The Gaza War and the West's Reckoning

Full article at https://x.com/Mr_Andrew_Fox/status/1947566906791100527

The Gaza war, while devastating in its own right, has revealed something more profound and more disturbing than the immediate tragedy in the Middle East. It has laid bare the West’s internal decline: the dominance of post-modern thinking, a failure of integration, a tolerance for imported hatreds, and a troubling vulnerability to foreign-funded disinformation. What started as a distant conflict has rapidly escalated into chaos on our streets, campuses, and institutions. Antisemitism surges. Extremism thrives. Underpinning it all is the exploitation of our freedoms by those seeking to destroy us from within.

The erosion of moral clarity within Western institutions, as revealed by the Gaza war, is deeply rooted in the intellectual decline caused by postmodern thinking..

The Gaza death toll is a perfect example. Rather than simply analysing the data we have, there is a whole academic sector dedicated to “proving” that the death toll is higher, simply because their feelings tell them it should be. Thus, we see a slew of methodologically unsound academic reports elevating the death toll, based on shaky research that seeks to reverse-engineer false conclusions, with outcomes predetermined long before the research began. The media report on these studies, and so false data floods the ecosystem of discussion.

This is symptomatic of the intellectual collapse in Western academia. Campuses steeped in post-modern ideology no longer teach students how to think, but what to feel. Critical thinking, once the very foundation of liberal education, has been replaced by critical theory, which sees every issue through the lens of race, power, and oppression. Truth is not determined by logic or evidence but by who can claim the greatest victimhood. In this paradigm, Jews are recast as oppressors simply because Israel exists and succeeds, despite their historic suffering and minority status.

This mindset has given rise to campus mobs who chant “intifada” and “globalise the resistance” without understanding (or perhaps not caring) what those slogans involve. It fuels the journalist who insists that “context” justifies atrocities, and the NGO that parrots Hamas death tolls without a shred of source criticism.

It has also corrupted our moral vocabulary. Terms like “genocide,” “colonialism,” and “apartheid” are now used not as serious legal or historical concepts, but as tools to attack the West and defend its enemies.

This is why facts no longer matter. Hamas can release a propaganda video, and it spreads faster than any IDF rebuttal. The rape and massacre of Israeli civilians is downplayed, while the mere accusation of disproportionate response becomes the dominant story. In a post-modern culture, emotion often trumps evidence. Narrative is everything, and if the narrative suits the ideological agenda, then it becomes sacred and untouchable.

The ultimate outcome is a culture that is disarmed in the face of evil. When morality is solely defined by power, victims who possess any form of power (Jews, Israel, the West) are recast as villains.

This is the crux of the matter: we are not seeing just an attack on Israel. This is an attack on the West.

Nowhere was this moral confusion more apparent than on American university campuses. Universities that once prided themselves on being centres of free thought have instead become breeding grounds for hatred. At Harvard, Columbia, and Cornell, students celebrated Hamas's atrocities, blaming Israel for the 7 October massacre. Administrators, terrified of offending activists, responded with cowardice. The line between protest and sympathising with terror blurred, and Jewish students were left abandoned.

This did not happen by chance; for decades, Soviet information operations pushed the post-modern line to left-leaning fellow travelers in academia. Russian propaganda continues to encourage, amplify and assault the fault lines in our societies. The corruption was also bought and paid for, in recent years. Qatari billions have flooded Western academia, creating ideological allies on campuses.

The result is academic departments that operate more like propaganda tools: a ruined intellectual critical paradigm, financially-compromised academics shaping civil servant and media narratives, and student groups like Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) that can organise “Day of Rage” rallies within hours of Hamas atrocities. Our universities, and the state and media institutions they inform, have legitimised hatred under the banner of social justice.

The West’s openness has become its Achilles heel. Adversaries understand this. Iran, Hamas, Qatar, Russia and their fellow travelers exploit our freedoms with surgical precision. They flood our social media with lies, fund our institutions, radicalise our youth and our immigrant populations, divide the remainder, and then sit back as our societies unravel from within.

This is not just about Israel. It never is. As history shows, when antisemitism surges, democracy itself is under threat. The Jews are the canary in the coal mine. If we cannot protect them, we have failed to protect the moral integrity of our society.

I fear we are lost. Our governments cannot even recognise the problem, let alone conceive a solution. We are ignoring the canary’s warning, and the entire mine is collapsing around us.