Anti-Jewish violence in the Middle East has always been religiously-motivated. Documents, news reports and speeches from the 1920s and 1930s clearly show that Arab invective was couched in extreme religious terms. The anti-Jewish rhetoric of Amin al-Husseini is a case in point. A democratic Jewish state, where Jews run their own affairs, is anathema to the supremacist instincts of those Arabs want either a pan-Arab nation or an Islamic caliphate where Jews and other minorities are stripped off their rights and/or murdered.
The West, which has become increasingly secular in recent decades, is blind to the religious warfare being waged against Jews and other so-called infidels.
The West, which has become increasingly secular in recent decades, is blind to the religious warfare being waged against Jews and other so-called infidels. Europe’s left-wing idealists are inept in their understanding of religious conflict.
They attribute acts of terror not to religion but to poverty, alienation, mental illness – anything but Islam. They are simply incapable of recognising the Islamist character of terrorism when it occurs in Nice, Paris, London and Madrid.
This is where the Islamists have the advantage. They understand only too well that the war against Jews and the West is an imperial-religious, even apocalyptic, war of conquest. Europe, by contrast, is ignorant of this reality because it is embarrassed by its own colonialist past and has rejected religion as a way of life.
The near-total destruction of Jewish life in the 1930s and 1940s, combined with the post-1945 deChristianisation of Europe, has left the continent without a religious counter-ideology on which to base a comprehensive response to Islamist supremacism.
The situation would not be so bad if Europeans had embraced a robust and confident humanism, which emphasises critical thinking, freedom and progress. Sadly, many Europeans, again mainly on the Left, have become politically-correct automatons who tolerate the intolerable by creating “safe spaces” on campuses and institutions for anti-Semites and Islamists. And anyone who dares to criticise this sordid set-up is branded “Islamophobic,” “racist,” “a neo-con,” “a Blairite war-monger,” “a Zio-Nazi” or “Tory scum.”
But there is one thing that Europeans could do, while it is still possible. And that is to stop cosying up to the Jew-hating, misogynistic and homophobic elements within Palestinian Arab society, and instead stand alongside the democratic, secular and pluralistic Israelis who have enshrined so many things leftists are supposed to care about – workers’ rights, animal welfare, religious freedom, gender equality and equal rights for the LGBT community.
If Europe’s leftists really believe in tolerance, progress and equality, then they should support the Jewish state, not pander to Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, which regularly incite violence against Jews, murder gay people and lock up dissidents. But it seems the leftists’ obsessive anti-Zionism prevents them from seeing things clearly.
The Left’s betrayal of Israel is possibly one of the worst ethical missteps since the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact of 1939. By demonising and delegitimising the State of Israel, Europe has not only emboldened Muslim fascists in the region, it has also stiffened the resolve of Islamists around the world who smell the decay of Western moral failure and go on to attack civilians in European schools, cafes, promenades, bars, workplaces, supermarkets, nightclubs, trains and buses.
In other words, by picking the wrong side in what is shaping up to be a global conflict between liberal democracy and Islamism, Europe’s anti-Zionist leftists have helped unleash a very bitter whirlwind, which the rest of Europe is paying for. In other words, they are morally complicit in the Islamist attacks on the people (Jew and gentile alike) of Nice, Paris and Brussels.