Churchill Is Still on the Front Line of the Culture War

T he latest attack on the statue of Sir Winston Churchill in Parliament Square in London is a yet further indication — were one needed — that more than 60 years after his death, he is still on the front line of the culture war. He himself would probably not have minded that, having been on the front line of no fewer than five previous wars, but we ought to be outraged on his behalf.

The latest assault on the statue was allegedly undertaken by a 38-year-old Dutchman, who spray-painted “Free Palestine,” “Zionist War Criminal,” “Stop the Genocide,” and “Never Again — Now” on the bronze statue and its stone plinth. The last of these blitheringly idiotic and unhistorical slogans is a reference to the Holocaust — against which the world has always said “Never Again” — but which the spray-painter seems to want repeated now. The inverted red triangle symbol of Hamas was also left on the statue in Palestinian activists’ trademark red paint, in case we were in any doubt as to who is more than willing and ready to carry out a second Holocaust.

This was therefore by no means just a vicious act of ideological vandalism; it was a cold-bloodedly hateful and specifically antisemitic act, and it was intended to be recognized as such.

Of course, in one of his phrases, the perpetrator was half correct: Churchill was indeed a Zionist, although certainly not a war criminal. Since long before the rise of Hitler, as long ago as the earliest days of the 20th century, Churchill believed passionately in the creation of a nation-state for Jews in the Holy Land, a tiny part of the Near East where they had lived for millennia and where hopefully they could finally find safety from murderous persecution. Churchill was a member of the government that promulgated the noble and statesmanlike Balfour Declaration, 16 years before Adolf Hitler came to power.

Genuine genocide was the Nazis’ industrialized murder of over half of Europe’s Jews between 1941 and 1945. It cannot be mentioned in the same sentence as the deaths in warfare of less than 2 percent of the Palestinian population of Gaza, half of whom were Hamas fighters who deserved everything that was coming to them after they perpetrated the horrors of October 7. Genocide requires a desire to destroy a people owing to their racial or ethnic origin, something entirely lacking in the Israel Defense Forces’ military campaign against Hamas in Gaza, as evidenced by its warnings to the Palestinian population to leave areas likely to be contested by Hamas fighters. Every war in built-up areas has collateral damage, which is tragic but unavoidable in the kind of war that Hamas deliberately chose to fight.

Israel is the country whose existence ensures that — no matter what the antisemitic spray-painter might want — there is indeed never going to be another Holocaust, unless Iran is allowed to build and deploy a nuclear missile.

It is profoundly ironic that the alleged spray-painter is Dutch, because it was Churchill who placed Holland near the top of the list of countries to be liberated by Allied forces in the summer of 1944. Instead of pushing straight through France into Germany after D-Day, Churchill ensured that the Dutch were saved from their long years of starvation and humiliation. Many Dutch people revere Churchill’s statue, but the blind hatred spawned by Islamicist fanaticism can clearly make exceptions.

The time is coming when we are just going to have to make up our minds about what we should do about so-called pro-Palestinian direct action, and this latest attack on Churchill’s statue has hopefully made the issue even easier for everyone to understand. The attacks on think tanks and banks have included vandalism, window-smashing, and spray-painting at one end of the spectrum, but also extremely violent assaults on Israeli defense firms and Royal Air Force bases at the other. One policewoman was hospitalized with a broken back in a recent incident.

We do not need new laws to deal with this kind of assault on our democracy: We have plenty of them. What we don’t have is the will on behalf of the entire legal system from police to judges and juries to fight back — and aggressively so. We once had the cultural self-confidence to stand up for ourselves and our great historical figures, including such icons as Winston Churchill. The way Britain treats this disgusting attack on his statue will be indicative of its self-respect as a nation. The last time the statue was attacked, the perpetrator escaped with the legal equivalent of a wrist-slapping.

In Ancient Greece, it used to be an offense to desecrate the city-state’s gods and heroes. There can hardly be a more egregious example of secular desecration in Britain than the antisemitic spray-painting of Winston Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square. If all we do once again is let the alleged perpetrator off with another wrist-slapping, we will know what a truly degraded and decadent country we are today, hardly worthy of even having a statue to a truly great and brave statesman like Churchill facing Big Ben in our capital city.

Loathsome antisemitism was one of the warning signs that taught Churchill that the Nazis were on the rise in 1930s Germany, and we know how that ended. We in Britain must learn the lessons of Sydney, Australia, and southern Israel, and so many other places, and come down very hard on the oldest hatred, presently hiding in the garb of pro-Palestinianism. Stains can be washed off bronze and stone, but not off our own consciences if we ignore this blatant warning sign once again.