Two weeks ago, I was contacted by a journalist from the prestigious Associated Press news agency and wanted to interview me for an article about the abductees, a topic around which my life and my family's life have revolved since October 7.
We interview everyone, and we hold the role of the foreign media in high regard, but I remembered reading that the Associated Press told its reporters not to define Hamasniks as terrorists, God forbid, but as "fighters" or "armed." This insight made me feel strange. Why talk at all to someone whose moral judgment is something I can't even decipher?
I told her in all my Euro-maritime politeness that I was debating whether it would be right for me to be interviewed. What to do. And I find it hard to feel comfortable or safe among people whose loss of distinction between right and wrong is so much that even baby kidnappers and body rapists have such a thoughtful vocabulary.
"Look," she replied out of empathy that wouldn't shame a washing machine on coins, "it's not personal! Nor is it directed specifically against Israel. This is our agency's consistent stance in the face of every conflict we cover around the world."
And it was precisely this answer of hers that tipped the scales.
"Conflict?!" I asked her. Theater is my profession, and "conflict" is the most basic concept in drama. But how can you call what is happening here "conflict"?
"If someone wants to kill me, whereas I aspire to live, it's not a 'conflict.' Kapish?" I explained to her. "The word 'conflict' describes a clash of two desires and desires, both of which have some legitimate basis. A rapist, murderer or human trafficker does not 'manage his side of the conflict' when he attacks an innocent victim. It is impossible to call 'conflict' what happened between Hitler and the Jews. And what's happening between Sinwar and Hamas, may their names be erased, and every Israeli and Jew, yesterday and today and in the future, is something I expect from any sensible person to shake the rust off his brain and call him by his name."
Her reply, in the best tradition of blank text, was something like, "Let's agree to disagree." The next morning I encountered some difficulty in greeting my favorite greeting: "You are gifted to a man of knowledge."
• • •
Our advocacy is weak. This is known to all, and this weakness is taking its toll on us. Much of the weakness is our fault, but it is worth recognizing that there is also another, also notable part, about which we have little to do. We should also get used to the thought that we may never be able to explain Israeli justice to people like Greta or Roger Waters.
We are certainly responsible for many failures, but we are not to blame for the profound eclipse that completely disrupted the moral compass of much of Western civilization. If a referendum were held on the question of who we would like to entrust with Israeli hasbara, I assume that the close race as of today would take place between two people: Yosef Haddad and Douglas Murray. Coincidentally or not, neither is Jewish.
Douglas Murray has become one of the brightest, most popular and prominent explainers of our position in the conflict over the past month. It must be admitted that until last October he was known only to a few of us, mainly thanks to his book The Strange Death of Europe, which is a restless text and a brave gem of intellectual honesty in a world of idiotic defenses. Not many of us still read books, but anyone who reads Murray's book will find themselves quoting from it again and again.
Sometimes it seems that the "West", as an ideological space, as a culture and as a concrete living space, is turning before our eyes into a kind of parody of the tales of the "wise men". A parody of a parody. "The Strange Death of Europe" is a follow-up to this delusional process.
Murray points out that Europe's immigration policy took for granted that within a generation, or even less, Muslim immigrants would become Europeans. They will abandon worldviews, customs and habits that are precisely why they abandoned their countries of origin, and adopt more liberal, life-loving and tolerant attitudes.
They would probably still prefer to eat pita bread with juicy shawarma, rather than a rye cracker topped with a piece of cheese and a hint of cucumber. They may also continue to visit the mosque here and there. But within a generation or two they will integrate culturally, striving to express and demonstrate their Europeanness. The vast majority will become more feminist, friendlier to LGBT people and different religions. They will smile more and threaten less.
This assumption failed miserably, it and the policies that developed in its wake. This failure stunned, and still amazes, those who didn't think it could be otherwise. And here's the heart of the Western liberal's personality disorder – I know this about the liberal part of myself: he firmly believes that his magic is irresistible. He is convinced that the advantage of his life over any other form of life—which he is careful not to patronize and call "backward"—is not something that needs to be explained. The advantage of liberal-European life is the advantage of light over darkness, although these words must not be used. It's not forces. There is no way that anyone who peeks, even for a moment, at the free and luxurious lifestyle, will be able to overcome the temptation to leave everything and run amok into European life.
• • •
Europe thought, foolishly, that the waves of emigration of recent decades from Africa and Islamic countries would be conducted similarly to the way in which Jewish emigrations took place. Those where, within a generation, the children of immigrants became more Dutch than Dutch and more German than Germans. So that's it, no. Not at all.
And this is one of the most startling observations in Marie's book: in various parts of Europe, there was conflict, even conflict, between the local culture and the immigrant population, which insisted on respecting the customs and principles they brought with them from their homeland. All of them - including the hatred and contempt for European values.
The absurd situation of "you must respect the fact that I am not going to respect you, and you must respect me in the name of the same values and norms that I advocate" caught the liberal camp not so prepared. And precisely in these situations, many European leaders – mainly in Sweden, but not only – preferred to say that Europe has no heritage anyway. Unlike the immigrant public, it has no narrative, sacred values or principles that cannot be thrown behind their backs. To Marie, this self-effacement seems like a collective tendency toward suicidality. Hence the title of the book "The Strange Death of Europe".
This phenomenon is not only strange - these days we realize how distorted it is. On 7 October, thousands of murderers left Gaza to massacre, abuse and desecrate the human image. They came to conquer and wipe the memory of Israel off the ground. It was quite easy for the European left to understand that what was happening there was a barbaric attack by jihadist imperialism.
But in their toolbox there is no way to say such a thing. Imperialism, in their eyes, can only be white. The imperialist is necessarily European. Dark-skinned, then, can only be an oppressed victim, so his violence is a struggle for freedom. For the sake of this distorted theory, they present all Jews and Israelis as a white people and Zionism as colonialism. Even though we are a people that has no color, and even though we have no other country.
For that matter, they repress the fact that very soon, on what was their land, they may be forced to experience up close not only the collapse of the paradigm but the horrors of jihadist imperialism, and what exactly it looks like when its freedom extends from the river to the sea. Every river. Any sea.
Wrong? We'll fix it! If you find a mistake in the article, please share with us