Ed Miliband’s mother, Marion Kozak, who died in May, survived the Holocaust as a girl and took away the message, like fellow survivor George Soros, that since it was extremist nationalism that brought the calamity, she would oppose all nationalisms, Zionism first, and she plainly succeeded in inculcating this worldview in her son.
None of us can judge her motives, but her theory has been disproven by history, and nothing makes this clearer than the moral abyss that her son has tumbled into this week. Laughing it up with Marxist Jew-haters who crave Global Intifada, and chatting with people who openly dream and plan a new Holocaust, and destroy their societies to that peverse end.
Nationalism wasn’t the issue per se, but extremist nationalism, which found in the stateless Jews (and Gypsies) the perfect foil. The internationalists spread as much death in the same era.
The Jewish girls born today—and around 400 were born literally today—will not face the grim fate that most of Kozak’s generation did. And that’s not because of what she fought for, in the hope that it would never happen again, but because of what she fought against: Zionism. Most of the Jewish girls born today are born in the State of Israel, a safe haven that keeps getting attacked by people who Kozak allied with, and who her son poses with, but they keep failing harder each time.
Kozak can and must be forgiven; her prescription came from a misunderstanding of the history she experienced in real time and with real scars. But we have the full perspective of hindsight.
It is now obvious to all with eyes in their heads that what saved Jews from a second Holocaust at the blood-soaked hands that Miliband shook is not what Kozak thought it would be. The anti-Zionism she espoused was shared by them, but they didn’t want a world without borders, a socialist paradise, or a global open society, but a world without Jews and a global caliphate.
She must be excused; her son must never be. But it’s useful that he exists and has the role that he does: he gets to test his mother’s beliefs to breaking point as he tries to ensure he is “remembered for being a good person,” and break they will.
He will discredit in practice what his academic Marxist parents proposed only in theory. The IRGC will fall, Israel will continue to thrive, the multipolar world they dream of will continue to be a fantasy, and his name will be a byword for preening banality and failure. He is their dim and fading torch into the future.
EVIL: Here’s Ed Miliband today “standing up for what is right” by shaking hands with Abbas Araghchi of the IRGC’s Quds Force, which—according to British intelligence—is behind over 20 potentially lethal terror plots in the UK targeting British Jews, journalists and dissidents.