The Slow Death of the West

Part of our collective humanity died with the Bibas family

Today Hamas performed another disgusting spectacle of Jew hatred. Four black coffins, two of young children, were paraded in front of a small crowd of Gazans, Hamas fighters, their children, the Red Cross, and the world.

There is so much to unpack in this obscenity. Others have said it better than me, and I will not share the footage so gleefully broadcast by news networks. This is what Hamas want: to incite horror in those who oppose them; and jubilation in their supporters.

The “whatabout” crowd will ask, whatabout the dead children in Gaza? Whatabout the rumours they were killed in an IDF airstrike?

Irrelevant to the conversation and disingenuous.

The simple fact is this: these children and their mother, and fourth hostage, Oded Lifshitz, and tens of thousands of Gazans, would be alive today had Hamas not abducted them as part of their 7th October slaughter, rape and mutilation rampage. End of discussion.

In conjunction with Trump’s ripping apart of Western security this week over Ukraine, the events of the last 16 months in the Israel-Gaza war represent the end of a way of life. Those coffins feel heavily symbolic. The Bibas family died. Truth died. Trust in institutions died. The international order, such as it was, died.

In seeing those small coffins, a part of our souls died.

The subversion of truth and the weaponisation of lies against the Jewish state is not new, but post-7th October, it has taken on a new dimension.

In unfair and shameless attacks on Israel defending itself, and through the media presenting Hamas’s lies without question - the “starvation”, the “war crimes”, the “genocide” - Western media was complicit in the death of the Bibas family and the death of truth itself.

Disinformation campaigns play their role, X being the perfect example. It is a bastion of falsehood. Lies compete with the truth, and because the lie is more powerful, the truth is lost.

And so, after years of wobbling, in this 16-month darkness of falsehood, our ability to trust the media finally dies for good. They have blood on their hands.

Our institutions have been likewise subverted.

International “law” has been weaponised. The West’s enemies have worked out that whilst we try to abide by the rules, they need not. They will face no consequences for abusing it with spurious genocide cases in the International Court of Justice or baseless charges in the International Criminal Court.

And so faith in our institutions dies.

Pro-Gaza Members sit in the House of Commons, elected on an anti-Israel ticket, turning the green benches into a throne of lies. As the President of the USA nakedly breaches the constitution, negotiates with monsters, and parrots Russian disinformation about Ukraine, it is clear that neither our electoral systems nor international systems can be trusted anymore. And so democracy dies.

Those small children’s coffins contain an individual family’s grief. Grief is merely the inverse of life: it is healthy. But it is also immeasurably sad.

As we mourn the Bibas family and Oded Lifshitz, we mourn innocent lives taken by the utmost barbarity. Immeasurably sad.

Almost as sad is what their loss represents: an end to decency, hopes of peace, trust in the media, national democracy and international institutions. Immeasurably sad.

In the 16-month failure to properly hold anyone accountable for the Bibas family’s plight, in allowing malign actors to victim blame them for their own plight, our media and our institutions have failed us. In doing so, this cornerstone of democratic debate, the media, have failed themselves. Immeasurably sad.

Let these small coffins mark the moment the idea of the West, the ideas of justice, and fairness, and truth, died.

But today, we mourn the Bibas family and Oded Lifshitz mos of all. Mourning for our way of life is secondary, and comes later. But dead, it is.

As my friend Zach said to me:

The post-Second World War international order and human rights were built on the backs of dead Jews, whom the world refused to save from being marched into death camps.

It was dealt a fatal blow defending Hamas, the group that just made a celebratory spectacle of returning the bodies of dead Jews.

May the memory of the hostages, all those who died, be a blessing. Right now, the world needs one.