Was Hamas’ brutal raid on Israel the day liberals realised their delusions about Islamic extremism were dead?
WILL people ever wake up? That’s the question some of us have wondered for decades now.
Facts that have been staring us in the face have been ignored. Fantasies that shouldn’t have been entertained have been flattered.
But reality always breaks in.
And that’s just what happened for many people on October 7 when Hamas carried out its brutal rampage in Israel.
Not just because it once again showed us the face of Islamic extremism.
We have seen that many times before. In New York and Washington on 9/11. As IS rampaged across the Middle East. In Paris, at the Bataclan Theatre. And in some of our own cities, not least the Manchester Arena suicide bombing of 2017.
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For years we have seen this.
But during the same period we have been fed a diet of purest horses**t.
Nothing to say
This has come from people who have said things we know not to be true. People who tell us that if you “misgender” someone you are committing “actual violence”.
People who think JK Rowling is the most dangerous person on the planet.
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People who have pushed woke nonsense down our throats and say that “silence” in the face of oppression is “violence”.
For a time these two things seemed to rub along together badly. But on October 7 they finally split completely.
Because that was the day that the “silence is violence” brigade went very silent indeed.
The same people who claim that anything they don’t like is an “aggression” had nothing to say about Hamas’s massacre.
They had nothing to say about young people raped beside the bodies of their friends at what remained of a music festival.
Of children and even a Holocaust survivor dragged into Gaza to be held as hostages by Hamas.
All the leftists in the media who normally leap on the slightest rumour of racism had nothing to say about the biggest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
Worse, they actually seemed to support it.
As the writer Konstantin Kisin pointed out in a piece for The Free Press this week, the whole period has been a fast learning curve for a certain type of “liberal”.
Indeed, as he said, it seemed to be “the day the delusions died”.
A day when, as he says, people he knows admitted to having woken up a liberal and gone to bed a conservative.
I’m not surprised. Reality does that to you.
And reality hit the people of Israel very hard indeed on October 7.
Many of the people massacred in their homes by Hamas were themselves “peaceniks”, people who worked towards greater harmony and cooperation with the people of Gaza.
The hundreds of young people gunned down at the music festival near the Israeli side of the Gaza border were attending a “peace rave”.
Did it matter to their killers, rapists and abductors that many of them would have been liberals? Not at all. All that the monsters of Hamas cared was that they were Jews and Infidels.
That, now, is for the people of Israel to address.
But what has been alarming for so many people here at home is the attitude that has been allowed to grow in our society. The sheer cruelty and callousness of so many people.
The cruelty of the BBC moving straight on from the actual massacre to parroting Hamas propaganda that an Israeli rocket hit a Gaza hospital.
According to US and UK intelligence, the hospital car park was in fact hit by a Palestinian rocket misfire.
But it is in the cruelty on the streets that so many liberal dreams are being shattered.
Smears and lies
It has been in watching the young Muslim women in London tear down posters put up to draw attention to the Israeli children who have been kidnapped.
Of people claiming they are “queer” aligning themselves with people who support the ethnic cleansing of Jews in their historic homeland.
In the smears and lies pumped out by MPs such as Jeremy Corbyn and his old ally Chris Williamson.
In the students at Cambridge University who have failed to condemn the Hamas massacre but instead called for a “mass uprising” to destroy the Jewish state.
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I’m sure this has all come as a shock to a lot of old liberals. They dreamed impossible dreams. They did indeed turn out to be delusions.
At least there are a few more people who now see things as they are. Perhaps they can now join decent people of all political types in not just facing up to these horrors — but in defeating them.