In 1933, the Oxford Union Society infamously voted 275 to 153 for the proposition, “This House will under no circumstances fight for its King and country.” That pathetic statement, the so-called Oxford Oath, gave aid and comfort to the enemies of the West; it reportedly led both Hitler and Mussolini to the conclusion that the British were internally weak, and thus prey for aggression.

Just this past week, 90 years later, a motion was shared to members of the University and College Union, a different body in Oxford. That motion proposed that “only a mass uprising on both sides of the green line and across the Middle East can free the Palestinian people,” and called Hamas’ genocidal attacks on Jews “a direct consequence of decades of violent oppression of the Palestinian people by the Israeli state.”

This motion is Jew-hatred, pure and simple. Any moral equivalence drawn between Israel and Hamas is simple Jew-hatred.

When you support Hamas and its agenda, you are supporting the barbaric murder of babies in their cribs; you are supporting women being kidnapped, raped, and murdered.

How has such an unbridled sentiment in favour of terrorism and murder become acceptable in polite society? How has it infused the halls of Oxford and the streets of London? How is it that in the heart of the country that bore parliamentary democracy and classical liberalism, 100,000 people take to the streets to declare their support for Hamas terrorists and their like minded allies?

The answer is simple: the West is embarrassed of its own values. And this embarrassment has led it down the road of blindness. The West has decided that in order to avoid accusations of ethnocentricity, it must make a core assumption: everyone thinks like us.

Now, it is patently obvious that everyone does not think like us.  People who kill babies for the crime of being Jews are not like us. People who paraglide into electronic dance music festivals and gleefully rape women, murder 260 people, and drag innocents back to their hellholes in Gaza are not like us.

But that is a disquieting thought. It’s disquieting because it means that evil is quite real, and cannot be bought off. No “settlement freeze” will stop it. No negotiated settlement will end it. We don’t like that idea.

And so we lie to ourselves. We ignore Hamas leader Mohammed Deif, explaining, “Today you Israelis are fighting divine soldiers who love death for Allah the way you love life and who compete among themselves for martyrdom like you flee from death.” We pretend that Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh is lying when he says, “We love death like our enemies love life.”  We pretend that imams who preach the same words in London don’t mean what they say. We pretend away generations of indoctrination in a genocidal hatred of Jewish people. We ignore that Hamas hides its rockets behind its own children after slaughtering the children of others. After all, we’re all alike.

So we search for complexity. We search for nuance. And in the meantime, we promote an immigration policy which brings people who don’t think like we do into Western countries in large numbers.

All of this benefits Hamas and its allies, who are perfectly happy to take advantage of our blindness. They caterwaul about human rights while stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from the citizens for whom they are responsible; they complain about lack of water while removing water pipes to retrofit into rockets. They remind one of the old joke about the man who murders his parents and then falls on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan.

And we fall for it. Not only do we fall for it, we seek solidarity with the monsters. Because if we can find solidarity, they aren’t monsters after all. And if they aren’t monsters, then Western values aren’t actually better. And maintaining that lie is the first priority for a great many Westerners these days.

But it is a lie. The West’s values are superior. And that’s uncomfortable, because that comes with actual obligations. You can only stand for Hamas – you can only decide that you won’t defend king and country – if you truly believe that king and country aren’t worth defending. But if they are, if the West has a set of values worth upholding, that means standing up for those values.

It means rejecting the Marxist notion that equality of outcome is necessarily the result of exploitation rather than the reality: that equality of outcome might come down to differences in culture and decision -making. It means rejecting the post-modernist notion that all morality is a reflection of power dynamics – and that in reality, there is such a thing as a right and a wrong. It means rejecting the weak-kneed morality that substitutes tolerance for decency. The philosopher Roger Scruton wrote, “In place of the old beliefs of a civilisation based on godliness, judgment and historical loyalty, young people are given the new beliefs of a society based on equality and inclusion, and are told that the judgment of other lifestyles is a crime…The ‘non-judgmental’ attitude towards other cultures goes hand-in-hand with a fierce denunciation of the culture that might have been one’s own.”

We must reject this new suicidal belief system. King and country and values are worth fighting for. Once upon a time, the world decided too late that they were worth fighting for. By the time the world realised its error, six million Jews were dead. 

Today, the existence of the State of Israel means that Jews need not wait for anyone else to come to the realisation that monsters exist and evil is real. But the West must too come to that realisation.

Not for the Jews. Not for Israel. But because if the West does not defend itself, it will cease to exist. And the monsters will win.

Ben Shapiro is co-founder & editor emeritus of The Daily Wire, and host of the Ben Shapiro Show