Western dhimmitude peaking?

The universal and shocking hostility shown by Europeans against Israel (but it’s not only Europeans) as she seeks to defend herself from a Muslim jihadist army attacking it with rockets from Lebanon makes VFR reader Roger draw grim conclusions about the state of Europe. However, what Roger sees as primarily driven by anti-Semitism, I see as primarily driven by liberalism. He writes:

The Islamization of Europe has already largely occurred

The overwhelming reaction from Europe to Israel’s war with Hezbollah tells us a great deal about the state of Europe today. A truly democratic and truly Western country is blatantly attacked by an Islamic terrorist group no different from Al Qaeda which hates and is a sworn enemy of the West and which represents the very antithesis of Western values. Israel is in fact fighting for the West against an Islamic terrorist group that almost inevitably will be carrying out terrorist attacks in the West. Yet the predominant reaction coming from Europe is enormous hostility to the victim Israel who is seen as the aggressor for the crime of defending its people. Yet there is no such palpable hostility towards Hezbollah, Syria, or Iran. A major Norwegian paper even has a cartoon of the prime minister of Israel as a Nazi shooting innocent civilians.

What we see here is a complete inversion of reality where everything is seen as the exact opposite of what it actually is. This is a distortion of reality of delusional proportions. How can this be explained? These Europeans are not seeing reality clearly, because they see it through a preexisting schema of anti-Semitism where Jews are seen as evil malevolent aggressors and usurpers. And this is the very same mental pathology that drives Hezbollah’s attacks on Israel, that drives its masters in Iran, and that can be said to be a fundamental core feature of the Moslem Middle East today. Anyone in the West who succumbs to this pathology is powerless to see and act against the jihad against the West and in fact becomes an agent of that jihad. The greatest threat to the West today may be the ideological jihad which consists of the spreading of anti-Semitism throughout the world. This was officially inaugurated at the 2001 UN Durban conference after an Islamic conference in Iran. Yet almost no one with the exception of Bat Ye’or even sees or has any real understanding of this threat.

There has been much talk of the feared progressive Islamization of Europe. But Europeans are very unlikely ever to convert to Islam. However once they yield to anti-Semitism they become ideological soul mates of the Islamic world and are rendered utterly defenseless against the jihad, because they are obsessively caught up in fighting an imaginary enemy, the Jews, and are blind to their real enemy toward whom they feel an affinity. This bears some similarity to World War II and the Nazis. Even if someone was not German and did not accept ideas of German racial superiority, if he was anti-Semitic he became a collaborator with the Nazis. Even though the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was neither German nor had roots in Western Civilization he was on the same page as Hitler. The same is true today. European and American leftists have become collaborators and formed an alliance with the Islamic world in its jihad against the Jews as have anti-Semites on the right such as Patrick Buchanan. But they have also become agents of the jihad against their own Western civilization. That is also why today there a striking correlation between anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism. The pervasive and shocking degree of hostility towards Israel presently coming out of Europe for the crime of defending its people against Islamic terrorists shows that the Islamization of Europe has already largely occurred.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 29, 2006 07:35 AM | Send