On 7 October 2023, Hamas terrorists emerged from Gaza to commit an horrendous atrocity against Israeli civilians. This deadly incursion has been well documented so I won’t elaborate on the gruesome details. Inevitably Israel responded with deadly force in order to deter further aggression and to rescue the civilian hostages that Hamas had kidnapped during their cowardly assault.

This Israeli response immediately evoked an anti-Semitic tirade around the world. There were demonstrations and street protests, university sit-ins and motions passed in the United Nations condemning Israel’s natural reaction to defend itself.

Predictably the Palestinian attempt at the genocide of Jews was labelled “resistance” , while Israel’s resistance to being annihilated was labelled “genocide”.

In Australia there was a huge gathering of pro-Palestinian protestors on the steps of the Sydney Opera House who were allowed to utter provocative anti-Jewish hate speech without intervention by the police. Islamist Imams publicly applauded Hamas and its cowardly, bloody attack against Israeli civilians. And then to top it all Australia’s Foreign Minister, Penny Wong warned Israel against a vigorous response and sided with the pro-Palestine parties in the United Nations.

This was soon followed domestically with numerous anti-Semitic acts.

Homes, cars and schools have been  set on fire or spray painted with anti-Israel messages, and there have been arson attacks against a synagogue in Melbourne and a child care centre in Sydney. Last month, police said they had disrupted a potential anti-Semitic attack after they discovered a caravan containing explosives in a Sydney suburb.

Recently,two nurses in a Sydney hospital were suspended for saying they would kill Jewish patients or refuse to treat them in a video chat with a TikTok user who told them he was from Israel.

Moreover in our capital cities pro-Palestinian protesters have been turning out every weekend mouthing anti-Semitic slogans and interfering with ordinary citizens going about their business. i

The Albanese government’s response to this anti-Semitic activity was at first quite muted. To begin with they tried to equate the anti-Semitic incidents with Islamophobia but there is little evidence that there is any equivalence between the incidents reflecting hatred of Jews and those reflecting hatred of Muslims in Australia.

The government’s pathetic response is unsurprising given that Albanese and his colleagues in the left of the Labor party have long been supporters of Palestine.

But this struggle between Israel and Palestine is more than it might appear on the surface. It is a superficial manifestation of a far deeper problem. And that problem is the existential struggle between fundamentalist Islam and the West.

The Hamas-supporting Islamists were not just gloating about what they saw as a victory against Israel after the 7 October 2023 atrocities, they were celebrating what they perceived as a decisive strike against the West. Whilst they see the immediate problem as destroying the democratic state of Israel, this is merely the first stage in imposing fundamentalist Islam on all of Western society.

The so-called Palestinian cause has for decades been supported by the intelligentsia and political activists of the left in the West. They share a deal of common ground with the Islamists. They hate the traditional culture and the Judaeo-Christian values of the mainstream West. In this way they seek to portray Israel as a “settler-colonialist” state that usurped the land of Israel from its original inhabitants that they maintain were Palestinian Arabs. They attempt to portray Jews as white, powerful oppressors and seek to align them with the white European colonists that settled countries such as Australia, the USA, India, and large parts of Africa and South America.

Now this widely accepted notion of Israel being a further example of white colonialism is wrong.

To begin with most Israeli Jews are brown or black skinned.

Moreover Israel was not established by an act of conquest but as a result of mandates by the United Nations (which now seems decidedly anti-Israel) and its predecessor, the League of Nations.

World War 1 led to the partitioning of the previous Ottoman Empire. Britain was consequently granted control of Palestine, or Mandate Palestine as it was then called (which included the territory of Palestine and Israel as we know them today) by the League of Nations.

Then in 1947 the United Nations voted to partition Mandate Palestine to create a Jewish state (Israel) and an Arab state (Palestine). This was accepted by the Jews but rejected by the Arabs. When in 1948 the Jews asserted their new found independence the Arabs resisted which led to the 1948 war of independence when Israel was forced to defend itself against the invading armies of the neighbouring Arab states. Israel prevailed in this struggle which forced the Arabs to withdraw and tacitly accept the new state of Palestine.

It requires some vivid imagination to equate the establishment of the state of Israel with colonisation!

The other misconception that is widely peddled is that Hamas is dedicated to the liberation of Palestine. In fact Hamas has little interest in the liberation of Palestine. Its prime reason for existence is the elimination of Israel. Their purported defence of Palestine is a cunning ruse to perpetuate Palestinian victimhood which is then used to leverage international condemnation of Israel.

Their incursion into Israel to murder, rape and kidnap innocent Israelis had nothing to do with defending Palestine but a deliberate provocation of Israel whose inevitable response was then used to vilify Israel. This was a successful strategy which saw the United Nations condemn Israel’s retaliatory response, and to Australia’s shame, such condemnation was supported by Penny Wong and Anthony Albanese.

Radical Islamists (including Hamas) are backward looking. They are seeking to recreate the glories if Islam’s past.

The golden age of Islam occurred around 750 AD. At this period the Muslims had successfully conquered the Middle East, North Africa and a large part of Spain. However it was not just the territory that they controlled but the relative sophistication of the Islamic society, in comparison with Europe, that set it apart. Islam had preserved the knowledge of the Greeks and Romans that had been lost to the Europeans in the Dark Ages. It had fostered scholarship and trade. Under its protective umbrella science and mathematics prospered.

Islamists have a dream of jame towhidi, the ‘society of believers”. This is a dream of recreating things as they had been in the earliest days of Islam, when the Prophet, Muhammad, ruled, and the spiritual and the secular were one, and everything that was done by the as yet small community could be said to be serving the faith. It is an unsophisticated belief that if only Islam could be restored to the faith and practices  that Muhammad preached that Islam would again restore its past glory.

Whilst there was a resurgence of Christianity after the Renaissance, Islam is now the fastest growing religion. Islam predominates in such Middle Eastern countries as Iran, Iraq and Pakistan, Lebanon and Egypt. But most of the world’s Islamic population live in Asia. Indonesia has more Muslims than any other country. Other countries dominated by Muslim populations include Turkey, Nigeria, Algeria, Morocco, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo. There are also rapidly growing Muslim minorities in many European communities.

But a quick perusal of the heartland of Islam reveals that the majority of Muslims now tend to occupy underdeveloped countries with low standards of living in sharp contrast with their glorious early history. This seems to have fostered a climate of resentment against those who are materially better off. As a result a movement has been created that agitates for a return to the past in the mistaken belief that this will somehow change things for the better. This movement which promotes aggressive action to achieve these ends is generally known as “Islamism”.

In December 2022, Mamoud al Zahar, a co-founder of Hamas declared:

We are not talking about liberating our land alone.

He went on to say that the movement was intent on liberating the whole world!

Earth will come under a system where there is no injustice, no oppression, no Zionism, no treacherous Christianity and no killings and crimes like those being committed against the Palestinians and against the Arabs in all Arab countries, in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and other countries.

Melanie Philips, the British public commentator, writes:

The West however refuses to acknowledge the war being waged by the Islamic world against Western civilisation. Worse, by appeasing Iran, undermining Israel and ignoring the Islamisation of the free world, it has been giving succour to its mortal enemies.

The reason this is occurring is obvious.  Post modernism and the “woke” ideals peddled by the left have denigrated Western society and sought to make citizens of the Western liberal countries be ashamed of their history, their culture and traditions.

Again quoting Melanie Phillips:

……… our best and brightest have told us for decades that the West was born in the original sins of imperialism and colonialism, racism and white privilege. It’s not worth fighting or dying for.

So the core reason for the capitulation of the West to competing ideals is that the West has largely stopped believing in itself. Consequently our political and cultural leaders have stopped believing in the West and are therefore disinclined to defend Western values and ideals when they are challenged by fervent zealots like the radical Islamists who, however illogically, are prepared to sacrifice their lives in progressing their cause.

Once our education system was used to sustain and transmit our national culture. But today the education system has morphed into a vehicle for political and ideological propaganda that largely denigrates Western culture.

Thomas Jefferson reputedly said:

The price of liberty is eternal vigilance,

Unfortunately, we in the West have forgotten such wisdom and are now foolishly engaging with the world with our eyes tightly shut! As a result a strange alliance has brought together activists from the left and radical Islamists in trying to overthrow Western civilisation.

This is why the struggle in Palestine is so significant. It is essentially the vanguard of an existentialist threat to the West. The Islamists have already made significant gains in Europe. It has been borne along by a ceaseless wave of Muslim migration which in many ways is already modifying and diluting Western culture in European countries.

The reckless acceptance of 3,000 immigrants from Gaza without proper checks by the Albanese government sounds the warning that without proper management of our immigration, Australia is bound to go the way of Europe.

Let us make no mistake. The conflict between Israel and Hamas is not just a minor confrontation in the Middle East. It is the harbinger of a far greater struggle which pits Western civilisation against Islamism.

The opponents in this struggle could not be more different. 

Western civilisation is the product of a long process in evolution of thought ranging from the Greeks and Romans through the Reformation and the Age of Enlightenment eventually resulting in modern liberal society underpinned by democracy and capitalism founded on Judaeo-Christian values.

Radical Islamism relies on only one source – the historically dubious doctrines that purportedly arose by divine inspiration from an illiterate seventh century Arab called Muhammad. In their desire to recreate this fabled past Islamists are committed to re-establishing Sharia law which is illiberal, misogynistic, homophobic and generally barbaric.

It’s time we regained the courage to defend our Western values, traditions and ideals! And to begin with we can’t allow Israel to fail in securing its sovereignty and viability as a nation.

Postscript

As I write this essay, courageous Palestinian civilians are rising up to protest against Hamas. They have come to the rightful conclusion that Hamas is prepared to sacrifice their welfare on the altar of anti-Western Islamisation. I can only hope that the West provide succour and support for these brave people!