The harsh lessons of 2023
Hugo Gurdon
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In this season of Christmas good cheer, it may seem inapt to dwell on the grimmest story of the year. But it is necessary to do so, for the story is also the biggest and most important not just of 2023 but for many years. And there are vital lessons that should be drawn from it and new resolutions, too.
I refer, of course, to the Hamas terrorists’ massacre of 1,200 people in Israel, in which many of the victims were women, children, and even babies, killed in the most depraved and appalling ways. Oct. 7 shocked the world.
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In Israel itself, that dreadful day made clear what had for a while been occluded — that no compromise with the Islamist terrorists is compatible with the Jewish state’s peaceful long-term existence. Hamas commits itself daily to Israel’s destruction and to murdering as many of its 8 million citizens as possible. The terrorists promise this in defiance of their foolish or knavish apologists, who turn the obvious truth upside down to claim mass rape, torture, and civilian pogroms are legitimate forms of resistance to Israeli “occupation.”
The events of 10 weeks ago galvanized Israel. They restored its unity and resolve, which are necessary to see through the task of complete military victory and the smashing of Hamas. The Jewish state sees that there is no other way to a stable and civilized future.
The lessons are not for Israel alone to learn. The explosion of antisemitic support for Israel’s persecutors confirms what conservatives have proclaimed for decades, that the woke, intersectional, anti-racism Left intends to wreck and subdue our civilization. Its ideology, expressed on campuses and in many American cities, endorses any behavior by “people of color,” favored castes, and the dysfunctional “global South” — the more destructive, the better. Equally, it condemns any act, no matter how legitimate, by their supposed oppressors, white people in general and, at the national level, the West’s developed, high-functioning liberal democracies.
This needs to clarify opinion in the United States and wider West and steel the decent majority to meet the threat that international leftism and its domestic American adherents present to our civilization and well-being.
The Left’s foot soldiers wake up every day dedicated to the task of uprooting America’s founding values, which are also Israel’s — freedom, the rule of law, equality of peoples, human dignity — which made our country the world’s leader and made the Jewish state so swiftly an exemplary success in a region of corruption and failure.
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Recent dark events will have a silver lining if they finally open eyes in this country to the irremediable malignancy of the Left’s agenda and make plain the necessity of resisting it always and everywhere. It is only thus that we will retain the good and traditional values that are now under relentless ideological attack.
The kaffiyeh-clad fascists, who threaten, barrack, and kill American Jews, who mob their homes and smash their businesses, are merely the latest and most egregious elements in a much bigger movement that is Marxist in inspiration and revolutionary in method. It has broken into the open more obviously than ever before. It will not offer any respite. It will give no quarter. It intends on salt the earth.