As Israeli diplomats are gunned down in the capital of the United States, Jewish students are barricaded in university buildings, and synagogues face violent threats from mobs emboldened by moral abdication, I’ve found myself asking the question one should never again have to ask: How did we get here?
The answer, like most shameful chapters in civilizational history, lies not in a single act but in the accumulation of tolerated obscenities. It lies in the polite silence of people who should have known better: in the deliberate equivocations of editors, the moral evasions of politicians, and the Faustian bargains struck by those entrusted with the stewardship of public reason.
Since the atrocities of October 7, 2023, the world has witnessed the total inversion of moral gravity. That date – when Hamas, theocratic proxies of Iran, stormed into Israeli towns to rape, burn, mutilate, and abduct civilians – should have marked a universal moment of reckoning.
It should have triggered the full-throated condemnation of any ideology that dreams of Jewish extinction and plots it with millimeter precision. It should have unified the free world in the unambiguous rejection of all who celebrated it.
Instead, within hours, the narrative pivoted.
A failure of response
Where once there should have been clarity, there came a cacophony of conditional condemnations. “Of course, we condemn violence, but…” “We abhor antisemitism, however…” The perpetrators were relativized. The victims were decontextualized. And the world, as it has done too many times before, looked for reasons to excuse the men with the machetes.
What followed was not simply a failure of response. It was a concerted campaign to erase the cause-and-effect chain that began with the mass murder of Jews and continues with the attempt to destroy the only state in the world that guarantees their protection.
The consequences of this refusal to reckon are now in full view. In London, protesters chant for intifada beneath the statue of Churchill. In New York, placards openly lionize the October 7 attackers as “martyrs.” In Brussels, Jewish members of parliament are jeered into silence.
And just this week, in Washington, two Israeli embassy staff – Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgrim – were murdered in a targeted act of terror. The world offered its regrets, of course – brief, formulaic, and airbrushed of outrage.
The cost of cowardice
Such cowardice has a cost. And it is being paid in Jewish blood.
The mainstream media, for its part, has acted less as a truth-teller and more as an accomplice to libel. For almost two years, many of the most prominent outlets have willfully participated in a distortion campaign of historic proportions. When children were kidnapped, they wondered aloud whether the hostages were real. When survivors testified to mass rape, the headlines inserted caveats. When Israeli hospitals were attacked, the victimhood of terrorists was given equal footing.
This is not journalism; it is a laundering of atrocity through the grammar of “balance.” It is the aestheticization of false equivalence.
Worse still has been the performance of the political class. Parliamentarians who could not rouse themselves to speak plainly about Hamas suddenly found the courage to denounce Israeli airstrikes against rocket sites in Rafah. Cabinet ministers who managed to choke back tears over Gaza’s humanitarian plight had nothing – absolutely nothing – to say about the 251 hostages taken into the tunnels of hell.
And what of the public intellectuals? The tenured professors who style themselves as defenders of the oppressed yet fall strangely mute when the oppressed are Jewish? The artists and authors whose solidarity seems to extend everywhere but Sderot, Ashkelon, or Ofakim?
They, too, bear responsibility – not because they pull triggers or wave flags, but because they give cultural permission for those who do.
Let us be absolutely clear: Jews are being killed again. Not because they are occupiers or imperialists or colonizers but because they are Jews. The slogans may have changed, the choreography updated for social media, but the underlying hatred is identical to that which fueled every pogrom, expulsion, and extermination from York to Kishinev to Treblinka.
We are told now that to name this hatred is to “weaponize” antisemitism. I submit that to ignore it – to muffle its recognition in the hope it will not offend – is to invite catastrophe. Silence is not neutrality; it is complicity.
There is a tipping point in every society when the cost of cowardice outweighs the price of truth. We have arrived there now.
The great failing of our time will not be that the mob shouted. It will be that those who knew better whispered – or worse, said nothing at all.
It is not too late to speak, but it soon will be.
The writer is a former vice president of the Royal United Services Institute.