The Moral Bankruptcy of the West

When Infamy Takes to the Streets

THE MORAL BANKRUPTCY OF THE WEST
When Infamy Takes to the Streets
By Dr. Nelson Jorge Mosco Castellano

There are days when history seems intent on punishing our forgetfulness, repeating its worst ghosts under new disguises but with the same stench of moral decay.
Yesterday Freddy Nieuchowicz Abramovich made a moving reference to “ J’accuse.” Orlando Petinatti (his stage name) gave way to the pain of yet another brutal act of barbarism against the Israeli people.
If Émile Zola were to raise his head today, he would not have to search the dark offices of an antisemitic General Staff to proclaim his immortal “I accuse!” It would be enough for him to look out onto the streets of our complacent democracies to behold the grotesque spectacle of those who, under the excuse of supposed ideological rebellion, take to the streets to march, celebrate, or whitewash barbarism on the very day when the civilized world should hold its breath to honor the memory of those massacred by terrorism.
What we saw and continue to see is not political dissent, nor false solidarity with a people occupied by terrorism; it is the absolute bankruptcy of the Western soul.
Back in 1898, antisemitism hid behind the “sacrosanct” “reason of State” to bury Alfred Dreyfus alive on Devil’s Island.
Today, the new antisemitism—as old as hatred of Jews, but retreaded with the postmodern jargon of left-wing terrorism—shelters behind banners of supposed solidarity to justify, minimize, or trivialize the extermination of innocent civilians at the hands of fundamentalism.
It is the same perverse mechanism of moral inversion: the executioner disguises himself as the victim, the massacre is renamed “resistance,” and the suffering of those massacred becomes an object of public mockery and street celebration.
How have we come to this?
We have come to this because our institutions have knelt before cowardice and electoral calculation, and because our culture has stumbled onto the dangerous slope of militant relativism.
When republican values are emptied of meaning, when executives and parliaments hesitate for fear of cancellation, or become accomplices, and universities abandon the rigorous pursuit of truth to become breeding grounds for sectarian dogmatism, society loses its immune defenses against camouflage fascism looking at itself in the mirror.
The abhorrent becomes normalized. Democratic respectability is granted to the chorus of terror. Concern for the people is invoked with malicious intent, without saying that they are subjected to terrorism, while on the other hand a democratically elected leader is criticized who represents once again the defense of the survival of the people who are victims of extinction.
The alibi of “context” or “geopolitical complexity” is nothing more than a cynical euphemism to justify the most rancid antisemitism.
What context can justify the celebration of the murder of families in their homes, of young people massacred at a music festival, of babies hanged or kidnapped? None.
This scum follows the manual: it considers fake whatever does not serve its purpose to criticize or express anguish; and it attacks head-on, concealing the savage terrorism that serves its immoral instincts.
Celebrating the day after a massacre of defenseless families, young people, and children, commemorating or concealing terrorist horror is not freedom of expression; it is complicity with crime.
It is proof that part of our society has renounced the most elementary decency and has decided to dance on graves under the alibi of a moral superiority as false as it is bloodthirsty.
Faced with this orgy of cynicism, silence is no longer prudence: it is cowardice. Eighty years after Auschwitz, and more than a century after the infamy committed against Dreyfus, antisemitism once again demonstrates that it is the canary in the mine of freedom: when it is tolerated against Jews, democracy as a whole, and especially freedom, is already sentenced to death.
Because when a society tolerates terror and hatred being celebrated in its public squares, the only thing marching toward the abyss is its own humanity.
Those of us who are grandchildren of immigrant victims and survivors of the filthy terror of wars have the historical memory to distinguish clearly between victim and perpetrator.
To grasp with rigor and harshness the precise scale of the barbarism committed on October 7, 2023, by Hamas, it is necessary to confront the forensic, medical, and survivor testimonies that documented the premeditated brutality inflicted on the most vulnerable.
Those who today call marches or bow submissively to join them, in order to mock that date or relativize the horror, forget—or choose to conceal—the systematic and sadistic nature of what occurred in the kibbutzim and at the music festival.
Among the multiple atrocities documented by forensic experts and international investigators against women and children, three episodes embody the height of dehumanization:
Sexual cruelty as a weapon of war, terror, and torture: Detailed reports by the UN and human rights organizations confirmed that during the pogrom there were gang rapes, genital mutilations, and systematic sexual assaults against women and adolescent girls, often perpetrated in front of their own families before they were executed with shots at point-blank range.
Infanticide and the burning of entire families: The terrorist commandos did not limit themselves to killing; they applied meticulously calculated terror that included the murder of infants in their own cribs and the deliberate burning of entire families inside their homes, sealing the doors and setting the houses on fire to force them to choose between dying from asphyxiation or being burned alive.
The kidnapping of children and babies as shields and trophies: The captivity of minors—from small children to babies only a few months old torn from their mothers’ breasts or made to witness the murder of their parents—was used as spoils of war and bargaining currency, subjecting them to extreme conditions of psychological and physical terror.
What context, what political cause, and what sick mind can justify, relativize, or celebrate the rape of women, the burning of babies, and the kidnapping of children? None.
It is urgent to recover Zola’s ethical intransigence. To unmask the hypocrites, demand accountability from the institutions that look the other way out of cowardice or base political intent, and remember, without inhibition or euphemism, that human dignity is indivisible.
Because when a society tolerates terror and hatred being celebrated in its public squares, the only thing marching toward the abyss is its own humanity.

Moral bankruptcy of the West
Normalization of antisemitism
Relativism and institutional cowardice

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