The world is at war - Dr. Mordechai Kedar

by Dr. Mordechai Kedar

The world has finally seen the light - or is it the darkness? It is going to have to reassess some of its sacred cows if it wants to survive.

The world is at war. And that's old news. Immediately after 9/11, over 14 years ago, former Mossad Chief Efraim Halevy said that WWIII had begun. The only thing that has changed over the past few days is that the rest of the world is also beginning to realize that it is at war.

The Western world, the immutable objective of World Jihad, has awakened to find itself standing on a firing range where its heart serves as the target and its culture is the bulls-eye.

Tragically, the bell tolls in the form of mass murder and the sight of blood flowing like water Last Friday's attack in Paris was not just the wanton murder of innocents, it was also an attack against the symbols of Western culture: theater, concerts, restaurants, stadiums. In the proclamation claiming responsibility for the atrocity, Islamic State announced that it did not merely attack the capital of France, it attacked the capital of prostitution and adultery and the "standard bearer of the Crusades."

Islamic extremists are at war with the most iconic symbol of Western culture, liberty – and primarily, with the liberation of women.

The attack against the Russian plane on its way from Sharm a Sheikh is part of that war. Russia is fighting the Jihadists in Syria, making its citizens a legitimate target in Jihad eyes. It doesn't matter that these were innocent tourists who only wanted to relax on the Sinai Desert's pristine beaches. And if the crash harms the economy and causes tourism to slump is Sisi's Egypt, that is all to the good. He is, after all, an enemy of the Muslim Brotherhood. Add to that the cultural by product: those tourists, mostly female, come to the Sinai beaches, drink alcohol, possibly take drugs, and lie on the sand minimally clothed, all of which infuriates Islamic fundamentalists.

The war is not limited to firearms and bombs. More and more people are beginning to discern the gaps allowing the enemy to breach the walls of the West's encampment. The mass migration from Islamic lands, starting in the seventies, is well entrenched in Europe but has not integrated into European culture, has not adopted its mores and has, instead, carefully held on to its original culture, nurtured in neighborhoods where the host country's culture is not welcome.

As a result of last weekend's attacks, French President Francois Hollande announced that France will change its laws to allow the government to cancel the citizenship of suspected terrorists. Now they wake up? Where were they three years ago, in 2012, when Rabbi Jonathan Sandler, his two sons Arieh and Gabriel and the little Miriam Monsonego were murdered in Toulouse by a murderer who arrived from the Jihadi fields of the Middle East? Where was the French government after the murders at Hyper Cacher and Charlie Hebdo this past January? What steps were taken when Ilan Halimi was barbarically murdered in Paris in 2006? All these terrorist murders were perpetrated by Muslims who could have had their citizenship revoked. France is shutting the barn door now that the horse has bolted.

If it wants to survive, Europe must go beyond mere legal measures and constitutionality and begin examining three of the principles that are the mainstays of its culture: human rights, political correctness and multiculturalism.

The concept of "human rights" is a broad term that took over much of Europe's public, media and legal discourse as a result of WWII, the Holocaust and Europe's colonialist crimes. This all-embracing concept has left no room for its counterpart, "human obligations', and is interpreted to mean that every human being has basic rights whether or not he fulfills his basic obligations and duties. That is the reason Europe granted the entire world's unemployed the right to reach its shores.

An exaggerated concept of human rights also provided the justification for not having children. As a result, the demographic statistics for Europe are disastrous, making it necessary for a constant stream of foreign workers to arrive to work in factories, transportation, services, groceries and laundromats. Except that these workers, unlike immigrants in the past, live in cultural enclaves and do not budge from the lifestyles of their countries of origin.

This brings us to the next Achilles' heel, multiculturalism. Many Europeans believe that a country can manage to contain a number of cultures. In the case of Islamic immigrant culture, that means allowing polygamy, dependence on welfare systems, family violence, vandalism, violence against people who are not Muslims, unorganized labor and the acceptance of Sharia courts whose verdicts are often at odds with the host country's laws.

The real meaning of multiculturalism in this case is the takeover by a violent society of the non-violent host culture in the public, economic and political domain, a situation that cannot go on for long. Law enforcement officers fear entering the violent neighborhoods that harbor this culture, one that lives on the social, economic and political periphery of the host country. Marginal people who feel neglected and ostracized are a short distance from terror.

The third problem Europe will have to find a way to deal with is political correctness that shuts the mouths of anyone pointing to the problem by labeling them racists, extremists and rabble rousers, then placing them in the docks to be castigated by the media, academia, politicians and the public. Political correctness paralyzes any efforts against those who are destroying the foundations of society – it has reached the point where, in Sweden, it is forbidden to connect the rising harassment and rape of women to Muslim immigrants, even though the vast majority of the incidents really are perpetrated by Muslim immigrants - who believe that the wives of infidels are their property.

The battle is not confined and cannot be confined to those who fired, blew up and murdered hundreds of French and Russian citizens over the past month. The war is being waged on a much larger battlefield, with a comprehensive ideological framework that justifies violence against the nations of Europe and their culture.  The nations of Europe must take back the ability to defend themselves instead of allowing democracy to be used as a tool in the hands of those who are against democratic values, especially that of liberty.

Israel is part of the campaign

Israel talked for quite a while about declaring the "Northern Branch" of the Islamic Movement, headed by Sheikh Raed Salah,  illegal. This branch currently enjoys all the protection and freedoms which a democratic society provides its citizens, but does not believe in democracy in the slightest. It subscribes only to the Islamic values as set down by the Muslim Brotherhood's philosophers. It does believe in liberty, but only for Muslims, and not including religious liberty or the freedom to leave the Islamic faith. It does believe in equality, but only between Muslims, while Jews, Christians and infidels must live under Islamic protection with limited rights. It does believe in monotheism, but other monotheistic religions such as Christianity and Judaism, are deemed invalid, while Islam is the only true faith.

The Islamic Movement believes that Jews form religious communities which are part of the various nations in which they live and therefore are not a nation deserving of its own state. They believe that the Land of Israel, in its entirety, is holy to Islam and only to Islam, so that there is no justification for the State of Israel's very existence – in their eyes, it is the state of a non-existent nation with an invalid religion, whose territory is slated to become part of a Muslim country.

The branch headed by Raed Salah was founded in 1996. Since then, he has been inciting Israeli Arab citizens against the state, its government and its army, and is especially virulent about Israeli control over the El Aksa Mosque, the site of Judaism's Holy Temples.  He views Jewish control on the Temple Mount as an indication of Judaism's return to life, posing a theological threat to Islam and so the Movement works feverishly to undermine Jewish hold on Jerusalem.

The Northern Branch

Both the Northern and Southern Branch believe in the same ideology, but the Southern Branch plays the Israeli political game, sits in the Knesset and acts as though it accepts the existence of a Jewish State. It is less violent and therefore less popular among Israeli Arabs.

Now that Israel has decided to declare the organization illegal, it is crucial to oversee the effectiveness of that measure on two fronts;

a. Have the movement's activists stopped their anti-Israel activities or have they gone underground and moved to less legal and more violent attacks?

b. How will this move affect the rest of Israel's Arab citizens? Will they side with the movement and its goals or will they – in time – turn their backs on it.

This is a war, a war against Islamic fanatics, and in war as in war. The West and Israel do not have the option of losing.

Written in Hebrew for Arutz Sheva, translated from the Hebrew by Rochel Sylvetsky, Arutz Sheva Op-ed and Judaism editor.


Dr. Mordechai Kedar

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