Applauding Your Own Execution

Have you ever seen a man beheaded?

I have.

I remember watching it online, well over a decade ago, sitting in the living room of a friend who would later die of cancer. He turned to me and said, "You wouldn't even do that to a pig." Jihadis are particularly scrupulous when it comes to pigs, dogs, and infidels — but the point was well taken: when Islamic extremists hate you, they really, really mean it. No bullstuff. No pretenses. Just raw, unvarnished hatred.

Today, people seem to have forgotten that such things happen. After the October 7th attacks on Israel — a massacre involving rape, murder, and hostage-taking — the world wept rivers of tears...for the terrorists. College campuses erupted into anti-Semitic, pro-Hamas fervor, with keffiyeh-wrapped social justice warriors waving Palestinian flags (and often Hamas and Hezbollah flags too) at illegal campus encampments, sparring with police too cautious to deal with the bourgeois darlings of the elite class. Posters of Israeli hostages were torn down. Apparently, as Douglas Murray noted, some lives are now worth less than missing pets. Miniature pogroms erupted in cities like Amsterdam — yes, Amsterdam, where once a young Jewish girl hid in an attic. Today, Jews are leaving places in Europe altogether, realizing that the old hatred has returned — and it has returned with a vengeance.

Meanwhile, Iran fired the largest ballistic missile barrage in military history at Israel — a nation that has lived under existential threat since its founding. And yet even under missile fire, some Jews are leaving Europe and making Aliyah to Israel, choosing to face the rockets rather than the growing hatred metastasizing in the West. They understand what Golda Meir once said: "We have nowhere else to go." Better to stand and fight than to die waiting, as history repeats itself under a different flag.

As for the Israelis, they have understood since 1948 that if they do not kill their enemies, they will most assuredly die. Today, the full weight of academic opinion has been leveraged on the side of the undeniably pro-Hamas cult of sympathizers — the product of years of propaganda masquerading as education. At these institutions, even faculty and university presidents cannot bring themselves to condemn genocidal chants directly. Instead, they whimper that a call for the extermination of Jews "depends on context." Well. That is illuminating.

Progressivism doesn't bother me because I oppose all of its aims. Some of them, on paper, are even admirable. What bothers me is the hypocrisy — the desperate attempt to mask raw hatred behind a veneer of moral righteousness. If you hate and blame the Jews for everything, fine. At least be honest about it. Joe the Nazi down the block isn't pretending to be a crusader for human rights. He's open about his hatred. He’s proud to acknowledge who and what he is. I can respect that honesty far more than the perfumed lies of today's progressive moralists.

It isn't my place to interject myself into a conflict half a world away. I'm not Jewish. I'm not a "progressive." I'm certainly no humanist. I’m somewhat an admirer of Stirner, who said: "No one else's struggle can be my struggle. Only my struggle is my struggle." Humanism, to me, stands against the Law of Evolution — against Darwin. Men have been struggling against each other, fighting and killing with animalistic abandon, since time began. I should think they are ever going to stop?

But still, some things weigh heavily in the balance. When whole populations glorify — or offer aid and succor to — those who would happily saw off their heads for sport, they are operating contra the law of survival. It is a bizarre, perplexing, almost comical state of affairs. Have the minds of the West’s academic elites become suicidally unhinged? Do they not understand the stakes — the real stakes — unfolding in the Middle East, as Iran edges ever closer to acquiring nuclear weapons?

To sing praises to those who would slaughter you is an absurdity so grotesque that even Albert Camus might have taken exception to it. As for me, I alternate between apathy and umbrage, watching as the victims of October 7th are flushed down the memory hole, replaced by slogans, propaganda, and the cult of self-hatred.

In a sane world, you would not weep for the butcher. In a sane world, you would not eulogize the rapist. In a sane world, survival itself would still be a virtue. But ours is not a sane world. It is a suicidal one. And as always, the undertaker waits.

One final note: the last long book I finished reading (I usually only read graphic novels, comics, or pieces from anthologies) was An Interrupted Life by Etty Hillesum. Etty and I are lightyears apart philosophically and spiritually, but I find her image — her ghost — to be compelling. I wonder what she would have thought of the world today, as the old hatred fires up again, like the crema at Auschwitz.

Etty was murdered there in 1943.

Best regards.