No, they don’t want Hamas to win

Commenting on Labour’s decision to cut arms sales to Israel, Boris Johnson asked: “Do they want Hamas to win?”

No, they don’t, is the answer to that one. They don’t want Hamas to win. They just want Israel to lose, and they don’t really care to whom.

It could be Hamas, but it doesn’t have to be. Hezbollah will do just as well. Or Iran. Or Syria. Or Egypt. Or Burkina Faso, if she felt like taking Israel on.

It’s useless pointing out to the likes of Prime Minister Starmer or Foreign Secretary Lammy that Israel is an oasis of Western civility in a desert of barbarism. They know this. And they want Israel to lose not in spite of it but because of it.

Lammy can talk all he wants about “international humanitarian law” that supposedly demands that Israel be disarmed, or as near as damn. Engaging him on this battleground is like trying to explain to Fido that chasing cats around the block isn’t a good idea.

Fido doesn’t do so because he thinks it’s a good idea, but because hostility to cats is wired into his DNA. If the dog could talk, he’d doubtless come up with a seemingly valid explanation, possibly one based on the urgent need to protect the rights of mice and rats. But any sensible person would know the real reason.

Modernity was ushered onto the historical stage by a collectively felt urge to repudiate Christendom, as the West was then called. That was the foundation of the modernity edifice, with everything else, such as the talk of liberty and equality, merely window dressing.

Then, whole classes deemed incurably infected with the emanations of Christendom had to be exterminated en masse. That massacre was portrayed as an unfortunate necessity, a means to glorious ends. But it wasn’t. The only reason for mass murder is always the urge to murder masses. The destruction of Western heritage, be that people or physical plant, wasn’t the means. It was the desired end.

The animating impetus of modernity was negative – it was hate, not love. But in due course modernity bifurcated into philistine and nihilist strains.

The desire to expurgate every vestige of Christendom remained strong in both, as was the craving for physical comfort. The difference was – as it so often is – in the relative emphasis placed on these desiderata.

If the philistine put comfort first and revenge second, the nihilist reversed that order. Push come to shove, the philistine could even forgo revenge if it began to threaten his comfort. Similarly, the nihilist was more prepared to sacrifice his comfort if it got in the way of hatred.

Today’s Left live off that nihilist legacy, which has been lovingly passed on from one generation to the next. They too loathe the West, even though it can no longer be legitimately described as Christendom. Never mind: some earthly fragments of the old order are still extant, and there’s no shortage of secondary targets to aim at.

It’s vital to keep in mind – and I don’t mind repeating myself – that the animus of this lot remains negative. In this case, they don’t love Hamas because it’s a terrorist organisation. In fact, they may not love it at all. They support it because of the shared hostility to the West, personified in that region by Israel.

That’s one problem with Israel the Left identify either viscerally or consciously, doesn’t really matter which. The other is her being Jewish.

The Jew is a traditional bogeyman of the Left, ever since Marx erased the distinction between Jew and capitalist. That gave his followers a semblance of a philosophical justification for anti-Semitism, which was so much more attractive than simple zoological hatred – or rather could be sold to the outside world as being more attractive.

Some Lefties, such as Jeremy Corbyn, use Marxist dogma as camouflage for their primordial anti-Semitism, others may not be intuitive anti-Semites at all. They just feel duty-bound to hate Israel because such is the cost of admission to their ideological club. However, if they happen to be politicians, they have a full set of shibboleths at their fingertips to explain why they regretfully have to do all they can to make sure Israel will lose.

They aren’t going to divulge the real reasons, such as hatred of the West in general and Israel in particular. Professing affection for “international humanitarian law” plays so much better on Evening News. This stands to reason, and they can’t be faulted for it – a professional politician isn’t going to commit professional political suicide.

But it’s not only football but also politics that’s a game of two halves. One half is nonentities like Starmer and Lammy coming up with manifestly false explanations designed to conceal their real feelings. The other half is their opponents’ inability, possibly reluctance, to bring Leftie dissemblers to account.

This too reflects subterranean tectonic shifts of long standing. Just as the Duke of Orléans had to become Philippe Égalité to earn the right to speak (though, as it turned out, not to keep his head when all about him were losing theirs), so do today’s ‘conservatives’ have to play the game by the rules drawn by the dominant Left.

It’s not only the Creation that the Word was in the beginning of. Political power also starts with the Word, the ability to dominate and impose the language of public discourse. I refer to this tendency as ‘glossocracy’, the government of the word, by the word and for the word.

Glossocracy is a rigged game, in that it’s both played and refereed by the same people. The other side is allowed to play the game but, because the glossocrats lay down the rules, there’s never any victory in sight.

In this instance, someone like Boris Johnson may have a go at Lammy, but only on the latter’s terms. Even someone considerably more principled than Johnson (which doesn’t narrow the field down too much) would impose self-censorship on any desire to take the Left to task at a fundamental level.

Any politician or, for that matter, establishment pundit daring even to hint at the ideas I’ve touched upon would be instantly drummed out of the guild for violating its ironclad charter. For example, no one could get away with saying to Messrs Starmer and Lammy that, after Maidanek and Magadan or, come to that, Bucha and Mariupol, any talk of “international humanitarian law” is disingenuous prattle.

The most one would be allowed to argue is that Israel hasn’t really broken that sacred covenant, at least not as badly as her opponents did. Specious arguments one way or the other would then fill the air with their miasma, only then to disappear in a puff of smoke – including the kind coming out of the guns fired by Hamas murderers into the heads of Israeli hostages.

It’s impossible to argue the case at the deeper level, that of our retreating civilisation engaged in a desperate rearguard fight, with Israel and the Ukraine doing the fighting. Dig as deep as that, and the whole existential edifice of modernity will begin to totter. Can’t have that, can we now?

Glossocracy is tyranny imposed by language, and it can only be resisted by fighting for every word, the way Israelis and Ukrainians are fighting for every patch of their land. Whenever someone talks about Israeli ‘occupiers’ and their mistreatment of ‘Palestinians’, or about the Ukraine exclusively populated and run by corrupt Nazis, he mustn’t be allowed to get away with it.

His true motives must come into focus, for all to see what they really are. These people don’t support evil because they can’t recognise it. They support it because they approve of it, and will continue to do so for as long as it coincides with their own cravings.

And people who approve of evil are evil themselves. Even if they are democratically elected to run a great country, or employed to write columns for a great paper.