Book review: "After The Pogrom" by Brendan O'Neill

In 2011, Melanie Phillips, award winning British journalist and author, published a non-fiction work called The World Turned Upside Down. She wrote, among other things, of the gradual disappearance in society of reason and logic. Fast-forward thirteen years and what she was talking about becomes much clearer. Brendan O’Neill is another British journalist and author, chief political writer for the on-line publication, Spiked and a regular contributor to centre-right media. Which, to say the least, is interesting, given that in his earlier years he was allegedly a Trotskyist and a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party. O’Neill has recently published his non-fiction work After The Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation in which he deftly analyses the events that took place in Israel on that dark day for humanity in 2023. Billed as “an unflinching account of how the West failed the moral test of 7 October…(and) how the West’s academics, activists and commentariat ended up making excuses for Hamas’ pogrom – the worst act of violence against the Jews since the Holocaust”, it is exactly that. O’Neill always writes candidly, lucidly and in depth and this book is no exception. Despite his hard-left-leaning misspent youth, in After The Pogrom, he has given short shrift to Marxist inspired, academically championed relativism and based his assertions on facts, common sense and logic. After The Pogrom should be mandatory reading for high school and university students. But don’t hold your breath waiting for that to happen.