses.

This week, something truly appalling took place at Columbia University in New York City. A vigil for the 1,200 people butchered by the fascists of Hamas in southern Israel on 7 October was noisily interrupted by the Hamas fanboys of the cranky Columbia left. ‘Fanboys’ is not hyperbole. Some were chanting ‘Resistance is glorious!’. This was on Monday, on 7 October, the anniversary of Hamas’s pogrom. If you are singing the praises of a ‘resistance’ one year after that ‘resistance’ slaughtered more Jews in one day than anyone else has since the Nazis, then you are a Hamas fanboy, you are a fellow traveller of fascism.

Jewish students and their allies had gathered to pay tribute to the dead and stolen of 7 October. They prayed for the Jews murdered by Hamas and demanded the release of the Jews Hamas still holds captive. They assembled on Columbia’s South Lawn. They displayed giant milk cartons featuring images of the Israeli hostages and a collection of teddy bears covered in red paint symbolising those who were murdered. Their lamentations were soon interrupted, though. Their murmured grief was punctuated by the shrill cries of Columbia’s legion Israelophobes. ‘Israel go to hell!’, these radical Westboro Baptists screamed.

Hundreds of ‘pro-Palestine’ activists ‘took over the campus’, reports the Daily Mail. The ‘raging students’ hollered their hackneyed Israel-loathing slogans over the ‘vigil to mark the one-year anniversary of the 7 October Hamas-led attacks’, the Mail says. Some were masked, many were adorned in the keffiyeh, the uniform of the self-righteous, the must-have fashion item of every turbo-smug radical who wants the world to know how good and edgy he is. They played ‘loud Arabic music’ and it ‘drowned out the sound of Israeli music that was playing for the vigil’. Shorter version: pipe down, Jews.

In one especially disturbing scene, two young, mournful women, the Israel flag draped over their shoulders, were surrounded by the barking mob. They stood stone-faced as the keffiyeh set swarmed, their placards crying ‘Resist by any means necessary!’. Think about this: Jewish students marking the one-year anniversary of the worst act of anti-Semitic violence since the Holocaust were mobbed by students celebrating that violence, bigging it up as ‘resistance’. This was Jew-taunting dolled up as radical activism, the salt of Israel-hate rubbed into the wound of Jews’ grief.

‘Two brave Jewish girls stand proudly while a crowd of terror supporters surrounds them’, tweeted Eyal Yakoby, a student and campaigner against anti-Semitism. ‘Terror supporter’ is accurate. When the TikTok revolutionaries of the painfully privileged Columbia classes cosplay as Middle East militants, complete with masks and keffiyehs, and loudly swoon over the gloriousness of ‘resistance’, by which they mean 7 October, they are indeed indicating their support for terror. One side at Columbia was mourning a pogrom, the other was celebrating it. It was the West’s crisis distilled: a small group of students quietly standing with civilisation while a larger, louder, brutish group of students essentially swore their fealty to civilisation’s opposite – Israel’s barbarous foes.

They couldn’t let the Jews have one day? One day to give voice to their torment over what was done to their people a year ago? They couldn’t put away their megaphones, hang up the keffiyehs and keep their strange, swirling loathing for the world’s only Jewish nation under wraps for a measly 24 hours? It seems not. The reason they just had to get on those lawns on 7 October itself, despite Jews grieving there, is because to them 7 October was a great day. It was a day of resistance. Of glorious resistance. They were not going to allow anything as trifling as heartbroken Jews stop them from praising the pogromists.

They were not the only ones who barged, Westboro-style, into the grief of world Jewry. In London, on Saturday, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign called a demo to ‘mark one year of Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people’. And what happened a year ago? They don’t say. No mention of Hamas’s butchery of Jews that started the war. It’s memory-holed. They are essentially turning 7 October from the date Jews suffered the genocidal violence of Hamas into the date the Jewish State launched a ‘genocidal’ war against Palestinians. It is a moral inversion of epic and grotesque proportions.

The hijacking of the anniversary of the pogrom was much in evidence this week. Across social media, Israel-haters falsely mourned 7 October as the start of Israel’s ‘war on Palestinians’. In truth, Israel’s war on Hamas, not Palestinians, did not properly begin until a couple of days after Hamas’s anti-Semitic obscenity, and its full-scale ground invasion did not start until 27 October. Shame on the student radicals, activist class and newspaper front pages that spent Monday 7 October wringing their hands over the wickedness of the Jewish State rather than over the suffering of the Jewish people at the hands of marauding Islamists one year ago.

To exploit a day of Jewish grief to whip up yet more fashionable animus against the Jewish nation is unforgivable. These grief-intruding ghouls may not have gone so far as to hold up placards saying ‘Gods Hates Jews’, but they might as well have. The message of their year of deranged agitation is that the Jews have no right to defend themselves against their Islamist enemies, no right to their own homeland, and no right even to grieve. That is taken from them too, by the privileged pricks of the Israelophobic activist class and media class whose puffed-up phoney virtue must take precedence over everything, even the sorrow of Jews. No, let’s be more honest: especially the sorrow of Jews.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy