On Oct. 7, 2023, Gazans danced in the streets to celebrate Hamas’s rape, torture, abduction, and murder of Israelis. The last time they were so happy was on Sept. 11, 2001. Meanwhile, thousands of their supporters, a motley crew of angry Muslims and maladjusted leftists, celebrated in the cities of the West. Three years later, on the third anniversary of Oct. 7, the Gazans are a defeated people. Yet, the celebrations continue in our cities.
In London, the Metropolitan Police falsely claimed they lacked the power to prevent a rally from marching across the city center. The Met asked the march’s organizers to choose a less offensive day, but the marchers refused. The Met could have asked the Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, to ban the event, but it did not believe that the chances of “serious disorder” were high. This assessment was correct. British Jews are civilized and decent people. If we behaved for one day as our enemies have done for years, the police would have banned the march. If a tiny percentage of Britain’s civilized and decent non-Jewish population turned out just once and confronted the Left-Islamist mobs, there would be no more marches.
Mahmood recently banned face masks at political demonstrations. The ruling was made after white English people gathered to protest the British state’s role as a facilitator of illegal immigration at the ports. So far, this ruling has been applied only to white English people. They include a man who joined a protest in Portsmouth wearing a burka and identifying as a woman. The police arrested him anyway. The Met allowed the Oct. 7 celebrants to cover their faces and motives with the usual keffiyehs, niqabs, and soiled COVID-19 masks. But officers did stop a small Jewish counterprotest from raising an Israeli flag.
The historian Simon Sebag-Montefiore called the decision to allow the march “unconscionable, cowardly and despicable,” and an “abuse and degradation of our values of free speech and assembly.” It revealed, Sebag-Montefiore said, “a saddening and alarming void at the moral center of this government and police that should worry us all.”
The void is filled by evil intent. Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of New York City, must have thought long and hard about how to both-sides his commemorative post. He condemned Hamas for its murder and kidnapping, but forgot to mention the gang rape and sexual torture of women and girls. This is what the economist Paul Anthony Samuelson called a “revealed preference.” People might say one thing, but their choices tell us what they really think.
Mamdani knows that gang rape and sexual torture in the name of Islam are a bad look, so he chooses not to mention it. Instead, Mamdani revealed further preferences by devoting most of his statement to accusing Israel of “war crimes,” “ongoing genocide,” and “apartheid,” and the U.S. government of “complicity.” Little more than two weeks after Oct. 7, Mamdani called on Israel to lift its “blockade” and “siege” on Hamas-controlled Gaza, where Hamas still held over 250 Israeli hostages, and for pro-Palestinians in the United States to “take action” against a “genocide” that had yet to happen. This was tantamount to support for a proscribed foreign terrorist group. It is consistent with the social media record of the earlier revealed preference of his wife, Rama Duwaji.
To see where this is heading, look at France. Time was, we might have expected France’s Islamogauchiste hordes to excel in degrading their country on the Oct. 7 anniversary. But they were otherwise occupied. High schoolers, many from immigrant backgrounds, joined in public-sector strikes. The radical Left party France Unbowed joined them for the same degraded electoral calculus as the Democrats had when they fanned the George Floyd riots of 2020. Schools across France went up in flames. Hundreds were injured and arrested. France Unbowed’s leader, Jean-Luc Melenchon, is second in the polls for next year’s presidential elections. The usual French disorder threatens the survival of the Fifth Republic and the credibility of the French economy.
When my fellow opinionator Daniel Hannan sees some especially foolish example of an advanced liberal democracy accelerating its own demise, he is in the habit of quoting Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech from 1968: “We must be mad, literally mad [as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependents, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant descended population]. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.” In the year to October 2023, Britain’s Office of National Statistics calculated that 1,469,000 people immigrated to Britain.
The pyre is stacked in Britain. It is now smoldering in France. It is being prepared in New York City and Dearborn, Michigan. First the marches, then the matches.
Dominic Green (@drdominicgreen) is a Washington Examiner columnist and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.