It is striking how ‘far-right’ has become an all-purpose insult in Europe and the West. It is a label slapped on anybody who stands outside the narrow conformism of woke politics. Whether it’s parents protesting against drag queens preaching trans ideology to children, or citizens concerned about anything from the EU’s crusade against cars and farmers to the imposition of vaccine passports or mass migration, they are all apparently ‘far-right’ now.
The message is always that ‘these people’ are basically scum, beyond the limits of respectable debate, and should not be engaged with. Instead they should be cancelled, arrested or banned altogether.
Little wonder then that the police, politicians and media seized with relish on the ‘far-right’ counter protest in London on Armistice Day last weekend. They focused on a few hundred white working-class football fans who briefly skirmished with police near the Cenotaph on Whitehall (before respecting the two minutes’ silence for the war dead), as a welcome distraction from facing the truth about the massive ‘peaceful’ pro-Palestinian demonstration up the road, which was really an anti-Israeli, often antisemitic, hate march.
So, is it considered ‘far-right’ to express your hatred for the genocidal terrorists of Hamas these days? Will we be suspected of ‘far-right sympathies’ for opposing the open antisemitism of the Islamists and their Islamoleft allies in Europe? What about defending Western civilisation against barbarism, is that a fringe ‘far-right’ cause toos? After all, here in the UK we Brexiteers have long been branded ‘far-right’ for daring to demand national sovereignty and democracy.
Amid the furore about the ‘far right’ in London last weekend, a rough home-made banner displayed by one of those counter protestors provided more clarity and insight than all of the worthy media waffle around the mass protests. ‘It’s Not Pro-Palestine,’ read the hand-painted sign, ‘It’s Anti-British’. That is one thing those branded ‘far-right’ surely got right.
Surveying the vitriolic protests in other European and U.S .cities, we could add they are not so much pro-Palestinian as anti-Western, a long-simmering outburst against everything from our history to our society’s bedrock values. Though admittedly it might be hard to fit all of that on a banner made from the bedsheet.
Of course, the thousands on those marches—many of whom might struggle to find Israel on a map—are sympathetic to the plight of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. But these protests are not really about humanitarian sentiments. If so, they might surely direct some of their anger at Hamas, who started the war by launching a pogrom against Israelis on October 7th and have since been using civilians in Gaza as human shields. They would certainly be demanding the release of more than 200 Israeli hostages kidnapped by Hamas.
Instead the automatic, knee-jerk rection is to blame Israel and the West for everything. Protestors increasingly downplay the Hamas atrocities of October 7th—or in some cases try to deny that they even happened. These are not humanitarian marches for peace. The hate marches are the latest offensive in the politico-culture war against our democratic civilisation in the West.
As so often, the problem begins at the top. Europe’s spineless elites are now so equivocal about defending Western values that they find it hard to give genuine support to Israel in its existential war against Islamist murderers. President Macron of France let the mask slip this week when he told the BBC that Israel should ‘stop bombing babies’ in Gaza—as if it was the Israelis, rather than Hamas terrorists, who were deliberately targeting defenceless civilians. Macron’s subsequent attempt to ‘clarify’ (that is, cover up) what he really meant cut little ice; we clearly heard what he said, and we know where they stand.
Speaking of the BBC, throughout this war they have embodied the European media’s anti-Israel bias. This week brought another grim example, when a BBC newsreader reported that the Israeli Defence Forces had ‘targeted health workers and Arabic speakers’ during its assault on the Hamas command post hidden in a Gaza hospital complex. The BBC then had to apologise and explain that she meant to say the IDF ‘included,’ not targeted, health workers, and Arabic speakers. Despite claims that this was a simple case of ‘misreading,’ it looked more like another example of anti-Israeli liberal ‘journalists’ seeing what they wanted to see, rather than all that was really there. And of course the lie had gone around the world, via social media, before the correction had even got its boots on.
Meanwhile back in London, the Metropolitan Police continue to enforce their double standards; allowing marchers with pro-Hamas banners to carry on unmolested while threatening to arrest ‘far-right’ counter-protestors for displaying our national symbol, the Union Flag; or standing idly by while anti-Israeli idiots prance about and wave Palestinian flags on top of war memorials.
This equivocation at the top has given the green light to all those who despise Western democracy to display their true feelings, using the Palestinian cause as a fashionably convenient pretext.
It was surely only a matter of time before Greta Thunberg, the poster girl for the apocalyptically anti-modern Green movement, effectively threw in her lot with the medieval Islamist death cult waging war on Israel. Meanwhile, what else but loathing of Western society, coupled of course with their own self-righteousness, could have motivated LGBT+ activists to launch something as loony as ‘Queers for Palestine’? A campaign effectively boasting about Homosexuals for Hamas, as others have observed, has a distinct air of Turkeys for Christmas about it.
There have been other bizarre expressions of loathing of traditional Western norms, under the guise of solidarity with the Palestinians, perhaps culminating in the UK Sex Workers’ Union declaring its ‘unequivocal solidarity’ with Palestinian resistance to Israel’s ‘genocidal violence.’ Prostitutes for Palestine? Hookers for Hamas? After one porn star called the Hamas murderers of October 7th ‘freedom fighters’, the writer Brendan O’Neill pointed out that it is ‘truly surreal that a woman who got rich from showing her breasts is cheering a movement that would stone her for showing her ankles.’
And don’t imagine this irrationality is confined to the lunatic fringe. What remains of the mainstream European left is also infected by it, tail-ending the Islamists and echoing their ‘from the river to the sea’ chant—basically a call for Israeli Jews to be driven into the Mediterranean. The more liberal and educated they are, the more likely they seem to have endorsed this war on the West, embracing the identity politics which decrees that Palestinians are born victims who can do no wrong, while Jews are deemed the beneficiaries of ‘white privilege’ and as such, more or less legitimate targets.
They seek to justify all of this by branding their opponents ‘far-right’, deserving only of being cancelled, while boasting that they by contrast are ‘on the right side of history.’ This toxic phrase really expresses their wish to wipe out the history of Western civilisation, to start again from Year Zero. That is why they felt nothing about protesting on Armistice Day or dancing on war memorials. It is also why they feel comfortable with the demand to erase the past 75 years of Israel’s history, by wiping the world’s only Jewish state off the map.
These pro-Palestinian protestors, aka apologists for Hamas, like to pretend that their enemies are the rulers of the Western world. In fact, as last weekend showed, the democracy-haters reserve their real fear and loathing for the demos, the supposedly ignorant masses, who they imagine are embodied by those working-class football fans at the Cenotaph.
Once we understand the anti-Western character of these protests, it should be clear that, even if some know little and normally care less about events in the Middle East, now is the time to take sides unequivocally with the Israelis and with the besieged Jews of Europe. As Democracy Watch has argued from the start, they are fighting a life-and-death war over there; and over here, we are faced with a political and cultural battle that we cannot afford to lose, either.
So, let us not worry about being branded ‘far-right’ or told that we are on ‘the wrong side of history’ by those who hate us. What matters is that we are on the right side in the struggle between civilisation and barbarism.