Anti-Semitism in the West is on the rise and progressives are its clueless enablers, writes Ayaan Hirsi Ali
When I was a student at the University of Leiden in The Netherlands between 1995 and 2000, my professors introduced me and my fellow students to a sensitive and difficult discussion: the betrayal of the Jews to the Nazis by Dutch collaborators during World War II. Three-quarters of Dutch Jews were murdered.
Inspired by Daniel Goldhagen’s 1996 book Hitler’s Willing Executioners, which argued that ordinary Germans were complicit in the Holocaust, my professor had us reckoning with a dark chapter in the Dutch past. To what extent were ordinary Dutch people responsible for the deportation and murder of their Jewish neighbours? Would we have joined the brave men and women who protested against the persecution of Jews or would we have been among the silent, if not complicit, majority?
Most of us at Leiden thought we would be in the former camp, which is very easy to say in hindsight. There were few students who thought it inappropriate of the professor to make us go through that exercise of moral reckoning, though perhaps these days more would say they felt “unsafe”.
Now we are facing another reckoning, and all of us in the West must ask and answer that same question when it will really make a difference. In the wake of the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel and Israel’s response in Gaza, the poison of anti-Semitism is coursing through the veins of the West once more. This time it manifests itself as a well-orchestrated campaign against Israel, the state founded as the nation of the Jewish people, a place Jews can call home without fear of discrimination, pogroms and the threat of genocide.
In major cities all over the Western world, from London to Sydney, as well as on the campuses of elite universities from Harvard to Stanford, pro-Palestinian protesters chant, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” – that is, Israel will be wiped off the map. Anti-Semitic hate crimes are up 1350 per cent in London. A Jewish prayer walk in London was cancelled after police informed the organisers that attendees would not be safe (a pro-Palestinian march was taking place 11km away on the same day). Petrol bombs were hurled at synagogues in Berlin. Posters of Israelis kidnapped by Hamas have been torn down systematically in London and New York, and Jews are being told to make themselves inconspicuous for their own safety.
‘Even when jihadist terror groups are militarily defeated, as ISIS was and Hamas may be, the dogma lives on in mosques and online.’
In short, Jew-hatred is again on the march in the heart of Europe less than a century after the Holocaust.
Why are moral, well-educated people on the left so keen to excuse the Hamas butchers and march alongside people calling for Israel’s annihilation?
Many of these people say they are anti-Zionists, not anti-Semites. They insist they are affected by the plight of Palestinian civilians in Gaza and do not endorse the terrorist tactics of Hamas.
But what exactly is anti-Zionism? At best, it is a lazy attitude that makes pristine moral demands of the state of Israel. It is an attitude that never questions Palestinians or for that matter Arab leaders on why they find it acceptable for Hamas terrorists to hide behind women and children and launch rockets from schools, mosques, hospitals and other civilian sites.
Take the example of the rocket misfired by Palestinian Islamic Jihad that hit a hospital in Gaza. After the fog of the initial confusion lifted and it became clear that PIJ was responsible, did any “anti-Zionists” marching for the Palestinian cause pause to digest what had happened? PIJ had clumsily killed – byHamas’s own account – more than 400 civilians. It did this while Hamas urged the residents of Gaza to stay put, knowing full well Israel was preparing a surge to clear Hamas out of Gaza. Hamas is dishonest in so many ways but at least it is honest about the fact it does not value human life – least of all the lives of those unfortunate enough to reside in Gaza.
My question for Western supporters of Palestinian activism is simple: Where was your outrage on October 8, the day after 1400 Israelis were slaughtered? Whatever your rationalisation, there must be a reason you feel less empathy for them than for the Palestinians who have been put in harm’s way by the actions of Hamas. Are you quite sure your anti-Zionism is not an old hatred clad in new clothes?
In some cases it is clear we are dealing here with privileged woke types indulging in revolutionary cosplay who just as readily might attend a Black Lives Matter demo or a Just Stop Oil action.
The odd thing is that such people – who are invariably passionate believers in the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender minorities – are so willing to align themselves with the Islamists who are now the principal proponents of anti-Semitism in the world.
The Palestinian cause was once the cause of Marxist-Leninists and secular nationalists. No longer; today, the toxic ideology of Islamism is the principal driver of the war against Israel, and a core element of that ideology, genocidal anti-Semitism, has been spread to the Muslims of the West by Islamist propagandists.
The Western left tends to look away from the theological underpinnings of the likes of Hamas, al-Qa’ida and Islamic State, blaming their atrocities on Western foreign policy or the alienation of young Muslim men. Western governments, meanwhile, have seen the problem narrowly as a military or security issue to be solved with the tools of intelligence and counterterrorism. Both groups fail to recognise that Islamism is a collection of deeply held sacred beliefs. They ignore the cries of “Allahu Akbar!” and “Jihad!” and the use of faith-based symbols such as the tawhid (the raised index finger of the right hand) by terrorists.
Even when jihadist terror groups are militarily defeated, as ISIS was and Hamas may be, the dogma lives on in mosques and online, spread by Islamist networks, including charities, under the protection of the Western norm of free speech. The Islamists use the freedoms of the West – freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of association – against the West.
All one has to do is look at the original Hamas charter – which invokes Islamic scripture to justify its hatred of Israel and the Jews and calls for the destruction of Israel – to see the religious foundations of its ideology.
The same goes for groups such as Hizb ut-Tahrir and the Muslim Brotherhood (from which Hamas is descended). These and many other Islamist groups have infiltrated the West and indoctrinated a whole new generation of Muslims with their vile beliefs. But what is truly astonishing is that “progressives” on the left join forces with the Islamists, apparently oblivious to the fate that awaits any member of the LBGTQ+ community who makes the mistake of coming out in Gaza.
The answer to this problem is not as British Home Secretary Suella Braverman has suggested – for the police to arrest those who call for jihad in the streets of London. Braverman’s call for police intervention was rightly rejected by Sir Mark Rowley, head of the Metropolitan Police.
As a free speech fundamentalist, I disagree vehemently with the criminalisation of any sentiment, however vile. For too long we have looked to the police to make the problem of Islamism go away. But it is not their job to erase religious dogma. The real challenge is to reform our institutions of education and culture, which have abjectly failed through negligence or going woke.
The real battlefield is not for control of the streets but for hearts and minds. Only by countering Islamist ideology through working with groups such as the anti-Islamist CLARITy Coalition (of which I am a founding member) can the new anti-Semitism be defeated and the naive leftists who support it persuaded to change their minds. Everyone in the West is now being asked the same question that the people of Europe were asked during World War II. For, if historian Bernard Lewis’s prediction that Europe will become majority Muslim at some point this century is fulfilled, and if the Islamists – already so popular and influential in our democracies – gain real political power in the West, I do not think it alarmist to worry that another Holocaust will be the result.
Right now, the Islamists are, however dangerous, nowhere near as powerful as the Nazi invaders were, but too many of us are hesitant to stand up to them. We must reckon with Islamist anti-Semitism now, while we still can. Alas, on the basis of what we are seeing in our cities right now, I fear we will fail our Jewish friends and neighbours yet again. Thank God the proposal to rename a German daycare centre named after Anne Frank in deference to “parents with a migrant background” appears to have been defeated. But the fact anyone could suggest such a change takes me back to The Netherlands. On August 4, 1944, Anne Frank and her family were arrested. She died, probably of typhus, in Bergen-Belsen about six months later.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford and founder of the AHA Foundation.
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