RUTHFULLY YOURS

There is a British woman who survived 15 months at the hands of a neo-fascist militia. A woman who was cruelly deprived of her liberty and dignity by racist monsters and yet who emerged from that hell smiling and defiant. A woman who spent her 28th birthday in the bondage of an army of bigots. A woman who was subjected to the most intolerable persecutions for one ‘crime’ and one ‘crime’ only – she’s a Jew.

And yet if you said her name on the streets of Britain, many people would not know who she was. No one on the ‘anti-racist’ left held a vigil for her. The activists of Antifa raised not a peep of concern for this Jew seized by a racist army. These people see ‘fascism’ everywhere, in every utterance made by Donald Trump, every bristling against mass immigration, every criticism of the Koran. Yet when a fellow Brit was cruelly incarcerated by a movement founded with the express intention of murdering Jews, they said not a word. To them everything is fascism, except fascism.

Her name is Emily Damari. Go and say it to people. Let them know that a British citizen was kidnapped by Hamas and that British ‘progressives’ said nothing. Let them know that this British-Israeli was brutalised by Jew-killers and it made not so much as a dent in the conscience of Britain’s bourgeois left. The people who cry ‘black lives matter’ and ‘trans lives matter’ and ‘Muslims matter’ could not bring themselves to utter these three poxy words: ‘Emily Damari matters.’

Ms Damari was taken from her home in Kibbutz Kfar Aza in southern Israel during Hamas’s orgy of barbarism on 7 October 2023. She was shot in the hand, causing her to lose two fingers. She was dragged to Gaza where she spent 471 days in the captivity of anti-Semites. She was released yesterday, as part of Phase 1 of the ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas, along with two other women: Romi Gonen, 24, and Doron Steinbrecher, 31. I have come ‘back to life’, said Emily on Instagram after her release.

To be clear, Emily was not forgotten. Britain’s Jewish community held vigils for her. Fans of Tottenham Hotspur – the team she supports – campaigned for her release. So did fans of Arsenal. Not for the first time, working-class football fans showed themselves to be the moral backbone of the nation, as our ‘betters’ shamefully looked the other way. It fell mostly to Emily’s heroic mother, Mandy, to keep her daughter’s plight in the headlines. Her dogged campaigning even compelled government officials to break their reprehensible silence and speak on the racist brutalisation of one of their own people.

And yet the unhappy truth, the truth we cannot ignore, is that beyond these pockets of moral clarity there was little concern for Emily’s fate. On the contrary, ‘progressives’ seemed more sympathetic to the Islamist tyrants who so horrifically violated her security and liberty than to Emily herself. They called their barbarism ‘resistance’. Nothing better captured the moral decay of the modern left than the fact that a British leftist from eye-watering privilege referred to the day Emily Damari was seized by racist invaders as a ‘day of celebration’. Meanwhile, the true day of celebration – yesterday, when Emily was released – has merited not one mention from these self-styled anti-fascists.

Britain’s left did cheer someone’s release from captivity yesterday – not Emily Damari’s but Chris Nineham’s. He’s the impeccably upper-class founding member of the Stop the War Coalition who was arrested on Saturday’s ‘pro-Palestine’ demo in London and held overnight. His ridiculous tweet about feeling ‘dishevelled’ but ‘safe and well’ following his release from captivity has been liked thousands of times. I don’t think I have ever felt as despairing of the British left as I do right now, watching them hail Nineham as some kind of posh Mandela on the very day a British Jew was released from whatever dank lair her fascistic oppressors held her in for more than a year.

All people of good conscience will be elated to see the release of Emily, Romi and Doron. And yet even as the surviving hostages stagger back to liberty, and even as this war comes, possibly, to an end, it is essential we do not forget what happened these past 15 months. It is essential we remember the anti-civilisational hysteria of the post-pogrom moment. That many of our young sided with the pogromists over their victims. That when posters of Hamas’s kidnap victims were put up in our cities they were graffitied and smeared with shit. That our educated elites defamed Israel as ‘the pigs of the Earth’ and its citizens as being in the throes of ‘genocidal mania’. That even the kidnap of a British Jew left them blissfully, unforgivably unmoved. Jewish lives, it seems, don’t matter.

We forget all this at our peril. Israel has had its reckoning with the armies of anti-Semites on its borders, and now we need a reckoning with the bigotry and delirium and sympathy for barbarism that swept our societies in the wake of the 7 October pogrom. We should take inspiration from that British badass, Emily Damari – if she can survive 15 months at the hands of Islamist fanatics, surely we can look the fanaticism in our own midst right in the eye.

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