My Lords, the 7 October Hamas attack on Israel was more than a war crime. This anti-Jewish pogrom was dripping with sadism.
Do noble Lords remember the horror when we saw film some years ago of so-called Jihadi John and the ISIS Beatles using swords to behead hostages such as David Haines and James Foley—the cruelty of it? We knew then that this was not about the number of hostages killed—a handful that we know of in that instance—but we viscerally understood that this was an off-the-scale incident in terms of depravity. Those sickening shockwaves are felt a thousand times over in response to the 7 October killing spree, in which Hamas butchers recorded themselves boasting of their torture and violence and gloating over the desecration of naked dead bodies.
Yet, ever since then, self-styled progressives in the UK, Europe and the US have insisted that the evil of the atrocity emanates from Israel, presenting the real victims as civilians in Gaza. In a grotesque distortion of political categories, events on 7 October are being portrayed as some sort of justifiable resistance to oppression. Too many—especially, shamefully on the left—seem to be stuck in the past, imagining that today’s Palestinian armed resistance is the same as earlier national liberation movements fighting against colonialism. Indeed, Green Party MSP Maggie Chapman responded to the Hamas attack by posting:
“The OPPRESSED are fighting back … Don’t let the Western media fool you into thinking it’s terrorism, this is decolonization”.
Let me be clear: no, it is not.
As someone who has supported Palestinian rights for decades, I find disgusting the suggestion that Hamas is any kind of a national liberation movement trying to free Palestine. In reality, it is an anti-Semitic death cult hell-bent on establishing a global Islamic caliphate. How do I know that? Anyone who reads the Hamas constitution and watches its propaganda will see that there is not an iota of aspiration to democratic freedoms for the Palestinians or for anyone else in its tracts. Yet, still, in the media, in mass demonstrations and on all online platforms, swathes of right-minded people are queuing up to point the finger at Israel for bringing the massacre on itself, amid an embarrassed silence about Hamas’s crimes.
It is hard to explain such moral disorientation. As one commentator noted, those who collaborated with the Nazis often claimed they did not know that Hitler’s henchmen were planning to exterminate the Jewish people. Today’s progressive apologists in the West have no such excuse, as Islamists flaunt their desire to eliminate the Jews, and yet, still, too many look away, ignoring these inconvenient truths.
Such attitudes present our society with a problem. Beyond the military battles in the Middle East, we have a domestic battle of ideas to fight and some difficult questions to answer. Thousands of British and European artists issued an open letter accusing Israel—Israel, no less—of “unprecedented cruelty” in its dealings with Gaza. Let us ask them why they did not write a similar open letter on the unprecedented cruelty of the Hamas pogrom—although, sadly, it was not unprecedented for the Jews.
We have to question those who angrily demonstrated against the accused Israeli perpetrator of the horrific bombing of the hospital in Gaza: now that all the evidence suggests that it was a misfired Islamic Jihad missile, why are those “progressive humanitarians” not out on the streets as we speak, expressing righteous fury against these Palestinian civilian killers?
We also have to ask how we explain that we now have open support for radical Islam on UK city streets? Why have we allowed it to grow unchecked for years, with concerns quashed as Islamophobia? We also have to ask why so many students and young people see all Jews as part of a privileged oppressor class and why we have allowed the toxic influence of identity politics and its discourse of white privilege, of which Jews are collectively seen as the epitome, to grow unchallenged. Why have so many institutions, such as universities, buckled in the face of this identitarian ideology of competitive victimhood, which gives anyone claiming the label of oppressed victimhood a collective pass? We have to ask why diversity advocates, who are usually hypersensitive to alleged racist microaggressions, such as using phrases like “blacklisting”, suddenly become deaf and dumb while marching alongside groups of radicalised youth shouting, “Allahu akbar” and anti-Semitic dog whistles.
Finally, we as legislators have to ask how we should respond at this pivotal moment, now that the curtain has been pulled back on this new anti-Semitism. One plea I will make to us all is that we should resist the siren calls for more hate speech laws, for people to be sacked for wrongthink and for arrests to be made of those using “offensive” and “dangerous” slogans, however repugnant or hateful. Unlike the noble Lord, Lord Stevens of Birmingham, whose excellent speech I agreed with—apart from on this question—I do not think we need more laws to solve these problems. Even in the few years that I have been in this place, we have passed a plethora of draconian public order and speech-restricting laws.
But I fear that a public clamour for more restrictions is likely in response to what could be described as, at best, “eccentric” policing priorities, so well described by the noble Baroness, Lady Eaton. The police can turn up at your door if you misgender someone, they can arrest you for praying silently in the wrong place and they can treat a terrified autistic pupil as a criminal for accidentally kicking a Koran, yet they passively
stand by as pro-Gaza protesters deface public monuments, scale scaffolding on government buildings and allow people to run riot on the streets.
But, despite such institutional torpor, eroding free speech is never the answer. We need to face the pernicious cultural problems I have discussed face-on. If we are to take the call of the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, for more and better education seriously—and if we are to win young hearts and minds away from the new identitarian anti-Semitism, and to offer the young some moral clarity—we need more, not fewer, difficult arguments in the public sphere.
We have illustrated the importance of such public debate today, and it is a credit to the noble Lords who have spoken that that has happened. I hope that we can move forward without compromising our commitment to freedom.
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