A Europe that can resist its atavistic Jew-baiting habits is a Europe that can thrive

Remarks by Prof. Richard Landes at Herzliya Conference 2015: BDS, Europe, and Jihadi Cogwar

Brussels pro-Hamas rally (2009)

[...] Strategically speaking, the elimination of Israel constitutes the primary initial military goal for global jihad. Israel represents the most painful slap in the face of Arab and Muslim honor, a global humiliation, a Naqba, the symbol of Arab and Muslim impotence in the modern age. Destroying Israel would whiten the Arab world’s blackened face and restore its honor, its manhood. And with Jerusalem finally, again, in Muslim hands, the apocalyptic process of world redemption will advance. No single event would more powerfully drive Muslim faithful to join the apocalyptic Jihad for world conquest, than the fall of Israel. By the same logic, nothing would be more counter-indicated for the West than to support the Jihadi campaign to destroy Israel.

And yet that is precisely what has happened over the first 15 years of the 21^st century in two major theatres of war: Israel, and Western democracies (primarily Europe). On the Israeli front, Palestinian Jihadis deliberately provoke IDF reactions that inevitably hurt Palestinian civilians, and then count on the MSNM to blame Israel for the Palestinian suffering whose images they run 24/7. Fired by the lethal narratives fed them as news by journalists and NGOs, including self-accusing Jewish and Israeli ones, world outrage forces Israel to withdraw, sparing the Jihadis who then rearm.

On the European (Western) theater of war, each new Israeli military action – 2000, 2002, 2006, 2008/9, 2010, 2012, 2014 – provokes a wave of lethal journalism which in turn unleashes massive and increasingly aggressive, violent demonstrations in the capitals of Europe. In Paris in 2000, a crowd in Place de la République shouted “Death to the Jews” for the first time in a European capital since the Nazis. By 2014, that cry, again in response to lethal journalism about Tsuk Eitan, was heard all over Europe, occasionally leading to near pogroms.

BDS weaponizes and deploys these lethal narratives. It injects the Western public sphere, especially academia, with Jihadi hate-propaganda (Israel Apartheid Weeks), and then mobilizes a poisoned public opinion toward a legal and financial effort to strangle Israel. One of the greatest Jihadi cogwar victories has been to get European progressives (with whom they share no common values) to see Israel as a symbol of evil: a shared Antichrist, Dajjal, Nazi, the pariah state.

Needless to say, but alas, much in need of being said, it is pure folly for Europeans to think that by throwing Israel into the maw of Jihadi hatreds, it can spare itself from being the objects of those hatreds. And yet, that is the constant trend of the last fifteen years. Implacable Muslim Jew-hatred, for example, has Prime Ministers of Western European countries worried aloud that their Jews will leave. Who, in early 2000, could have predicted that? From the Jihadi point of view, a Judenrein Europe is ripe for submission. In other words, Westerners embracing BDS is nothing short of suicidal.  [...]

The Jihadis want the West to embrace their hatred of Israel – exemplified in BDS – as a Trojan Horse that will bring them inside the walls of the city. What insanity for the West to repeat the folly of the Trojans!

If you had told a signer of the Hamas covenant in 1988, that within two decades, infidels would be shouting “We are Hamas” in Western capitals, he would have replied, “only Allah can make someone that stupid.” [...]

As ironic as it may be, a Europe that can resist its atavistic Jew-baiting habits, that can embrace Israel, its natural and civilizational ally, and can confront Islam’s deployment of Jew-hatred, is a Europe that can thrive, indeed become a world leader. Welcome to the painful paradox of the 21^st century, for the world’s infidels, and its genuinely moderate Muslims: give up Jew hatred and live in peace; continue your addiction to hating us, and live in the nightmare dystopias.  My personal advice: “choose life.”