It must be me. That I’m getting soft in my old age. That I’m an old woke snowflake who is struggling to come to terms with what appears to be normal these days. Today I have seen, and cannot now unsee, the Hamas victory parade in London last night and a similar one in Australia next to the Sydney Opera House. The latter featured hundreds of supporters of a terrorist organisation chanting ‘Gas the Jews’. In 2023, a victory parade for terrorists who murdered men, women children, raped women and the paraded their corpses to a baying mob. In Australia, people call for the return of places like Auschwitz – what else could they possibly mean by calling for Jews to be gassed? – and, if there was such a place, we’d be knocking on the door of hell.
The people celebrating the deaths of Jews and calling for the survivors to be gassed are described as protestors. No, they are, in effect, celebrants, seeking joy from mass murder. And judging from the pictures their happiness knows no bounds.
I offer no words of support to Benjamin Netanyahu’s terrible Israeli government. I could not think of a worse man nor a worse government to be in power in Israel at this volatile time. That is not to say I do not support ordinary Israelis; I do, unequivocally, I respect and support the right of Israel to exist and I understand how it must be very hard not to seek revenge against the fascists of Hamas, but this way the circle remains unbroken and nothing can ever change.
Foolishly, I looked at footage of Hamas’s murderous assault on young people at a music festival, killing at least 260 innocent people who were campaigning for peace, and I have seen video of dead people being paraded on the streets in front of joyous Palestinians. As with the images from London and Sydney, I can’t unsee these images, too. Surely, into the 21st century we can do better than this, except that when there are literally people who want to murder, and in the case of Australia, want to gas Jews, maybe we can’t. Maybe we are just too far gone.
I am not pretending, as I hope I have set out here, that the Israeli government comes out of any of this well, but I can’t see how anything can justify the wilful and extensively planned slaughter of the innocents, almost certainly with the willing involvement of Iran and, who knows, Vladimir Putin.
If you allow your mind to wander, you can almost imagine how this could be an existential issue for the Middle East, maybe in the whole world. In the UK, former UKIP MEP Lance Forman called for a nuclear attack on Gaza, perhaps unaware of the location of Gaza and its proximity to places like, well, Israel. We can dismiss Forman as a right wing crank, if we like, but there are numerous right wing cranks like him, some of whom are in government.
This is the time for calm voices to prevail. Unfortunately, there aren’t any in the Middle East at the moment and the powderkeg seems to be more combustible every day. And I fear that given the personalities involved things will get worse before they get better.
