One should not always think the worst of one’s political opponents, or even enemies. Nobody is all good, nobody is all bad. I’ve met awful people who I mostly agree with on political issues, and I have met great people, who I disagree with on most issues. And I know this might come off as pretentious or holier-than-thou, but I always try to have hope for people to surprise me. Otherwise, what the hell am I doing with all this writing and talking? I want to think that a great text with sufficiently convincing facts will sway even people who started off disagreeing with it all. Maybe this makes me a naive small -l liberal to a certain extent.
But I have to say that I wasn’t surprised with the reactions to the 7th of October massacre in Israel. I’ve followed the postcolonial left for too long to be surprised that they celebrated. I’ve witnessed the imported antisemitism many muslims carry with them here first-hand. I wasn’t surprised by the complete lack of show of empathy for the victims of the massacre. The outpour of empathy was for Gaza, not for the hostages taken there or the murder victims at the Nova music festival, and this was even before Israel had responded.
Why? Why this evil, right in our midst? That’s what today’s guest has written a book about. Brendan O’Neill is the chief political writer at Spiked, where he also was the editor from 2007 until 2021, and his latest book is called After the pogrom – 7 october, Israel and the crisis of civilization (Abe books 2024). He’s hard to label, but has called himself a marxist libertarian, which is quite hard to make sense of really.
But disregarding labels, Brendan always makes sense in my view, and is one of the people I’ve often turned to when the world seems to be going mad. Read this book, but first you can listen to the interview.
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