One of the most chilling things about 7 October 2023 is that a Holocaust survivor was murdered. Moshe Ridler, 92, had daringly escaped from a Jewish ghetto in Eastern Europe when he was a boy. But he could not escape the Islamo-fascists of the 21st century. Hamas fired a rocket-propelled grenade into his bungalow in Kibbutz Holit. Then they threw in a hand grenade to make sure he was dead. It was 82 years to the day that the Nazis sent him to the ghetto.
The savage slaying of a survivor shook the global conscience. It shamed humanity, said the New York Times, that the ‘survivors from one historic massacre [were] being terrorised in another’. Well, this year, it happened again. This time not in Israel but in the West. Alex Kleytman was 87. He was born in the Ukrainian city of Odesa in 1938. His mother had survived the Nazi camp in Pechora. They later found sanctuary in Australia. And there, at Bondi, on 14 December 2025, Alex was murdered by armed anti-Semites. He could escape the Jew-haters of Nazi-occupied Ukraine but not the Jew-haters of the Islamist-infected West.
No horror better captures our betrayal of ‘Never Again’ than this racist slaying of a Holocaust survivor on a sunny Sydney beach on the first day of Hanukkah. The hatreds of history finally caught up with him. The century of extermination he so valiantly survived eventually found him. ‘She managed to survive’, wrote Kleytman in a tribute to his mother in 2020. Dreadfully, unimaginably, he did not – fascism, this time of the Islamist variety, got him in the end.
2025 was a truly deadly year for anti-Semitism. It was the year Jew hatred went apocalyptic. It was the year the racist sadism of 7 October went global. In the US, the UK and Australia, mini 7 Octobers exploded, laying vicious waste to Jewish life.
In Washington, DC in May, a young couple, both Israeli Embassy staffers, were shot to death outside the Capital Jewish Museum. Their suspected killer reportedly pulled out a keffiyeh and said ‘I did it for Gaza’ after pumping bullet after bullet into their backs. A month later, in Boulder, Colorado, a man yelling ‘Free Palestine’ doused a gathering of Jews in flammable liquid and set them alight. An 82-year-old lady, Karen Diamond, later succumbed to her injuries. It’s 2025 and they’re burning Jews to death again.
In Manchester, England, on Yom Kippur, a knife-wielding anti-Semite assaulted congregants at the Heaton Park synagogue. Two were killed. Then there was Bondi. The worst mass murder of Jews in Australian history. One of the worst acts of fascistic violence in the West since the era of fascism itself. Under the black flag of ISIS, that father-and-son Jew-killing machine ended 15 innocent lives, from 87-year-old Mr Kleytman to a 10-year-old girl called Matilda.
‘Globalise the intifada!’, hollered mobs of bourgeois Israelophobes and bigoted Islamists these past two years. And in 2025, it happened. The extreme prejudice with which the Islamo-fascists of Hamas dispatched more than a thousand Jews made its presence felt here, in our own communities. We watched as anti-Semitic abuse and assaults surged in 2023 and 2024. In 2025, that simmering, seething Jewphobia turned murderous.
Incredibly, it could have been even worse. This week, to round off an awful year for anti-Semitism, two radical Islamists in the UK were found guilty of planning the mass murder of Jews in Manchester. They arranged for guns to be smuggled into Britain so that they might cause ‘untold harm’ to the Jewish community. They were driven by a ‘visceral dislike’ of Jews and ‘very firm opinions’ on Gaza – anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism logically crashing together in an orgy of violent Jewphobia. Surely no one can continue to deny that Islamist anti-Semitism poses a grave threat to the modern West. We await the left’s clear condemnation of this medieval plot to massacre Jews. Meanwhile, in November it was announced that Mossad had foiled Hamas plots to massacre Jews across Europe. And still the half-wits of the faux-virtuous activist class see Mossad as the source of every earthly evil and Hamas as ‘resistance’. Shorter version: Killing Jews – fine. Saving them – how dare you.
How has this happened? How were gunmen and knifemen and mobs in the West allowed to heed that deathly instruction issued by Hamas on 7 October – namely, kill Jews? A key ingredient was the wilful blindness of the West. Jews and their friends warned over and over that things were spinning out of control. Alex Kleytman himself raised the alarm, in 2020, about ‘desecrated cemeteries [and] painted swastikas on the walls of synagogues’. Such barbarous racism reminded him of the dark past he survived. And yet Jews like him were ignored. They were accused of hyperbole, of ‘weaponising’ their feelings for cynical ends. Now he is dead while the vile minimisers of anit-Semtiism thrive.
Jews are once again bearing the brunt of the West’s abandonment of its civilisational values. Just as they were the prime victims of the Nazis’ ruthless destruction of European civilisation, so they are now the collateral damage of the modern West’s craven cowardice in the face of the Islamo-left threat. The elites’ fashionable loathing for the Jewish State has crashed together with the Islamist hatred for the Jewish people, giving rise to a moment of true danger for the Jewish people.
2025 has made it clear – we have failed our Jewish brothers and sisters. Europe’s porous borders allowed anti-Semites from regressive cultures to arrive on our shores. The cultural establishment’s frothing obsession with the ‘evil’ Jewish State reanimated the latent anti-Semitism of the bourgeoisie. The media’s ceaseless defamation of Israel, the damning of it as a genocidal entity that relishes in the murder of children, resuscitated blood libels of old. And the left’s flagrant ignoring of Jewish pleas for protection sealed the deal. ‘Don’t listen to them’, they essentially said. ‘They’re exaggerating.’ Even after Bondi, even following a massacre of Jews the Nazis would have gushed over, they’re saying this.
The West’s infrastructure of censorship played a central role in this callous damning of the Jews to their presumed fate. The elites’ ruthless shutdown of discussion about the borders problem, the rise of Islamism and the true nature of Israelophobia allowed regressive thinking and bigoted animus to fester and spread. It is always in the dark corners created by the cowardly creed of censorship that foul ideologies take root.
That ends right now. From Cable Street to the liberation of Auschwitz, goodness has frequently reasserted itself against the pox of Jew hatred and the contempt for human civilisation it always embodies. In 2026, we can do that again. Our best weapons? Liberty, truth and courage. And maybe some street-fighting where necessary.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.
