October 7th: The UNREALITY Era
A Year On from Tragedy, We Inhabit A Postmodern Escape Room
While Hamas terrorists inflicted the most barbaric atrocity in modern history, I was celebrating my brother’s birthday in an escape room. Escape rooms take you for a moment out of reality. Yes, we need to find the code before the bomb drops and we all die, but really, there is no bomb. We’re working together with the game masters (God bless them) to reinforce a false reality.
Today, the West is an escape room; its players have left reality behind.
On that fateful day, however, once the game was over, my brother’s friends and I rejoined real life. We recovered our phones from lockers, as reality washed over us. While we’d been playing make-believe, terrorists were raping, murdering and torturing young partygoers and pacifists in Israel.
The Surprising Truth About Hasidic Jews & Israel
As is the case after earth-shattering moments, it took time to become fully conscious of the brutality of the attack and the extent to which the world had irrevocably changed - but many of us got there as the mournful days passed. However, a year later, many have chosen to remain in the game.
October 7th brought in the dawning of the Era of Unreality.
It cannot be a coincidence that those who throw their weight behind Israel tend to be centrist and irreligious, while the marching tribes for Palestine (or at least against Israel) include not only the Far-Left and the Far-Right but extreme radical Muslims and - this may surprise you - extreme Haredi Jews.
The Haredi or Hasidic Jews are misunderstood. The vast majority of Jews are secular and irreligious - but those who have never met us (since we take up a minuscule proportion of the world) would be forgiven for conflating us with the Hasidics. In reality, they are to the typical Jew what a Jehovah’s Witness is to a secular person of Christian heritage.
Most Jews never come into contact with Haredis, who make up an extreme and insular community. They are devoutly anti-Zionist. This relates partly to their beliefs about the Messiah but is also a reaction against the secular nature of Zionists. Israel is a multicultural, progressive and modern state, which runs counter to the ways of life of most Haredi communities.
Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is not anti-Jewish in a religious sense. He adores them and always made a point of taking photos cuddling up to the Haredis. Corbyn - like many on the Far-Left - embrace fervent religious ideologues of any faction because they are so firmly embedded in a shared unreality.
It is secular Jews that the Far-Left despise, which is why this hatred is known as anti-Semitism and not anti-Judaism. When you go against Israel, you are not against “the Jews” - just the secular, rational ones.
Blasphemy Laws & Peep Show
As an atheist myself, I feel there must be room to criticise beliefs, whether they be Jewish, Christian or Islamic. We don’t however, attack people of any ethnicity for immutable features and stereotypes (such as large noses or stinginess). The Far-Left - in their unreality world - do this upside down.
This is why the battle between the Woke Left and the centrists is so tense. Anti-Israeli factions are religious-minded (think: Queers for Palestine), but the other side may criticise heavy-handed elements of the Israeli government but believe Israel has a right to defend itself.
This is reflected in the British sitcom Peep Show when setting out the stances of its characters Jeremy (bohemian, ideological) and Mark (grounded, science-based, realistic):
Jeremy: “Who do you support? Mark likes Israel. I’m Palestine. Makes it more interesting when you pick a [side].”
Gender Madness
This ‘unreality’ virus is brought home through the story of my upcoming guest, Maia Poet. Maia—whom I interviewed last week after I spoke at Genspect in Lisbon—believed that she was a man. She moved to Israel partly because her parents wanted her to experience the real world.
Yet, she lived secretly as a man among both Haredi Jews and Palestinian Muslims, the latter of whom would have killed her had she been discovered. As a security measure, she wore her breast binder even while sleeping.
Only when running from bombs in Israel - and realising she’d left her breast binder behind - did reality dawn on her. In the immediacy of war, a brutal truth confronted her and dispersed the cloudy dogma that had convinced her she was a man. It’s a remarkable story I can’t wait to broadcast in a few weeks.
The Woke Need A War
It also proves something that many of us long suspected: this generation needs a war. Obviously, I don’t wish war upon them. But people are so safe and sheltered in the West that they’ve forgotten not only what man and woman mean but, more importantly, war.
We’re so accustomed to peace that we forget that it is a rare privilege to exist without war on our doorstep. Having never had to fight for our rights, we devalue them. Having never existed in a tumultuous war zone surrounded by zealous enemies, we’ve lost the ability to understand conflict.
War is a necessary evil when the alternative is October 7th on repeat.
It seems that the safer we are, the more unreality tempts us. In war zones, there are no courses by arrogant professors on postmodernism. Is this table real?, and is my green the same green that you see? are fascinating conversations for high teenagers, but aren’t all that helpful when considering how to respond to a rape-filled murderous terrorist attack by your neighbours.
Only this era of unreality can explain how thousands can march through the streets to protest against an apparent apartheid in one of the world’s most multicultural and egalitarian societies. Only here in unreality can they scream genocide at a country that has far exceeded attempts by other modern countries to avoid civilian casualties despite the terrorists’ insistence on using them as human shields.
Genocide has long been used to insult Israel because it cruelly subverts the Holocaust. But the truth is that the world Jewish population still hasn’t caught up with pre-Nazi figures, while the Palestinian population has grown at an extraordinary rate.
This is a problem, and not just for the Jews. It’s over-used, but apt: “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities”.
The fact is that we rarely know when we’re going wrong. One thing that slave owners, Nazis and Bolsheviks had in common was that they all thought they were fighting for the greater good. Looking back, they seem obviously immoral. But they didn’t seem that way at the time.
That’s why Bertrand Russell’s philosophy is key:
When you are studying any matter or considering any philosophy, ask yourself only what are the facts and what is the truth that the facts bear out. Never let yourself be diverted either by what you wish to believe or by what you think would have beneficent social effects if it were believed. But look only, and solely, at what are the facts.
The Woke Right
This is also why my friends
, James Lindsay and others have been referring to the Woke Right. It may or may not be the appropriate name to describe those on the Right who have diverted from reality, but it highlights a growing problem in an age that values - on both sides of the political spectrum - feelings above reason.
I had the privilege of speaking at Dissident Dialogues in New York before the main event: evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins vs Ex-Muslim Ayaan Hirsi Ali. The latter had recently become Christian, to the surprise and chagrin of the atheist world. Not surprising was the admiration and respect given to both speakers by an adoring audience.
One devotee went a little too far, screaming from the back of an anxious crowd, “ALLAHU…”. By the time we realised she was - very slowly and in a foreign accent - attempting to scream, “I love you”, half of us had ducked for cover, our hearts in our mouths. This was, of course, another example of reality hitting us squarely in the face. All your ideological beliefs about the religion of peace quickly dissipate at the sound of an Allahu Akbar.
What truly shocked me, though…
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