“Western countries are in a much worse situation than Israel in terms of their will to live", Michel Houellebecq said from Jerusalem a year ago.
Nasrallah, Haniyeh, Sinwar, Deif and now Khamenei: in one year, Israel has demonstrated to its worst existential enemies that its will to live is not negotiable.
We didn't take ISIS seriously and we saw how that ended.
And let's think of North Korea: a communist statelet outside of history, ruled by a clown heir to the dictatorship, but which, thanks to the atomic bomb, enjoys immunity.
Sunni or Shiite, the Islamic nuclear apocalypse is a serious matter and should be taken as such. Instead, we Westerners think we live in a candy-pink world.
America can't do a damn thing against us…Khomeini boasted as he held 52 American hostages for 444 days.
The Carter Administration had weakened the Shah's government in favor of the Islamists who seized power, and groups of Muslim "students" claiming to have come "in peace" attacked the US embassy in Tehran.
Our failure to understand Iran in the 1970s foreshadowed our failure to understand its war for half a century.
The weakness of the flaccid Carter had transformed Khomeini's provocation into a convincing state slogan.
America failed to prevent its diplomats and soldiers from being taken hostage and paraded through the streets, when Moshe Dayan declared: "It is inconceivable that Khomeini would make decisions that affect the security of the entire West without the West reacting."
Supreme Leader Khamenei provoked Trump with the same slogan in June, after being asked to abandon Iran's nuclear program. "Our answer is clear: they can't do anything to us," he echoed the regime's founder. Khamenei had it written in Farsi on stage.
Now Trump has shown Iran that America can still do something.
The European reaction to America and Israel's preemptive war against Iran is appalling: lukewarm statements, false distinctions, superficial distancing, power vacuums and a lack of political and military accountability.
Meanwhile, radical Islam has taken control of much of Western Europe with attacks at trains (Madrid), theaters (Paris), airports (Brussels), beaches (Nice), buses (London), Christmas markets (Berlin) and synagogues (Manchester).
The moment is crucial: no distinctions, no hesitation, no shyness. We must continue to break their backs until they understand that the free world will not be assimilated into their infernal project of subjugation.
We must stand with civilization, Israel and America’s Trump.
It remains to be seen whether the West still has enough backbone to figure out which side to take. I doubt it.