Sixteen Jews innocently celebrating Hanukkah are shot dead at Bondi Beach, Australia. The attackers are Muslims.
Three Americans, including two National Guard members, are murdered in Syria. The killer is a Muslim fanatic member of the Islamic State group.
Hanukkah celebrations are besieged in Amsterdam, in the Netherlands, but Jews taking part are saved from injury by massed police. The masked marauders, in their hundreds, are Muslim immigrants waving Palestinian flags.
EDITORIAL: THE LESSON OF BONDI BEACH
Thousands of Christian villages in Nigeria are wiped out, and their churches burned, sometimes with their congregations inside. The perpetrators are Muslims.
Paris cancels Christmas festivities that have been held on the Champs-Élysées each December for decades because violent thugs and looters plan to be there and do their worst. The predators are mostly Muslims from the city suburbs.
German police foil a terrorist plan to attack a Christmas market in Bavaria. The intention of the five apprehended plotters had been to ram a car into shoppers and kill as many as possible. They, like the doctor who did the same thing in France last year, are Muslims.
Many thousands of young English girls are systematically tyrannized and repeatedly raped over decades. The guilty men are Muslims.
One could go on forever, for such crimes are committed almost as fast as one can write them down. But you get the picture. Whenever you hear news that makes national headlines involving murder, mass vandalism, stabbings, riot, a violent plot set in motion or thwarted, high-profile lawlessness, or any egregious violation of our civilizational norms, you know immediately that there is a high chance of the offender being a Muslim immigrant or the Muslim son of a Muslim immigrant.
To respond this way does not involve a great leap but a tiny step of logic. It is common sense, not racial or ethnic prejudice. It is the result of a normal, instantaneous mental assessment of probabilities based on facts and trends of which anyone living in Western society is aware. Even those who have increasingly and preposterously argued over several decades that “diversity is our strength” and who adopt a pose of willful ethnic blindness cannot but suspect the same thing, though they wouldn’t dream of admitting it.
The Bondi Beach massacre on Sunday has driven this point home forcefully because Australia is on the opposite side of the planet from almost everywhere else. If Islamists are committing atrocities there, at the bottom of the world, it’s clear no place on Earth is free of their menaces. The mayhem they bring is planetary.
I’m not the first to point out that this is what “globalize the intifada” means. This is significant because it points ineluctably to several conclusions that one must draw about Muslim predation.
To arrive at these, let us start by remembering that the original intifadas involved Palestinian Muslims murdering and terrorizing Jews in Israel, supposedly to fight their oppression and press the case for Palestinian statehood. But the breakout of the intifada from the Levant to cover the whole world demonstrates what has always been true — the Intifadas and other Muslim violence against Israel is not really about Israel and Zionism, the so-called “occupation,” or self-determination.
The Palestinian cause has always been about Islamism, not about land or a homeland. That is true from way back in the 1920s, when it was started by Adolf Hitler’s friendly acquaintance and ally, Amin al Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem. He encouraged the murder of Jews in the Mandate for Palestine not because there was any popular yearning for a Palestinian Arab state — no one thought that way until the late 1960s — but because he and the Islamism that inspired him wanted Jews dead and gone.
The sudden fact of the intifada’s globalization today shows that it is about unleashing horror on Jews everywhere. In this country, restaurants owned by Americans who happen to be Jewish are surrounded by howling mobs who inveigh against customers, businesses owned by Americans who happen to be Jewish are vandalized and graffitied with swastikas and other paraphernalia of hatred, and the homes of Americans who happen to be Jewish are besieged by protesters who intimidate the occupants. No effort is made to conceal that the motivation is Jew-hatred, not anti-Zionism — no more, indeed, than it was by marchers in Paris a few years ago who chanted, “Hamas! Hams! Jews to the gas!” Jews don’t have to be Israelis; they can be any nationality, and they are always the enemy.
But, as is made plain by the examples of Nigeria, and of Americans murdered in Syria, and of attacks on Christmas markets and other celebrations, the targets are not just Jews either. The first enemies are Jews, yes, but Christians are enemies, too. What we are seeing is not simply a Muslim war and a global movement against Jews, but a Muslim war and a global movement against all non-Muslims.
Sometimes Islamists find it convenient to conceal their true aims behind bromides about self-determination and statehood, or beneath academic falsehoods about colonial settlement. But these are flimsy pretexts often tossed aside. Muslim terrorists and their sympathizers in our midst willingly proclaim their intention to overthrow non-Muslim civilizations, and to subjugate or kill all non-Muslims.
Ten years ago, when the Islamic State group was on the rise, we were subjected to gruesome videos on social media of Muslim terrorists beheading infidels. The beheadings began as long ago as 2002, when Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was decapitated on video.
One might expect that such a horror would do more to alienate than to attract. But it drew more adherents to Islamist extremism. The horrors perpetrated by the Islamic State group did the same thing a decade after Pearl’s murder. So did the massacre of 1,200 people in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. The killers appeared to be powerful and so attracted followers.
It is impossible to know how many radicalized Muslims would go so far as those who set such an appalling example, although it is reasonable to think many men in their teens and 20s would. But even if many would not be prepared to do anything quite so grisly and would not undertake an act so personally one-on-one, there are almost certainly more who are prepared to drive trucks into crowds, and yet more willing to beat and intimidate non-Muslims celebrating at festivals of their religious calendar.
As the intifada has globalized, it has naturally acquired adherents who are willing to be violent, disorderly, and otherwise lawless, even though they might not stomach committing the worst atrocities. This, if you can get over the civilizational shock of accepting that barbarism is attractive, is what you’d expect — as it has globalized and spread, the intifada is diluted a little among some of its practitioners. More radical Islamists are willing to lend a hand or a fist, willing to throw a firebomb or speed their car. It is behavior that is, or should be, utterly unacceptable in our civilization, but it does not stretch credulity quite so far as did the savagery of 10 years ago.
In the immediate aftermath of the Bondi Beach massacre, and some of the other attacks committed or planned against Jewish and Christian seasonal events, there was speculation that global Islamism was engaged in a coordinated test of Western resolve, because it planned something really big, perhaps when Easter and Passover coincide next year on April 5.
Maybe and maybe not. But it is a distinction without a difference. Whether or not there is coordination or deliberate preparation, feeble responses by Western governments clearly encourage the enemies of our civilization to escalate their attacks against us.
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As long as Western governments refuse to call Muslim violence what it is, violent Muslims will know that we lack the resolve to defend ourselves. Australia’s government responded to the Bondi Beach outrage with gun control and sensitivity training. It is at best a combination of deflection and irrelevance, and at worst, it will contribute to the next massacre. It is squinting to avoid seeing a pattern.
If our governments pretend that all people, all ethnicities, from all countries can come together in multicultural harmony, even while we encourage arrivals to avoid assimilation and retain their vibrant cultures, violent Muslims will know they can dial up their aggression, and ours will continue to retreat. As long as we keep worrying about Islamophobia as though it were a real thing, as if it were an irrational gut fear rather than rational antipathy, we will show that we would rather be victims and surrender than speak truth and preserve our civilization.
