Ezra Levant and Brendan O’Neill expose the "Islamo-left"—a radical alliance where Western progressives, like Jeremy Corbyn’s "friends" in Hamas or chants of "We are all Hezbollah," embrace anti-civilizational hostility, scapegoating Israel for colonialism despite its non-white identity. O’Neill’s After the Pogrom highlights October 7, 2023, protests in London, Sydney, and Berlin as pogrom celebrations, featuring swastika-Star of David symbols and "fuck the Jews" chants. The duo links this to UK grooming gangs—1,400+ cases in Rotherham alone—where authorities suppressed evidence for years, enabling crimes while criminalizing dissenters like Tommy Robinson. Levant and O’Neill argue that elite-driven mass migration, like Ireland’s 20% foreign-born population or Dundrum’s 280 military-age men without public debate, fuels resentment by ignoring democratic consultation, proving Western civilization’s crisis isn’t just military but ideological. [Automatically generated summary]
You know, I've been following Brendan O'Neill for years.
He's the senior writer at Spiked Online.
I love the guy, but I've never really been able to interact with him.
He's not on Twitter, which is my favorite social media.
Well, we managed to rope him into an interview for the show today.
He was generous enough to give us a full hour.
We talked about everything in the UK and Ireland and immigration and Brexit and Nigel Farage, and mainly about his new book, After the Pogrom.
It's a conversation I've been looking forward to for a year, and I hope you enjoy it.
But first, let me invite you to become a subscriber to Rebel News Plus.
That's the video version of this podcast.
Just go to rebelnewsplus.com, click subscribe.
It's eight bucks a month.
I know that's not a lot of money to you, but boy, it adds up for us.
We need it because we don't get any ads through YouTube.
We were demonetized, and of course, we don't take any government money from Trudeau, one of the few media in Canada that don't.
So that's RebelNewsPlus.com.
All right, here's today's podcast.
Tonight, a fascinating conversation with Brendan O'Neill and his new book, After the Pogrom.
It's October 15th, and this is the Ezra Levant show.
Shame on you, you censorious bug.
Well, there's something I admire about the United Kingdom that I don't think we have in the New World, and that is the kind of well-read, prolific, intellectual, public intellectual person.
I think of Douglas Murray when I think of that, someone who, I don't know where he gets the time to have so many deep thoughts, and I say that unironically.
And someone I put in that category is someone I've never interviewed on the show, but I've been a fan of for years.
He's the chief political writer for Spiked Online, and his name is Brendan O'Neill.
I have found the opportunity to interview him because he has a new book out called After the Pogrom, 7th of October Israel and the Crisis of Civilization.
And it truly is an honor to have him join us today from London for a conversation.
Brendan, what a pleasure to have you on the show.
Hi, Ezra.
Thank you very much.
Pleasure to be here.
Well, thank you.
I'm, I guess, being a little bit effusive because I'm a fan.
I'm struck by how prolific you are.
Before we get into it, tell us a little bit about Spiked Online because that's how I found you.
But you write in many other newspapers.
Give us a bit of a background of Spiked Online and your own journalism.
Yeah, so Spiked Online has been going for almost 25 years, so a long time.
I was there from the very start, and I was editor for 15 years.
I'm now chief political writer.
And people are often surprised to learn that Spiked was born out of a magazine called Living Marxism.
So we come from a left-wing background, but it was a very kind of contrarian left-wing background, one that was anti-state, pro-freedom, pro-enlightenment.
So not the kind of left people would think of these days, which are the opposite of all of those things.
The left now is rapidly crazy and insane and anti-enlightenment, illiberal, and so on.
So we come from that kind of tradition.
But I guess these days we would call ourselves a humanist magazine or, I don't know, a democratic magazine.
We see ourselves as the magazine that really makes the case for enlightened thinking, a defense of reason, a defense of ordinary people against the slings and arrows of a state that doesn't trust them anymore.
That's really how we would position ourselves on the political spectrum.
And in my view, Spike is hands down the best magazine on the internet.
Every day we publish brilliant, exciting stuff.
So I would encourage your listeners, if they haven't already read it, to make sure that they do.
Well, and I'm happy to have you make that plug because it's very true.
I think because the magazine emanates from the left, your criticisms of the left are more effective because you understand the thinking of the left.
And the left in recent years, especially the last 12 months, has really been a hothouse, an incubator of shocking anti-Semitism.
I put the lion's share of it in Canada, and I think it's fair to say in the UK, at the feet of new immigrants who come from countries that are endemically anti-Semitic and have brought that with them.
But there's no denying that their allies, their Sherpas in the new world, are woke leftists.
I've attended several of the huge Islamist rallies in London, and I see these old socialist workers' party types who have basically said, ah, this is where the energy is.
This is the fountain of anti-Western thought.
I'm going to team up with them.
There's a real Marxist-Islamist alliance, isn't there?
Yes, absolutely.
And in fact, one of the chapters in my book is called The Unholiest Alliance, and it's about the Islamo left, which is a phrase that was born in France, but it's now used quite widely across Europe.
And it really describes a left that has got into bed with radical Islam.
And you can trace the history of it.
I give a potted history in my book of how this phenomenon occurred.
It really goes back to the mid-1990s.
There was a pamphlet published in Britain called The Prophet and the Proletariat.
And the title gives you a sense of what the pamphlet was about.
It was actually published by people around the Socialist Workers' Party.
And it was the argument that there might be times when the left could align with radical Islamists in the fight against imperialism, in the fight against Israel, etc., etc.
And what's happened since then, that was 1994, since then, what started off as a cautious alliance between the left and radical Islamists has become all-out bedhopping.
You know, these two movements are in cahoots, very, very closely connected.
Jeremy Corbyn, the former leader of the Labour Party, infamously referred to Hamas as his friends.
We've seen people on the streets of Europe, leftists on the streets of Europe, chanting, we are all Hezbollah.
And we know that the left is very hostile to any criticism of radical Islam or even to any criticism of Islam itself, which the left is very fast to denounce as Islamophobia.
So the left has just got into bed with radical Islamists.
And I think what they share in common is this burning hostility towards modern society, towards enlightened society, and to the West more broadly.
They have this loathing for Western society and Western civilization and Western values.
And that's really what binds these two strange groups together.
You end up with an organization like Queers for Palestine, witlessly unaware that if they were ever to set foot in Palestine, they would be thrown off the top of a building faster than they could say free Palestine.
You know, it's real kind of suicidal idiocy that we are seeing in this left that is really getting into bed with Islam.
My next question was going to be about Queers for Palestine.
I see them on the streets in Canada.
I've seen them in the UK.
And I don't think they have thought through what it would be like to be queer in Palestine.
But I don't think that's, I don't think they would care because just they are just looking for the strong horse to take down the West.
before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the greatest challenge to the West was the Soviet Union.
And so that was their ally.
That has faded largely.
And so Islam is it, I think the word queer gives it away.
And I don't think they mean it sexually.
I think they mean contradict the norms, attack the establishment.
Who will help me detonate the state as it is?
Once that's done, we can quarrel about what the new utopia will be.
But right now, we've got to get rid of these capitalists and these damn Jews.
I don't think there's any contradiction when you understand that queer doesn't necessarily refer to their sexuality.
It means to be contrary to the status quo.
Am I wrong on that?
No, I don't think you are.
And it's definitely not a gay rights campaign in the way we might have understood it 40 or 50 years ago, you know, when there were gay liberation movements that were just focused on, you know, basically telling the state to back off, you know, go away, leave us alone, let us live our lives.
This is definitely something different.
This is a movement, and I don't just mean queers for Palestine, but the broader pro-Palestine movement, which I saw someone with a placard the other day saying whores for Palestine, you know, so you now are prostitutes for Palestine.
And there are, there's Fatis for Palestine, which is morbidly obese people who support Palestine.
There's queers for Palestine.
I mean, everyone.
Greta Thunberg and those climate change alarmists have thrown their weight behind the Palestine issue.
It really has become the omni-cause for all these lost leftists and bereft liberals who don't know what to do with themselves in a kind of post-class, post-Soviet society.
You know, they feel very bereft.
They feel very unanchored.
And so they're looking for a cause through which they might define themselves and through which they might continue to take pot shots at the West, which is what they hate above all.
And the issue they choose to do that through is their unhinged hatred for the world's only Jewish nation and their ridiculous support for the armies of anti-Semites that threaten that nation, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Islamic Republic of Iran.
So, yeah, I agree.
It's not really queers for Palestine is not anything to do with sexual freedom or anything that we might have talked about a few decades ago.
It is another way in which young people who have been educated, in fact, to be wary of the West, to be suspicious of Western civilization, to hate the gains of Western society.
They've been told this for a very long time.
And it's not surprising to me, I make this point in my book, it's not surprising that if we educate a whole new generation to be fearful of civilization, we are going to drive them into the arms of its opposite, which is barbarism.
In this case, the barbarism of Hamas, the barbarism of 7th of October.
So I think what attracts groups like Queers for Palestine to this issue is that they like the frisson of this barbarism.
They appreciate what it does.
And what it does is not only threaten the existence of Israel, but it also calls into question the moral authority of the West.
And that's really what draws them to it.
We're talking with Brendan O'Neill, the author of a new book called After the Pogrom.
You've just been talking about Western, as in people born in the UK, sometimes called old stock Brits.
That's the phrase we use in Canada, old stock Canadians.
And there's a lot of psychological things happening there.
A lot of it is getting back at dad, I think.
But my observation from the big hate marches I've attended in London and what I see in my own country is that 85, 90% of the people are not those socialist workers' party whites.
They're not the Jeremy Corbyns.
Culture of Amnesia00:03:57
They are, not to put too fine a point on him, Muslim immigrants who have perhaps become even more radicalized in the UK and Canada than they were at home.
Maybe they're being organized by Iran.
I mean, in Canada, we had a report there are 700 Iranian agents operating in the country, whipping up a lot of these protests we have.
I mean, sure, I think that they would happen organically, but they've been financed and promoted and organized and programmed by an active foreign element.
And I think that there, I think there's really two debates.
How do you handle Westerners who have turned against their own selves, so suicidal Westerners?
But there's also people who come here from in mass numbers, from Pakistan, from Gaza now coming to Canada.
I don't think that they are as susceptible to course correction.
I don't think, you know, studying the Western classics, having Holocaust Awareness Week, that's not going to deprogram millions of people who come to the West from endemically anti-Semitic regimes.
I think you've got two problems.
They're problems together, but the solution for mass anti-Semitic immigration is a very different one for woke millennials who are looking for meaning.
What do you think?
Yeah, we have a very serious problem in Europe with radical Islam.
You know, it's reached catastrophic levels, and hundreds and hundreds of people have been killed in Europe over the past 20 years by radical Islamists.
Around 100 have been killed in Britain since 2005 and many, many more in France, but also in Spain, in Belgium, even in Finland.
People have died at the hands of radical Islamists.
So we have a very serious problem and people don't want to talk about it.
And in fact, when you do talk about it, you're accused of Islamophobia.
You're accused of stirring up hatred.
You know, I'll never forget that after the Manchester Arena bombing in 2017, when 22 young people were killed by a suicide bomber, they were at an Ariana Grande concert.
The song we were all encouraged to sing was the Oasis song, Don't Look Back in Anger.
You know, there were vigils around the country where people were singing Don't Look Back in Anger.
And that's the whole vibe after a terrorist attack in Europe.
Your only responsibility as a citizen is to lay a flower, say something mournful on social media, and then get on with your life.
You know, don't ask any questions, don't get angry, don't raise any prickly issues that society might want to address.
So there is this culture of amnesia around terrorist attacks.
We are encouraged to forget them.
And also there's a culture of censorship around the issue of radical Islam, but it's a real problem.
You know, the way I see it, I think the way in which Europe has handled the immigration question over the past seven or eight years has been really, really bad.
And the migrant crisis of a few years ago has unquestionably contributed to serious problems in some European societies, including Sweden, including Germany, various parts of Europe that brought in large numbers of largely Muslim migrants.
They have got lots of social problems as a consequence of that.
And it's not racist to talk about that.
It's not racist to raise questions about that.
But I think it's a two-fold situation.
So it's the worst of both worlds.
For on the one hand, we're bringing in unprecedented numbers of migrants.
On the other hand, these are societies that have absolutely lost faith in themselves and in what they stand for and what they represent.
There is a culture of self-loathing across European society.
Two Tier Justice00:05:40
So we're inviting migrants to come into our countries, but we are very stubbornly refusing to encourage them to integrate.
And we have become anti-integration, because why would you want someone to integrate into societies that are institutionally racist or institutionally Islamophobic, which is what we are told all the time.
So I think it's that toxic mix of uncontrolled migration as a way of the elites signaling their virtue by saying we're going to welcome in as many people as possible, plus the failure of societies to pursue any form of integration at all or even to attempt integration because they don't think our societies are worth integrating into.
And I think that really creates a tinderbox environment in some of our European societies.
Well, I watched very closely a couple of months ago when there were riots.
I think it's fair to call them race riots in the UK, sparked by a few particular incidents.
There was a gypsy child who was being picked up by child welfare services, a mass protest by the community.
He was released because basically the community threatened to riot.
These were Romani gypsies, not UK travelers, I think.
There was a stabbing of children in Southgate, and there were some questions about who the knife man was before it happened.
There was an attack by Muslim-identified people in the Manchester airport, huge coverage, no arrests made.
I think all of these things happening made people realize that there were kid gloves with minorities, with new immigrants.
And there were riots, violent riots.
There was arson.
But the response to it was just as shocking.
It was shocking to see race riots.
But it was even more shocking to see the establishment, the thrill of prosecuting people who had tweeted things.
Or like the police were boasting on Twitter.
This man was convicted of gesticulating at police.
This man was convicted of shouting at a police dog.
You know, these people were getting jail terms of two years plus.
These were the white indigenous working class Brits who were being given astounding sentences for basically thought crimes, not for rioting.
I'm for arresting rioters.
And I saw the difference between the police and the legal and the prosecutorial response to white working class Brits fed up with this violence from immigrant communities versus those immigrant communities who were doing actually violent things.
And I think that in the UK, it's becoming harder and harder to talk about these things.
Even Nigel Farage is being extremely careful.
He's ruled out mass deportations.
I think he's worried that he'll be branded far right otherwise.
What do you make of what's happened in the last couple of months in the UK?
Well, I think there is, you know, there is a two-tier justice system, it seems, to many people, and there is a two-tier policing system.
I think, you know, if you look at the riots that we had around the Southport stabbing, so this is the stabbing in Southport in the north of England near Liverpool, where three young girls were killed by a man with a knife.
That is what triggered the riots across the country in various different working class communities, or I guess you might call them even lower class communities.
There was a real seething sense of anger.
I agree with you.
People who get involved in rioting deserve to be arrested.
You know, you cannot destroy your own community.
You cannot set fire to things or attack police officers or smash up cars without paying a price.
You know, we want to live in civilized societies.
It seems to me unarguable that communities are treated differently depending on how the police view them and depending on how the political class more broadly views them.
And there is a culture of cowardice in sections of the establishment when it comes to talking about significant problems of crime or antisocial behavior that exist in certain parts of Britain.
You know, for me, the best example of two-tier justice was in January this year.
A man with a knife went into a kosher store in Golders Green in London.
Golders Green is a community with a large Jewish population.
He went into a kosher store and he pointed the knife at the people in the store and said, tell me your views on Israel in Gaza right now.
That man did not spend one minute in jail.
He was given a suspended sentence for threatening people with a knife, threatening Jews with a knife.
You fast forward to the aftermath of the Southport riots, and a woman, a 53-year-old woman, was given a 15-month jail sentence for writing something on Facebook.
Now, what she wrote on Facebook, in my view, was grotesque.
She said, let's burn down the mosques.
I don't think people should say that.
That's incitement.
That's a bad thing to say.
But she wrote it on Facebook.
She regretted it very quickly and she deleted it.
She was given 15 months in jail.
And as she was sent away, this woman who had never troubled the law before and who is the sole carer for her husband, as she was being led away, she said, Thank you, Your Honor.
And to me, that was a very clear illustration of the fact that we have a two-tier system.
We have a political class and a police force, police forces, who don't treat communities equally.
And if we don't have equality before the law, then I think we're in big trouble.
Grooming Gangs Crisis00:12:05
You know, you mentioned earlier a statistic of how many Brits have died at the hands of terrorists.
And the number, I think you said, was around 100.
And that is a large number.
And we know about the subway bombings and the Manchester Ariana Grande concert bombing, etc.
The Westminster Bridge, you know, SUV plowing through people.
Those are the spectacular headline-grabbing crimes that cannot be swept under the carpet.
But there are other matters afoot, and I'm vaguely familiar with them.
And I'm talking about rape gangs.
They're called grooming gangs in the UK, where girls as young as nine are targeted by primarily Pakistani Muslim men.
And it's difficult to even say that without being called racist.
So here's Majid Nawaz on LBC Radio saying it for me because he is a Pakistani Muslim man, Pakistani British Muslim man.
Here he is talking a little bit about this rape culture, which is not like a smash and grab, pull someone into the alley and rape them.
It's to trick them and trap them and exploit them and get them hooked on alcohol and blackmail them and then have them have sex with the rape gangs every night.
And these are children as young as nine.
Let me just throw the clip of Majid Nawaz saying that so you understand the truth of it.
Here it is.
For too long in this country, we, media, the establishment, society, the chattering classes, the liberal elite, whatever term you want to use, have ignored the issue of grooming gangs of young, vulnerable teenage girls who have been victimized, drugged and raped and abused.
Whether it's the Rotherham case or all the other cases that were replicated across the country, it is both the conclusion of the prosecutor in the Rotherham case, British Pakistani Muslim Nazir Afzal, or indeed the official inquiry into why it took so long for these young, vulnerable, underage girls to get justice.
Both of those concluded that fears of racism prevented us from coming to the defense of vulnerable underage girls.
Fears of racism meaning that the state was scared that it would be accused of being racist if it rightly arrested and prosecuted British Pakistani, largely British Pakistani Muslim men in their abuse of underage white teenage girls.
And so from fear of appearing racist, there was a silence across the country as multiple cases of grooming gangs emerged up and down the country as evidenced now due to multiple prosecutions, successful prosecutions, but sadly and unfortunately too late.
If we hadn't all been silent, if we had all addressed this issue head on when it needed to be addressed, when it was time to address it, then the void would not have emerged for the populist agitators to fill that gap and become popular, actually, as a result of addressing what is a legitimate issue.
They ended up hijacking what should have been the concern of every right-minded citizen in this country.
And unfortunately, it takes a bit of courage to address something that people will hurl abuse at you for talking about.
I know on this show, on my own show on the weekends, I've tried to book certain MPs to come on and address the issue of grooming gangs.
And on multiple times, they've had to back away from fear of the backlash.
We recall Sarah Champion, who in the Labour Party attempted to address this and lost her position in the front bench as a result.
There have been multiple cases now, and it's beyond any level of doubt that there's a disproportionate number of British Muslims involved in grooming gangs against underage white girls.
And to say that is to report on the facts.
It's not to be racist.
And if we're backing away from this conversation, then all we're doing is leaving the ground far open in what is a legitimate issue that requires addressing.
We're leaving the ground for the populace to hijack that legitimate issue and make it their own for their own nefarious purposes.
And that's precisely what's been going on.
And it's in that regard that what I'm saying here is I just wish, I wish that those young girls had seen justice served for them as fast as the judge served Tommy Robinson justice in this case.
Because in this case, it's very easy for us to pick on the bogeyman.
But actually the truth is that our silence over decades in this country is the real bogeyman.
And that's the real thing we should despise, our own cowardice in the face of grooming of young girls up and down this country and our conspiracy of silence.
So I've seen some estimates.
I mean, Rotherham itself, which was a shocking story that was swept under the rug, the most modest number I've seen reported is 1,400 girls raped in that city.
I think the number is far higher.
There's a book called Easy Meet that suggests the number across the UK is actually 100,000.
And I know that every single authority is reluctant to acknowledge this.
If you read the inquiry into the Rotherham rapes, and if you do a word search in the huge document for the word racism, again and again, social workers, police, politicians said, I was afraid of being called racist, so I didn't say anything.
They saw the rapes.
The rapes were easily detectable very quickly in hospitals and social workers.
And everyone said, shut up about it or you'll be called far right.
So you mentioned 100 terrorist murders.
And of course, those are horrific.
But it may be a thousand times worse than that in unspectacular crimes that haven't been reported.
I know that's part of it.
I think that there was a they tried to torch the hospitalien in Rotherham, I think it was.
I think it was actually in Rotherham.
And part of these race riots because they know what's going on.
That's part of this too, isn't it?
It's not just the Southgate stabbings.
It's the slow-motion rape of Britain.
Or am I being too incendiary?
Well, I wouldn't use the term rape of Britain, but I do think there is a problem with grooming gangs, unquestionably.
And it's a twofold problem.
The first problem, of course, is the gangs themselves.
These are gangs of largely Pakistani men, largely Pakistani Muslim men, who were organizing gangs of girls that they could exploit, that they could sexually assault and that they could rape.
And this was going on in various towns in England, and it's a real problem.
And obviously, it's a problem.
It's a grotesque thing to happen.
You know, the violation of young girls by cynical, opportunistic gangs of men is really, really gross.
The additional problem, as you indicate, was that the officialdom refused to talk about it.
And in fact, refused to investigate it thoroughly enough in the beginning.
Things have started to change a little bit.
But in various towns, Rotherham, also in Manchester, Oxford, various different towns, you will often see that there have been inquiries lately into the grooming gang failures.
And as you say, people continually discover that the authorities were worried about whipping up Islamophobia, worried about being accused of racism.
And therefore, they either play down the problem of grooming gangs or they fail to investigate it properly or they let things drag on.
And, you know, there's a two-fold bigotry in the arguments that these officials were making.
The first is this idea that ordinary people in Britain, primarily they're referring to the white working classes, are so stupid and bovine and bigoted and violent that if we have an honest discussion about problems in our communities and grooming gangs is a serious problem, if we were to have an honest discussion about that, this stupid underclass of people would rise up and go completely nuts.
So there was this kind of classist bigotry, which meant that they wanted to keep this under wraps in order to pacify what they view as the vulgar, stupid population.
And then there's also the bigotry, I would say, of low expectations and this notion that the Muslim community also is incapable of having an honest, frank discussion about some of the problems in its own community, as if they are, you know, children who need to have their eyes and ears covered and need to have special protection from the rulers of society.
So actually there was this two-pronged bigotry that fueled the failures over grooming gangs.
And that really summed up how the elites view the country.
They view Britain as a country that they have to myopically manage, where they have to keep control of everyone, patronize everyone, police everyone and censor everything.
Otherwise, we'll all burst into flames and go crazy.
So the grooming gang problem, I think, spoke to problems within communities, clearly severe problems within communities, but also an even more profound problem amongst the ruling class who don't know how to organize society in a real proper way.
You know, it's my fault.
We've taken a bit of a detour talking about immigration and Islam culturally as opposed to the October 7th terrorist attack.
I want to get back to that.
But one thing I note in the UK, and I visit there a fair bit and I visit Ireland to observe how immigration is being handled.
It's very strange there.
To even talk about immigration is to be called far-right, which isn't a scary phrase in Canada.
It would be called alt-right here.
They're basically calling you racist in a very painful way, and it's so evident to me that Nigel Farage is trying so hard to avoid being tagged as that, although he is anyways.
And Tommy Robinson, who I think is one standard deviation more audacious than Nigel Farage, I mean, he's basically the enemy of the state.
I think they're going to throw him in prison for a couple of years, frankly, in just a few weeks.
And the problem with that is if you don't allow people within the political system, within the mechanisms of political discourse to talk about this, if you so marginalize Nigel Farage that huge swath of British society that is unrepresented, the white working class or lower class, if they have no party that'll speak for them, it used to be the Labour Party, now Labour's throwing them in jail.
If you won't let Nigel Farage have a podium, if you criminalize the people that are reaching out to Tommy Robinson, you're basically saying you either have to accept everything silently, and you better be silent or we'll throw you in prison for a Facebook post, or what do you do?
I think the riots were partly because there is no peaceful political outlet to handle these people.
They're being pushed out of the mainstream and everyone's patting themselves on the back for silencing misinformation.
But you've got millions of Brits who are completely alienated from society.
What are they going to do about right?
I'm not excusing it.
I'm trying to explain it.
I think the fact that they're silencing Farage, trying to kill GB News, I'm sure you've been targeted by censorship, the new Online Harms Act or whatever the censorship law is, they're basically saying you cannot have the safety valve of a public discussion.
So either shut up and deal with it or terrible alternatives.
Allowing Community Voices00:08:08
What do you think of that?
You know, I think public discussion, open free discussion, is always the right way to approach these issues.
And in fact, every issue.
I don't think there's ever a justification for clamping down on honest, frank, sometimes difficult discussion about the problems facing society.
I should say that I differ from Nigel Farage, and I differ enormously from Tommy Robinson on these issues, particularly on the issue of immigration.
I've always had a more liberal take on immigration.
And I am the son of immigrants.
My parents are immigrants.
I'm a first-generation Briton.
I grew up in an immigrant community in northwest London where there were various different groups of people.
And it actually worked pretty well.
You know, we mucked along pretty well.
And things, obviously, it was difficult because it was a fairly poor, a relatively poor area of London.
But things actually were not bad for the most part.
But I think, so I'm someone who's always been sympathetic to immigration and someone who actually benefited from immigration.
I wouldn't be talking to you now or doing the job I do if my parents had stayed in the very poor part of Ireland that they come from.
But I think what's happening more recently is that immigration has, immigration has become one of the issues through which ordinary people most keenly experience their lack of power and their inability to have any say over what's happening to the country they live in.
Because immigration has gone from being a fairly narrow economic phenomenon where societies have always said, you know, we need some new workers.
Let's get some new workers.
There's always been that economic calculation in relation to immigration.
Immigration has also gone from being a question of freedom of movement or any of those kind of more utopian goals that some people might have talked about in the past.
What's happened recently is that immigration has become a tool of the elites.
It is a means through which they demonstrate their virtue, especially in Europe.
If you want to impress the oligarchs of Brussels in the European Union, then you had better be very open with your borders.
You better let in as many people as you can.
That is the way in which these elites demonstrate their virtue to one another.
They demonstrate it through being pro-immigration, pro-immigrant, and so on.
So immigration increasingly has become something done way above the head of ordinary people and way above the head of democratic deliberation.
One of the reasons the Brits voted out of the EU is because the European Union is a sovereign intervention, is an undemocratic intervention into our sovereignty.
It tells us what we must do on certain issues, including border control and the number of people we must allow into the country.
So people voted against the EU in order to retain or regain control over borders and over the destiny of the United Kingdom.
So increasingly, people experience immigration as a hostile act by an elite that doesn't care for them anymore.
And that's particularly the case in Ireland.
If you look at Ireland, where now we have a situation where 20% of the people in the Republic of Ireland were born outside of Ireland.
To put that into context, during the great melting pot era of New York City in the 19th century, when everyone referred to it as the melting pot of the world, back then it was around 16% of New Yorkers were born outside of America.
Now in tiny Ireland, which is far from a rich or large country, 20% of people were born outside Ireland.
And lots of Irish people feel that this has been done without consultation, without democratic discussion.
And more to the point, if they do raise questions, they're referred to as racist and far-right and fascists and so on and so forth.
So that inability of people to have a discussion about it, that inability of people to say, look, we're not necessarily anti-immigration, but we want to talk about how it works, who comes here and what they're doing when they're here.
People want to have that discussion.
The less that we allow them to have it, the more I think there is a possibility people will blow up and either vote for certain parties that they might not otherwise vote for, or even take to the streets, as we've seen in Ireland and Britain over the past few years.
So, yes, democratic, free discussion on all these issues all the time.
Let me just throw in an anecdote.
I was in Dundrum in Ireland, which is in Tipperary County, if I recall.
Little village, 200 people live there.
The government signed a contract with the local hotel country club to basically rent out the entire building to bring in 280 migrants, men, military-age men, in a village of 200.
They're adding 280 people.
There was no town hall.
There was no planning meeting.
The contract itself is secret.
It's just the most astonishing thing.
And I don't even think you can call that immigration anymore.
What is that?
How long will they be there?
What will these men do?
They don't speak English.
It's just so astonishing.
I can't get over the stats there.
And there's this weird thing in Ireland where they do that, just overwhelming numbers in little communities that have been the same for centuries.
I don't know the whole story of Dundrum, but it feels like the left talks about replacement migration as a conspiracy theory.
Don't you dare use that phrase, even though the UN had a study called replacement migration, which you can find online.
But what do you mean?
You've got a lot of ties to Ireland.
What's going on when you literally move a greater population into a village than the village has?
Give me 30 seconds on that before we get back to the book.
You know, it's where my parents come from in the west of Ireland.
There are lots of small villages whose population has doubled overnight because that is what's happening.
You know, people are being brought in and made to live there and they don't have jobs and they're not productive members of that community or productive members of society.
And it is crazy.
And I think it demonstrates an absolute contempt from the Dublin elites for these kinds of communities, for their traditions, for their relationships, for the way in which they live.
You'd have to have complete contempt for a village or a town to impose an entire new population on them overnight.
And then to call that village or town a racist hellhole if anyone kicks up a fuss.
You know, I don't, I have an issue with the idea of the great replacement theory.
And I have an issue with it because I actually think it presents what I think is probably opportunistic, desperate politics by an elite that has completely lost connection with its voters and with the ordinary people.
It tends to present that as something far more conscious and organized.
I don't think these people could organize a piss-up in a brewery.
I don't think the people we are ruled by are competent in any way whatsoever.
I think they're a bunch of charlatans and chancellors who don't know what they're doing from one day to the next, other than the necessity of impressing each other on the global stage and impressing, in Ireland's case, their political masters in Brussels, in the European Union.
So I think it's even worse.
I think it's actually a very ill-thought through policy, an ill-thought-through process, the consequences of which are never considered, debate about which is never countenanced or allowed, and it's just creating future problems that these societies won't be able to deal with very well.
So again, it really does, I know this sounds like a pat solution to every problem, but it does come back to allowing people to have a say and to have a meaningful deciding say on what happens in relation to borders, immigration, and their own communities.
Yeah, I tell you, I love Dundrum.
It's so beautiful.
Civilizational War Echoes00:12:09
And I love how close-knit it is.
I mean, I was there with our cameraman.
We went to get lunch and people were out.
Well, who are you and what you're doing?
It felt slightly nosy, as maybe small villages do, but you could feel how cohesive the community was.
Like everyone talks to you because, and imagine, like they've just detonated.
They've ended what that village is.
That village will continue in some form, but it's sort of a demarcation period before the migrants and after the migrants.
And I'm very grateful I visited it before.
Let's get back to the book.
What motivated you to write it?
What is your observation?
I mean, there's the story in Israel.
There's the story of the war and the story how the war is being prosecuted.
But I think the largest story, and I think you might agree with this, is the West.
The story of what's happening in London, in Ireland, in Toronto, in the West is far more telling.
By the way, there are no pro-Hamas marches in Abu Dhabi or Dubai or Riyadh.
Not that there's a lot of political freedom there, but they don't even allow the discourse there.
Is it true that the more interesting, the more terrifying front line of this war is in the West as opposed to in Israel?
Yeah, well, that's precisely why I wrote the book.
And I make it clear in the introduction that the book is about the West, fundamentally.
It's not about Israel versus Hamas and the intricacies of the war or anything like that.
It is about the fallout from 7th of October in the West.
Because when 7th of October happened and when the pogrom happened, I was horrified like everyone else.
I was shocked.
I thought it was clearly the worst attack on Jewish people since the Holocaust.
It was horrendous in every way.
And I predicted very early on that the response from so-called progressives, the response from the chattering classes, the response from university students and the academy more broadly, I knew the response was going to be bad.
I knew there would be excuse making for what Hamas did.
I knew there would be apologism.
I knew there would be marches on the streets against Israel rather than against the anti-Semites that had just attacked it.
I knew all of that was going to happen.
That was predictable.
But it was so much worse than even I expected.
It was so much worse.
And so to give you a taste of it, on the 9th of October, less than 48 hours after the pogrom, there was a gathering outside the Israeli embassy in London.
And it presented itself as an anti-Israel protest.
But of course, Israel hadn't really done anything significant by that stage.
And it certainly hadn't invaded Gaza on the ground.
That full-scale invasion didn't take place until the 27th of October.
I'll tell you what that gathering was.
It was a celebration of the pogrom.
They were playing pop music.
They were dancing.
They were letting off fireworks.
They were laughing.
This was a pro-pogrom gathering on the streets of London in 2023.
And I make the point in my book that we would remember if Londoners poured onto the streets to celebrate Kristallmacht.
So we should remember that they did it for the 7th of October.
And there was a similar protest in Sydney outside the Sydney Opera House.
A group of people gathered.
They chanted fuck the Jews and they burnt the Israeli flag.
That was also around 24, 36 hours after the pogrom.
Same thing in Berlin, pro-Hamas celebrations.
So when I saw all that unfolding, when I saw that people were not just making excuses for Hamas, but were celebrating its anti-Semitic butchery, then I knew that things were going to be worse than I thought.
And then I had a feeling that all the anti-civilizational trends in our societies were going to come to the surface like scum on water.
I knew that was going to happen.
And that's when I really started clocking everything in and making a note of everything in order that I could eventually write this book and say, look, this is how messed up our societies have become, where, you know, when fascism returns, we have significant numbers of people in our societies who have taken its side.
I want to ask you, who were the people doing the celebrating?
Were they Western woke progressives or were they newcomers, foreign nationals, perhaps, who had not assimilated the pluralistic values of the West?
It was a mixture of the two.
So if you looked at the gathering outside the Israeli embassy on the 9th of October, for example, it was really a split between, I would say, affluent socialists and radical Islamists.
So it was a mix between these anti-Western native Britons who have sucked in all the woke crap about how awful Britain is and how awful the West is and how evil Israel is.
And then also radicalized young Muslims, radicalized young Muslims who have a burning hatred for Israel.
And that will not be a surprise to anyone.
That's been the case for quite some time.
And, you know, to my mind, because we've had loads of huge marches in London against Israel, and I've gone on some of them to observe, by the way, not to take part.
And I've gone on some of them to observe.
And what I have found unforgivable is that on these marches, everyone I've been on to observe, I have seen flashes of actual anti-Semitic hatred.
So I've seen young groups of radical Islamists chanting about Muhammad returning to kill the Jews.
I've seen people obviously carrying placards with the Star of David mangled with the Nazi swastika.
I've seen people chanting in favor of the Houthis, which is a violently anti-Semitic organization.
And of course, I've seen people in London celebrating Hamas, openly celebrating Hamas and its jihad against the Jewish state.
And a lot of that stuff, a lot of that more jihadist stuff is coming from radicalized young Muslims, younger Muslims in Britain who have become radicalized in some way, online or through their mosques or whatever else it might be.
But what I have found unforgivable is that legions of England's middle classes have been marching shoulder to shoulder with these radicals.
So there have been thousands of Guardian reading white posh people from the leafy suburbs of London who have descended onto the city center every other weekend for almost a year saying basically death to Israel or, you know, screw Israel, whatever their chants are, you know, victory to Palestine.
I don't know what they say.
And for them to claim to be so virtuous and anti-racist and anti-fascist, which is what they would describe themselves as, and yet to happily march shoulder to shoulder with what I would consider to be the fascistic imagination, the radical urge to destroy the world's only Jewish nation.
I found that particularly unforgivable.
I'm not surprised that radical Islamists say awful wicked things, but I am shocked and horrified that England's middle classes would be happy to march alongside them.
Well, how's it going to end?
I mean, I think when Israel decapitated the Hezbollah leadership, not only did that deflate them militarily, I think that was a startling strategic move.
I think Hezbollah was always the most feared Iranian proxy just because of their sophistication and the sheer number of rockets they had.
And I think that's actually the most astonishing thing that's happened.
And when I saw that, I saw the anti-Semitic agitators online become morally deflated.
There's some shill accounts on Twitter, like Jackson Hinkle, very strange old stock Americans cheering for Iran, cheering for Hezbollah.
And I saw their deflation when Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah, was assassinated.
I think if, and I saw the same when Hamas, certain Hamas leaders, including one in Tehran, was assassinated.
I think part of it is because the war is not over yet, for whatever reason in Gaza, that has given these Western activists and Islamist activists energy and hope and motivation.
Yes, we are your brothers.
We're your allies.
We're your Western front allies.
I think if Israel delivers a decisive knockout blow to Hamas and ends it and ends Hezbollah, and I don't know what will come with Iran, I think that will deflate a lot of this because I think, as Osama bin Laden said, people like the strong horse.
If Israel can dispatch this, then some of the feverish dreams of this woke Islamist alliance might evaporate.
I don't know.
I just think it's going just as, but it's going just as strong today as it did a year ago.
How's this going to end?
Will it end?
What's the long-term outcome here?
You know, that's a really interesting theory that I hadn't really thought about before, which was, you know, what impact would Israel's various military successes have on the work in the West.
That's a good question.
I think, you know, to my mind, there are two fronts in this war.
Well, Israel is facing many fronts in the war, but there are two broad fronts.
Firstly, there is the physical military war that Israel is fighting against its enemies.
And I think every good, decent person who values not only the continued existence of the Jewish state, but also civilization itself, should be on the side of Israel in those wars.
It should be on the side of Israel as it fights against Hamas, as it fights against Hezbollah, and as it keeps the Houthis in check as well.
We should support Israel in all those efforts, no question.
So that's the kind of physical front of the war.
That's the military front.
And then there's the, I don't know how you would describe it, maybe the philosophical front or the intellectual front, which is being fought here in the West.
And that really is a war for, that's a civilizational war, just as Israel is fighting militarily.
It's a civilizational war to defend the values of the West and the virtues of the West against these agitators and these mobs of people whose hatred for Israel is fundamentally an extension of their hatred for the West.
You know, their anti-Israel hysteria is really a projection of their anti-civilizational hysteria and they're turning their back on the values of Western society.
It manifests itself so viscerally in their hatred for Israel.
They see Israel fundamentally as the sin eater of modern society, as the sin-bearer for all the crimes that they think the Western world has committed.
You know, they project all of them onto Israel.
They call it a settler colonial entity.
They call it a genocidal nation.
They call it white supremacist nation, even though it's not even a white nation fundamentally.
They project all these sins of modernity onto Israel and then rage against it.
It's very medieval.
It's classic scapegoating, where you project the sins onto the goat, Israel, and then try and cast it out from the family of nations.
It's a very guttural, visceral form of politics that I don't think has anything in common with peace marches of the past or anti-war marches of the past.
It's something much more elemental and destructive and unhinged.
And so I do think that that's the war that we need to focus on right now.
Israel will do what Israel needs to do, and I think we should support Israel in that endeavor.
The War of Words Needs More Ante00:01:57
But over here, the war of words against the kind of anti-civilizational trends that we are surrounded by, that war needs to be, if anything, the ante needs to be upped even more.
And we really need to have it out as to what's happening in our societies and how we can defend our societies against those who defame them as racist, criminal, backward, et cetera, et cetera.
So there's two fronts in the war.
There's the front in Israel and there's the front over here.
Well, listen, Brendan O'Neill, what a pleasure to spend so much time with you.
The book is called After the Pogrom.
It's available on Amazon Worldwide.
I'm a fan.
It's a pleasure to engage with you directly.
I follow you on Instagram.
Is that the best way for people to follow you?
I don't think you're on Twitter, are you?
Yes, Instagram is the only social media I use.
When you were referring there to some of the lunatics on Twitter, it reminded me why I don't use Twitter because it's full of strange people and strange things.
So I've always avoided Twitter.
I don't use Facebook, but I am on Instagram and people can find me at Spiked primarily.
Spiked is where you can see most of my stuff.
All right.
We'll put your Instagram handle on the page as well as Spiked online.
I would like to make the case to you to join Twitter.
You can ignore the hecklers.
I really think it's becoming more and more the essential public square.
And with its tilt towards free speech, I think your messages would do very well there.
I see people take screenshots of your Instagram posts and put them on Twitter.
I think if I can make the case, I think you would do very well on Twitter and have an enormous reach.
So don't think about the hassles.
You don't have to, you can mute all that, but think about sharing your very wise words.
Brendan O'Neill, good luck out there and thanks for being with us today.
Thanks very much.
All right, there you have it.
Brendan O'Neill, senior political contributor at Spiked Online and the author of After the Pogrom.