BRENDAN O’NEILL: Charlie Kirk was a better anti-fascist than most of the left.
Kirk was enraged by the pogrom of 7 October. In that clash at Cambridge, with the student so well trained in the moral relativism of the modern campus that he couldn’t even draw a moral distinction between a neo-fascist army and the democratic state it attacked, he reminded his overeducated jeerers of what happened that day. This war started, he said, ‘because 1,300 Jews were killed and 200 were taken hostage’. Hamas ‘recklessly’ went to ‘music concerts, to homes, to kibbutzes’, knowing well there would be a ‘firestorm’ in Gaza as a result. The ‘only entity to blame’ for this war, he told the lost souls of Cambridge, is ‘the leadership of Hamas’.
The ‘moral truth’, he said, is that ‘there is a good guy and there is a bad guy’. That’s the ‘morality of a child’, barked his critic, to effusive applause from the assembly of plummy Israelophobes. Then came Kirk’s killer line: ‘A child who knows that Israel is the good guy and Hamas is bad has a lot more wisdom than a student like yourself at Cambridge University.’ He schooled them. It was moral clarity in action. It should not have taken a visiting firebrand from the US to tell some of Britain’s most privileged, well-read youths that the Islamofascists who raped and then murdered Jewish women are the bad guys – but it did.
In sharp contrast: Oxford Union president who debated Charlie Kirk appears to celebrate his killing.