Since pre-Christian antiquity, anti-Semitism has flourished time after time in troubled times when old certainties vanished into thin air and the future seemed exceptionally ominous. It is not surprising, then, that it has resurfaced strongly in recent years; In many parts of the world, it is already common for synagogues and Jewish schools to need to be protected by well-armed police or military personnel. For reasons that no one has been able to satisfactorily explain, in times like these, it is always up to Jews to play the role of scapegoats. For many, the temptation remains irresistible to treat them as if they were guilty of all the evils that afflict the human race.
Although it is a protean phenomenon that changes according to circumstances, what all anti-Semitic movements that have been recorded have had in common is envy. Had the Jews been noted for their mediocrity, no one would have been too concerned about their willingness to remain faithful to their ancestral traditions, but it turns out that their culture has always privileged those willing to engage in intellectual pursuits, which, over time, would enable many to make very valuable contributions to Western civilization. The feeling that, for allegedly sinister reasons, Jews have been unfairly successful continues to influence the attitude of many toward members of the so-supposed tenacious minority.
On this occasion, the most aggressive anti-Semites are active in the alliance that Islamists and leftists have forged. They are determined to convince others that the only explicitly Jewish nation, Israel, whose many military, economic, scientific and social successes infuriate them, is by far the most cruel, racist and imperialist country on the planet and therefore deserves to be wiped from its place “between the river and the sea,” that is, from the face of the earth. Although such a view has been common for decades in the UN and related multinational institutions that are dominated by Muslim countries and their allies, it was repudiated by the governments of the democratic world until, more than two years ago, mobs supporting the Hamas jihadists began to flood the major city centers of Europe, North America and Australia.
Those behind such demonstrations assume that all Jews are genetically Zionists and therefore complicit with the Israeli army that is fighting Hamas in Gaza, a campaign that, in their opinion, is clearly racist and colonialist because it is directed against a “people of color.” Like other governments, including those of the United Kingdom and France, the Australian government of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has sought to ingratiate itself with Islamists, and with the very influential local progressivism, by affirming itself in favor of the Palestinian cause.
It is for this reason that, in the opinion of many, it helped set the stage for the massacre by two jihadists of Jews celebrating Hanukkah on Sydney’s Bondi Beach. As is always the case after a shocking Islamist atrocity, politicians in Australia and other parts of the world roundly condemned it, but stopped short of committing to taking action to reduce the risk of even more bloody massacres of innocents soon occurring.
Albanese and other politicians called attention to the bravery of one of the bystanders who tried to disarm the attackers; It was a Muslim of Syrian origin, Ahmed al-Ahmed, who was seriously injured. If more of their coreligionists living in the West behaved in the same way, actively opposing extremists – as the governments of many countries in the Middle East do -, the prospects for the large Muslim communities that have formed in Europe, North America and Australia would be more hopeful than they are today, but, unfortunately, almost all community leaders are more interested in combating “Islamophobia” than in ensuring that the laws in force in the societies in which they have existed are respected. settled. Their attitude is similar to that of the ecclesiastical authorities when accusations of pedophilia against priests and even cardinals began to proliferate; The Vatican’s refusal to act forcefully would greatly harm the Catholic Church.
Still, something is changing in the Western political world. Popular pressure is intensifying for governments to take much tougher stances against the challenge posed by militant Islam. Politicians calling for draconian measures are rising in opinion polls at the expense of those who treat them as extremists. Despite the supporters of the multicultural model, the consensus is consolidating with disconcerting rapidity in Europe that it has failed and that, for better or worse, it would be impossible to fully incorporate Islam in its current state into a pluralistic society in which all religious minorities, including Jews, and others can live together in peace.
This is the position that has always been maintained by the governments of central European countries such as Poland and Hungary, which, to the frustration of EU officials in Brussels who insist on downplaying the importance of religious and cultural differences, refuse to allow the entry of contingents of refugees and asylum seekers from the Middle East and North Africa. In addition to alluding to their own historical experience, to justify their position they say they are reluctant to run the risk of exposing their countries to epidemics of sexual violence and other forms of crime, such as those that continue to occur in France, Germany, the United Kingdom and Sweden, which, as a result of the arrival of millions of people of Muslim culture, increasingly resemble the places from which the immigrants fled.
The situation in which Europe finds itself is largely due to the refusal of its political leaders and cultural leaders to take Islam really seriously. They underestimate it, as if it were nothing more than a quaint fashion imported from exotic regions. They ignore the opinions of believers convinced that the civilization that Islam has generated constitutes a genuine alternative to the Western one and who, like the spokesmen of organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood – whose preaching inspired Al Qaeda, the Islamic State and Hamas -, foresee that in the not-so-distant future the entire world will be dominated by a great caliphate. From the point of view of those in power in Western countries, such ideas are absurd.
It would seem that for those who think this way, the history of the world began very recently and everything that happened before the First World War is meaningless. Unlike their counterparts in previous generations, many Western leaders assume that Islam, like all other religious cults, is just a set of irrational superstitions of folkloric interest that has little impact on the lives of its adherents. They forget that, in the not-too-distant past, many Europeans were positively impressed by the martial spirit that is characteristic of Islam. On one occasion, Adolf Hitler ventured that if the Germans had adopted it a couple of centuries ago, they would already be owners of the entire world. Likewise, although Winston Churchill believed that the social and psychological consequences of Islam had been disastrous, he never hesitated to pay tribute to the martial qualities of millions of Muslims.
At the end of the 19th century, Churchill warned that “Mohammedanism, far from being moribund, is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout central Africa, and at every step it has formed brave warriors. If Christianity were not protected by the strong arms of science (the science against which it fought in vain), the civilization of modern Europe could fall, like the civilization of ancient Rome.”
In the opinion of many, such views seem pathetically old-fashioned, typical of reactionaries who advocate militarism, but they are more realistic than those of progressives who include Muslims among the weak victims of white imperialism. According to the woke supporters of what they call “intersectionality”, in which the world is divided between still powerful oppressors and the oppressed who in order to free themselves should close ranks, Muslims find themselves in a situation similar to that of members of other persecuted minorities such as those made up of homosexuals, transsexuals and women.
Although the leaders of Islamic groups in the United States and Europe have not hesitated to take advantage of the economic, political and legal benefits of being among the favorite “victims” of the tyrannical white patriarchy, there are those who rarely pass up an opportunity to slyly remind their progressive friends that, in many parts of the Islamic world, homosexuality is often punished with the death penalty and that all women are expected to humbly obey the men in their family. Still, while militant Islam is irreconcilable with the modern left, for pragmatic reasons, including shared hostility toward Israel, they continue to act as allies.
