Israel Matzav: The Something about Islam

The Something about Islam

Hugh Fitzgerald argues that Western Europeans are discovering Something about Islam, and when they finish discovering it, they will support Israel.

Things became very bleak for Israel in Western Europe. But now things are changing, and they are not changing because of anything the Israelis have done. They remain as inept as ever in the proper presentation of their own history, their own claims, their own rights, their own case. No, what has changed is that, over the last thirty years, the political and media elites of the countries of Western Europe allowed into their midst, into the midst of their countries, and their by-now long-suffering peoples, far too many, even millions, of Muslims. The behavior of those Muslims makes clear that behind that behavior is something else, a Total Belief-System, that is not susceptible of change, and that rests on the idea, inculcated by Qur'an, Hadith, and Sira, that between Believer and Unbeliever, Muslim and Infidel, a state of permanent war, though not always of open warfare, must and does exist. And the texts of Islam, the tenets of Islam, are coming into view -- slowly but surely. The behavior of Muslims themselves is by now obviously more threatening and intransigent than the behavior of any of the other many immigrant groups that have arrived in Western Europe.

They are most threatening, it seems, in those very countries, Denmark and the Netherlands, which have elevated Tolerance practically to the level of state religions. And since it is not the Chinese, not the Hindus, not the sub-Saharan but Christian black Africans, not the Filipinos or the South Americans, but always and everywhere the Muslims who are the cause of such trouble and anxiety, and since they are the cause of such trouble and anxiety for non-Muslims not in one, or two, or five countries of Western Europe, but absolutely everywhere that they go, that they live, in numbers large enough -- 2 or 5 will apparently do -- it has become clear that there is Something About Islam. It is that very Something that many inhabitants of Western Europe can no longer pretend does not exist. They are now determined to find out just exactly what that Something is.

As soon as the peoples of Western Europe come to realize what Islam is all about -- and they are being forced to realize, for the Muslims in their midst are doing the forcing -- they will, slowly, come to understand not the non-existent "plight" of the non-existent "Palestinian people." They will change, and change in favor of Israel. They will come to realize that, as they become aware of what is truly happening in their own countries. Those countries are now faced from within with what is a quite-unnecessary danger, that of Muslim populations that cannot, save at the edges, among the least-Muslim of Muslims, integrate, and that believe they have not only have a right but a duty to remove all obstacles to the spread, and then the dominance, of Islam. That goal will be, is being, pursued by all means. Those means include, in addition to terrorism and its ever-present threat, such means as the Money Weapon, campaigns of Da'wa, and demographic conquest (discussed openly among Muslims, and sometimes even, as by Boumediene at the U.N. in 1974, and Qaddafy a few years ago, Arab or other Muslim rulers). That goal requires the slow or rapid undoing of the political and legal institutions of Infidel nation-states, the undoing of social arrangements and understandings, the undoing of the very freedoms, and solicitousness for the individual, that characterize advanced Western democracies, and are regarded as the accomplishment of many centuries of thought.

And as they begin to better comprehend Islam, those Europeans will, necessarily, begin to realize as well that the war against Israel has no end and is unsusceptible of a "solution." For the Arab and Muslim claim, or the Arab Muslim claim, is not to be met, nor assuaged, by any reduction in Israel's size. Already absurdly tiny, Israel is now, in its current borders (including the "West Bank," which is the name the Jordanians gave to those parts of Judea and Samaria, part of the Mandate for Palestine that was always intended to be included in the tiny territory allocated for the Jewish National Home by the League of Nations), existing in a state of permanent peril that no other state must endure. For any of those other states to lecture or hector Israel on why it should surrender more territory, is both cruel and absurd. Once Islam is grasped, both that cruelty, and that absurdity, of such pressures and demands on Israel, will be clear.

I wish I could share Hugh's optimism that Israel might actually garner support from Western Europe. But the World's oldest hatred doesn't have a rational basis and it's not likely to go away that easily. To remind you all, the World was supposed to stop hating us once we had a Jewish state, because then we wouldn't just be a minority everyplace else. That didn't work out too well either.

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Israel Matzav: The Something about Islam