Never Again by Jake Wallis Simons review: ‘A book for our times’ - The Jewish Chronicle

Jake Wallis Simons’ last book, Israelophobia, was published in September 2023. Its examination of the intellectual and political roots of the eponymous phenomenon would have been valuable at any time, but coming just days before the Hamas massacre of October 7 it was especially prescient.

Wallis Simons, formerly editor of the JC, has followed this with a broader but adjacent subject: how the West betrayed the Jews and itself, as Never Again’s subtitle puts it. The book is a superb distillation of the many varying issues facing both the West and the Jews, essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how we have ended up in a position where the October 7 massacre was followed not by an outpouring of grief and sympathy for the victims but marches supporting the murderers.

It is a depressing read. In one pivotal passage Wallis Simons describes how “signs of defeat are everywhere. This is the case whether one uses subjective markers like unhappiness, poor life satisfaction, social incoherence, decaying trust in institutions, pessimism, and lack of purpose, national pride and shared culture; or social metrics like rising numbers of deaths of despair, deteriorating mental health, levels of immigration and integration, crime rates, obesity, welfare dependency, plummeting birth rates, addiction and decaying family bonds; or economic measures like poor productivity, deindustrialisation, soaring levels of national debt, high taxation, crippling health and welfare spending, uncontrolled rates of inflation and unemployment and trade imbalances; or geopolitical factors like the rising threat of war (combined with poor defence preparedness), the continued blight of terrorism, the fall in numbers of world democracies and increase in authoritarian regimes, political instability, degenerating quality of governance and fraying international alliances.” At least the sun is out, I consoled myself as I read it.

Wallis Simons rightly argues that antisemitism is inextricably linked to these social trends in societies in which it festers and grows, and that the betrayal of the book’s subtitle is thus of both the Jews and the West itself. The key point about that seemingly exhaustive list is that it has one seminal measure of ill health missing: “the intensity of hatred towards the Jews. This oldest bigotry is so fundamental because it flows from our most primordial fears and prejudices, and arises with greater virulence when these become agitated and unchecked. Disinformation; poor education, in the broadest sense; an ebbing of our sense of the nation’s place in the world; cultural impoverishment; social resentment; economic hardship; fear of conflict; ethical rudderlessness; an absence of beauty; tribalism; fanaticism; the rise of demagogues; under such afflictions, our long muscle memory of antisemitism naturally targets the Jew as a way of explaining things, a howl of anguish and consternation, a kind of therapy.”

But while there are deep roots to our problems, Wallis Simons identifies three “tribes” as being responsible for our current upheavals in the West: progressives, Islamist extremists and nationalist chauvinists. As he observes, while they are different, they all depend on the very tolerance that they reject to flourish. And they have one common fixation: the Jews.

Here in Britain, we have stood by while the Muslim Brotherhood has built bases, institutions and front organisations from which it can operate globally, a phenomenon observed in 2006 by Melanie Phillips in her Londonistan: How Britain Is Creating a Terror State Within. We cannot even bring ourselves to proscribe the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the terror, radicalisation and propaganda arm of the Iranian regime. We might as well hoist a sign with the words: “Welcome all, feel free to come and destroy us.”

But it is not just the Islamists whom we allow to do their worst. We do it to ourselves by allowing those in thrall to progressive ideologies (such as Critical Race Theory) to take over the likes of academia, broadcasting and much of the public sector and private sector HR departments. Wallis Simons cites research showing that many British schools are teaching from guides such as Brilliant Black British History, a “decolonisation” textbook that asserts that black people built Stonehenge and that “Britain was a black country for more than 7,000 years before white people came” (a point contested by historians who argue such claims are impossible to prove with certainty). Pupils are also taught how the Vikings were “diverse” – indeed that they were Muslim. And if you dissent from any of this, it is simply proof of your inherent racism.

How has this madness taken root? Wallis Simons uses the historian Jonathan Clark’s term “far-Centre” to describe those who “depict themselves as balanced moderates, as experienced technocrats, as the only sensible adults in the room”. This belief in their own enlightened position means that they see it as their duty to impose their worldview on society. The issue is not that they themselves believe that, for example, the Vikings were Muslim. It is that they believe the people who do believe it are right-thinking and so must be platformed and supported. Wallis Simons is especially good on Rory Stewart, the epitome of far-Centre groupthink, who he uses as the exemplar of the idea of the “basically fine” scale, in which almost anything which challenges this outlook is dismissed as “basically fine”. As he writes: “Perhaps the most eye-popping display of centrist fundamentalism, however, came in February 2024, when Stewart appeared on the Making Sense podcast, presented by the philosopher and neuroscientist Sam Harris. For about 20 minutes, Harris – an atheist who is sceptical of Islam – attempted to discuss the scourge of jihadism in the Muslim world, only to have his questions deflected at every turn on the shield of Stewart’s basically fine-ism. ‘I think people don’t like foreigners trying to boss them around and they will reach for religion when it suits them,’ the former Conservative minister said at one point. ‘I think these phenomena are much broader and I don’t think they’re limited to Muslims,’ he said, effectively relativising jihadism out of existence.”

Never Again is full of such titbits, expertly woven together into a comprehensive account of Wallis Simons’s broader thesis. This is a book for our times.

Never Again: How The West Betrayed Jews and Itself, by Jake Wallis Simons

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