If anyone had doubts as to the seriousness of the threat to the West and its heritage of political freedom, what happened this last week in the “Mother of Parliaments” should be enough to dispel them.
[T]he fight is between those who hold civilization dear and those who embrace the pre-civilizational.
When Pim Fortuyn was assassinated two decades ago in Holland, largely because of his opposition to multiculturalism, most shrugged it off as unimportant. When Islamists went on a rampage of murder after a Parisian satirical magazine published a satirical cartoon that offended many Muslims’ sensibility, that seemed like an isolated incident and why stir up trouble anyway? We wrote off concerns about radical political Islamism as racist, xenophobic, whatever, when they spawned political reactions in Switzerland, Sweden, and Hungary. (READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin: Antony Blinken Declares Israeli Settlements Illegal)
But now it is in Britain. And it is huge and it is ugly.
Southend West Member of Parliament Sir David Amess was stabbed to death in 2021 by Ali Harbi Ali. Ali’s intended target had been Conservative Mike Freer, the MP for Golders Green, home to London’s largest Jewish community, who is himself not Jewish. Ali went to Freer’s office, didn’t find him, and went on to kill Arness.
Freer announced about a week ago that he was calling it quits after thirty years in Parliament. He was subject to constant death threats; his office was torched in December, and he and his staff have had to wear stab vests whenever they went out. Freer finally had enough. He explained to the BBC the routine that eventually wore down his nerve:
You just have to be aware of your surroundings. So when you park your car, just make sure there’s no one hanging around. When you approach the office, people quite legitimately could be waiting to see you. Always make sure you keep a distance. Always make sure the office is well lit, the CCTV is working, the panic buttons are there.
If you do a public event, always make sure you have an exit that you can run to behind you, in case someone comes at you from in front. It’s all that kind of awareness that becomes engrained.
Prime Minister Sunak properly condemned the attacks that led to Freer’s resignation:
They’re not just an attack on him but an attack on British democracy … people are free to debate issues passionately and have robust debate. Intimidation and abuse is simply unacceptable.
Nice words, and properly cautious to indicate that he was not quashing “robust debate.” Yet the rule of law along with free speech is in trouble in Britain right now, and Sunak’s proper words have not yet been matched by proper and effective action.
Britain has had for some time strong laws against hate speech. They were employed to deny entry to Britain for radio talk host Michael Savage for his harsh criticism of political Islam. The same was true for Dutch politician Geert Wilders (whose recently won the Dutch election). Delicate concern for the sensitivities of Britain’s large and growing Muslim communities was clearly thought to be part of a quid pro quo. They thought that, offered special protection from hearing challenging opinions, this large population that came from authoritarian lands and cultures would then appreciatively assimilate into the British culture of robust free speech and fair play.
That hope was laid to rest after October 7. Hamas’s orgy of rape and murder has lit a fire under terrorist wannabes and organized campaigns of violence and intimidation burst forth. Hundreds of thousands march the streets of London, and police who were quick to enforce the niceties of the hate speech laws against the likes of Savage and Wilders temporized in the face of the mobs chanting the exterminationist slogan “From the River to the sea, Palestine will be Jew free” (my slight emendation indicates what their euphemism really means, wink, wink) and threatening violence to all who oppose them. When asked why they did not arrest a man screaming for “Jihad” at one such rally, a senior police officer rationalized that “jihad” “can mean a lot of things to a lot of people.” (READ MORE: The American People Know the Real Hamas)
Indeed, it can. One can, though, make a reasonable inference from context, just as the university presidents asked us to do when excusing their egregiously antisemitic speech double standards before Congress. Their performance so disgusted us because we knew what draconian actions they had taken toward the least impropriety against a more intersectionally fashionable group. So, too, there is a building recognition that this new-found sensitivity to speech rights in Britain is intersectionally selective, and in real life, outside the fog of rationalizations, Jews are not receiving equal protection of the law in Britain.
But Jews have served the world as the canary in the coal mine. Enemies of freedom regularly come for the Jews first, but you can be sure that the next target will be anyone who values the freedom implicit in Genesis’s assertion that all humans are created in the divine image.
And so as the institution of Parliament comes under attack, and Parliament buckles before the mobs, the intimidators, and the assassins.
Here’s the story. Parliamentary tradition has established days in which the parties who are in opposition get to propose motions that normally would not get to the floor.
The main British opposition is the Labour Party. Labour had gone hard-core antisemitic for a number of years, and were crushed at the polls for it. A new leader took over in the aftermath, Keir Starmer, who made an effort to rid the party of antisemites. However, he is faced with the same dilemma facing Democrats here — they have a large Islamist constituency that is very happy with the antisemitism and wants it back. They are pushing Labour to renew the hostility to Israel that had attracted them to the party.
On this Opposition Day, Starmer was put into a corner by the small Scottish National Party, a hard left antisemitic party. The SNP used this day to put a motion that called for a Gaza ceasefire together with blaming Israel for “collective punishment” of the Gazans. Not a word about the massacre, rape, and kidnapping that Hamas set in motion and which it is committed to doing again, nor of its atrocious policy of hiding among civilians.
This placed Starmer in a pickle. The motion elides over Hamas’s ghastly atrocities executed on a mass scale, and places the blame on Israel for the war crime Hamas committed by using civilians for human shields when Israel responded to the war Hamas began. Starmer made his reputation on being above such hate. But with the angry mobs making their violent mood known and smelling blood with the success of their intimidations so far, the antisemites in Labour were about to join the Scottish party’s motion, and so embarrass Starmer and perhaps bring his leadership to an end.
At this point, the Speaker of the House of Commons, Lindsay Hoyle, suddenly jettisoned decades of precedent and allowed Labour to amend the SNR’s resolution by eliminating the repugnant libeling of Israel’s refusal to grant Hamas victory for the war crime of using civilians as a shield. The governing Conservative Party and the SNP both objected to the unprecedented ruling of the Speaker and walked out, enabling Labour to save face and carry the amended motion, purged of antisemitism, saving Starmer for the moment. (READ MORE: Trump: The New Churchill)
The Speaker, however, was facing censure for his breaking of the established rules of the day. He apologized to the House, while claiming that he did what he did to protect the lives of Members of Parliament which he felt were in immediate danger from the Jew-hating mob.
He wasn’t wrong on that danger. Politico.eu reports a Labour MP commenting on the danger he and his colleagues face:
I’ve a wife and a three-year-old son at home,” said a male Labour MP. “They aren’t elected, and even if they were, why should my home be a target for anyone? In what civilized world should politicians have their homes or their lives targeted?
Correct. In no civilized world. As Victor David Hanson puts it, the fight is between those who hold civilization dear and those who embrace the pre-civilizational. It is a fight against the great bulwarks of civilization, the Jews as representatives of the Biblical tradition, and constitutional government and its rule of law. And as Hanson points out, civilization only survives if it refuses to be confined to the rules that its enemies will never obey, and fight for its life.
What does that take?
A Labour member of Churchill’s wartime coalition, Hugh Dalton, described how in the darkest days just after Dunkirk, with Britain now all alone against the onslaught of organized savagery. Churchill was incandescent in a meeting with his ministers. He told them how he had considered and rejected the idea of entering into negotiations with Hitler. They could only lead into subjection to the savagery by choice. He was sure that all agreed. Dalton quoted Churchill’s finish:
“And I am convinced,” he concluded, “that every man of you would rise up and tear me down from my place if I were for one moment to contemplate parley or surrender. If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.”
Britain, like America and like Israel, is facing the violence-loving heirs of Hitler. To temporize about that is contemptible. As in the face off between Jeremy Corbyn and Boris Johnson in 2019, Britain faces again the choice between the ghost of its pre-constitutional past, when it was the first nation to expel its Jews, and its finest hour when it stood alone and faced down Nazis.
The choice must be made again and again, by Britons and Americans alike. And it must be with a commitment as stark as the terror and hatred we all face. Now, again and again, must be our finest hour.
