Even before the Israelis reacted militarily to the sadistic massacre of more than a thousand people, including hundreds of young people attending a rock music festival in the desert, exultant mobs filled the streets of cities in the Middle East, Europe and North America to celebrate what they took to be a perhaps definitive defeat of the “Zionist entity” at the hands of Hamas. Although the majority of those celebrating the terrorist pogrom were Muslim, it also included many “progressives” who believe that Israel, the only Jewish state on the planet, is a white, colonialist, racist, genocidal oppressive country that deserves to be destroyed. Needless to say, it would never occur to them to treat any other people in the same way. For them, Jews are different.
To no one’s surprise, after the Israelis began the counterattack on Gaza with the purpose of annihilating Hamas, the mass demonstrations of hate became even larger and more bellicose; who had gloated over the cruelty of the murderers of civilian adults and babies, burning them alive, and raping women before stabbing them to death, began to demand a “humanitarian truce” to save the “innocent” Palestinians trapped in Gaza, knowing that Hamas would take advantage of it to regroup.
They had the enthusiastic support of figures such as António Guterres, the Secretary General of the UN. The thing is that a joke that has been repeated a lot lately no longer motivates smiles; When a United Nations official suggests that the international organization have a soccer team that would represent the human race, they ask him: who would they play against? The answer, of course, is against Israel.
Likewise, in Western capitals the idea was resurrected that the only solution to the conflict between Jews and Arabs in what was the Holy Land would be the creation of a Palestinian State with well-defined borders, a State in which, the spokespersons of the Palestinian Authority, there would be no room for any Jews; Under the laws in force in the area dominated by the Mahmoud Abbas regime, selling land to a Jew is a capital crime. Those attracted to the notion of an independent Palestine overlook a small detail: a significant proportion of Muslims have no interest in adding another Arab state to the twenty that already exist; What he wants is to kill all the Jews.
For understandable reasons, since there are tens of millions of Muslims in Europe and several million in the United States, Western leaders are reluctant to take the religious factor into account. Rather, like George W. Bush in the days following the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York, they say again and again that there is no link between Islam and the many atrocities committed in its name.
Accustomed as they are to taking faith for a private matter that is usually innocuous, it is difficult for them to understand that for some, starting with pious Muslims, it is the most important thing there is, which is why militant Islam has become so influential. in an immense region that extends from Xinjiang in China to the Atlantic Ocean. While the Chinese have not hesitated to intern those who might be tempted by Islamism in re-education camps, the Westerners have allowed them to concentrate in increasingly closed enclaves that resist integration into the host countries. In France, President Emmanuel Macron is far from alone in fearing that Islamic separatism could lead to civil war.
If Israel were a Muslim country, no one would give a damn what it would do in Gaza to put an end to the bloodthirsty Hamas madmen. In Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Iraq and other countries, millions of people have been brutally murdered for sectarian reasons without mass protests in European metropolises or North American cities. Instead, the spectacle provided by Jews struggling to survive in a part of the world where religious fanaticism is routine has been more than enough to provoke countless hate marches in which, as happened in Sydney, Australia, can be heard cries of “gas to the Jews” and other equally barbaric slogans.
The fact is that anti-Semitism (in the non-linguistic sense of the word Semitic) was not born with the French who persecuted Alfred Dreyfus or with the Nazis but rather has deep roots in both the Western and Muslim worlds, where it is enshrined in the very Quran and in sayings attributed to Muhammad. Well, thanks to the strong Islamic presence in Europe and the popularity in prestigious universities of “identity politics” that divides humanity between groups of vile oppressors and good oppressed, the two traditions have merged.
Israel is faced with a far from simple dilemma. If he chooses to seek to eliminate the Hamas jihadists while strictly respecting what Europeans and North Americans insist are “the rules of war” that would prohibit him from endangering civilians, he will lose. In addition to letting Hamas and other equally ferocious gangs continue attacking it, it would “radicalize” the supposedly moderates who have until now been impressed by the Jewish state’s military capabilities. On the other hand, if Israel operates according to the ruthless rules of its neighborhood, it will win but will run the risk of being abandoned to its fate by its Western allies, starting with the United States, where the elites want to convince themselves that the era of The total wars ended in 1945.
The sad truth is that, for Israel, any form of pacifism would be suicidal. Their leaders understand very well that if their enemies “choose peace”, all the countries in the region, and their inhabitants, would benefit enormously, but that if they did so unilaterally, they would soon be massacred. More to the point, they know that while Islamists can survive dozens of battlefield defeats, just one would put an end to Israel and its Jewish inhabitants. This is an obvious reality that many have refused to recognize. There were even Israelis, like many who were raped, shot, beheaded or kidnapped by jihadists, who believed that, with good will and daily examples of mutual aid, they would be able to live with their neighbors in Gaza; among the victims of the pogrom of October 7, there is the illusion thus assumed. Despite our regret, the old Roman aphorism still retains all its validity; “si vis pacem, para bellum”; If you want peace, prepare for war.
This is something that many Westerners raised in a sui generis era in which their own countries did not seem to be threatened by the conflicts that arose in the rest of the planet have forgotten, but in the United States and Europe governments have begun to understand that it would be in their best interest assume a less utopian stance because history has not yet come to an end. Thanks to the war in Ukraine, they realized that their own arms industries, which in theory should be many times more productive than the Russian ones, were not in a position to supply an ally with everything it desperately needed, which, of course, , disturbed them.
More importantly, what happened in Israel warned Europeans and Americans that local Islamists and their many sympathizers might decide to emulate their Hamas co-religionists and that they had better take the danger they pose very seriously. The thing is that, far from fearing death, jihadists believe it to be glorious since it guarantees them a place in paradise, hence the proliferation of suicide terrorists. However irrational such feelings may seem from the perspective of “normal” people, until relatively recently they were shared by almost all of the ancestors of today’s Europeans. It is for these reasons that, for the first time, European leaders such as German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who cannot be described as “ultra-right”, are speaking of the need to expel “on a large scale” those immigrants who refuse to assimilate into developing countries. who hope to continue living.
The revival of absolutist Islam, which for a couple of centuries seemed to be receding into the past, has been spurred by the sense that Western civilization is in retreat. It is no longer so obvious to Muslims that Europe and its American progeny are the future of the human species. Not only the immigrants who have settled in what they called “the war house” inhabited by those who have not yet submitted to Islam, but also other Muslims, contrast their own forceful certainties with the doubts and confusion that afflict Europeans. and Americans. They also feel that by insisting that war is a primitive practice that they are unwilling to tolerate, which is why they fled Afghanistan and other parts of the world, Westerners have weakened themselves to the point that they would be unable to confront them. While those who think this way are likely to have been mistaken, the temptation to renew the holy war against infidels is proving too difficult for many Islamists to resist.
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