by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
National Review Online<\/em><\/p>\n F<\/i>irst the terrorists of the Middle East went after the Israelis.<\/i>\u00a0From 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.<\/p>\n Yasser Arafat, replete with holster and rants at the U.N., had become a \u201cmoderate\u201d and was thus free to steal millions of his good-behavior money. If Hamas got European cash, it would become reasonable, ostracize its \u201cmilitary wing,\u201d and cease its lynching and vigilantism.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n When the call for a \u201cRight of Return\u201d 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.<\/p>\n When the U.N. and the EU talked about \u201crefugee camps,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n The security fence became \u201cThe Wall,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n In any case, anti-Semitism, oil, fear of terrorism \u2014 all that and more fooled us into believing that Israel\u2019s 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\u2019s nest, and so let them get stung on their own.<\/p>\n We in the United States preened that we were the \u201chonest broker.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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\u00a0Cole<\/i>.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Then came September 11 and the almost instant canonization of bin Laden.<\/p>\n Suddenly, the prior cheap shots at Israel under siege weren\u2019t so cheap. It proved easy to castigate Israelis who went into Jenin, but not so when we needed to do the same in Fallujah.<\/p>\n It was easy to slander the Israelis\u2019 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.<\/p>\n Apparently, the hatred of radical Islam was not just predicated on the \u201coccupation\u201d 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.<\/p>\n But Europe was supposedly different.<\/i>\u00a0Unlike 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u201capes and pigs,\u201d distribute\u00a0Mein Kampf<\/i>\u00a0and the\u00a0Protocols<\/i>, or plot in the cities of France and Germany to blow up the Pentagon and the World Trade Center \u2014 all that was about things \u201cover there\u201d and in a strange way was thought to ensure that Europe got a pass at home.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cgood\u201d West.<\/p>\n But then came Madrid \u2014 and the disturbing fact that after the shameful appeasement of its withdrawal from Iraq, further plots were hatched against Spanish justices and passenger trains.<\/p>\n Surely a Holland would be exempt \u2014 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 \u2014 and always defiance and promises of more to come rather than apologies for their hatred.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s government. But it was the United States, not liberal Britain, that evoked such understandable hatred.<\/p>\n But now?<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cunderstandable\u201d Islamic grievances.<\/p>\n 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 \u2014 and about everybody else on the globe \u2014 that Middle Eastern warriors were full of confidence and pride after all.<\/p>\n 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 \u2014 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n What can we learn from all this?<\/p>\n Jihadists hardly target particular countries for their \u201cunfair\u201d foreign policies, since nations on five continents suffer jihadist attacks and thus all apparently must embrace an unfair foreign policy of some sort.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cbut\u201d \u2014 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, \u201cIslamic terrorism is murder, pure and simple evil. End of story, no ifs or buts about it.\u201d<\/p>\n 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 \u2014 and past time for Europe and the United States to rediscover their common heritage and shared aims in eradicating this plague of Islamic fascism.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Unfettered immigration, billions in cash grants to Arab autocracies, alliances of convenience with dictatorships, triangulation with Middle Eastern patrons of terror, blaming the Jews \u2014 civilization has tried all that.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n But until the Wall fell, we did\u00a0not<\/i>\u00a0send 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.<\/p>\n \u00a92004 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We’re at war. How about acting like it? by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online First the terrorists of the Middle East went after the Israelis.\u00a0From 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[787],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-17F","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":5041,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/fortress-israel\/","url_meta":{"origin":4319,"position":0},"title":"Fortress Israel?","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 25, 2002","format":false,"excerpt":"Something there than doesn't love a wall. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online President Bush's speech outlined well enough the general parameters of peace \u2014 Israeli security, a new democratic government in Palestine without Mr. Arafat, return of most of the West Bank\u00a0et al. Whether such promised autonomy will\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "June 2002"","block_context":{"text":"June 2002","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2002\/june-2002\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1681,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/whats-happening-with-israel\/","url_meta":{"origin":4319,"position":1},"title":"What’s Happening with Israel?","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 26, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services Current American relations with our once-staunch ally Israel are at their lowest ebb in the last 50 years. The Obama administration seems as angry at the building of Jewish apartments in Jerusalem as it is intent on reaching out to Iran and Syria,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "April 2010"","block_context":{"text":"April 2010","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2010\/april-2010\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2966,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/been-there-done-that-policy-in-the-middle-east\/","url_meta":{"origin":4319,"position":2},"title":"Been There, Done That: Policy in the Middle East","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 11, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services With much fanfare, President Barack Obama announced a new effort to end the endless Israeli-Palestinian struggle \u2014 by naming a brand-new Middle East envoy, former Sen. George Mitchell. The announcement was underwhelming, to say the least. For 40 years, we've seen such serial\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "February 2009"","block_context":{"text":"February 2009","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2009\/february-2009\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":810,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-new-anti-semitism\/","url_meta":{"origin":4319,"position":3},"title":"The New Anti-Semitism","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 29, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Defining Ideas Not long ago,\u00a0The Economist\u00a0ran an unsigned editorial called the \u201cAuschwitz Complex.\u201d The unnamed author blamed serial Middle East tensions on both Israel\u2019s unwarranted sense of victimhood, accrued from the Holocaust, and its unwillingness to \u201cto give up its empire.\u201d As far as Israel\u2019s paranoid\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Israel"","block_context":{"text":"Israel","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/israel\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4526,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/cracked-icons-why-the-left-has-lost-credibility\/","url_meta":{"origin":4319,"position":4},"title":"Cracked Icons: Why the Left has Lost Credibility","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 17, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online There is much talk of post-election reorganization and rethinking among demoralized liberals, especially in matters of foreign policy. They could start by accepting that the demise of many of their cherished beliefs and institutions was not the fault of others. More often, the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "December 2004"","block_context":{"text":"December 2004","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2004\/december-2004\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":540,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-muddle-east\/","url_meta":{"origin":4319,"position":5},"title":"The Muddle East","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 2, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online No one has any idea what the Middle East will look like next year, much less in five years \u2014 especially the revolutionary players themselves. There are not even the old familiar fault lines this revolutionary time around. 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