There are some grounds for optimism. They are:

• The Supreme Court (how I hate that stupid Tony Blair name for the highest court in a country where the constitution consists of three words – "Parliament is supreme") has thrown the entire public sector into turmoil by answering a question so obvious that every sane person is embarrassed it was ever asked.
• President Trump is a brilliant negotiator, a reasonably competent businessman but an economic illiterate, it seems. Still, he's shaking up the corrupt parasites preying on American taxpayers pretty well. I find it hard to imagine that his term will end without seriously positive changes to the behaviour of the US Federal government. Let's hope so. At least, for the first time since Ron Reagan left office, the American people have a President who is on their side.
• President Milei in Argentina, the only politician in the world I could vote for entirely without reservations, is achieving undeniable success. It seems likely his democratic mandate will be renewed despite the vicious campaign against him by the parasitical classes in Argentina and elsewhere. 

Yet still I fear the endarkenment – my word for the sustained attack on Enlightenment values that seems to represent current standard thinking.

I had dinner with two good friends this week. The guy is my best friend in the world and I have known him and his wife since they first met. They know two of my three friends in London and asked about them. I mentioned that I had feared losing one of them because of her inexplicable (to me) pro-"Palestine" stance. "Let's stop you there" they said. "We're pro-Palestine too". The wife continued "We can't side with genocide."

We changed the subject and moved on, but my heart sank. If you thought the trans issue was embarrassingly simple, it's as nothing when you consider the war in Gaza. If not indoctrinated in an Islamic country, the morality of the situation is incredibly obvious.

Israel is a free, democratic country. Its citizens - many of them Arabs – all have equal civil rights. Arguably, the only Arabs with civil rights in the Middle East and certainly the only female Arabs, are those in Israel. It's not a problem for an Arab to live in the Jewish State, yet Israel's enemies scream "apartheid". To do so honestly, requires blind stupidity. It is near impossible for a Jew to live in an Arab state. Jewish populations have declined to near zero in all of them. Yet an Arab judge on Israel's Supreme Court could and did sit in judgement on Prime Minister Netanyahu. There are Arab members of the Knesset. There are Arab Israelis in every national institution - including the Israel Defence Force. It's deceptive to call Israel an apartheid state. Clever propagandists are using the term maliciously because "apartheid" is one of those concepts that everyone in the West agrees is wrong. It's a smear.

We all agree that "genocide" is wrong too. Genocide is very wrong. That's why the propagandists of the "Palestinian" cause dishonestly use the word constantly. Yet the IDF's success in minimising civilian casualties in Gaza – despite the fact that Hamas systematically uses civilians as human shields – is arguably the most remarkable aspect of this story. The IDF's  rate of civilian casualties in Gaza is lower than that of the United States Armed Forces and their allies in urban warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's actually lower than the Allies (the last warriors all my friends would agree were fighting a just war) achieved in World War II. The IDF is actually the only army in history to risk greater casualties on its own side by alerting the enemy to their next targets to give civilians the chance to get out of the way. That's nuts. It's also a waste of time because Hamas kills them if they try to run. Hamas wants civilian casualties for propaganda purposes and its leaders boast that "the wombs of our women will replace the dead".

Genocide – the systematic elimination of an entire people - is the actual goal of Hamas, Hezbollah and all Islamist terrorists. It's also the goal of their chief state sponsor - the Islamic Republic of Iran. When their side screams "genocide" at Israel, they're either lying (if they're intelligent) or projecting (if they're ignorant). The indoctrinated morons amongst them assume their enemy wants to do to them what they would do to the Jews if they could. 

As my best friend in Israel once said – "Imagine the Arab Muslims were magically disarmed. You would have peace. Imagine Israel was magically disarmed. You would have genocide."

This simple thought experiment is really all you need to know. My educated and intelligent friends have the capacity for such thought. of course. They're just not using it. They're soaking up as gospel the mainstream narrative from Western Academia and the media, which is that – in simple binary Critical Race Theory terms (facts notwithstanding) Israel is white and therefore an oppressor, whereas the Arabs attacking her are brown and therefore oppressed.

Israel may be the only modern state established without violence or conquest. It was formed by a UN resolution setting out a two state solution under which the Jews gave up most of the historic land of Israel to the Arabs. The Jews in Israel accepted that solution. Their Arab neighbours rejected it and attacked over and again – attempting to wipe out the Jewish state. They have repeatedly been defeated and have lost lands in the process. David Ben Gurion, the first Prime Minister of modern Israel, invited Arab locals to stay. Those who did are the only Arabs in the region with equal civil rights. Those persuaded to flee by their Arab brothers promising to wipe Israel out, have been kept in camps as "refugees" and turned into a new synthetic people – the "Palestinians". Their Arab brothers have othered them, keeping them and their descendants in camps when they could have been accepted either in Israel (which would have taken back those who formerly lived there) or in the Arab states that actually took over the land allocated by the UN in 1948 for them to live in. 

Until Yasser Arafat with advice from the KGB, came up with the propaganda concept of Palestine in the 1960s, there had never been a state of Palestine even in imagination. Arafat was an Egyptian and his passport that showed him as born in Jerusalem was a KGB forgery. The lands naifs and scoundrels now call "Palestine" were territories of first the Roman and then the Ottoman Empires. Palestine was geography not politics. Like Leicestershire, but without even a local authority. 

Gaza is a former Egyptian territory captured by Israel during one of these many genocidal attacks. It ceded the territory voluntarily to its Arab occupants, not in the hope that they would do anything different than they actually did (Israel's history of being constantly under attack does not allow for such naivety) but under pressure from the "international community" to allow for the possibility for an independent "Palestinian" entity to emerge there. International aid has poured into Gaza in billions. None has been used to build the mediterranean Paradise it could have been. Billions have been stolen by the Hamas leadership to fund their lifestyles in Quatar and London. Fewer billions have been diverted into building tunnels for military purposes and raining missiles constantly on Israel. 

This war didn't begin on October 7th, Israel's enemies say. In this they are right. The war has never stopped. Israel has simply adopted a defensive stance and sheltered beneath its "Iron Dome" of anti-missile defences. It's accepted regular modest casualties in order to avoid all out war. I suspect it has done so partly because – pressured in some cases by electorally-influential Muslim populations in former Western allies – it's aware that support for it defending itself is weakening.

The brutal inhumanity of the October 7th pogrom, the worst genocidal violence against the Jews since World War II, simply triggered the current campaign to wipe out Hamas's military capabilities and to rescue the hostages. Gaza is under the iron grip of Hamas. There are no independent journalists in there. All the statistics and "information" reported in the Western press and accepted as gospel by my intelligent, well-meaning but misinformed friends, emanate from Hamas. One dead civilian is too many. One dead civilian child is too many. But if you don't want civilian casualties, just don't start a war. And in particular don't start one sheltering your fighters and their weaponry behind your civilians, in their homes and in your hospitals.

Before Hitler made anti-semitism unfashionable, it was common on both Left and Right. Stalin began World War II as Hitler's ally. He would have ended it as such, were Hitler not (thank God) a fool. International Socialism's problems with National Socialism were doctrinal – the kind of factionalism common - thank God - on the Left. Stalin didn't believe that socialism in one country (even a big, resource-rich country such as Hitler planned to make by murdering his way into lebensraum) was possible. It wasn't Hitler's attitude to the Jews that was a problem to Stalin. It was his lack of global ambition!

The greatest propaganda feat in history was the Left's post-war success in disassociating themselves from their erstwhile ally. Hitler was a man of the Left. Those of us on the Right have been demonised forever by the notion – now universally accepted  – that he was the extreme version of us, not yet another extreme version of them. So perhaps it's not surprising that, as the last survivors of VE Day pass away, antisemitism (mostly unconscious and/or euphemised as anti-Zionism) is back. 

I am genuinely afraid just how deep is the darkness that is coming.

I have spent some time on the website of The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) over the years. The purpose of MEMRI is:

Exploring the Middle East and South Asia through their media, MEMRI bridges the language gap between the West and the Middle East and South Asia, providing timely translations of Arabic, Farsi, Urdu-Pashtu, Dari, Turkish, Russian, and Chinese media, as well as original analysis of political, ideological, intellectual, social, cultural, and religious trends to the governments of the U.S. and its allies, and to their counterterrorism officials, law enforcement agencies, militaries, and other authorities. 

This is not some crazy partisan propaganda outfit. Past US Presidents have served on its board of advisors. Its current board of directors includes a former US Attorney-General. It serves an important function (or could, if more people would use it) in helping us understand the thinking both of people in the Middle East and people from the region who now live among us.

Their content is depressing. You can see children being indoctrinated. You can see how issues in the region are portrayed in their everyday media. If someone grows up in these countries, constantly exposed to hatred – even in classrooms – they're in for a shock if they move to the West. If, that is, they make any attempt to expose themselves to local culture. If they don't then it's you and I who are in for the shock. Here's a mild sample. 

Having watched a few hours of MEMRI content over the years, I should not have been surprised when Muslim neighbours – the Mohammeds and Ahmeds who routinely deliver me and my goods or serve me in their shops in West London – took to the streets to celebrate the October 7 pogrom in Israel. Half a mile from where I live, they danced for joy and called for the destruction of Israel. This, before the Jewish state had responded in any way – making a nonsense of the line taken by most Palestinian apologists that they don't support Hamas's actions (to the extent they don't actually deny them) but are merely protesting the alleged ferocity of Israel's response.

I had a wonderful career overseas but in retirement there's a price to pay. I have only three good friends in London and two of them are older than me. Most of the people I could socialise with in my retirement live in Warsaw, Prague or Moscow. My London friends and acquaintances are not woke (one is a Catholic who is hoping Pope Francis will be replaced by an actual Christian) but their thinking is informed by the relentless statist propaganda of Britain's mainstream media. They automatically hear the word "unregulated" as a criticism, for example. As if only activities supervised by state employees could ever be good. They would all agree that regulators sometimes go "too far," but also think that I go too far in supporting Montesquieu's view that:

When it is not necessary to make a law it is necessary NOT to make a law

They consider me an extremist for holding views that were perfectly ordinary throughout the rise of Western Civilisation. The ideas, in my view, that caused that rise. They would all instinctively chuckle at Ghandi's famous reply to a journalist who asked him what he thought of Western Civilsation, which was:

I think it would be a good idea.

They're not as extreme as many of my contemporaries in London. Not that I selected them for their views. I can be friends with any decent human. I don't need them to be free from error. But I often pick up on things that remind me they've been exposed to two decades more of indoctrination on multiculturalism than I was when I was working as a proud Englishman among proud Poles, Russians and Chinese.

The Ancient Greeks said you can never step in the same river twice. While I was away for twenty years, blithely praising the superiority of Western thought to the survivors of Soviet socialism, Britain was changing behind my back. The greatest culture shock I ever received was not moving to Poland, Russia or even China. It was moving back home when I was done.

Only one of my friends is so far gone as to have imbibed the narrative of the intifada and support the notion that Israel, in seeking to liberate its hostages and defeat the terrorists who were attacking it constantly even before October 7, is committing "genocide". I try to avoid the topic. She has many virtues and I love her as a friend, but she won't let it drop. I have tried to explain that I operate on NATO's "no first strike" policy. If she doesn't read my blog, she's never going to hear me bang on, unprovoked, about the justice of Israel's cause. Unless, that is,  she bangs on herself about the rectitude of terrorists.

Yet she insists on sending me snippets of kefiyah-wearers justifying evil. Her late husband moved in London Labour circles and all her friends are very much of the Left. Among themselves they don't speak of Right and Left these days, of course. They speak of Left and Wrong. They don't review the actual rate of civilian casualties in urban warfare in Gaza - though the Israel Defence Force (IDF) is performing better than the Allies in WW2. They just assume uncritically that the brown people are right and the nasty (ideologically-white, if not all actually so) Jews are wrong. They don't need to say any of this out loud, you understand. It's just the political water in which they swim. 

The British Left seems to have worked its way back to where it was before Hitler (we all thought finally) discredited anti-semitism. Stalin would have ended WW2 – as he started it – on Hitler's side – had Hitler not favoured (as Socialists often do) schism over solidarity. If you spend some time in the stacks at a university library (as I once did) and read the English newspapers of the 1930's, you'll find that Hitler's views on the Jews did not cause as much alarm as you might think. He was a worry, with his talk of a master race and lebensraum, but the "blame the Jews" stuff was seen as superfluous seasoning in his rhetorical soup. Rather like my London friends today on regulation, the intellectuals of the time took the view he sometimes went "a bit too far".

If I had spent my whole life here, instead of abroad, I would firstly be more acclimatised to this horror and would secondly have a deep enough pool of friends to throw this one back. I  am reluctant, however, to lose 33% of my close friends at once. Nor, at the age of 68 – and with the cautious pace at which we English make friends – am I ever going to make any more.

I sometimes wonder if my exciting overseas career, unalloyed joy at the time, was a mistake. My father, a man firmly rooted in the place our family seems to have lived since prehistory, made very different choices and was always puzzled by mine. At his funeral, a normally-dead church that can't afford a vicar came to life by being filled with everyone he'd ever known still capable of walking (or being wheeled) up its path. His choices made a lot of sense to me at that moment. I could understand his marvelous statement to the family at his bedside, hours before he died, that he was "the happiest man alive". He was rooted in family and community. He had friends "for fetching out" as they say up North.

I have made a temporary peace by getting my friend to agree not to raise the subject again until she's read a book from the other point of view. I chose this one and have sent her a copy. I give her credit for agreeing to that, though I fear she'll – with no sense of irony – dismiss it as extremist propaganda.

I do not understand how a kind and caring person can find herself on the side of evil. Yet, to watch the BBC or read the Guardian, you'd think (as she does) that every educated person in Britain is.  That brings me to another piece of my late father's wisdom. He once told me that – whatever medical advances may come – it's better that we all die because the world changes so fast that if we live too long, we won't fit in.