March 29, 2024

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They Savor Wine but Keep an Open Bar for the Hard Stuff

http://www.theaugeanstables.com/2016/04/18/they-savor-wine-but-keep-an-open-bar-for-the-hard-stuff/

Richard Landes

The following is the text of talk I delivered at the Council for European Studies in Philadelphia entitled, “European Resilience?” The panel was entitled: 

A Measure of European Resilience: Anti-semitism(s) Old and New

Chair: Jeff Weintraub

Participants:

“A New ‘Exodus’? The Political Economy of Jewish Migration.” Scott Siegel, San Francisco State University

“European Muslim Antisemitism: Its Sources, Its Allies.” Gunther Jikeli, Indiana University

“They had it Coming: Retributive Justice Attacks on European Jewry.” Steven Baum, Journal for the Study of Antisemitism; Florette Cohen-Abady, College of Staten Island – CUNY

“Secular Supersessionism and Post-Christian Europe’s Tolerance for Anti-Semitism.” Richard Landes, Bar Ilan University

Discussant: Jeff Weintraub, Harvard University.

 

They Savor Wine but Keep an Open Bar for the Hard Stuff

Secular Supersessionism and Post-Christian Europe’s Tolerance for Anti-Semitism

The following represents excerpts from a chapter of a history book, written in 2050, on the asymmetric war of invasion that Jihadis had been waging against the West since 1979/1400. The historian identified this as an apocalyptic war for Muslim world conquest, a drive to turn all of Dar al Harb into Dar al Islam. The excerpts focus on Jihad in Europe during the first decade and a half of the 21st century, a period this historian considered the turning point in the Jihadi campaign, and a set-up for the subsequent decades-long civil wars that plagued the continent from 2020s onwards. The first segment describes the process of reversal of forces in 2000, the second attempts to explain why the Jihadis had such widespread and unexpected success. As a preliminary note, this author has the habit of writing his chronology not only AD/CE, but also AH, the Islamic count; and refers to the first two decades of the third millennium as the “aughts” and the “teens.”

The turn of the millennium, 2000/1420, marked a dramatic change in the fate of Europe. From this point onward, the rapports de forces between Europe and the movement of global Jihad that targeted the democratic continent, shifted dramatically in favor of the “weak side” of this asymmetrical invasion. This occurred just as the EU was reaching its highest point of both extension and integration, a development that seemed to make the EU a global colossus on a par with the USA. At the time, few even noticed the shift, much less attributed any real significance to it.

Up until the “fin-de-siècle/millennium” of 2000/1420, global Jihad’s goal of Muslim world conquest struck virtually everyone as ridiculous, especially in the West, now, with the internet, the globally dominant hegemon. Granted the Jihadis had scored major victories in the previous decades: Khoumeini in Iran (1979/1400), Bin Laden in Afghanistan (1989/1410), and the same year, Khoumeini’s dramatic extension of Sharia law to Dar al Harb with his death fatwa against the blasphemer Salmon Rushdie. But the idea that Muslims could actually take over Europe, the West? Inconceivable! Even Muslims who found the dream tantalizing, still considered it a pipe dream.

In late 2000, however, global Jihad took an immense leap from the margins to the center of the global community, and surprisingly enough, often with the enthusiastic approval of the very European elites whom they targeted. The dynamic so rapidly took hold, that what in the 1990s/1410s was virtually unthinkable – namely the Islamic take-over of the European continent – by the mid aughts/1420s, started to look to some observers as inevitable: a string of books made the dire prophecy of European demise: Eurabia (2005), Londonistan (2006), While Europe Slept (2006), America Alone (2006). These books were treated by the gatekeepers of the public sphere as either dangerous or ridiculous, alarmist, conspiracist, creating the very hatreds they warned against.

On the contrary, many Europeans thought they were in their glory days. In the very same years as the dire books appeared, another set proposed a profoundly optimistic, even triumphalist scenario of European dominance in the 21st century: The United States of Europe: The New Superpower and the End of American Supremacy (2005), The European Dream: How Europe’s Vision of the Future Is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream (2005), Why Europe will Run the 21st century (2006). And all of this, just moments before the Muhammad Cartoon affair extended Muslim blasphemy laws world-wide.

It began with the second Intifada, in late September and the rapid rise to dominance of a school of lethal journalists who systematically reported as news Jihadi war propaganda. This war propaganda electrified the global Umma, including in Muslims in Europe. The actual Palestinian military uprising was a failure: it failed to chase the Jews from Israel. But it did sanctify the supreme Jihadi weapon of the new century, suicide terror, soon turned on other infidels – the next year 9-11 – and then on Muslims. The suicide terrorist became the trademark of a global jihad that fed on the destructive chaos it created.

But what the Palestinian Jihadis failed to achieve on the kinetic battlefield, they more than compensated for in the cognitive theater of asymmetrical global war. News images of Palestinian suffering and Israeli cruelty awakened Muslims the world over, and the nascent internet multiplied the effect manifold. These images of Jewish terror and Palestinian victimization aroused immense anger among Muslims, and confirmed the message that apocalyptic Jihadis had been pushing for decades: Islam was under existential threat: This is a war on Islam itself. Al Jazeera rose to unprecedented heights distributing these icons of hatred in the Arab and Muslim world. Bin Laden turned the footage of the IDF shooting a twelve year old boy to death in the arms of his pleading father, into a video summons to the global Jihad of planetary conquest.

Among Europeans, the victory of Jihadi war propaganda was at least as spectacular: not only did the icons of victimization and hatred awaken European Muslims, but the message was given immense prestige and reach when Western journalists presented it as news. In turn, the same media that emphasized Israeli aggression, systematically underreported the Muslim aggression those broadcasts provoked against European Jews. This pattern was most pronounced during periods of military clash between Israel and their neighbors, during which pack journalists unwittingly, but enthusiastically, promoted Jihadi propaganda and played down Jihadi aggression.

And even as they incited Jihadi hatred against Israel and cheered on the “resistance” by demonstrating in suicide bomber belts, they became paralyzed. “The Arabs act as if they have a knife to our throat and we act as if they did,” noted one scholar in hushed tones. And indeed they did: the knife was the threat of suicide terror. So when during Ramadan of 2005/1426 rioters shouting “Allahu Akhbar” rioted all over France in response to a lethal narrative about French cops killing two Arab boys, the police tried to contain; and French journalists and academics denied it had anything to do with Islam.

Indeed, the early aughts brought to prominence a kind of “global progressive left” street presence whose spokespeople, by 2003, claimed – in the pages of the NYT – to constitute one of two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion, which was against war. These demonstrations, which reached into the tens of millions worldwide in 2003, gave prominence to and welcomed the energy of Jihadis, who proudly sported giant portraits of Saddam and Arafat and in various places like Paris, beat up Jewish participants in the rallies. In the replacement theology of the global left, Israel became the secular anti-Christ, the new Nazis, committing genocide against the Palestinians, the new Jews.

This “Street” of public opinion, initially sponsored by the global progressive “anti-war” left, spawned its own, aggressive, and independent “Muslim Street” in Europe: starting with the Ramadan riots in France in 2005/1425. It continued with protests against the blasphemous Danish Cartoons (Salmon Rushdie redux, 2006/1426) and protesting the Pope calling Islam a violent religion (2007/1427). Infidel progressives tended not to join these demos, although they did not laugh at the absurdity of Muslims violently protesting someone calling them violent.

But the one constant, the one phenomenon that brought out all the protesters in their most enthusiastic and angry moods, was the periodic episodes of lethal journalism about Israel. Even American war crimes – in some cases far worse – did not bring out the angry crowds. Thus, each episode of fevered own-goal journalism – Al Aqsa Intifada, Jenin Massacre, Lebanon, Gaza I, Mavi Marmara, Gaza II, Gaza III – produced major gains for European Jihad. Indeed, by the end of the aughts, Hamas had developed the pattern into a formal strategy: provoke an Israeli attack, get as many Muslim civilians killed as possible, and count on the Western news media to so outrage the world community, that diplomatic pressure forced Israel to stop.

In communicating the lethal narrative of Palestinian anguish and Israeli cruelty, the news media fueled the widely held belief in Europe, even among infidel intelligentsia: “The IDF kills Palestinian children every day”… the first global blood libel of the early 21st century and global Jihad’s best recruiting device.

In 2000, for the first time since Hitler, the cry of “Death to the Jews!” was heard on the streets of a European capital, in the Place de la Republique in Paris. After a decade and a half of own-goal war journalism, this genocidal cry was heard all over Europe, chanted publicly for hours. Jihadi hatreds shattered the streets of European capitals; and European leaders suddenly realized they were losing their Jews to those hatreds. “La France sans ses juifs n’est pas la France,” noted the Foreign Minister Manuel Valls, in a multi-cultural variant on De Gaulle’s more imperious version. In response, Jihadis stepped up attacks on any European infidel. In those days, anti-Zionist post-modern gentiles turned to their former Jewish friends leaving for Israel and lamented, “at least you have some place to go.”

The journalists who so acted, did this not because they were consciously supporting the goals of Jihad, but because their obsession with Israel blinded them to the longer-term consequences of their actions. They thought they were siding with the “underdog,” the Palestinians whom they, as a pack, viewed as victims and freedom fighters, the “David,” resisting the Israeli “Goliath.”

Our mid-century  historian then explores the reasons for this self-destructive behavior on the part of the Europeans.

Two terms best explain Europe’s vulnerability to Jihad: “moral Europe” and moral Schadenfreude. The core of the triumphalist books about European “soft power” was the illusion that Europe was, if not a military superpower, nevertheless a moral superpower. This self-image was so powerful that repeatedly Europeans perched themselves on the high moral ground no matter how delusionary, and no matter how dangerous.

The response to the Muslim challenge was principled: we cannot behave in ways that will debase our moral standards. Angélisme did not allow Europe to defend itself, lest it lower it moral standing, lest it unleash its fascist demons. Utopian memes circulated unchallenged: War is not the answer. Who are we to judge? Are we not terrorists if we can prevent innocent lives being lost and we do nothing? (Derrida on 9-11). “If we kill our enemies, they win.”

The height of this conceptual folly came in 2015, when Angela Merkel, in a grand gesture of collective redemption, opened the gates of Europe to millions of Muslim migrants, most of them young men. Thus, a radically disoriented Europe thought it was atoning for its past sins by importing massive numbers of people who carried the very virus of exterminationist anti-Semitism, that had produced the Holocaust for which they were atoning. And these carriers target Europe as well as her Jews.

Behind this disastrous moral preening, lay something far less attractive: an almost boundless appetite for Schadenfreude about both Israel and the US, which proved, in the end, disastrous. It is best summed up in two remarks from the early aughts/1420s that illustrate the disastrous cognitive disorientation of the Europeans:

1) Europe1 reporter, Catherine Nay, speaking for many and opposed by few, announced that Muhammad al Durah’s death had “replaced, erased, the image of the boy in the Warsaw Ghetto. In other words, a child’s alleged death in a crossfire reportedly started by his own side [thanks to the failures of Western news reporting, she did not know it was staged], erased, replaced an image that symbolized the deliberate murder of a million children.

2) Ten days after 9-11, the same le Monde that had on the morrow declared “we are all Americans,” ran an article by Jean Baudrillard extolling the attack: “They did it; we wanted it… That we have dreamed of this event, that everybody without exception has dreamt of it, because everybody must dream of the destruction of any power hegemonic to that degree…” The enemy was the suffocating American hegemon, and the Jihadis had struck for freedom. Once again, Europeans, settling petty scores with their friends, cheered on their mortal enemy.

For the Jihadis, the soft-underbelly of Europe was anti-Zionism and its concealed/denied anti-semitism. When the target was Israel, Jihadis could count on Europeans to join their side: they could count on journalists to run their war propaganda; they could count on academics to craft a post-colonial narrative in which Israel was the last remnant of an evil White, European, privileged, colonial, imperialism; they could count on “soft-power” human rights activists to so obsess about Israeli wrongs that they sucked the oxygen from all the other victims including Palestinian victims of their own predatory regimes, they could count on crowds of useful infidels to shout “We are Hamas! We are Hizbullah! Death to Jews!” in the streets of European capitals.

While the Europeans sipped the tasty wine of moral Schadenfreude about sovereign Jews misbehaving, and played revolutionary in the streets they, willy-nilly held an open bar of the most lethal hard stuff for their Muslim compatriots and stood helpless before the growing violence it incited. And in their complacent sense of moral superiority, borne of their conviction of Israel’s moral collapse, it never seem to occur to the Europeans that the Muslims they so inebriated with hatred of Jews, might not be grateful for the favor, but rather view them, too, as the enemy, the target.

One cannot understand the wars of the mid-21st century without understanding why it took so long for Europeans to realize they were promoting, endorsing, empowering their apocalyptic Jihadi enemies in their very midst. And the only factor that can account, not for the existence of the phenomenon itself, but for its persistence among the information elite for so many years into the new century, so long after it was clearly counter-indicated, is a form of malevolent envy, a craving for narratives whereby “moral Europe” could piss down on both the US and Israel, that is to say, a “secular” supersessionist narrative in which the global progressive left, with Europe in the lead, represented the moral global superpower, leading the world into the new, social justice, global century.

Our historian curiously concludes his chapter with a quote from a talk given in Philadelphia at the CES conference of 2016, just years before the outbreak of the thirty years war, in which the speaker addressed the issue of the conference: European Resilience?

I have a suggestion for those who finally, at long last, realize the challenge of global Jihad and wish to defend European democracy and its moral commitments. Get over your anti-Zionist Judeophobia, because right now, it’s killing you. It’s strengthening your enemies, attacking your allies, and weakening your ability to resist, by so cognitively and morally disorienting you that you misunderstand virtually everything that is happening in this increasingly lethal war you are losing.

Defend the Jews, and the principles of tolerance and freedom that allow them to live productively among you. Rebuke the triumphalist Muslims who want to bring back the pre-modern world of holy war, theocracy, and inquisition and who have chosen the Jews as their first target.

Make some Jewish friends. Not the kind of Jews who side with their enemies, who mouth foolish and deadly but oh-so pleasing formulas about how the settlements are the core problem and Islamophobia is to early 21st century Europe was what anti-Semitism was to its early 20th century… make some healthy, non-suicidal Jewish friends.

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