The terror of the anti-Israel machine Manchester was the result of a years-long campaign

Violent eruptions of Jew-hatred are now a daily occurrence in the West. But yesterday, as news broke of a deadly attack at the Heaton Park Synagogue in Manchester, was not just another day. It was Yom Kippur — the holiest day of the Jewish liturgical calendar — a day of atonement, repentance, and fasting, when attendance at services peaks. The assailant reportedly rammed pedestrians with a car and then began to stab them. He killed at least two people, and left several others injured, before being shot and killed by police himself.

While incidents of this kind — ramming followed by stabbing — are common in Israel, the Manchester attack targeted Jews and Judaism, not Israelis. In the coming days, critics of Israel will no doubt insist, yet again, that anti-Zionism in no way implies antisemitism. But it is no longer possible to ignore the link between the two. For there has been an unprecedented spike in antisemitism since October 7, 2023, and it has been fueled by the concerted efforts of what has been described as “the Israel delegitimization machine”. The machine is a device with many moving parts: international organizations, NGOs, news media, even teachers’ unions. It gathers data and produces reports, but its purpose is not to establish facts or determine truth. (That’s clear enough from the BBC’s decision to air the claim that IDF soldiers are deliberately shooting Gazan children in different body parts depending on the day of the week, or the U.N.’s dubious assertion that 14,000 Gazan babies would die within 48 hours without humanitarian aid.) It is to manufacture global consensus on a single, pressing point: that Israel’s conduct in Gaza is so morally abhorrent as to be intolerable to all civilized nations.

It won’t do just to blame all this on ancient and perennial hostility to Jews and the Jewish state, though that is part of the problem. At least as important is what the machine’s constituent parts learned in college, where progressive doctrines flow like milk to newborns. They took courses in critical race theory, intersectionality, postcolonialism, and other neo-Marxist ideas, all of which presuppose that the West’s signature combination of liberal democracy and capitalism is systemically unjust. Marx taught that the point of such ideas is not to interpret the world, but to change it. Having taken that lesson to heart, they now use their jobs as platforms to advance revolutionary action in the service of the latest cause — being sure, in this age of virtue-signaling, to be seen doing so.

Some, no doubt, serve the machine without fully understanding the violence that real revolution entails. But radical activists, to whom opinion-making elites have outsourced their political conscience, regard half measures as useless. Establishing universal freedom and equality requires using politics to help demolish existing social and political orders. This means, in the first instance, destroying foundations of national life that have been hallowed by time and tradition.

That was the goal of Nikole Hannah-Jones’ 1619 Project, which argued that the US was founded not in 1776, but in the year when enslaved Africans were first brought to Virginia. The 14 August 2019 issue of The New York Times, which launched the 1619 Project on the 400th anniversary of the slaves’ arrival, included essays attacking capitalism and advocating universal health care. Hannah-Jones dismissed weighty criticisms of the Project’s erroneous claims and scattergun scholarship because her critics — leading American historians like James McPherson, Allen Guelzo, and Sean Wilentz — were mostly white men. Officially blessed with a Pulitzer Prize, the Project was turned into a curriculum for primary and secondary school students; by 2020, it was being taught in 4,500 schools nationwide. But perhaps the biggest lesson to be learned from the 1619 Project was that we’d entered a post-truth era, where strong emotions trump evidence and rational argument.

Six years later — after Covid, BLM and Antifa, the birth of the censorship-industrial complex, and 10/7 — the machine is applying that lesson beyond national borders, not just to the reinterpretation of the past, but to the construction of the present. And at the center of that construction, the one place, as a popular meme proclaims, where all the West’s ills intersect, is Palestine. This totalizing approach has something for everyone, from old boomer protesters in socks and sandals to young nihilists in keffiyehs, while simultaneously following Saul Alinsky’s advice in his 1971 book Rules for Radicals: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” In other words, attack something concrete that is emblematic of the whole you wish to destroy: in this case, Israel.

Yet neither the machine nor the Western activists who seek to “globalize the Intifada” seem to have noticed that attempts to liberate ostensibly oppressed populations by attacking the foundations of their civilization have an unbroken record of horrific failure, from the Soviet Union and the Third Reich to North Korea. History repeats itself. And, so far, the tragedy and farce of current events has, yet again, followed the pattern established at the primal scene of all future revolutions: the French Revolution, in which the pursuit of lofty democratic ideals rapidly degenerated into civil war and terror, and ended with Napoleon’s coup.

Reading A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution — edited by the distinguished historians François Furet and Mona Ozouf, and published in 1989, the 200th anniversary of the storming of the Bastille — one discovers that the Revolution’s radical ambition was unlimited. It held out, not just to France, but to everyone, the “boundless promise” of an escape from social corruptions and injustices. It was meant to be the final solution to the riddle of history: a “total event” in which “men sought to resolve all their problems at once — political, social, and moral — and to change themselves thoroughly and completely”. The first step in constructing this utopia of liberty, equality, and fraternity was to raze the old social and political order and jackhammer its foundations.

Revolutionary destruction proceeded in ways all too familiar today. Cultural and religious artifacts, including monuments, statues, paintings, books, icons, and altars, were smashed and burned with a fervor that justified the coining, in 1794, of a new word: “vandalism”. Drained of spiritual substance, religion was repurposed as a political force: a campaign of de-Christianization swept the land, even as Christ’s example was invoked in support of revolutionary ideas like the “universal fraternity” of men. Catholic priests were persecuted; churches were looted and closed; quasi-religious cults, including that of Reason and of the Supreme Being, were established. Much like George Floyd and Luigi Mangione, revolutionary leaders achieved secular sanctification in iconic paintings like Jacques-Louis David’s depiction of the murdered fanatic Jean-Paul Marat.

The Revolution moved quickly to gain control of historical time as well as political space. Because it was to replace Christ’s ministry as “the beginning of eternity”, the Christian calendar had to be scrapped, with Year I beginning on the day the Republic was proclaimed in 1792. The first version of the calendar comically presumed that nature itself would submit to the imperatives of the rational will. There were to be “ten months of equal length, divided into ‘weeks’ of ten ten-hour days”. These months would bear names — Bastille, People, Republic, Unity, Liberty — suited to molding the “new man”. But the plan required too many calendrical interpolations and adjustments to be workable. Nature ultimately triumphed over history: the final calendar included 12 months with seasonal names like Nivôse, Pluviôse, and Ventôse, which Thomas Carlyle characteristically translated as Snowous, Rainous, and Windous.

Ideological hubris has always been eminently mockable. But the Revolution’s guiding assumptions — that politics can do anything; that everything is political; and that revolution must be total — are no laughing matter, not least because the communist and fascist horrors of the 20th century have done little to diminish their popularity.

Max Weber captured the intransigence of social and political reality when he described politics as “the slow boring of hard boards”. The Revolution supposed, on the contrary, that reality posed no serious obstacle to its aims. When the revolutionary spirit failed to achieve its objectives (a daily occurrence), “the perversity of adverse wills” was to blame. The fantasy that politics could do anything fueled paranoia — counterrevolutionaries were presumed to be around every corner — and furnished innumerable justifications for scapegoating violence. It also encouraged a psychotic rejection of the significance of observable phenomena, for in this atmosphere of universal suspicion, “what could be seen was not what really existed: reality was a lie”. Nor were there safe ways to steer clear of the total presence of politics: silence, hesitation, indifference, and fence-sitting on political questions suggested that one harbored counterrevolutionary tendencies and deserved, so to speak, to be canceled. And the assumption that revolution must comprehensively reject the established rules of society meant that its main motions were illegal. People grew used to committing what, until yesterday, were crimes — including, in the end, killing their fellow citizens.

In brief, the Revolution was unthinkable without a near-universal unmooring of thought from logic, reason, and the actual conditions of human life. It’s easy to imagine something like this happening today (many would say that it already is), especially because this unmooring was accelerated by the discovery that even “democratic” revolutions cannot tolerate the free flow of information and opinion. The Revolution initially embraced freedom of the press; but unfiltered public opinion, which reflected the actual life of the people, turned out to be inconveniently diverse. What was needed was the top-down formation of a unified “public spirit”. But stage-managing consensus proved impossible, and the September Law of Suspects, passed in 1793, allowed the Revolutionary Tribunal to arrest and execute journalists and publicly burn their writings.

Thankfully, no new Robespierre has as yet emerged to guide the revolutionary energies of groups united by little more than their antipathy to the West. But the machine’s cartoonish shadow-plays of good and evil are produced by people just as sanctimonious and anti-democratic as the Jacobins. In the US, they are currently at the astroturfing-and-censoring stage of manufacturing public spirit, including issuing strong warnings about the threat populism poses to its increasingly detested political brand: “Our Democracy.” (Of course, the Trump administration’s heavy-handed approach to free speech hasn’t helped.) The Europeans have gone further still, canceling elections in Romania, banning a leading candidate in France, and preparing to outlaw the most popular political party in Germany.

The machine nevertheless promotes insane allegiances and feeds fantasies like those of “Queers for Palestine”, or of prime ministers whose pledges to recognize a Palestinian state assume that Israel can continue to live alongside an enemy dedicated to its annihilation. Most important, it targets the people of Israel for the same reason the Revolution attacked the Catholic Church in France: because they founded, along with the ancient Greeks, the ancien régime it seeks to overthrow — the Western civilizational order that emerged in the creative tension between Athens and Jerusalem. The Jews’ survival for more than three millennia, to say nothing of their present flourishing in the Land of Israel, constitutes an intolerable rebuke to the revolutionary consciousness.

Taking its cue from the 1619 Project, the delegitimization of Israel imputes to it the sin of systemic racism. By invoking the memory of white-ruled South Africa, the widespread accusation that Israel is an apartheid state adds the stench of fascism to its target. (Wikipedia, a reliable arm of the machine, provides 25,000 words on “Israeli apartheid”; 16,000 on “Racism in Israel”; and 10,000 on “Comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany”.) Convincing people that the world’s only Jewish state is as genocidally racist as the Third Reich doesn’t just give comfort to antisemites. It helps make the case that the West, built on foundations rotten with chauvinism and hypocrisy, is well and truly irredeemable.

Ignored and suppressed for too long, however, reality always has the last laugh. Run mostly by intellectually lazy people, for whom radicalism is a fashion, not a cause worth dying for, the Israel delegitimization machine may nevertheless hasten the collapse of the brittle civilizational order on which it rests, and which it so thoughtlessly despises. The French diplomat Talleyrand is said to have remarked to Napoleon, “One can do everything with bayonets except sit on them.” Have the mandarins who run the machine considered that they, too, need a place to sit, and maybe even think?

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