by Giulio Meotti
According to French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, heir to the great liberal thinkers, from Raymond Aron to Albert Camus, “we have slipped into hatred towards our world. The woke spirit, which has taken the place of communist ideology, defines white supremacism as absolute evil and makes the Israeli the quintessence of this evil.”
Hence the assault on the history and culture of the West to dismantle and disperse them both.
And this West now hates itself to the point of generating crazy paradoxes every day. Under these circumstances, how long can our house, the increasingly divided house of the civilized world, stand?
And while in Canada – the country of Leonard Cohen, Saul Bellow and Mordechai Richler, one of the most peaceful and safe places in the world until a few years ago – Molotov cocktails are thrown against synagogues, stars of David and threatening letters are painted on Jewish homes. University of Alberta Samantha Pearson, the head of the campus’ sexual assault centre, signed an open letter denying that Hamas-led terrorists raped Israeli women during the devastating assault of October 7th.
At the same time, Gretchen Felker-Martin, the well known horror writer and transgender activist, defined the blowing up the World Trade Center as “probably the most defensible thing he (Bin Laden) did”.
The West has rotted to the point that high percentages of young people sympathize with the writings of Osama bin Laden.
The president of New York University’s “non-binary students” also defended Hamas.
Meanwhile, the third largest Norwegian newspaper, Dagbladet, of one of those countries that consider themselves rational and enlightened, managed to write that Israel had started the war, then had to add that on October 7th, Hamas had first killed 1,200 Israelis.
Meanwhile, a professor at Exeter University in England hailed the “courage of Hamas”.
What is this evil acid that corrodes Western humanism, and where does it come from?
Harvey Mansfield is a great Harvard academic, a leading scholar of Machiavelli, and in Le Figaro he told this amazing paradox:
“An Iranian student in my class told me: ‘In Iran you have to be careful about what you say in public, but in private you can say pretty much whatever you want. At Harvard it’s the opposite. It is students’ self-censorship out of fear of other students, a way to keep their thoughts and doubts to themselves, even among their peers. This is a fact of life in most American universities today, especially the most prestigious ones. Only those who are considered oppressed have the right to say an identity; the others, considered oppressors, like white men, are expected to submit (…) The strange thing is that opposition to the West comes from within the West. Islamic radicalism, for all its barbarity, invites the conscience of the West to join its fight against the West.”
Over the weekend, the great Italian monuments were stormed by the symbols of the October 7th massacres. But where is the scandal?
Former British Home Secretary Suella Braverman had only written that the pro-Hamas marches are an assertion of primacy by Islamic groups. British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak fired her.
You would expect them in the square, instead of demonstrating for Ismail Haniyeh, standing in a vigil for Mahsa Amini, beaten to death for her no to a headscarf. Instead they stand with those who stone those who do not align themselves with the morality of Allah. But it must be nice in the morning to march around with a clenched fist railing against the West and Israel and in the evening to return home and dive into the reassuring well-being that the West has given you, again with all due respect to coherence.
The Austrian novelist Elfriede Jelinek condemned on October 7th: “Humanity, it could be useful for us. After the Hamas attack, I no longer know what it is about. It becomes a piece of paper on which many good and beautiful things have been written and then set on fire. Fanatics rage, for whom life has no value, and death is something worth fighting for, through which one can become a martyr.”
“The more the demonstrators affirm the legitimacy and rightness of their action by shouting and insulting, everywhere, even here, in front of St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna, the more a void, an aspiring void, is established. Every exchange is reduced to ashes. We only see the black smoke that flies away and the horror that remains.”
Jelinek doesn’t say it, because she is a great writer but she is also very progressive and progressives don’t see shadows within their own world.
But horror germinates in the withered heart of the West. And it’s tangible.
Close to the First World War, the great Austrian writer Karl Kraus said that the era would soon arrive in which, in the heart of the highest Western culture, “men will make gloves from other men’s skin”.
After October 7, perhaps we will see them again, human leather made into gloves.