The Jihad against Jews Is a War against the West

By Andrew C. McCarthy

Saturday, November 09, 2024

 

There is a lesson to be drawn from Thursday night’s sharia-supremacist pogrom against Jews — not Zionists, Jews — in the Islamic Emirate of Amsterdam, formerly known as the capital of the Netherlands, the beating heart of transnational-progressive, multicultural, post-sovereign Europe. It’s a lesson I’ve been writing about here for over 20 years, but now is an opportune time for a refresher, with Donald Trump’s election as president having opened the possibility of a new American national-security footing.

 

This is not just a jihad against Jews. The war against Israel is the war of Jew-hatred in Europe. Russia’s war against Ukraine is materially supported by Iran, the jihadist maestro of the war against Israel. The Biden-Harris administration’s woeful failure of deterrence has ushered America’s principal geopolitical adversaries, China and Russia, into positions of influence in the Middle East; they see sharia supremacists, including but not limited to their partners in Tehran, as major assets in their anti-Western project.

 

The jihad against Jews is a war against the West.

 

The savage attacks in Amsterdam were blood-boiling but not surprising. Europe has been overrun by Muslim “migrants” from sharia-supremacist strongholds. The Netherlands, a country of about 17 million, estimates that only about 5 percent of the population is Muslim. But that population, centered in Holland’s major cities — Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and The Hague — punches way above its weight. No one really knows how robust it is.

 

Beginning in the 1960s, the Netherlands welcomed Turkish and Moroccan immigrants as guest workers. In the 21st century, the country, like the rest of Europe, has been inundated by “political refugees” from Syria, Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan, and Iran. One 2008 study by a pro-immigration Dutch NGO found that, even by then, well over half the “youth” population in Amsterdam was non-Western. That was 16 years ago. Those kids are now fighting-age adults, and they’ve got lots of company thanks to the major surge in “migration” beginning in 2015, which brought millions more Middle Eastern Muslims to Europe.

 

On October 14, 2023 — just a week after Hamas carried out its barbaric attacks in Israel, in which over 1,200 were killed, hundreds more maimed, raped, and otherwise wounded, and 250 abducted — 20,000 pro-Hamas demonstrators marched on Amsterdam. Ever since, protests have been the soundtrack of Dutch life. They are also why Geert Wilders’s Freedom Party (PVV) stunningly triumphed in the November 2023 general election. That Dutch populist-nationalist party is opposed without apology to sharia supremacism, open borders, and the post-national European political project.

 

The PVV’s increasing popularity owes to that project, which created the conditions for Thursday’s mayhem.

 

The jihadist target of opportunity was a soccer game at the Johan Cruyff Arena between Maccabi Tel Aviv, a popular Israeli club, and Ajax, Amsterdam’s team. In a methodically planned attack, gangs of jihadists took positions at hotels and train stations, armed with clubs and knives. The jihadists hunted for Jews, setting upon the ones who obviously appeared Jewish, and interrogating others — seizing passports, checking whether those they detained were Hebrew speakers. The beatings that resulted were cruel — many of them captured on X/Twitter and other social-media platforms (see this harrowing account from the StopAntisemitism account). There are reports (see, e.g., here) of some Jews being thrown into canals, others being swiped at by cars bearing Palestinian flags, still others being attacked by gangs the night before the game, and hundreds huddled in locked hotel rooms in fear of being mauled.

 

As has become habitual, the government and its police provided negligible security. Miraculously, no one was killed, though several were hospitalized. Local Jewish communities quickly organized carpools and security groups to evacuate those under siege. The Israeli government, in the midst of Iran’s seven-front annihilationist war against the Jewish state, ensured that planes were dispatched to bring Israelis home this weekend.

 

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu observed that the Amsterdam attack took place just before the 86th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the Nazi pogrom against German Jews (November 9–10, 1938). I’d say it’s past time to relearn — or in the case of Western leaders, in their willful blindness, to learn for the first time — some more recent history. Two concepts in particular: voluntary apartheid and the conscious avoidance known as “countering violent extremism.”

 

As I explained in these pages over a dozen years ago, voluntary apartheid is the sharia-supremacist strategy for conquest in Europe and North America. It was notably championed by Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, who, until his death at age 96 in 2022, was the world’s most influential Sunni-sharia jurisprudent, the authority most revered by the Muslim Brotherhood and its Palestinian branch, Hamas. Voluntary apartheid aims to kill the West by means of its own lax immigration policies — which have devolved into collapsing border security.

 

Qaradawi encouraged Muslims to migrate en masse to Europe and North America, and there to gravitate into enclaves. When the Islamic population reached a critical mass — which needn’t be very big, 5 percent is more than enough (as the Bolsheviks could tell you) — Muslims would put pressure on the local authorities to recognize the de facto autonomy they’d aggressively established. The Muslims’ demand would be to conduct their affairs in accordance with sharia, Islam’s scripturally rooted law and societal plan, which is antithetical to Western concepts of liberty, equality, private property, privacy, etc. By convincing “Western leaders and decision-makers of our right to live according to our faith — ideologically, legislatively, and ethically,” Qaradawi reasoned that Muslims would “traverse an immense barrier in our quest for an Islamic state.” Under the plan, the burgeoning Islamic enclaves grow in number, spread in terms of territory controlled, and eventually connect. The indigenous Westerners in and around these enclaves either conform or leave. For all intents and purposes, sharia supremacists become the sovereign.

 

Importantly, such enclaves are crucibles of jihadism. As the local Muslim elders become more audacious, and the Western authorities are increasingly cowed, it becomes a cinch for jihadist groups to indoctrinate, recruit, train, raise funds, and plot. A standard target of their plotting is Jews, hatred for whom is scripturally based — regardless of whether Western progressives acknowledge this remorseless fact. That’s why we’re seeing pogroms in European cities. But the target is the West as a whole. The jihad is not just something that happens to Zionists. They’re coming for everyone. “From the river to the sea” is just the appetizer; the entrée is “Death to America.”

 

Voluntary apartheid is the core of dawa, sharia supremacism’s extortionate form of proselytism. Dawa preaches that calls for assimilation are “crimes against humanity” — as proclaimed by Turkey’s strongman Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, a champion of Hamas who may be the most consequential vector of fundamentalist Islam’s campaign against Europe. Dawa pressure has induced Western progressives to join with their Islamist allies in branding all critical examination of Islam — and in particular, critical examination of sharia supremacism, the fundamentalist political program — as “Islamophobia.” We’re to equate this fraudulent concept with racism. (To be clear, there exists hatred of Muslims just as there is hatred of Jews and other religious groups. “Islamophobia” is something else: a term used by demagogues designed to insulate sharia supremacism from study and inquiry.)

 

For those with eyes willing to see, there is an unmistakable thread that runs from the eradication of border security to mass illegal immigration to the voluntary apartheid practiced by fundamentalist Muslims. If you think what’s happening in Amsterdam, London, Berlin, Paris, Rome, Madrid, and Malmö can’t happen here, you’re not paying attention. It has already started happening.

 

Which brings us to “countering violent extremism.” This was the Obama-Biden administration strategy that supplanted intelligence-based counterterrorism.

 

In the post-9/11 era, even if the Bush 43 administration was overly concerned about the sensitivities of Islamist organizations (many of them Muslim Brotherhood tentacles), law-enforcement and intelligence agencies still quietly went about the business of monitoring domestic bastions of fundamentalist Islam. The government was also explicit about Iran’s role as a revolutionary jihadist regime that was (and remains) the world’s chief sponsor of anti-American terrorism.

 

The big transnational-progressive thinkers of the Obama era admonished us that this mindset was more a catalyst of forcible attacks than a defense against them. They transformed counterterrorism into “countering violent extremism” — eschewing even the word terrorism as Islamophobic. (We’re not supposed to notice scriptures in which Muslims are commanded to “strike terror into the hearts of the unbelievers” — see, e.g., Quran, 3:151–52.)

 

The thinking was that any idea or set of ideas, taken to an extreme, can lead to violence; ergo, police focus on interpretations of Islam as an igniter of violence was likely to cause violence — Muslim resentment against being singled out, it was said, was more dangerous than any Islamic ideology could be. As always, we were the problem, not the people who were indoctrinated to hate us.

 

Our law-enforcement and intelligence apparatus was thus instructed to “de-link” efforts to prevent attacks from a focus on radicalization in Muslim communities. The Obama-Biden administration, with input from its Islamist advisers, purged the government lexicon of references to such terms as jihad and ousted instructors who’d previously lectured our law-enforcement, intelligence, and military personnel in the beliefs and objectives of sharia supremacism.

 

Willful blindness had been a dereliction of duty; in the Obama era it was transformed into official policy. Islam was projected as solely a “religion of peace” (as if peace were the creed’s only tenet) such that we were to regard terrorist attacks as “anti-Islamic activity” (a construct I’ve often mocked over the years as our bien pensant officials’ creation of “an Islam of their very own”).

 

A nation cannot be protected by lying to itself about whether it has enemies and averting its eyes from the objectives and tactics of those enemies. Our constitutional veneration of religious liberty is not a rationale for ignoring a totalitarian, anti-American political ideology — sharia supremacism — that cloaks its aggression in the guise of religion. Israel has known this all along, and for responding rationally and competently to our mutual enemies, it has earned the scorn of Western progressives. These Big Thinkers’ strategy to counter “violent extremism” gave us this week’s Amsterdam pogrom.

 

It will be President Trump’s most essential duty to assemble a national-security team that recognizes the war against the West for what it is. The Constitution is not a suicide pact, and it does not require us to host non-Americans whose principles are counter-constitutional and whose aim is conquest.