In 1933, the Oxford Union Society sadly voted 275 to 153 in favor of the proposal: “This House will under no circumstances fight for its King and country.” That pathetic declaration, the so-called Oxford Oath, gave aid and comfort to the enemies of the West; it is said to have led both Hitler and Mussolini to the conclusion that the British were internally weak and therefore susceptible to aggression.
Last week, 90 years later, a motion was shared with members of the University and College Union, a different body in Oxford. That motion proposed that “only a massive uprising on both sides of the green line and throughout the Middle East can liberate the Palestinian people,” and called Hamas’s genocidal attacks on Jews “a direct consequence of decades of violent oppression by the Palestinians.” Palestinian people by the Israeli State.”
This motion is pure and simple Jew hatred. Any moral equivalence drawn between Israel and Hamas is simple Jew-hatred.
When you support Hamas and its agenda, you are supporting the barbaric murder of babies in their cribs; you are supporting kidnapped, raped and murdered women.
How has such rampant sentiment in favor of terrorism and murder become acceptable in polite society? How has it permeated the halls of Oxford and the streets of London? How is it possible that in the heart of a country that was home to parliamentary democracy and classical liberalism, 100,000 people take to the streets to declare their support for the Hamas terrorists and their like-minded allies?
The answer is simple: the West is ashamed of its own values. And this shame has led her down the path of blindness. The West has decided that, to avoid accusations of ethnocentrism, it must make a fundamental assumption: everyone thinks like us.
Now it is evident that everyone he doesn’t think like we do. People who kill babies for the crime of being Jews are not like us. People paragliding into electronic music festivals and gleefully raping women, murdering 260 people and dragging innocents back to their hells in Gaza. they are not like us.
But that’s a disturbing thought. It is disturbing because it means that evil is quite real and cannot be bought. No “settlement freeze” will stop it. No negotiated agreement will end this. We don’t like that idea.
And that’s why we lie to ourselves. We ignore Hamas leader Mohammed Deif and he explains: “Today you Israelis are fighting divine soldiers who love death for Allah the same way you love life and who compete with each other for martyrdom as you flee from death”. We pretend that Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh is lying when he says: “We love death as our enemies love life.” We pretend that the imams who preach the same words in London do not mean what they say. We wipe out generations of indoctrination into a genocidal hatred of the Jewish people. We ignore that Hamas hides its rockets behind its own children after massacring the children of others. After all, we are all the same.
So we look for complexity. We look for nuances. And meanwhile, we promote an immigration policy that brings together people who don’t think like us to Western countries in large quantities.
All of this benefits Hamas and its allies, who are perfectly happy to take advantage of our blindness. They talk about human rights while stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from the citizens for whom they are responsible; They complain about the lack of water while they remove the water pipes to adapt them to the rockets. They remember the old joke about the man who murders his parents and then falls at the mercy of the court because he is an orphan.
And we fall into it. We not only fall into the trap, but we seek solidarity with the monsters. Because if we can find solidarity, after all, they are not monsters. And if they aren’t monsters, then Western values aren’t really any better. and maintaining that Lying is the first priority for many Westerners today.
But it’s a lie. Western values are superior. And that’s uncomfortable, because it comes with real obligations. You can only defend Hamas – you can only decide that you will not defend the king and the country – if you really believe that the king and the country are not worth defending. But if they are, if the West has a set of values worth defending, that means defending those values.
It means rejecting the Marxist notion that equality of outcome is necessarily the result of exploitation rather than reality: that equality of outcome could be reduced to differences in culture and decision-making. It means rejecting the postmodernist notion that all morality is a reflection of power dynamics and that there is, in fact, good and evil. It means rejecting the weak morality that substitutes tolerance for decency. Philosopher Roger Scruton wrote: “In place of the old beliefs of a civilization based on piety, judgment, and historical loyalty, young people are given the new beliefs of a society based on equality and inclusion, and they are “It tells them that judgment of other lifestyles is a crime… The ‘non-judgmental’ attitude towards other cultures goes hand in hand with a fierce denunciation of the culture that could have been one’s own.”
We must reject this new suicidal belief system. King and country and values. are It’s worth fighting for. Once upon a time, the world decided too late that they were worth fighting for. By the time the world realized its mistake, six million Jews had died.
Today, the existence of the State of Israel means that Jews do not need to wait for anyone else to realize that monsters exist and that evil is real. But the West must also come to that conclusion.
Not for the Jews. Not for Israel. But because if the West does not defend itself, it will cease to exist. And the monsters will win.
Ben Shapiro is co-founder and editor emeritus of The Daily Wire and host of the Ben Shapiro Show.
