On Monday night, I visited Oxford University in Great Britain.
My wife was somewhat hesitant about me visiting the U.K. at all, given safety concerns; after all, on Saturday, some 100,000 people marched in support of Hamas. Anti-Semitic hate crime is up 1,350% in London over the last few weeks. Imams have been shouting in Nottingham, “Oh Muslim, there is a Jew behind me. Come and kill him.”
But we felt it was important to go to Oxford, particularly at a time when the West seems unsure of its moral qualifications to condemn absolute evil in the form of Hamas. After all, Oxford is a thousand-year-old institution, one of the chief intellectual lights of the West. If we lose Oxford, it’s a good indicator that the West is in trouble.
Well, I’m here to report that the West is in trouble.
The university itself is gorgeous, a monument to the greatness of mankind. The architecture is magnificent; the history speaks from the walls, from Churchill to C.S. Lewis, from 1096 to 1945.
But the institution itself has been honeycombed with people who are in full support of Islamic terrorism.
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My opening remarks focused on the West’s shyness about its own values — its failure to recognize that not everyone thinks like Westerners do, and its consequent importation of people who believe that the West is deeply evil.
Those remarks were borne out in the actual event, when student after student approached the microphone to offer a bevy of morally obfuscatory arguments in support of Hamas. The most common was the clearly specious argument that Hamas burning babies alive in their cribs, raping mothers and then shooting them, and torturing fathers was somehow morally equivalent to the Israeli Defense Forces targeting terrorists while attempting to minimize civilian casualties.
When pressed, however, student after student admitted the real goal: the destruction of the State of Israel entirely. The rest was hot air.
Epic exchange between @benshapiro and an anti-Israel activist at Oxford University today. This “highly educated” student doesn’t know basic history pic.twitter.com/vbpfDnetgu
— Chaya Raichik (@ChayaRaichik10) October 31, 2023
To put it mildly, the experience was discomfiting. It’s not all that easy emotionally to stand across from student after student who call for the extermination of Jews “between the river and the sea,” Jews who are my literal friends and family. At modern universities, it’s considered erasure to mention men and women are different, but perfectly acceptable to openly justify and excuse the murder of innocent Jewish men, women, and children.
Radicalized Muslim students at the most important Western institutions feel no qualms whatsoever about calling for the obliteration of the Jewish State. Anti-Semitism runs rife in these halls.
And what’s even more disturbing is the tolerance with which it is met.
There is little or no pushback. There is certainly no feeling that such Jew-hatred is out of bounds.
This is why the West is in trouble. As I said last night, in 1933, the Oxford Union Society infamously voted 275 to 153 for the proposition, “This House will under no circumstances fight for its King and country.” That pathetic statement, the so-called Oxford Oath, gave aid and comfort to the enemies of the West; it reportedly led both Hitler and Mussolini to the conclusion that the British were internally weak, and thus prey for aggression.
The modern version of that is what we see today in the West: the belief that the values of King and country aren’t worth defending in the face of a muscular form of Islam that seeks the total destruction of its enemies.
Meanwhile, the rest of the world is following suit.
Amidst Israel’s attempts to root out Hamas from the Gaza Strip, Hamas is now receiving a helping hand from the international community and the legacy media. While Hamas sits on vast stockpiles of water, food, and medicine, the international community and legacy media have placed responsibility for Gaza’s civilian population … on Israel.
According to no less an anti-Israel authority than the New York Times this weekend:
As supplies of virtually every basic human necessity dwindle in Gaza, one group in the besieged enclave remains well-stocked: Hamas. … Hamas has hundreds of thousands of gallons of fuel for vehicles and rockets; caches of ammunition, explosives and materials to make more; and stockpiles of food, water and medicine, the officials said. A senior Lebanese official said Hamas, which is estimated to number between 35,000 and 40,000, had enough stocked away to keep fighting for three to four months without resupply. … The supply situation speaks to the relative sophistication of Hamas as a fighting force — an axiom among military professionals is that while amateurs talk about tactics, professionals talk about logistics. Yet with Gazans facing a humanitarian catastrophe, Hamas’s stockpiles raise questions about what responsibility, if any, it has to the civilian population.
There it is, that fabled New York Times objectivity: Hamas stealing billions of dollars from its citizens to fund its war machine “raises questions about what responsibility, if any, it has to the civilian population.”
Imagine that sentence in any other context.
Is there any question that the United States government has a responsibility for its civilian population? Or Israel’s government?
But being a genocidal Jew-hating terrorist means you don’t have to take responsibility for the civilians you supposedly govern. You might not have any responsibility for those citizens. In fact, Gaza hospitals are right now complaining about a lack of fuel — but Hamas currently has 260,000 gallons of gasoline and diesel on hand.
But no matter. Hamas has no responsibility.
Which is why Hamas’ friends are able to lament the plight of civilians in Gaza after having funded their impoverishment — and the current conflict, created by Hamas.
Aid dollars deployed to Gaza over the past 20 years have been embezzled by Hamas and used for its murderous plans.
But now the international community and legacy media say that it’s up to Israel to make humanitarian provision for Gaza’s civilians.
This, of course, is disingenuous.
None of the countries that voted in favor of a U.N. resolution pushing a ceasefire have offered to take in any Gazan civilians. None have called for Hamas to surrender to Israel, which would end the conflict immediately.
No, they say, Israel must stop its attempts to destroy Hamas.
The innocents are suffering.
This is the height of cynicism. It’s on par with the old saw about the man who kills his parents and throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan. Hamas started this conflict. Hamas is the governing body in the Gaza Strip. Hamas has chief responsibility for the health and welfare of Gazan Palestinian civilians.
And they don’t give two whits about those citizens.
In fact, they want those citizens to die. They say so openly. They say that their civilians are the responsibility of … the people they just murdered en masse. Yesterday, Hamas official Mousa Abu Marzouk was asked why Hamas built tunnels instead of bomb shelters where civilians could hide. He answered, “We have built the tunnels because we have no other way of protecting ourselves from being targeted and killed. Those tunnels are meant to protect us from the airplanes. We are fighting from inside the tunnels.” He said of Gazan civilians, “It is the responsibility of the United Nations to protect them. … it is the responsibility of the occupation (Israel) to provide them with all the services…”
Hamas Official Mousa Abu Marzouk: The Tunnels in Gaza Were Built to Protect Hamas Fighters, Not Civilians; Protecting Gaza Civilians Is the Responsibility of the U.N. and Israel #Hamas #Gaza pic.twitter.com/LlIVcQX6dt
— MEMRI (@MEMRIReports) October 30, 2023
So here’s the math, apparently: If a population elects terrorist leadership, that terrorist leadership consolidates its control by wiping out its political rivals, that terrorist leadership steals billions of dollars in aid and impoverishes its own citizens in the process, and then that terrorist leadership murders 1,500 Jews and kidnaps another 233 people, then so long as that terrorist leadership hides in tunnels, the terrorists must be left alone.
This is insanity.
It is insanity no other country would be expected to weather. Not the United States, not the U.K., not France, not Germany.
No one.
There cannot be a ceasefire until Hamas surrenders.
Anyone in the world who is not calling on Hamas to do just that — in fact, those who are calling for a lengthening of the conflict by shipping in more resources for Hamas to steal — cannot pretend to care about human life, either Israeli or Palestinian.
There is a reason both Hamas and the UN are calling for a ceasefire.
And it has nothing to do with human rights, and everything to do with stopping Israel from protecting its own citizens, the mass murder of whom created this conflict in the first place.