MY previous article for TCW was on the conflict in Israel between liberal secularists and religious conservatives.
Israel’s troubles are inevitable as the West becomes increasingly secular. Religiously observant Jews of Israel are duty-bound to resist secularism, if nothing else to ‘keep the Sabbath holy’. Israel’s conflict is a microcosm of a wider conflict encompassing the world’s hundred-plus Christian nations whose tradition, morality and law are based on Biblical teaching, not least the Ten Commandments of God of Israel.
Today’s mainstream media – for which nothing is holy – typically describe Israel’s religious conservatives as ‘extreme right-wing’. Pride, transgender and other woke ideologies such as ‘critical race theory’ hold the centre ground. (See the recent TCW article by Peter Simpson, ‘Woke bankers are the 21st century Pharisees’.)
The liberalist protest movement in Israel is set against the coalition government that seeksreform of the Israeli judiciary. At present, the unelected Supreme Court – whose judges are on balance secular, liberal and internationalist – has the power to override laws made by the elected government of the Knesset. In Israel, you see, the people unexpectedly voted for religious conservatism, just as a few years ago in the UK, the people unexpectedly voted for Brexit. The liberal elite don’t like it.
One cannot overstate the influence of the Pride movement in Israel’s conflict. As the leftist/liberalist Israeli newspaper Haaretz proudly reports, ‘Queer’ is ‘the driving force behind the protests’, and the ‘LGBTQ community has become a key pillar of the protest movement’.
As we have seen in the UK and the US, Pride is aggressive and influential. Its concern is no longer equal rights for people in same-sex relationships (which we have in the UK). Rather, Pride has become a political movement that seeks to transform – particularly through transgender ideology – the morality, concepts and assumptions on which Judeo-Christian civilisation is built, including sexual restraint and family values.
Nowhere is the Pride movement stronger than in Tel Aviv. The civic authorities promote their annual Pride event as ‘transforming the entire city of Tel Aviv’ into the largest Pride event ‘in the Middle East and Asia’, and a ‘Gay Paradise’. This is of course to mock the true Paradise, just as the notorious Telavivian gay Yuval Noah Harari (mentioned in my previous article) mocks Judaism, Christianity and all religion.
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The Pride movement has become all-pervasive. It runs through the powerful corporations of California’s Silicon Valley as it does through Israel’s ‘Silicon Wadi’. Its most powerful and influential body here in the UK is the ‘charity’ Stonewall.
Stonewall/Pride, we have seen in recent times, is aggressive against those of us it claims have ‘minority viewpoints’. It has the lobbying power to ‘cancel’ and destroy careers, and to persuade banks to close personal accounts. Coutts Bank’s exclusivist action against Nigel Farage is but one recent episode of the corporate world’s tyranny against those who openly challenge the Pride political ideology. And remember PayPal’s closing of Toby Young’s accounts of due to his outspoken criticism of ‘gender-critical’ theory. (PayPal backed down.) https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11256777/PayPal-lifts-ban-free-speech-chief-Toby-Youngs-accounts-outcry-MPs.html
Paradoxically, despite Telavivian Pride, the global Pride movement is generally anti-Israel. Telavivian liberals are playing with fire. Pride demonstrations outside Israel are often anti-Israelist and pro-Palestinian – oblivious to Gaza’s persecution of homosexuals. A few weeks ago, in Berlin (the anti-Semitic capital of Europe), Pride crowds were waving Palestine flags and chanting jihadist propaganda.
Why this double-think in Berlin and elsewhere? The disturbing precedent is the‘cabaret’ scene of inter-war Berlin (1919-1933), which was notorious for its sexual decadence, sexual experimentation, under-age prostitution (female and male) and organised crime, all fuelled by hard drugs. In the late 20s sex tourists and partygoers from around the world flocked to ‘progressive’ Berlin.
The movement, and the hard drugs, carried over into the Nazi military. The drug methamphetamine (crystal meth) was distributed to soldiers to make them more alert, fierce, fearless, and sadistic.
In 2019, I was invited to an academic conference (ISGAP) on anti-Semitism at Oxford University. I met some of the world’s leading academics on the subject, including political scientist Professor Amy Elman, who gave this talk: ‘Fatal Attraction – the Sadism of Antisemitism’, in which she explains how the sadism in Berlin’s sexual decadence was carried over into Nazism. She warns that sadism – getting sexual kicks from torture – invariably results in collective sadism against Jews. She points out that, since the 1960s, ‘Queer’ politics, theory and culture has associated itself with a ‘fascist aesthetic’. Leather, chains, black SS caps, commandants’ uniforms, Nazi tattoos are BDSM signals of erotica.
Amy’s talk in 2019 was just two months after Tel Aviv had hosted the Eurovision Song Contest, accepting into Israel Iceland’s band ‘Hatari’ (which translates as ‘hater’), despite knowing that the band is actively anti-Israelist. Apart from sadomasochism, the band members’ other declared interests include a complete ripping-up of Western culture.
BDSM has entered mainstream European culture, and is even deemed acceptable for children, as the BBC happily reports here, on the popularity of Hatari and BDSM fashion accessories amongst Icelandic children.
How can it be that Hatari is considered ‘mainstream’ and religious conservatism is ‘extreme’? And why are Hatari and other Queer organisations attracted to Palestinianism (described here by British-Israeli journalist Melanie Phillips as ‘The posthumous Nazi front against the Jews’)?
Iceland decided to go to Eurovision with the lyrics, ‘Hate will prevail’, ‘every joy derail’, ‘Europe’s heart impale’. The song did remarkably well, coming tenth in the contest. What better example is there of contemporary Europe’s self-hatred and self-destructive or masochistic decadence?
This is why I support my conservative friends in Israel. I want Israel to aim to be as God of Israel calls Israel to be, not as contemporary Europe, but as the light unto the nations.
