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Source: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/authors/simon-sebag-montefiore-the-cauldron-interview/
British Historian: "Hamas Must Be Dismantled"
(Telegraph-UK) Claire Allfree - The historian Simon Sebag Montefiore says, "The October 7 Hamas attacks against Israel...changed everything. It was years in the planning that did what it was meant to do, which was to put the Palestinian issue at the center of the world, unleash the ideology of anti-Zionism in Western universities, and nix the Saudis normalizing agreements with Israel. The only thing it hasn't succeeded in is helping the Palestinian people." The speed and intensity of anti-Israel sentiment that has spread like wildfire through Britain took Montefiore "by surprise." "There's nowhere better to live now than Britain or America or France than at any other point in the last 10,000 years. Yet that unprecedented comfort, liberalism and freedom have permitted the hothouse of exciting but intolerant radicalisms such as 'de-colonialization,' anti-Americanism,' 'anti-Westernism,' 'Third-World-ism'...particularly in many cultural, academic and media institutions in this country." "People absolutely have the freedom to preach the destruction of the liberal democracies that protect them. I'm not in favor of banning or cancelling anybody unless they're encouraging killing. But a lot of the people on the pro-Palestinian marches in this country, for example, were doing just that....They were also filled with extreme ideologues, who were backing Iran, and who were backing Hamas." While Montefiore has long been a champion of a Palestinian state, he says Britain's "recognition of a Palestinian state, for instance, was a [virtue-signaling] absurdity that achieved nothing. Instead, it revealed Britain's impotence in the Middle East and it rewarded a genocidal organization that is much more nihilistic than humanitarian....Hamas must be dismantled."