Rallies that condemn Israel’s war on Hamas and equivocate the October 7 terror attack that killed hundreds of Israeli civilians are symptoms that the West is losing its values, according to Daily Wire Editor Emeritus Ben Shapiro.
Shapiro appeared at the University of Oxford on Monday to speak about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Israel’s ongoing war against Hamas. At the top of a question-and-answer session, Shapiro explained that activists demonstrating against his visit to Oxford are part of an unfortunate and larger trend across liberal democratic countries.
“You’re hearing people outside chanting genocidal slogans like ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free,’” Shapiro said. “The real question is why is that such a common sentiment in The West? Why has this become such a common thing to see 100k people marching in the streets of London in a pro-Hamas rally?”
The answer, according to Shapiro, is that the West has become “ashamed of the superiority of its own values.”
“The West has become shy about its own principles. The West has become humiliated by its own principles. Instead, it has decided to substitute the idiotic notion that everybody thinks the same way, and it’s not true,” Shapiro said.
“Hamas openly says their goal is to exterminate all Jews. But we can’t believe them because we’re so paternalistic – we believe that nobody believes that, it must be economic discontent, it must be a land dispute,” Shapiro said. “Or maybe it turns out that people who burn babies in their cribs, who rape mothers in front of their children and murder both of them, maybe they don’t think like you.”
The Daily Wire host said that the answer to the rot within the West is for Westerners to reembrace the West’s values and defend them. Otherwise, the West will empower its enemies, such as Hamas.
“Back in 1933, [the Oxford Union] voted in humiliating fashion for the so-called Oxford Oath, that it would not defend King and Country. And that was used by people like Hitler, like Mussolini to lead when the West was weak. Any civilization that will not defend its own values, any civilization that creates an equation between its own values and the values of groups like Hamas is weak. And that’s not something The West can afford,” Shapiro said.
The heart of the dilemma facing the West is not about Israel, Shapiro said, but about what the West will choose to believe about itself and its values when faced with evils like the terrorism of Hamas.
“What it is about is whether the West is going to defend values that actually matter. It’s about if the West is going to recognize, once and for all, that its values are not the same as those of groups like Hamas, and not everything can be talked out in negotiations in a room,” Shapiro said.
“The people who would do the sorts of things we saw on October 7, they’re not morally equivalent to people who try to target those terrorists, who are trying to kill those terrorists while the terrorists themselves are bragging about putting civilians atop their rockets,” he continued. “Any moral equivalence that’s drawn in this conflict by people who are chanting outside should be treated as evidence of anti-Semitism because there has never been a clearer moral contrast than what you’re seeing right now.”
MUST WATCH: @BenShapiro torches Hamas supporters in Oxford Union as protesters who want to kill Jews yell in the background. Chilling. pic.twitter.com/plXgVyYqgB
— Liz Wheeler (@Liz_Wheeler) October 31, 2023