On the very day that my book Never Again? How the West Betrayed the Jews and Itself came out, two Jews were murdered by a man named “Jihad” outside a synagogue in Manchester. My previous book, Israelophobia, was published on September 7, 2023, exactly a month before Hamas’s atrocities changed the world forever. In my darker moments, I wonder if I should give this writing thing up. But there are things that demand repeating, and the deeper the shadow grows across the face of the West, the more urgent it all becomes.
When I consider the frenzied debate about antisemitism, and the relentless parade of outrages, it becomes ever clearer that society is missing the point. This isn’t about increasing funding to Jewish security groups or tinkering with the law to make this or that slogan illegal. It’s not enough to stop the patient screaming. You’ve got to address the source of the agony.
Such is the mission of Never Again? It is not just about the Jews, any more than an essay about global warming is about polar bears. Our snowy friends may get it in the neck to begin with, but the true message of their demise can be found in environmental destabilisation that affect us all. The problem, in other words, is the whole shebang.
Not that the Jews are heading the way of the polar bear. I am convinced that many more rich and wonderful chapters are yet to be written in the long story of Jewish history. My optimism may be an expression of faith as much as one of analysis: the people that survived the Babylonian conquest and exile, Crusader massacres, Imperial Russian pogroms, the Spanish Inquisition and the Holocaust; that gave the world ethical monotheism, the concept of universal moral law, 22 per cent of all Nobel Prize winners and the smoked salmon bagel will never be brought down by jihadism, far less the cretinous luxury fascism of the Free Palestine movement.
The West is more of a worry. Could the civilisation that gave the world the industrial revolution, modern medicine, the Enlightenment and rational inquiry, liberal democracy, just war theory, Beethoven, Brahms and the Beatles, really be contemplating terminal decline?
By and large, the Jews are not seeking to enact their own demise. I generalise, and there are notable exceptions.The tradition of the blood libel, invented in 1144 by a Jewish convert to Christianity called Theobald of Cambridge, is echoed today by his ideological descendants, the likes of Zack Polanski, the Jewish leader of Britain’s Green Party, who has supported the awful claim that Israel “kills a child every 45 minutes”. Visit any of the Gaza marches and you’ll see a “Jewish bloc”, cynically shunted into the vanguard by their Gentile peers as a human shield against allegations of antisemitism. You’ll even see a small number of black-hatted rabbis from the eccentric fringes of “antizionist” Orthodoxy. But these people are very much in the minority. On the whole, in our characteristically argumentative way, Jews stick together, and are relatively unequivocal about our identity, history, traditions and beliefs, as well as our determination to survive.
The same can no longer be said of the West. Under the influence of pervasive “centrist fundamentalism”, our post-Cold War era has been marked by a project of self-destruction. Wrongly assuming that the clash of civilisations was a thing of the past, our elites have pursued a vision of globalised equality and freedom that sought to tamp down all expressions of national exceptionalism, and with it our pride, insistence upon borders, belief in a distinction between our countrymen and outsiders, and an appreciation of our history. The philosopher Roger Scruton described it as a “down with us” mentality, and this lies at the heart of the problem. Our civilisation’s freedoms and accomplishments have earned us many envious enemies. They may be powerless to bring us down from the outside, but they stand a much better chance when assisted by those working to dismantle our own defences from within.
As is the polar bear to climate change, so is the Jew to the suicide of the West. Those attuned can see it happening everywhere. Examples are so abundant that one is spoilt for choice. In December 2025, Henry Nowak, an 18-year-old student at Southampton University, was fatally stabbed by a man called Vickrum Digwa. When the police arrived, the murderer falsely claimed that he had been racially abused; officers then handcuffed the victim as he lay bleeding to death. Leaving the particulars aside – an investigation has not been concluded – one might ask: what has such self-undoing racial madness got to with the Jews? Nothing, on the face of it. Scratch the surface, however, and it speaks of how a whole society has become so cowed by progressive radicals that we have decommissioned our common sense and outsourced our morality to their dogma.
What is the ideology at work here? It is one that encourages hyper-sensitivity towards even the mildest perceived injustice faced by “people of colour”, while Jews, as David Baddiel put it, don’t count. Why not? Because Jew are elided with white people and positioned as oppressors, thus deserving everything they get. Clearly, this is no genuine attempt to overcome bigotry. Rather, it is an attempt to subvert the claim of ownership naturally expressed by the majority over their own countries.
The language of anti-racism, in other words, is being used as leverage to topple well-meaning people from their established positions in society and replace them with radicals devoted to its dismantlement. The first step is to convince them that they are marked by the guilt of their forebears and, by virtue of their breeding, complicit with the “structural racism” which supposedly blights our culture. With the stuffing knocked out of them, they eventually comply with their own defenestration, supporting the very causes that are designed for their demise.
The Jew – targeted, perhaps, because he tends to hold onto his stuffing – takes the brunt of all this. When tens of thousands of affluent liberals take to the streets in support of Palestine, they lend critical mass to a movement that targets Israel as the stubbornest peg upon which Western identity is hung. There is a reason, after all, why the statue of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square is so frequently defaced during these marches. Indeed, in one archetypical selfie video that has lodged in my mind, a middle-class Gaza activist says the quiet part out loud: “I can’t wait for the West to fall.” Wait, wait: what would happen if Israel was truly wiped out and the corrupt and brutal Palestinian Authority, or its jihadi cousins in Hamas, ruled “from the river to the sea”? What would happen if Western civilisation did indeed fall, to be replaced by the types of regimes that proliferate elsewhere in the world? My money says that these agitators would wipe the smiles off their faces pretty quickly.
Without raising the spectre of Freud, their activism, in other words, is a form of childhood rebellion. The toddler feels secure in raging against mother because he knows she will never abandon him, no matter how long he lies on the floor and kicks. Gaza obsessives, meanwhile, feel entitled to undermine their own society because they do not believe they will ever succeed. They are simply performing a brattish radicalism that gains them adulation from their peers, notoriety from the establishment and a great many followers on social media. Their rage has nothing to do with the Israel of reality, which has many wonderful qualities alongside its flaws. It has nothing even to do with the real-life Palestinians, as evidenced by the proliferation of unIslamic crop tops and stylised homosexuality on the Gaza marches. No, they are lost in luxury, trapped in a never-ending infancy, infatuated with their own reflection.
Yet they are consequential. Take Shakespeare’s Birthplace Trust, which owns historic buildings and archives in Stratford-upon-Avon. It is now “decolonising” itself, exploring “the continued impact of Empire” on his work, even though British imperialism was in its infancy during Shakespeare’s lifetime. Clearly, it wasn’t the principle of empire that these people found objectionable, but the Britishness of it. After all, they did not seem concerned about the imperial exploits of the Ottomans, Russians, Mughals or Chinese.
Would the Trust’s board members demand that the Basho Memorial Museum near Osaka, which marks the birthplace of Japan’s revered haiku master Matsuo Basho, “decolonises” itself to include Western poets (such as Shakespeare)? Would they want it to explore “the continued impact of Empire” on the study of his work, since the Japanese imperial project peaked around the same time as the British one? Of course not. Other people’s cultures are to be preserved at all costs, and they are right to be proud of them. It is only our own that must be erased.
The fundamental Westernness of the Western drive to abolish Westernness is laughably invisible to those who uphold it. But it’s hard to see the funny side when a bunch of clowns are vandalising your house. These may be deeply unserious people, but they are ideologues who are both bent on our downfall and hold positions of influence in society. To make matters worse, they hold the door open for much more sinister forces, making common cause with the very jihadis who would in some cases have them beheaded. In 1979, leftists supported the Iranian revolution, only to be executed, expelled or imprisoned when it succeeded. All this circles naturally back to the Jews.
There can be no doubting the scale of the challenge facing those of us who wish to see the West restored and Jews living securely, and peacefully, within it. Nothing less is required than the reform of our immigration system, legal system, policing, education, civil service, universities, taxation, welfare, defence, and more. The list goes on. As a spiritual starting-point, however, we must give ourselves a booster dose of optimism when it comes to our civilisation. What does this require? It requires conscious de-brainwashing, ridding our minds of the false guilt with which we have been encouraged so insidiously to burden ourselves, and replacing it with the quiet patriotic pride that came so naturally before. It means dusting down the ethics of our grandparents and returning them to their rightful place in the sun. In short, it means getting behind a single rallying cry: “Up with us!”
Adapted from the foreword to the paperback edition of Never Again? How the West Betrayed the Jews and Itself
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