We are disconnected from history. Jews are being scapegoated, Hamas rewarded.

Originally published in the Columbus Dispatch, this is a slightly expanded version that goes into more detail. I truly appreciate the Dispatch for their willingness to include contrarian voices and headlines that help to sell newspapers.

“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” That aptly describes our current moment and acts as a warning to those ignorant of — or unwilling to learn from — our past.

Civilization is fragile because humans are an often-violent species. The freedoms and security too many of us take for granted didn’t just appear by wishful thinking. They were paid for by the blood of tens of millions of people — military and civilian. And the relative peace in most of the Western world since WWII is an historical aberration.

Do enough of us have the moral clarity to not just recognize the threats we face today but actually respond appropriately? Sadly, recent events suggest the answer is no.

I got a stark reminder of these stakes preparing for and moderating a recent public conversation with Douglas Murray, an Oxford educated journalist, experienced war correspondent, and New York Times best-selling author of eight books. Mr. Murray came to Central Ohio to share insights from his reporting from Israel and Gaza. We conducted our discussion before a packed house of more than 700 guests at the McCoy Center in New Albany.

Mr. Murray’s latest book “On Democracies and Death Cults” details the barbarism of the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on innocent Israeli civilians and the failure of most Westerners to understand that this threat isn’t limited to Israel. Some are right here in Central Ohio too.

In the book’s introduction, Murray details a call one of the terrorists made to his parents during the attack bragging about killing Jews. “Your son killed Jews!” he boasted. “Dad I killed ten! Ten with my own hands! Put Mum on.” His parents seemed equally excited, praising their God on hearing the news.

That call, Hamas body cam video, interviews with Hamas leaders, and his own direct observations of well documented atrocities spurred Murray to refer to Hamas and similar Islamist jihadi groups as “death cults.”

So savage were the Hamas terrorists in their gleeful murder of Jews — just for being Jews — that Mr. Murray told me referring to the assaults as Medieval “would be to slur the Middle Ages.”

Members of these cults aren’t limited to the Middle East. On September 5th, the Imam of a mosque in Dublin, Ohio intoned in a sermon to his congregation “Oh Allah, bring annihilation upon the criminal, aggressor Zionists, as well as those that are loyal to them, support them, and those who rejoice when they rejoice. Oh Allah … exterminate them and do not spare a single one of them..."

That might also explain why Ohio State Senator Beth Liston, representing the Imam’s community, backed out of her planned trip to Israel, rather than her excuse that she didn’t want to be used for Israeli propaganda. As of this writing, her silence about the Imam’s calls for the extermination of her Jewish constituents suggests a preference for a very different sort of propaganda.

Despite this undeniable evil, the leaders of some Western nations are falling over themselves to reward these death cults with official recognition of Palestinian statehood. It’s an echo of then British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s infamous and deadly naïveté that Britain could have “peace for our time” with Hitler.

You’d think the current British PM would know the murderous consequences that followed his predecessor’s folly. But you’d be wrong. Current PM Keir Starmer was one of the first Western leaders to officially reward Hamas’s über- Medieval barbarism. If we’re lucky, Starmer’s successor will have the wisdom of Chamberlain’s — Winston Churchill — who famously recognized that “An appeaser is one who feeds the crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.”

Why are so many in the West so disconnected from the lessons of their own history? Murray offered one clue when I asked why some, particularly college educated young people, seemed to be so enamored with the most illiberal governing ideology in the world today and antagonistic toward Israel, the only liberal democracy in the region.

He remarked that we’ve had decades of “intense indoctrination” of young people in the West, “worse if they go to university… that the world is effectively about oppressor and oppressed…” and that “… any place in the world, you look at it, you work out who is the oppressor and who is the oppressed and you side with the oppressed.”

It’s an ideology so devoid of historical context that Murray noted simply that “it doesn’t work”. Layer on top of that world view other popular and equally vapid academic dogmas of anti-colonialism, anti-capitalism, anti-racism, etc., and it’s no surprise so many blame Israel — rather than Hamas — for the horrors of the war Hamas started.

Today’s antisemitic, anti-Israel, pro jihadi movements aren’t about the awful casualties of the Gaza war. If they were, those same people proclaiming “glory to our martyrs” — our martyrs? Seriously?— on college campuses would have been even louder about far more civilian casualties from Islamist wars in Syria, Yemen, Nigeria, and Somalia. The fact that they’re not isn’t mere oversight; it’s willful blindness.

It’s not even really about the Jews, the convenient scapegoats for the failure of other cultures for thousands of years. Blaming Jews for warning the world about the threat of these death cults is like blaming the coal mine canaries for warning miners of their impending doom.

The excuses to support the barbarism of Hamas and all the ignorant and dishonest accusations against Israel and Jews are instead about the navel-gazing, faux-oppression nonsense that’s dominated Western culture for decades. This delusion deprives us of the moral clarity needed to see real threats. And our enemies are just as gleeful watching us tear ourselves apart over such foolishness as they were while brutalizing Israeli civilians two years ago.

No nation has completely clean hands. But Western civilization has provided nearly all of the freedoms, security, and prosperity we enjoy today.

If we cannot value our inheritance while shaping a better union, we’ll lose both. Rewarding Hamas rhymes with some of the greatest diplomatic blunders in history — and will likely produce only more stanzas of war and tragedy.

Readers interested in viewing the entire conversation with Douglas Murray can do so from this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2OM39qle28

 Special thanks are due to Ambassadors for Israel, Chabad Columbus, Rabbi Areyah Kaltmann and Rochel Kaltmann for inviting me to moderate the program with Douglas Murray. Central Ohio wouldn’t have had the opportunity to hear Murray’s powerful voice for moral clarity without their vision and leadership.