You Can’t Defend Israel Unless You Talk About Islam

What do the stabbings in Israel, the assaults on Hindus in Bangladesh, the Muslim mobs roaming English cities and the massacres of Christians in Nigeria all have in common?

The politically correct answer is nothing.

And that’s why the politically correct answer condones, justifies or ignores the violence.

Islamic attacks on non-Muslim majorities in India, Europe, America or Israel are justified as resistance by the oppressed, but violence by Muslim majorities against non-Muslim minorities in Indonesia, Nigeria and Bangladesh were justified by claims that the Muslim majority was economically disenfranchised. Muslim violence is always excused by false claims of victimhood.

Within Islam, Jihads are billed as a campaign to unify the world under the Islamic ‘Ummah’, to impose Sharia law on all mankind, and eventually usher in a global caliphate. Externally however they are tethered to local and political causes of groups that happen to be Muslim.

Muslims see them as Islamic wars, non-Muslims are told that they’re everything else but.

Patterns define how we react to things. The question is what is the pattern?

Is the pattern that disparate groups of violent men shouting “Allahu Akbar” are killing people around the world for socioeconomic and political reasons having nothing to do with Islam?

Or is this a religious war?

Hamas launched Oct 7 on the final days of the Jewish High Holy Days after originally scheduling them for the first day of Passover. What the world knows as Oct 7, Hamas and its supporters called ‘Al-Aqsa Flood’ after the mosque that the Muslim conquerors planted on the Jewish Temple Mount. Anti-Israel rallies use the ‘flood’ term such as ‘Flood Brooklyn for Gaza’.

Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, who was recently assassinated, told the International Union of Muslim Scholars in Qatar and the “sons of our Islamic nation” that “this is the battle for Jerusalem and the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and not the battle of the Palestinian people, or Gaza.”

This runs completely counter to the official narrative that the entire war is about Gaza.

The reams of media and expert commentary discuss Oct 7 in terms of everything except Islam.

To do that they had to ignore what Hamas was saying just as they had to previously ignore what Al Qaeda and ISIS were saying. To Hamas, Oct 7 was a religious war. The failure to recognize that is a catastrophic setback to Israel’s strategy and cause as it was to America’s after 9/11.

After Oct 7, Israel, like the Bush administration, called on a liberal consensus that no longer existed, and tried to rally public opinion against “barbarism” and “savagery”. But neither of those are motives. Rather than acknowledging what the enemy was and trying to build a coalition with other countries struggling against Islamic terrorism, Israel tried to appeal to liberals. And lost.

Israel had failed to define the enemy. Terrorist supporters stepped into that vacuum. Their narrative, easily familiar from even the briefest exposure to media and social media, is that Israel was oppressing a minority that had struck back as an act of resistance and liberation.

This is the same excuse used to justify religious violence by Islamic groups around the world against not only Jews, but Christians, Hindus, Buddhists and numerous cultures and religions.

The big lie that Islamic violence is socioeconomic and not religious, local not global, only works when no one talks about Islam or recognizes the larger pattern of Islamic violence for a thousand years that is being perpetrated on nearly every continent and against every culture.

Are Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, and Atheists all the problem? Or is Islam the issue?

When we fail to ask this fundamental question, we lose the argument.

The enemy had once again defined Israel following the familiar pattern of two centuries of class warfare rhetoric and a century of orientalist third world liberation theory. The Israelis were the English in Africa, the Spanish in South America and the French in Algiers. They were imperialists and colonialists being driven out by the heroic native resistance fighters.

Israel could have told another story. A tale of Islamic imperialist armies roaring out of the desert, exterminating entire civilizations, wiping out their cultures and religions, and selling their children as slaves. It could have connected the dots to the oil-rich Muslim states like Qatar that traffic in slaves and fund Jihadist conquests around the world. It should have told the story that the Jews were the last indigenous people in the Middle East standing in the way of a new Islamic empire.

But that story was too dangerous and controversial. It would risk alienating Israel’s last liberal supporters. The Biden administration and the EU would completely turn on it. The Abraham Accords would fall apart. Instead, Israel tried to once again tell a story of a multicultural liberal society, a place where gay men can hold hands even if one of them is Muslim, standing up to “barbarism”. It’s the same story that America, Europe and every liberal western society have been telling themselves and each other after every Islamic terrorist attack.

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle,” Sun Tzu had said.

Western nations choose not to know themselves or the enemy and so we continue to lose.

How could Israel fail to predict Oct 7? How could we fail to predict 9/11? How can so many nations fail to predict each new Islamic terrorist attack? Because they do not know the enemy.

When civilized people meet with soft-spoken terrorist emissaries who wear fine suits, they assume that they can be dealt with because they’re not “barbaric” or “savage”. They negotiate peace accords and ceasefires with them. They assume that their word can be trusted.

For two years, Hamas kept the deal it had negotiated until it was ready to attack and carry out barbaric and savage atrocities mandated by its religion. No amount of economic benefits from the ceasefire dissuaded it from the attack. Predicting the attack was impossible for those who understood Hamas as a political and social movement rather than a religious movement.

Islamic terrorism is always unpredictable if you ignore the Islamic part of the equation. It’s also inexplicable, impossible to defeat and impossible to even win an argument against.

Calling Muslim forces “barbaric” or “savages” is unconvincing rhetoric that explains nothing.

A tiny minority of criminals might break with society to commit crimes, but millions of people, whether in Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, the USSR or the Muslim world will not engage in deviant behavior: they will commit atrocities only because they believe they are right.

Israel lost the argument long ago because it allowed the conflict to be defined as a local issue. And it’s not a local issue but as Hamas and many terrorist leaders have asserted, a global one.

Why is what happens in a tiny strip of land in a relative backwater a global issue?

Because it’s not about Gaza and it’s not about Israel; it’s about Islam.

No one would care about Gaza if it were really a local territorial conflict, but every conflict between Muslims and non-Muslims is a religious war that draws in Muslims worldwide.

That is why Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh could call on the religious support of the International Union of Muslim Scholars in Qatar. That’s why Muslim mobs rallying in support of Hamas vandalized Washington D.C. and are assaulting random British people in the UK.

It’s not a local conflict. It’s not a ‘Palestinian’ conflict. It’s an Islamic religious war.

The Islamic invasion, colonization and subjugation of non-Muslim nations and peoples is the foundational mission of Islam. It was the means by which Mohammed brought Islam into being. But for political palatability, the Muslim colonists are disguised as a ‘native’ population.

In Israel’s West Bank and Gaza, the Arab Muslim colonists who had invaded and ethnically cleansed the Jewish population were rebranded as Palestinians. The Muslims who had brutally purged the Hindu population of Kashmir became the ‘Kashmiris’. And the campaigns were reduced to somehow irresolvable territorial disputes between a majority and a Muslim minority.

But why are these territorial disputes irresolvable? Because they’re not about territory. Land can be negotiated, but a religious dispute in which one side’s religion tells it to kill the other cannot.

That’s why no matter how much territory Israel has given up, the fighting only gets worse.

Diplomats and the media blame Israel for not giving up enough territory, but where has a conflict between non-Muslims and Muslim terrorists ever been resolved except by force? Democratic elections, foreign aid, territorial concessions have been tried with no success.

The failures are never blamed on the Islamic terrorists only on those who resisted them. The terrorists were the oppressed and the onus was always on the oppressors to change that.

Locked into the same spiral of failure, civilized nations continue trying to appease their way out of a clash of civilizations. The pattern is right in front of them, but they refuse to see it.

After 9/11, those in the government and the defense community who knew it was a religious war told the rest of us that we had to keep quiet about it to avoid escalating the conflict. But lying about the War on Terror being a religious war did not fool them: it fooled us. Western nations committed to the lie until they could no longer see the pattern that was killing them.

There’s a good deal at stake in the question of pattern recognition for Israel.

Israel cannot win the argument by contending that it has been trying and failing to compromise with the so-called ‘Palestinian’ people who for some unaccountable reason won’t negotiate. A minimalist argument cannot defeat a maximalist position. Agreeing to peace negotiations did not give Israel the moral high ground: it was an admission of guilt that destroyed it. The Islamic refusal to compromise in the decades since validated their position and their terrorism.

The complete failure of the liberal establishment to see that has brought us to this point.

Appeasing and negotiating with Islamic terrorists does not discredit them when they in turn refuse to negotiate, make concessions or keep their word. It only discredits the appeasers and locks them into a disastrous cycle of concessions that empowers the terrorists, but never addresses the fundamental issue which is not territorial, national or socioeconomic.The core issue is religious. And a religious issue can’t be solved with land swaps.

To win the argument, Israel must reject the false claim that it is involved in a territorial and national dispute with a local ‘Palestinian’ minority and instead correctly define this as one of the flashpoints in a global religious war between Islam and the rest of the world. These flashpoints have already touched every single major power, America, Europe, Russia and China, and every continent, Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas, and every major and many minor religions.

Israel does not have to be alone in this fight. None of us do. We have to see the pattern.

Treating Islamic terrorism as a local problem doesn’t actually isolate it: it isolates us.

When we recognize that we are all in this together, that our problems are not local, but global, then we have some hope of standing together against the greatest conflict of this century.

The decision to tell the truth about the war we are in is both difficult and necessary. Israel is the canary in the coal mine in more ways than one. No major country has told the truth plainly and clearly. Decades of mumbling about “moderates”, “democracy”, “misunderstanding Islam”, “root causes” and “extremism” led us to one defeat after another in the War on Terror.

Time is running out. Telling the truth doesn’t guarantee victory, but living in a fantasy world ensures defeat.

There is no way to defend the cause of Israel (or any free nation) against Islamic terrorism without talking about Islam. Without seeing the larger pattern, every conflict will be local, Israel will be depicted as a bully beating up on a weaker Muslim minority, and no amount of photos of Israeli beaches and gay bars, Bedouin IDF soldiers and Hebrew U students in hijabs will change that. That brand of liberal ‘hasbara’ has been tried and failed because it is not the solution.

The liberal reading of the world is the problem. That is why liberal nations have fallen. No liberal nation has been willing to stand for its own people against the Islamic invasion. Why would it stand up for Israel? Tolerance, multiculturalism and integration, foundational to Israeli ‘hasbara’, are exactly why Western nations will not defend themselves and similarly reject Israel’s defense.

Israeli resistance to Islamic terrorism is not the subject of admiration in Europe, but humiliation. It serves as a bad example. Prime Minister Netanyahu’s insistence on total victory turns back the clock to before Obama eliminated the entire idea of victory from our cultural vocabulary. The more Israel wins, the more it loses Western liberals who believe that victory is reactionary.

To win, Israel must reframe the conflict. Some half century ago, the Islamist-Marxist alliance reframed the conflict between Israel and its Arab Muslim neighbors from a struggle between one lone country standing up to a regional evil empire to a rogue state oppressing a minority group.

Israel must uncompromisingly reframe the conflict back to where it began. And there is more at stake than just its own existence. The future of civilization rests on whether we will all see the pattern, the great bloody wave rising above us, or whether we will go on pretending it’s a drop.

Oct 7 is not just in Israel, it’s in India, America, Russia, Africa and in Europe. Our governments have lied to us for too long and fooled us into not seeing the pattern that is killing us.

Unless we see the pattern, Islam will drown civilization in its own blood.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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