We must show steely resolve against Islamism

We must show steely resolve against Islamism

By Gil Troy
Canadian Jewish News
April 12, 2006

In March, after Israel invaded a Palestinian prison in Jericho to apprehend the murderers of an Israeli cabinet minister, Palestinian “militants” went on a kidnapping spree. The targets, naturally, were westerners who help Palestinians. One Canadian social worker, Adam Budzanowski, said on video: “I was advised straight away that this action is not taken against me personally or against any other detainees.”

Budzanowski’s gentlemanly understanding might be understandable, considering the filming occurred at gunpoint. But the reaction of an American victim, Douglas Johnson, is incomprehensible. After being freed, Johnson said of his kidnappers, “They are angry over what is going on in Jericho. I feel sympathy with them.” News reports reinforced this seemingly logical reaction by noting that angry Palestinians accused Britain and the United States of complicity in Israel’s siege of the prison.

Putting aside Palestinians’ self-destructive targeting of Western do-gooders who are sympathetic to their cause, why is the West so complacent about such racism? Rejecting attempts to punish members of an entire group for the perceived crimes of particular individuals was one of the 20th century’s greatest moral achievements. Americans learned to recoil when Southern whites lynched a group of blacks, claiming that one black man had dishonoured a white woman. South Africans learned to question the assumption that if one person of colour happened to be ignorant or violent, all were. Germans learned about the evils of deeming one group “diseased” and deserving of eradication.

Yet the Islamist war against the West has returned such evil bigotry to the mainstream of world discourse. Intellectual idiots such as Johnson validate such thinking, while supposedly objective reporters make such twisted thinking seem logical by writing stories in a linear fashion. That so many mainstream media outlets deemed the Danish cartoons of Muhammad “offensive” – when most were benign – seemingly rationalized the racist attacks on Danes, Europeans, and westerners in general. A dozen cartoonists sketched the controversial drawings, yet hundreds of millions were targeted – even as most cowering Western media outlets suppressed the cartoons.

Such bigotry is a defining characteristic of the new, ugly Islamism seeking world domination and advocating mass murder. While U.S. President George W. Bush carefully salutes Islam as “a religion of peace” and only targets Islamofascists, the Islamofascists target westerners promiscuously, aggressively and shamelessly.

The Hamas charter declares war on all Jews. Osama Bin Laden’s fatwas target “Jews and Crusaders” – Islamist shorthand for all Christians. Iran’s president singles out Israel and the United States, while his mullahs and their fundamentalist colleagues worldwide vilify all westerners. Bruce Bawer’s terrifying new book, While Europe Slept, shows, in the words of its subtitle, “How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within” by exploiting European naivete.

While westerners rationalize each violent outburst – explaining away Palestinian suicide bombings by blaming Israel, 9/11 by blaming America, the fall riots in Paris by blaming the French, the cartoon jihad by blaming the Danes – the Islamists pursue an integrated strategy of world war. While westerners dither about a response, the Islamists snicker and move forward. Hamas fanatics must laugh when suckers like former U.S. president Jimmy Carter hail their “pragmatism.”

Recently, Iran’s former leading nuclear negotiator, Hassan Rowhani, admitted that while western diplomats chatted in Tehran, the Iranians installed critical nuclear bomb-making equipment at the Isfahan nuclear facility. “From the outset, the Americans kept telling the Europeans, ‘The Iranians are lying and deceiving you and they have not told you everything.’ The Europeans used to respond, ‘We trust them,’” Rowhani boasted in a speech to a closed meeting of leading Islamic clerics and academic.

“We trust them” reflects some of the western mind’s most noble impulses: the commitment to rationality, the instinctive empathy for others, and the assumption that we are all fundamentally similar. But “We trust them” must not become the West’s epitaph. Too many lovely westerners “trusted” Hitler for years until the Anschluss. Too many idealistic westerners “trusted” the Communists for decades, even after the Stalinist purges. Likewise, too many naïve Westerners seem to trust the Islamists today.

We need to see this hateful ideology for what it is. We need to work together to encourage moderate Muslims to stop the bigots while showing that the West is united, resolute, powerful, and ready to fight terrorism and repudiate Islamism. We must stop finding excuses for an integrated, hate-mongering, pathological ideology that threatens good people throughout the world.

Gil Troy is Professor of History at McGill University. His book, Why I am A Zionist: Israel, Jewish Identity and the Challenges of Today will be released in an expanded and revised edition next month.

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