More than 30 years have gone by since the North American academic Samuel R. Huntington, who died in 2008, wrote ‘The Clash of Civilisations’ for Foreign Affairs. He then expanded the article into a book in which he stressed that culture, in the anthropological sense of the word, mattered far more than ideology. On that occasion, Huntington’s work was effusively praised by luminaries such as Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Francis Fukuyama, but many others stridently objected to his pointing out that “Islam has bloody borders.” Though this would be confirmed thousands of times in the following years, most Western leaders have remained reluctant to take seriously the warning it implied.
Their refusal to do so is making a major contribution to the political turmoil that is upsetting the established order in the United States and Europe where few “ordinary people” have heard of Huntington or read his writings but most know in their bones that he got things right. The pressure for governments to confront Islam head-on comes from below, not from the lucubrations of “public intellectuals” who for many years have tended to be multiculturalists who delight in attacking their own society’s traditions.
Unlike them, most people in the United States, the United Kingdom and France want their country to go back to what it was barely a generation ago before the large-scale influx of immigrants from other parts of the world that has radically transformed them got underway. This is the main reason why Donald Trump returned to power, Sir Keir Starmer is already the least popular British prime minister on record and President Emmanuel Macron could be forced to resign before he completes his allotted term in office. Those who feel that the land they live in has been taken over by foreigners who despise it and them may be a deplorably reactionary lot, but in democracies what they feel does not lack importance.
For many, the massacre that last week took place on Bondi Beach, where two Jihadists who had sworn fealty to the Islamic State gunned down Jews who were celebrating Hanukkah, should prove to be a turning point, one in which not only the Australian government but also those of other countries finally realise that Islam and what remains of what was once known as Christendom do not mix well. In part because, in the minds of many people far from Australia, Bondi Beach is a legendary haunt of carefree bronzed surfers who take a hedonistic view of life, but mainly because the slaughter of people just because they are Jews touches a very raw nerve, politicians throughout the world condemned it with what seemed to be heartfelt passion, just as they did after the murder of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists in 2015 before quickly returning to business as usual.
Will it be different this time? It could be. A combination of rapidly intensifying public dissatisfaction with the way things are and the shock provided by a brazen act of anti-Semitism may convince office-holders that doing nothing has ceased to be a sensible option. For over two years, many governments have not only stood aside and allowed mobs of Islamists and their leftist allies give vent to their hatred of the world’s only Jewish state in their capital cities but have even tried to appease them by expressing their willingness to formally recognise Palestine, as have Starmer, Macron and Australia’s PM Anthony Albanese.
There is a very thin line between outright anti-Semitism and criticism of the way Israel responded to the blood-soaked invasion of her territory by Hamas fanatics accompanied by unaffiliated Palestinians who took advantage of an opportunity to plunder homes, rape women before mutilating their corpses, and gruesomely kill anyone else who got in their way. That line has been crossed time and time again not just by Islamist holy warriors but also by hordes of student activists in the English-speaking world and elsewhere who roam college campuses calling for a “global intifada” – a murderous rampage – against everything connected with Israel, including almost all Jews who have kinfolk in the country they want to expunge from the face of the earth.
Much has been made of the courageous behaviour of a Muslim of Syrian extraction who tackled one of the Bondi Beach gunmen and got badly wounded as a result, but the sad truth is that, in the Western world, it is very unusual to see Muslims confront the killers in their midst. After the latest Jihadist outrage, most “community leaders” accuse outsiders of unfairly picking on Muslims by treating them all as potential terrorists and insisting that “Islamophobia” poses a far bigger threat to society than hatred of Jews. Their solidarity with fellow believers, including the members of the rape gangs that have preyed on thousands of working-class girls in the UK, or others – about 40,000 – who have earned a place on that country’s terror watch list, could have unpleasant consequences. Unless far more Muslims in the West behave like Ahmed al Ahmed, the Syrian who risked his own life to disarm one of the Bondi Beach killers, hostility towards everything connected with their religion seems certain to lead to expulsions on a scale comparable to those that are currently taking place in the US.
The choice looks clear. Either the Muslim communities put their own house in order by handing over Jihadists to the local authorities and demanding that the preachers who share their views get deported, or others will do the job in a most unpleasant way. Unfortunately, the dilemma facing them is far from simple. The Jihadists have scripture on their side; they can plausibly argue that, according to all the authorised interpreters of Islam dating back to almost 1,400 years, the watered-down version of their creed that their European neighbours could live with would be a heretical caricature of the true faith which obliges them to wage war against unbelievers until they submit.
The problems Muslims face are similar to those that, for centuries, troubled Christians, especially Roman Catholics and members of the sterner Protestant and Greek Orthodox congregations, but they eventually did manage to reconcile themselves to living alongside people whose attitudes were nothing like their own. Will something comparable happen in the Muslim word? Unless it does very soon, the “clash of civilisations” Huntington described could become every bit as ugly as, in his gloomier moments, that mild-mannered academic feared.
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