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First
the terrorists of the Middle East went after the Israelis. From
1967 we witnessed 40 years of bombers, child murdering, airline
hijacking, suicide murdering, and gratuitous shooting. We in the
West usually cried crocodile tears, and then came up with all sorts
of reasons to allow such Middle Eastern killers a pass.
Yasser
Arafat, replete with holster and rants at the U.N., had become a
“moderate” and was thus free to steal millions of his
good-behavior money. If Hamas got European cash, it would become
reasonable, ostracize its “military wing,” and cease its
lynching and vigilantism.
When some tried to explain that Wars 1-3 (1947, 1956, 1967) had
nothing to do with the West Bank, such bothersome details fell on
deaf ears.
When it was pointed out that Germans were not blowing up Poles
to get back lost parts of East Prussia nor were Tibetans sending
suicide bombers into Chinese cities to recover their country, such
analogies were caricatured.
When the call for a “Right of Return” was making the
rounds, few cared to listen that over a half-million forgotten Jews
had been cleansed from Syria, Iraq, and Egypt, and lost billions
in property.
When the U.N. and the EU talked about “refugee camps,”
none asked why for a half-century the Arab world could not build
decent housing for its victimized brethren, or why 1 million Arabs
voted in Israel, but not one freely in any Arab country.
The security fence became “The Wall,” and evoked slurs
that it was analogous to barriers in Korea or Berlin that more often
kept people in than out. Few wondered why Arabs who wished to destroy
Israel would mind not being able to live or visit Israel.
In any case, anti-Semitism, oil, fear of terrorism — all that
and more fooled us into believing that Israel’s problems were
confined to Israel. So we ended up with a utopian Europe favoring
a pre-modern, terrorist-run, Palestinian thugocracy over the liberal
democracy in Israel. The Jews, it was thought, stirred up a hornet’s
nest, and so let them get stung on their own.
We in the United States preened that we were the “honest broker.”
After the Camp David accords we tried to be an intermediary to both
sides, ignoring that one party had created a liberal and democratic
society, while the other remained under the thrall of a tribal gang.
Billions of dollars poured into frontline states like Jordan and
Egypt. Arafat himself got tens of millions, though none of it ever
seemed to show up in good housing, roads, or power plants for his
people. The terror continued, enhanced rather than arrested, by
Western largess and Israeli concessions.
Then the Islamists declared war on the United States. A quarter
century of mass murdering of Americans followed in Lebanon, Saudi
Arabia, East Africa, the first effort to topple the World Trade
Center, and the attack on the USS Cole.
We gave billions to Jordan, the Palestinians, and the Egyptians.
Afghanistan was saved from the Soviets through U.S. aid. Kuwait
was restored after Saddam’s annexation, and the holocaust of
Bosnians and Kosovars halted by the American Air Force. Americans
welcomed thousands of Arabs to our shores and allowed hundreds of
madrassas and mosques to preach zealotry, anti-Semitism, and jihad
without much scrutiny.
Then came September 11 and the almost instant canonization of bin
Laden.
Suddenly, the prior cheap shots at Israel under siege weren’t
so cheap. It proved easy to castigate Israelis who went into Jenin,
but not so when we needed to do the same in Fallujah.
It was easy to slander the Israelis’ scrutiny of Arabs in
their midst, but then suddenly a few residents in our own country
were found to be engaging in bomb making, taking up jihadist pilgrimages
to Afghanistan, and mapping out terrorist operations.
Apparently, the hatred of radical Islam was not just predicated
on the “occupation” of the West Bank. Instead it involved
the pretexts of Americans protecting Saudi Arabia from another Iraqi
attack, the United Nations boycott of Iraq, the removal of the Taliban
and Saddam, and always as well as the Crusades and the Reconquista.
But Europe was supposedly different. Unlike the United States,
it was correct on the Middle East, and disarmed after the Cold War.
Indeed, the European Union was pacifistic, socialist, and guilt-ridden
about former colonialism.
Hundreds of thousands of Muslims were left alone in unassimilated
European ghettoes and allowed to preach or promulgate any particular
hatred of the day they wished. Conspire to kill a Salmon Rushdie,
talk of liquidating the “apes and pigs,” distribute Mein
Kampf and the Protocols, or plot in the cities of France and Germany
to blow up the Pentagon and the World Trade Center — all that
was about things “over there” and in a strange way was
thought to ensure that Europe got a pass at home.
But the trump card was always triangulation against the United
States. Most recently anti-Americanism was good street theater in
Rome, Paris, London, and the capitals of the “good” West.
But then came Madrid — and the disturbing fact that after
the shameful appeasement of its withdrawal from Iraq, further plots
were hatched against Spanish justices and passenger trains.
Surely a Holland would be exempt — Holland of wide-open Amsterdam
fame where anything goes and Muslim radicals could hate in peace.
Then came the butchering of Theo Van Gogh and the death threats
against parliamentarian Hirsi Ali — and always defiance and
promises of more to come rather than apologies for their hatred.
Yet was not Britain different? After all, its capital was dubbed
Londonistan for its hospitality to Muslims across the globe. Radical
imams openly preached jihad against the United States to their flock
as thanks for being given generous welfare subsidies from her majesty’s
government. But it was the United States, not liberal Britain, that
evoked such understandable hatred.
But now?
After Holland, Madrid, and London, European operatives go to Israel
not to harangue Jews about the West Bank, but to receive tips about
preventing suicide bombings. And the cowboy Patriot Act to now-panicked
European parliaments perhaps seems not so illiberal after all.
So it is was becoming clear that butchery by radical Muslims in
Bali, Darfur, Iraq, the Philippines Thailand, Turkey, Tunisia, and
Iraq was not so tied to particular and “understandable”
Islamic grievances.
Perhaps the jihadist killing was not over the West Bank or U.S.
hegemony after all, but rather symptoms of a global pathology of
young male Islamic radicals blaming all others for their own self-inflicted
miseries, convinced that attacks on the infidel would win political
concessions, restore pride, and prove to Israelis, Europeans, Americans
— and about everybody else on the globe — that Middle
Eastern warriors were full of confidence and pride after all.
Meanwhile an odd thing happened. It turns out that the jihadists
were cowards and bullies, and thus selective in their targets of
hatred. A billion Chinese were left alone by radical Islam —
even though the Chinese were secularists and mostly godless, as
well as ruthless to their own Uighur Muslim minorities. Had bin
Laden issued a fatwa against Beijing and slammed an airliner into
a skyscraper in Shanghai, there is no telling what a nuclear China
might have done.
India too got mostly a pass, other than the occasional murdering
by Pakistani zealots. Yet India makes no effort to apologize to
Muslims. When extremists occasionally riot and kill, they usually
cease quickly before the response of a much more unpredictable angry
populace.
What can we learn from all this?
Jihadists hardly target particular countries for their “unfair”
foreign policies, since nations on five continents suffer jihadist
attacks and thus all apparently must embrace an unfair foreign policy
of some sort.
Typical after the London bombing is the ubiquitous Muslim spokesman
who when asked to condemn terrorism, starts out by deploring such
killing, assuring that it has nothing to do with Islam, yet then
ending by inserting the infamous “but” — as he closes
with references about the West Bank, Israel, and all sorts of mitigating
factors. Almost no secular Middle Easterners or religious officials
write or state flatly, “Islamic terrorism is murder, pure and
simple evil. End of story, no ifs or buts about it.”
Second, thinking that the jihadists will target only Israel eventually
leads to emboldened attacks on the United States. Assuming America
is the only target assures terrorism against Europe. Civilizations
will either hang separately or triumph over barbarism together.
It is that simple — and past time for Europe and the United
States to rediscover their common heritage and shared aims in eradicating
this plague of Islamic fascism.
Third, Islamicists are selective in their attacks and hatred. So
far global jihad avoids two billion Indians and Chinese, despite
the fact that their countries are far tougher on Muslims than is
the United States or Europe. In other words, the Islamicists target
those whom they think they can intimidate and blackmail.
Unfettered immigration, billions in cash grants to Arab autocracies,
alliances of convenience with dictatorships, triangulation with
Middle Eastern patrons of terror, blaming the Jews — civilization
has tried all that.
It is time to relearn the lessons from the Cold War, when we saw
millions of noble Poles, Romanians, Hungarians, and Czechs as enslaved
under autocracy and a hateful ideology, and in need of democracy
before they could confront the Communist terror in their midst.
But until the Wall fell, we did not send billions in aid to their
Eastern European dictatorships nor travel freely to Prague or Warsaw
nor admit millions of Communist-ruled Bulgarians and Albanians onto
our shores.
©2004 Victor Davis Hanson
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