A ‘Civilizational Counter-Offensive’: Josh Hammer’s Recipe to Save the West From Woke Forces

Western civilization faces a crisis of confidence, and Josh Hammer has a recipe to combat the three threats eroding its foundations.

His new book, “Israel and Civilization: The Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West,” lays out the key civilizational challenge and finds wisdom from the Bible to combat it.

“If you want to stand for something, if you want to actually turn back the tide against wokeism, Islamism, and global neoliberalism, it’s imperative that we be confident in who we are because only when we are confident in our inheritance can we possibly protect that strength and ultimately launch a successful civilizational counter-offensive,” Hammer, senior editor-at-large at Newsweek, tells The Daily Signal.

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Hammer calls his book “an audacious and ambitious call for Jews and Christians alike to link arms and stand shoulder-to-shoulder like never before.”

He warns that the opponents of Western civilization often attack Jews first, as a soft target, before moving on to attacking Christians, as well.

“I’ve been very active in national conservatism for years now,” Hammer notes. “If you care about the nation-state and you oppose the globalizing, homogenizing imperative, then I think that you should understand that the state of Israel is the nationalist canary in the globalist coal mine, the same way that the Jewish people for thousands and thousands of years have been the canary in the coal mine when it comes to a broader civilizational decay and broader civilizational rot.”

Hammer, who founded the organization Jews Against Soros, points to the major money forces behind the Left’s globalist agenda, such as George Soros’ Open Society Foundations (now run by Soros’ son Alex), the Tides Foundation, Arabella Advisors, and Klaus Schwab, executive chairman of the World Economic Forum.

He warns that globalism represents a threat to the idea of the nation-state—which he roots in King David’s uniting of the Twelve Tribes of Israel—while Islamism (a political force distinct from Islam but rooted in a radical interpretation of that religion) and wokeism (a Marxist ideology separating people into oppressors and oppressed by race, religion, and other factors) threaten other foundations of Western civilization.

“The entire premise of woke neo-Marxism [is] this notion that society in classical Marxist fashion can basically be boiled down to this false dichotomy,” Hammer says. “In the Wokerati’s case, that dichotomy ends up being oppressed versus oppressors. Basically white people, Christians, Jews, Asians end up being ‘oppressors.’”

“That’s news, frankly, to anyone who has ever read Jewish history, that the Jewish people could ever be oppressors,” he quips.

“All of this, where you are getting into this arbitrary dividing of humanity into these classes based on something like skin color or religion there, you’re rejecting the Bible,” Hammer claims. He says “the single overarching ethical imperative for all of Western civilization is Genesis 1:27—one of the first verses in the entire Bible—where it says ‘God made man in his image, male and female, he created them.’”

Hammer pushes back on likely objections to his claims that the Bible forms the bedrock for America’s legal system and Western civilization more broadly.

He notes that the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia features a quote from the book of Leviticus; that Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin wanted America’s national seal to be Moses parting the Red Sea; and that Abraham Lincoln spoke of Americans as an “almost-chosen” people in “this covenantal language that he clearly learned from the Hebrew Bible.”

Hammer argues that it is in America’s interest to partner with Israel, and he pushes back on the notion that championing the U.S.-Israel alliance represents a form of neoconservatism.

Of Trump, the author says, “He opened the embassy in Jerusalem. He recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. He pulled out of UNRWA. He pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal. I mean, it would take us hours, frankly, to kind of talk about all the minutiae that he did to bolster this relationship.”

“And frankly, what was the result of that bolstering of this relationship? The Abraham Accords,” Hammer notes. The Abraham Accords refers to a series of international agreements between Arab countries and Israel toward the end of Trump’s first term. Trump’s policies arguably brought peace to the Middle East before the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel.

Furthermore, he argues that as America redeploys assets to the Indo-Pacific to face its “number one threat” in the Chinese Communist Party, the U.S. has to figure out how to secure its interests in the Middle East.

“The obvious answer, and [President] Donald Trump gets this in his bones, is to embolden and empower your allies to patrol the region in a way that redounds to both of your interests there,” Hammer says. “This is the very sober, clear-headed, MAGA America First realist case.”