Mick Hartley

Melanie Phillips in the Times:

So the West’s embrace of the Palestinian cause means the guardrails against antisemitism have been dismantled. Posing as the championing of an oppressed people, Palestinianism has made such discourse respectable in western society. Well-meaning people have no idea that this is what they are supporting. And they don’t realise that the street demonstrations aren’t just a protest. They’re also a delirious expression of the Islamists’ belief that the October 7 onslaught, and the West’s subsequent support of the anti-Israel narrative, signify that they’re on their way to defeating the Jews and conquering the West. This is demonstrated by their command of the streets and the authorities’ toleration of their incitement.

Many Muslims in Britain, Australia and elsewhere in the West have no truck with extremism. The hero of Bondi beach, who tackled one of the gunmen and disarmed him with his bare hands, is a Muslim of Syrian origin. But it’s very wrong to deny that most terrorism is Islamist and that antisemitism is a major problem in the Muslim world.

In Australia an Islamic scholar, Wissam “Abu Ousayd” Haddad, preached in November 2023 that the Jews were “rats” and “cowards” who controlled the media and the banks and who needed war to continue in order to make money. And he specifically denied that he was talking about Zionists. Let the West condemn Zionists, he chuckled. He was talking about Jews. Islamic preachers similarly incite against Jews in Britain. As in Australia, no action is taken against them.

As a result of its sensitivity to any criticism of the Muslim world as “Islamophobic”, the West is missing the crucial fact that for Islamists the destruction of the Jews is a necessary step towards the destruction of the Christian West. From the early 20th century Islamic theorist Sayyid Qutb, who inspired modern political Islam, to Osama bin Laden and the Hamas charter, Islamic jihadis have said their war is against modernity which is a bacillus carried by the West; and behind both modernity and the West are the Jews.

The laundering of antisemitism as opposition to Israel means that the West can’t see it is the frog in the pot, slowly being boiled.

The take-over of our streets by the Islamist-hard-left alliance may have started out as a sign of our tolerance for diversity of opinion and public protests – a proud British tradition – but it’s now reached the point where the authorities actually seem frightened to do anything. Witness West Midlands Police and their easy capitulation to the hard-liners in banning Maccabi Tel Aviv fans – clearly frightened of a confrontation. The Islamists and leftists now parade at every opportunity, chanting their Jew-hate – “globalise the Intifada” – quite openly.

Many, particularly on the left, have been fooled into thinking that this this is a “traditional” battle of an oppressed people under imperialist rule. But in truth this is all about Islam.