Too many appear to have forgotten the original crime of October 7—the torture, murder, mutilation, beheading, rape, and burning alive of 1,200 innocent Israeli civilians and the kidnapping of 251 more by 5,600 Hamas and Palestinian Jihad terrorists operating alongside Palestinian civilians. In doing so, they have lost both their minds and their humanity.
Mercifully, there are others, including Brendan O’Neill, who still remember and remain rightly outraged by the absolute rupture in civilization represented by the October 7, 2023 massacre. Thankfully, some remain sane and continue to struggle to understand the astonishing ongoing sympathy and support not for the victims, but for the perpetrators of what is, by all accounts, the worst annihilationist pogrom since the Holocaust. This support began on October 8—before the killings had ended and before Israel had even responded. The horror of such an assent to radical evil, when the line separating good from evil has never been clearer, seems unfathomable.
Brendan O’Neill’s brilliant, brutally honest, and morally courageous analysis of October 7 and its aftermath in his book After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilization offers an answer and a way out of the current moral morass in which the West finds itself.
O’Neill, the chief political writer for Spiked—a magazine described as “irreverent where others conform, questioning where others wallow in received wisdom, and radical where others cling to the status quo”—embodies its motto: “Ban nothing, question everything.” In an interview with Batya Ungar-Sargon, American journalist, author, and deputy opinion editor of Newsweek, O’Neill described Spiked as a “humanist magazine about what is good for humankind.” It is a brave and honest publication in a time when dishonesty prevails.
O’Neill has been fearlessly outspoken in his support for Israel since October 7, condemning the prevailing and shocking support for Israel’s enemies and the baffling lack of empathy for the innocent. For his stance, Ungar-Sargon has called him her “hero” and one of the Righteous Among the Nations. She accurately describes his book as “a jeremiad against our worst enemies,” with his extraordinary “moral clarity” illuminating his exceptional writing. His work is remarkable—each elegant and evocative phrase perfectly encapsulates the distressing phenomena he describes, and every claim is meticulously supported with sources in footnotes throughout the eight chapters (with one chapter containing as many as 60 references).
O’Neill identifies and analyzes two pogroms—“two eruptions of barbarism in October 2023.” The first is Hamas’ massacre on October 7, and the second is “the sympathy for the pogrom across much of the Western world,” which includes both “excuse-making for Hamas atrocities” and the “celebration, even, of this army of anti-Semites that had paraglided, barged, and driven into southern Israel to decimate the civilian population there.” As one passage chillingly observes: “The bodies were barely cold, the hostages not yet shackled in Gaza’s dank tunnels, the rape victims still reeling from their defilement, when a cruel, taunting cry came from the West: ‘Well, what did you expect?’”
O’Neill rightly points out that the “orgy of killing” on October 7—the full horror of which is captured in “the sadism of the violence, the glee in it” even more than in “the death toll”—should have woken the world’s conscience. There was no grey area here. As Peter Savodnik put it in an article for The Free Press, we “crossed the Rubicon”: we were faced with a clear choice. “[W]e had to choose sides: you had to be with the people who oppose the murder of innocents. Or not.”
Yet, as O’Neill shows his readers, “that shining moral clarity never came.” The obvious and only choice was rejected by the hordes of pro-Hamas protesters who clamored to announce their allegiance with the “murderers of innocents,” ignoring or even denying the horrific atrocities—whether out of ignorance, indifference, or malevolence.
As O’Neill puts it, “Hamas had not only tested Israel’s territorial integrity, but also mankind’s moral conscience. It laid down a gauntlet with its grenades. It dared us to pit our civilization against barbarism. It dared us to be decisive. And we failed.”
O’Neill then explores why we failed this moral test and what we might do to ensure we never fail again. He reminds us of the full horror of both pogroms: the “apocalyptic assault” of the October 7 massacre and the “pogrom apologism”—the moral assault of pity for the pogromists—that began on October 8. He identifies the source of the massacre in the frenzied, psychotic Jew-hatred that propelled the perpetrators, and the source of the apologism in “the moral disarray of a Western world that has turned its back on the principles of the Enlightenment and the virtues of civilization.” This disarray has led to the embrace of the false and destructive myth of Israeli oppression and Palestinian victimhood.
In making his case, O’Neill examines “the lure of barbarism” that has attracted leftists, academics, influencers, and youth who have adopted the anti-West, anti-Israel ideology of Wokism; the “cult of the keffiyeh,” the “keffiyeh chic,” that have become acceptable symbols of vicarious victimhood; and even “Holocaust envy,” which would rob Jews of their unique, tragic historical suffering—and much more.
By warning his readers of the high stakes of this moral crisis, O’Neill performs a courageous and crucial service on behalf of civilization. Even now, barbarism continues. We have witnessed the sadistic and grotesque spectacle of Hamas’ staged hostage releases, featuring jeering crowds of Palestinian men and women—some carrying babies in their arms—and even children, all in a calculated attempt to terrorize the hostages and maximize their humiliation.
This recent abomination makes it crystal clear which side we must choose. Brendan O’Neill’s brave and honest book can help light the way for us.