Waking up to the Islamist threat
Western leaders must take what Jihadists are saying seriously and respond accordingly.
Islamists mean it when they call for the destruction of Israel, the murder of Jews, death to America, and death to the West. People have trouble accepting this because it sounds crazy. It is a mistake not to believe them.
History shows us that ideas being crazy has never been an impediment to them being adopted. Adolf Hitler’s book, Mein Kampf, was dismissed as a madman’s rantings upon publication. Germany’s then-vibrant Jewish press ignored it, and even Germany’s Far Right newspapers paid it scant attention. Hitler, however, meant every word, and proved so. You cannot say the world was not warned.
In 2017, the United Arab Emirates’ foreign minister Abdullah Bin Zayed said: “There will come a day that we will see far more radical extremists and terrorists coming out of Europe because of lack of decision making, trying to be politically correct or assuming that they know the Middle East, and they know Islam, and they know the others far better than we do. And I’m sorry, but that’s pure ignorance.”
Judging by what we have seen on US university campuses, the problem is now as much in the US as in Europe. You cannot say we have not been warned.
Attribution projection bias and the West’s changed relationship with religion make it hard for the West to understand Islamism. Attribution projection bias is a heuristic in which we project how we think onto others. We assume others will act as we would in the same situation. Consider the run-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Even after Russia had amassed a large army on the Ukrainian border, people were saying it would not invade. Western leaders could not imagine attacking a neighboring state, so they assumed Russia would not do so either. This heuristic also explains why the West always gets the Middle East wrong, including Israel. It is a tribal region with non-Western norms.
Religion’s declining role in Western societies has been a net positive - because religion and politics go together like nitro and glycerin - but it also means people no longer know what it is like to believe something with such fervor that they are willing to kill and die for it.
People find it hard to accept that Jihadists have celestial concerns and presume that they must have some terrestrial grievance. Hamas has been extremely clever in understanding this. It has hidden behind the Palestinian cause for unlettered Western audiences when its sinister true aim is to build a Caliphate.
It is patronizing to tell others they do not mean what they say, and egotistical to think you know what they really want or mean. When Islamist and Far Left agitators call to “globalize the Intifada”, they are calling for global terror. More than a thousand Israelis were murdered in the Second Intifada, when various Palestinian factions (Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Fatah, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) blew up civilian targets including buses, nightclubs, pizza parlors, and open-air markets, in waves of sickening attacks.
Anyone from overseas calling for such violence should be deported. If they are citizens, they should be charged with inciting terror, expelled from university, and placed on a terrorist watch list. People who enable them, including faculty members, should be charged as accomplices. Outside agitators must be arrested. People have a right to peaceable protest, but calling for murder and terrorism is not peaceable, nor is targeting Jews.
The 2001 attack on the New York World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the 2004 Madrid train bombings, and the 2015 attacks Paris attacks were Islamist attacks from abroad. These Islamists are now in the US, Europe, and other Western counties, and in significant numbers. The 2017 Manchester Arena bombing and the 2019 London Bridge stabbing offer a preview of what may be coming.
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