
Islamic attacks against Christians across Asia and Africa. Islamic attacks against Jews in Israel. Islamic attacks in Paris, Mannheim and Malmö. Islamic attacks against synagogues and churches in Dagestan. But if you connect the dots you are just an “Islamophobic conspiracy theorist”.
It begins with the Jews, but it will never end with the Jews.
Take a territory that is part of the Russian state, but is 83 percent Muslim and where attempts are being made to eliminate what remains of Christianity and Judaism. Do you remember anything? European enclaves?
Dagestan, North Caucasus, Russian Federation. Terrorists killed 20 police officers in a series of attacks on a synagogue and two churches in the cities of Derbent and Makhachkala. An Orthodox priest, Nikolai Kotelnikov, had his throat slit on Orthodox Pentecost Sunday. Two of the terrorists were the sons of the head of the local governorate.
In a square in Derbent, the oldest city in all of Russia, there is a monument to the brotherhood of three religions: a rabbi, an Orthodox priest and an imam. After all, Derbent is one of the first Christian cities in Russia, has one of the oldest Jewish communities in Europe and the muezzin's singing was first heard here. What better place to make a multi-religious Russian salad?
But if every figure in the statue has an alter ego and Russian salads are good on the plate but less so from a religious point of view, the priest in the center of the statue is Father Nikolai, killed by Islamic terrorists.
The Jewish community of Dagestan dates back to the eighth century, one of the oldest in the European diaspora. Derbent, attacked by Islamic terrorists, was a hub for Jewish life and boasted numerous synagogues before the Bolshevik revolution. Its Jews survived the Nazi massacres of the Eintzagruppen.
During the Second World War, Hitler joined the jihad by mobilizing North Caucasian Muslims against the USSR (and the Jews). Collaborating mullahs proclaimed Hitler the "grand imam of the Caucasus". During the occupation of the North Caucasus, five newspapers were published, one of which, Gazawat, bore an epigraph: “Allah is above us, Hitler is at our side.”
In Derbent in 2024 only the Kele-Numaz synagogue remained active. Now it was set on fire. During the Soviet era, Jews managed to maintain their religious practices, such as baking matza bread for Passover and lighting candles on the Sabbath. They survived although St. George's Cathedral was destroyed in 1938 to make way for a giant statue of Lenin.
But where Communism and Nazism failed, Islamic fundamentalism has succeeded: the Jewish population in Dagestan has plummeted from 50,000 to less than 10,000 in recent years, with many moving to Israel, the United States or elsewhere in Russia.
And it was such a beautiful story that it seemed to have come out of a volume of Tales and Legends of the Caucasus or a Soviet promotional leaflet praising “friendship between peoples”, but it's true: the rabbi of Makhachkala is named Eli-Sultan Alkhazov, because his father, himself a rabbi, had a Muslim as his best friend. Since the Muslim friend could not have children, he asked his Jewish friend to give his eldest son his name. Thus the rabbi has a Muslim name, transformed into Eli-Sultan so as not to confuse the faithful too much.
The terrorists wrote numbers from verses of the Koran on the gate of the Derbent synagogue.
The Islamization of this strategic region began in 773, when the city of Derbent was incorporated into the Arab-Muslim caliphate. Today we see the hunt for the remains of the "infidels". And both the synagogues of Derbent and Rouen, in Normandy, are burned.
After "Black Saturday" on October 7, when the rumor of a plane arriving from Israel spread, the hunt for the Jew was unleashed in the airport in Dagestan with the cry of "Allahu Akbar". Russia was forced to divert flights from the airport. Arriving passengers began to disembark, only to be forced back onto the plane as protesters waving Palestinian flags ran towards them to lynch them. An air force officer called them back to the plane by shouting "quickly!". The crowd then tried to prevent the buses from leaving the airport and also entered the buses el looking for Jews. And earlier an Islamic terrorist had attacked a church in Kizlyar, also in Dagestan.
This is why the attack on churches and synagogues does not only concern Putin's Russia and does not only concern Orthodox Christians or Caucasian Jews: it concerns all the West too. A monster is incubating at Europe’s doors and within its walls.
It was Födor Dostoevsky, on page 504 of “The Diary of a Writer”, who first warned us: "The fanaticism of Islam will be thrown against Europe”. And again: “But sorry, if he is so sensitive, he may also be offended by the fact that in the same street where his mosque is located, our Orthodox church is also located; must we tear it down so that he doesn't get offended?”.
Have we really not figured it out yet?