RUTHFULLY YOURS

So Yahya Sinwar has been killed. The leader of Hamas in Gaza is no more. The man widely believed to have been the architect of the pogrom of 7 October has been eliminated. The worst mass murderer of Jews since the Nazi era has been served the ultimate and most righteous punishment. The fascist is dead. This is a great day not only for Israel and the Jewish diaspora that has been smarting for more than a year from the horrors that Sinwar and his army of anti-Semites visited on southern Israel, but also for all of humanity.

It was during a ground operation in Rafah in southern Gaza that the IDF killed three terrorists. One was Sinwar. Rafah, of course, is the city every virtue-signaller in the West told Israel to leave well alone. ‘All eyes on Rafah’ went the social-media cry a few weeks back. Yet it turns out the man who green-lighted the rape, kidnap and slaughter of more than a thousand Jews was there. Listen, if your campaigning entails putting a moral forcefield around a fascist overlord, if it involves the protection of a Jew-killer from the Jews looking for him, then you might not be as virtuous as you think.

There will doubtlessly be much agonised analysis of Sinwar’s life. I expect we’ll even see the morally lost talking heads of the Western press gab about what a pensive leader he was or how his early life in a rundown refugee camp pushed him towards violent hate for the Jewish State. For now though, before all the unseemly handwringing, the basic facts of his life will suffice. He got involved in terrorism in the early 1980s. He later served as Hamas’s punisher of alleged Palestinian collaborators with Israel, earning him the nickname ‘The Butcher of Khan Younis’. He spent time in jail for the murder of such ‘collaborators’, one of whom he strangled to death with his bare hands, another of whom he suffocated with a keffiyeh. In 2017 he became leader of Hamas in Gaza. And in 2023 he okayed Hamas’s fascistic onslaught against the Jews of southern Israel.

This is a man who deserved to die. His crimes against the Jews were legion. He took the postwar cry of ‘Never Again’ and stomped it into the dirt. ‘Again, again’ was his preferred slogan. His violent disregard for Jewish life was a function of his deep-seated anti-Semitism – you don’t get to be leader of a terror group whose founding covenant committed it to an apocalyptic war on the Jews without being a Jew-hater yourself. Yet he was horrendously cavalier about Palestinian life, too. He let Hamas’s war with Israel drag on because he believed the ‘spiralling civilian death toll in Gaza’ would drum up global hate for Israel and global pity for Hamas. He sacrificed Jews to his racist ideology, and Palestinians to his grotesque vanity.

So Gazans also benefit from the demise of this monster. They are a step closer to liberation from the tyrannical rule of the death-mongers of Hamas. Humankind benefits, too. For Israel’s righteous slaying of Yahya Sinwar is more than justice for 7 October. It is more than a brilliant and targeted strike in a now year-long war on terrorism. It is also a message to the world. It says this: you cannot kill Jews with impunity anymore. It reminds us that those days are gone. It reminds us it isn’t the Middle Ages anymore, when the Church would reward your Jew-hunting, or the 20th century, when pogroms had the blessing of governments. No, there are consequences now to singling out Jews for special opprobrium and wicked violence. Do that today and you might very well die. Do that now and you might get your head caved in, as Sinwar did.

And here’s the chilling thing, the thing that should truly unsettle those of us who live in the West: we needed this message. Our nations needed this reminder. Our young in particular needed to be told that fascist violence is intolerable and killing Jews will be rightfully avenged. For across America and Europe in the aftermath of 7 October, unreason reigned. On our campuses, our streets, in our art world and media world, the sympathies of the privileged went not to the victims of Hamas’s pogrom, but to Hamas. Israel was offered not support but condemnation – and the most shrill, hypocritical and borderline bigoted condemnation you could imagine. ‘You had it coming’ was the subtext of the Israelophobic insanity that swept our cities after the pogrom.

We found ourselves in the horrific situation where many of our fellow citizens were seemingly content to see Jews once again loaded into trucks, burnt to a cinder and killed on account of their ethnicity. This spoke to more than a failure of sense and solidarity. It spoke to how determinedly our societies had turned their backs on the values of the Enlightenment and the virtues of civilisation, and could thus find greater common cause with the anti-Jewish, anti-modernity hysterics of Hamas than with the democratic state of Israel.

So yes, we needed to hear it. We needed to hear that the murder of Jews will be met with the severest of consequences in the 21st century. The killing of Sinwar puts flesh on the bones of the cry of ‘Never Again’ that had come to be so weakened and withered in recent years. Jew-killers everywhere will tremble now, making this not a day of death, but a day of hope.

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