Yesterday's March against Antisemitism in London (Justin Tallis/AFP/Getty)
“An innocent child who was lost has now been found and returned,” was how the Irish Prime Minister, Leo Varadkar, greeted the news of nine-year-old Emily Hand being released from her Hamas hellhole. He made it sound like the poor girl had been temporarily separated from her family during a busy shopping day at Brent Cross. This was the child whose father was so tortured by the thought of her being kidnapped by wicked men that he confessed he loved her so much he hoped that she was dead.
“Keep waving,” said the Hamas terrorists, handing over another little girl to the Red Cross on Friday night. As she waved back nervously — they still have seven of her family locked up, so of course she did — the Hamas PR machine must have been punching the air in delight. This is the narrative they are trying to sell you: Hamas are just misunderstood humanitarians — or, at least, principled freedom fighters pushing back against years of colonial oppression. We treat our captives well, they say. Not kidnapped, just lost.
How is it that some people fall for all this manipulative rubbish? There have been posters of these children ripped down all over London and New York by Hamas apologists, gleeful fools who seem to think it’s a lie that children were ever taken in the first place. It’s like watching Holocaust denial develop in real time. Antisemitism doesn’t just rot the soul; it rots the brain.
Admittedly, facing the truth is often impossibly demanding, especially when the truth is as distressing as this is. I thought I was mentally prepared for Bearing Witness, the IDF’s 47-minute compilation of footage taken on October 7, which I saw last week at a private screening. But my body clearly wasn’t. Ten minutes in, I started to shake. The organisers had prepared the audience as best they could and explained there was no shame in having to leave. And there was a point where I was close.
Some of the footage came from Hamas bodycams, some from their mobile phones, some from CCTV, some from first responders. All of it was horrific. Later, after a number of medicinal whiskies, I did manage to sleep. But I woke early. And in the small hours, there was little protection from all those images: the beheadings, the children crying out for “abba” as their father was murdered before their eyes, the sheer joy with which Hamas hunted down and slaughtered their victims, the lifeless bodies of children in their Mickey Mouse pyjamas, the contortions of the dying, the endless pools of blood.
All lies, say Hamas’s useful idiots. Why else, they say, would this IDF production be shown only to a select group of sympathetic (a.k.a. gullible) journalists and opinion-formers. In that case, I’m not sure how obsessive Israel-hater Owen Jones made it onto the IDF guest list. The gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell also sat behind me. He’s no establishment patsy by a long chalk.
Then, yesterday afternoon, more than 100,000 of us marched through central London. This too was bearing witness — it was not a digital social media battle but these were real people, with real worries. It was the largest and most significant assertion of support for British Jewry since the fascists were pushed back by a similar number of indignant cockneys at the Battle of Cable Street on another Sunday afternoon in 1936. A few yards in front of me, Tommy Robinson, a latter-day Blackshirt, was forcibly ejected from the march to everyone’s approval. Nasty little man.
The atmosphere was mostly sombre, with grey skies and a little gentle rain reflecting the mood. A few reserved chants of “Bring them home!” broke out as we marched up towards Parliament, but mostly it was reassuringly free of drama, still less any sort of threat. No one wore a mask. These did not feel like people who were used to going on demonstrations. “First time I have been on one since the Sixties,” said the rather glamorous octogenarian sitting beside me on the Tube. These are the “moderate people” that actor Eddie Marsan had urged in his speech “to stand up and face down extremism and bigotry and antisemitism and islamophobia and all forms of racism”. It was pretty distressing that it took so many police to protect so many peaceful people. But they needed to be there.
The news broke that four-year-old Avigail Eden was being released as the march reached Parliament Square. Avigail was orphaned on October 7, then kidnapped from Kfar Aza. She was held in Hamas’s tunnels for 50 days, where she had her fourth birthday. I cannot imagine she would have been liberated so soon without the Israeli army invading Gaza. Previous hostages have been held for years.
The news cycle moves so quickly that it’s easy to forget the overwhelming tectonic significance of what happened to Israel on October 7. Horror, shock and grief take far longer to process than news. But Israelis tell me that their world will never be the same again. It is certainly clear that the old rules have not worked. And no one knows whether two states will emerge, or whether there will be a death spiral, with apocalyptic and unknown consequences. Watching Bearing Witness, it felt like those Hamas 20-somethings, on their orgy of killing, were surprised that they had got through the fence and had the opportunity to do what they did. I don’t think they were quite prepared for it. And I still don’t think anyone is prepared for what is yet to come.
When this current cycle of hostage exchange is completed, the war will resume. Israel will not rest until Hamas is thoroughly defeated. It is a tragedy of the highest order that thousands of Palestinians will die as Hamas hides behind them. But watching Bearing Witness made me realise that the current war is so deeply existential for Israelis that there can be no going back to the old order. No more “mowing the lawn” of Palestinian discontent.
“Never again is now,” read posters on the march. It is like all the furies and demons of the Holocaust broke through a portal in history, through that wire fence from Gaza into Israel, and into the present. “Never again is now” is to say that, this time, the resistance to evil will be deafening. So don’t let a temporary ceasefire fool you. The horror is far from over.
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Subscribe“I don’t know what happened to make the WHO so implacably opposed to vaping.”
Lobbying, bribery, corruption spring to mind.
But lobbying by whom, and to what end? Could tobacco companies be paying off the WHO to protect their markets, particularly in developing countries?
Quite likely – countries with tobacco growing industries, perhaps even the high tax benefit from cigarettes in other countries.
Most UN organisations are rife with this sort of thing.
I would think so and not just in developing countries. It would seem obvious that tobacco companies would wish to discredit vaping, especially if it encourages people to quit smoking entirely.
There’s no reason the tobacco companies can’t dominate the vaping industry as well. They have the raw materials!
Of course, but it’s a diminishing market since it’s a halfway house to stopping rather than a long-term addiction like gaspers.
The only people who actually want to vape are those who already smoke cigarettes and want to stop.
No-one in their right minds would vape if they weren’t smokers in the first place.
The tobacco companies tried bubblegum flavoured vape – clearly aimed at young people who probably haven’t smoked cigarettes – but I think those are banned now.
Vaping clearly represents a major threat to them, hence the lobbying and bribery.
The Chinese are heavy smokers, just sayin.
India is a great country but its politics and governance are more than usually awful. Arbitrary and evidence-free government decisions are commonplace, as with this ludicrous ban on e-cigarettes.
The Indian government owns 28% of ITC, its main manufacturer of cigarettes, bidis and other tobacco products. Shares in stocks in that corporation are soaring.
See my post. $$$$$$$$$$
Yes smokers pay a lot of tax. They must continue to get ill or even die to pay for the NHS.
Well, sure, this is kind of true, but only in the sense that every public health institution has been incompetent on COVID well past the point where they made things worse rather than better. The WHO has been absolutely mind-bendingly terrible on COVID and the only thing that “saves” it is the fact that most other large public health bodies reflexively follow it, so it drags them all down to its level.
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Its stance on vaping is exactly what you’d expect to see from the WHO given its track record. This isn’t some weird aberration, the WHO is always like this. Misinformation pours out of it on a near daily basis. COVID is the textbook example, especially anything China-related, but it’s not just that. This is an organization that mounted an investigation of the lab leak theory which it had to renounce days later when people pointed out they hadn’t actually investigated anything. It claimed there was no clear evidence COVID was transmitted person to person, even though human-infecting CoVs always are. It stated outright to a BBC journalist that the there was little evidence masks worked but the messaging had changed due to political lobbying. Their last great outing on the world stage resulted in an article in Der Spiegel titled “Reconstruction of a mass hysteria: the Swine Flu panic of 2009”. Their chief at the time gave a speech in which she argued swine flu should be exploited to fight for “changes in the functioning of the global economy,” and to “distribute wealth on the basis of” values “like community, solidarity, equity and social justice” – and that was before they got an actual former communist as their chief!
The WHO is a disaster zone and should be scrapped. It took an entirely manageable medical problem and turned it into a global catastrophe due to its complete takeover by a hard left ideology that has learned it can manipulate people through an artificial fear of death.
(Oh, good article by the way, very important topic and I wasn’t aware of how big the difference is!
I couldn’t agree with you more about the WHO. . It has become over-politicised and the people running it, down to goodness-only-knows what level, are too compromised for it to just do a bout of navel-gazing and miraculously emerge ‘reformed’. The whole thing should be scrapped.
Quite apart from anything else, a global health bureaucracy, oddly enough, behaves like any other global bureaucracy does. Since its turf in this case is health, the more global health problems there are, the bigger the empire it builds.
If they’re coming for vaping (I’m a vaper), what about alcohol? Surely more harmful than vaping?
Don’t give them ideas.
What about vaping alcohol flavour-rum & bacardi that sort of thing?. The drinks industry would not like that
It hasn’t been perfect during Covid by any means, but it hasn’t been conspicuously worse than a lot of other institutions. First, is this a serious statement? And second, what kind of defense is it to say “others were worse.” WHO is the tip of the spear globally. It’s the same place that did its best to pretend China was not the source of the virus. It parroted the Chinese claim that there was no evidence of transmission of the virus between humans. That it’s off base on vaping does more to demonstrate consistency than leadership, and the wrong sort of consistency at that.
The bureaucratic mind.
If freedom of the individual is so important, why do we have to waste time and money persuading people that they shouldn’t smoke?
Imagine that all UnHerd contributors were smokers and governments around the world were trying to stop us from smoking. Outrage and more outrage!
We can still have laws to protect people who choose not to smoke from the dangers of passive smoking.
Exactly! Enclosed spaces like bars and restaurants should be able to define their own policies – advertise “Smokers’ Bar!” if they want – as long as no one is forced to work there and the policies are gradually implemented to allow those who took their jobs with the understanding they would be working in a smoke-free environment can change jobs.
It’s the HCN, CO, PNAs etc that are dangerous in smoke, not the nicotine. So vaping should be strongly promoted as a smoking alternative if the WHO wanted to actually, you know, promote health.
I think it is the Puritan strain which runs through much of the public health establisment that accounts for much of the hostility toward vaping. They get high on their prohibitionism and can’t stand that a fun smoking substitute might be available.
The WHO has shown itself to be easily captured by Chinese interests. Has Big Tobacco also bought its acquiescence?
My take as a pot smoker (not a tobacco smoker) is that there is something about vaping that is unconsciously associated with weed smoking. And that this visual association is enough to implicate the device. Between that and the tobacco industry it doesnt have a chance.
Sure the WTO is seriously flawed, but it’s hardly high brow to point this out.
Here’s why.. https://www.who.int/news/item/17-08-2016-michael-r-bloomberg-becomes-who-global-ambassador-for-noncommunicable-diseases
Hmm. Not a very balanced article. I’m a Canadian doc. The national committee I was on a few years ago, as part of its public health mandate, looked into the question of: is vaping an on-ramp to or an off-ramp from cigarette smoking? The answer is BOTH. Over time most places where vaping is common (mostly amongst youth) have seen cigarette smoking rates rise, indicating it is more of an on-ramp than off-ramp. (a huge number of new cigarette smokers started with vaping and moved up)
As with every question of societal policy, the scientific stats and research on vaping cannot answer the question of whether we should ban it. That is a question of civil liberties, and how much control we think the government should have over individual lives. People are free to do many risky things. Should they be allowed to vape as well?
I hate vaping as much as smoking. A friend vaped in my flat, telling me it was not as bad as passive smoking exposure. Even though he vaped by an open window, I started coughing which lasted all evening and well into the next day!
So it is not better than real cigarettes.
Vapers and smokers are banned from my home.
Don’t you just hate auto-correct. Instead of vape, it’s ‘corrected it to taped or raped!! Dumb robot!
On my IPAD I can turn off auto-correct.