Europe Learned the Wrong Lesson From the October 7 Attack | The American Spectator

The powerful blow that was delivered to Israel on Oct. 7 has yielded three very important historic achievements. First of all, it brought the Palestinian cause back. Why are all these countries recognizing Palestine now? The overall outcome of Oct. 7 forced the world to open its eyes to the Palestinian cause, and to act forcefully in this respect.

Thus spoke Hamas Politburo member Ghazi Hamad to Al Jazeera.

We can thank Herr Hamad for his ingenuousness. October 7 did seem to be an inflection point in the minds of exterminationists like Hamas as well as for their wannabes, useful idiots, and assorted camp followers in the media, on campuses, and an ever-larger percentage of Democrats. Unlike the Nazis, who even at the peak of their power still made a semblance of hiding their genocidal aims, Hamas and the other Gazans who followed them to rape, torture, kidnap, and murder Israeli civilians on that day posted their activities online, sometimes streaming them live. One memorable call placed by a Hamasnik to his parents back in Gaza had him screaming with pride and joy, telling them he had himself killed 10 Jews that very day, and the parents sounding as happy as Jewish parents hearing their kids tell them they just got into med school. (RELATED: Look Back in Anger: The October 7 Commission Report)

While the murders were still proceeding apace, demonstrations immediately formed on campuses and in the streets of Western European cities. Most demanded a ceasefire, an exceedingly strange thing to do since at that time, the only attack had been made by Hamas. Gradually, more and more demonstrators made clear by their words and by their deeds that they approved of the violence and supported the Hamas plan of completely eliminating the nation of Israel and of violence against Jews everywhere in the world. Demonstrators became vocal advocates for “Globalizing the Intifada,” the Intifada being the grisly campaign of bombing pizza shops, shopping malls, and city buses that Yassir Arafat launched against Israel’s civilians less than a decade after agreeing to peace with Israel on the White House lawn and getting the Nobel Peace Prize. They chanted, “From the River to the Sea,” designating that their goal is a single state, occupying all the area from the Jordan to the Mediterranean, that is as ethnically homogeneous as the PA is now — home to no Jews at all. (RELATED: Palestinians’ ‘Allies’ Need to Abolish Hamas, Not Israel)

All that is fairly old news, rehashed for the one or two readers who may have only now tuned in to the story. The new development this week was expressed with admirable candor and brevity by the Wall Street Journal editorial board in an August 6 editorial they titled: Kill Jews, Get Your Own State.

What they are referring to is the announced intention of both Britain and France to recognize a Palestinian state. Macron and Starmer are as adept as Daladier and Chamberlain at rationalizing their capitulation to terror regimes, though in Chamberlain’s defense, the Umbrella Man was at least sincere in thinking that appeasement would lead to Hitler’s moral reform and real peace. As well, in defense of Daladier, too, democratic leaders did not yet have the archetypal object lessons that the failure of the woeful policies of appeasement provided later generations to learn from.

Neither Starmer nor Macron has such an excuse.

And both Starmer and Macron are committed to the policies of uncritical acceptance of a gigantic stream of immigrants, of whom a significant number have no commitment to the core values pioneered by the West, first among them freedom of religion. Even more important, they have no affection for those constitutional systems. These systems are built on the wholehearted commitment of their citizens to the project of self-government. Those who back the Hamas/Hitler project instead treat democracy with cool contempt. They take every legal, political, and financial benefit offered by Western systems while working for those systems’ overthrow.

And Starmer and Macron get it — and they don’t seem to care. A reasonable conjecture is that it has to do with politics. An ever-increasing militant vote, completely on board with Hamas and its aims, is now an ever-increasing factor in European elections. And those who stake their political careers on the policy of accepting massive and indiscriminate immigration depend on that vote. They must feel ever-increasing pressure to stay in the good graces of the people who may hold the key to their power. When they have cover from the propaganda campaign to brand as genocide the battle to destroy the actual genocidal rump of Hamas, they think they can safely reward Hamas and its followers without seeming to betray democracy.

And so they move to reward the first massive state-sponsored pogrom since the Holocaust by welcoming into the comity of nations that people whose members perpetrated the atrocities, without bothering to eliminate the government that planned and executed it.

What should the Western democracies have learned from the disastrous failures of Chamberlain and Daladier? First and foremost, when dealing with leaders who embrace the power-or-death binary, words and ideas are meant only to manipulate and to obscure. Hitler’s word and Stalin’s word meant nothing. What mattered was only the calculus of power. Appeasement did not change Hitler or his long-announced aims — it furthered them. So it is with the fog of ideas poured forth by his latter-day acolytes — they are manipulative, absent of shared meaning, obscuring rather than revealing.

Until they feel it is safe to be perfectly clear.

Mr. Starmer knows that as well as anyone. Yet Mr. Starmer seems to have long ago compromised himself, seemingly out of the desire not to jeopardize the ongoing massive influx of unvetted immigrants from places where violent hatred of Jews and contempt for Western constitutionalism is the norm. Starmer was a leading U.K. prosecutor when the sordid story broke of the rape gangs that preyed on hundreds of English girls, grooming them into sex slaves pimped out for great profit. Starmer kept a tight lid on what would surely have led to outrage against the policies that made no distinction between those who would make law-abiding citizens and violent opponents of the Western order. Minimal actions were taken; no sense was given to the public of the size and scope of this monstrous criminal enterprise.

Starmer oversaw a few prosecutions and succeeded in seeing that no storm of protest arose. Instead, the people who did see clearly the horrible state of affairs were increasingly made the target of governmental coercion meant to shut them up. Speaking the truth was equated with fostering hate by the very governmental structure that the criminals hold in contempt.  Just ask Tommy Robertson about it — being sent to prison, where he would be nearly killed by Islamists for seeking to end the scourge of the rape gangs.

While the structure does not deserve contempt, those who held its responsible office do.

Now, as prime minister, Mr. Starmer’s government is making war against political freedom, just like radical religionists are so fond of doing. In the same August 6 edition of the Wall Street Journal, Dominic Green reports in an op-ed:

In late July, X users in Britain were blocked from viewing parliamentary speeches about grooming gangs or sharing footage of police arresting anti-immigration protestors. The government is also creating a police unit to monitor groups organizing protests against two issues on which the regime is vulnerable: mass immigration and the asylum crisis.

Mr. Starmer is beyond irony. The English Civil War was fought against the king for Parliamentary privilege: anyone in Parliament should be able to speak their mind there without fear of punishment by the state. Mr. Starmer’s folks did not disallow parliamentarians their free speech. But Mr. Starmer et al do deny the right of the supposed masters of a free country, the electorate, to hear the speech of their representatives. Headless King Charles is no doubt chuckling on the other side over that one. As is the ghost of King George III: Starmer’s government is telling American internet companies that they intend to regulate the content they may show in Britain, contrary to an assurance Starmer made only this February when in America as our guest. (RELATED: US to UK: Ditch ‘Hate Speech’ Laws or No Deal?)

As Green summarizes:

Britain’s regime forfeited its people’s trust by bungling the economy, bringing in millions of immigrants, and failing to defend the borders. It now suppresses legitimate responses by trying to interdict private communications and isolate the British from their free-speaking American cousins.

Mr. Macron’s government in France suffers from a similar absence of moral courage. They welcomed and gave a choice government university scholarship to a woman who, in September 2024, posted a video of a Hitler speech to her X account and added these words: “Kill their young and old. Show them no mercy. … kill them everywhere.” Popular outcry forced her expulsion, but France has opened its doors to those such as Fady Hossam Hanona, a Gazan journalist who, in a 2022 Facebook entry, posted: “The Jews are sons of dogs. I am for killing them and burning them like Hitler.” There is a large vote in France that responds positively to that sentiment — admiration and emulation of the man and the philosophy that humiliated France and turned its government and many of its people into collaborators with Hitler and his program of extermination.

It is people like that to whom Mr. Macron’s and Mr. Starmer’s policies cater. It gives the thinnest of cover to what is a cynical attempt to stay in power a little longer. By their actions, they show that they value their own election over the hearts of their citizens. Over the heart that constitutes the true greatness of the West, that moral courage that moved its people to devote themselves without resolve to see through the destruction of Hitlerism, Japanese militarism, and the Gulag Empire.

These chestless men of the West paint themselves in as exceedingly moral, but the disingenuousness of it in their base catering to a terrorist base makes them inferior to the Hamas Politburo apparatchik, who was at least honest about what he was doing.

Sooner or later, they will fail. Preferably sooner.

The citizens of Britain and of France are showing the signs of a maturing awareness of how badly they have been used. Despite the engines of government being used against its citizens, the love of freedom yet lives in too many hearts.

This last gasp of Hitlerism, gussied up with a religious cloak, will fail as well. Like the Greatest Generation, we will not in the end fail the task given us by history to see the cause of civilization through.

READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin:

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