Will the wishful thinking of Westerners never cease? President Biden tweeted this week:
Let me make myself clear: The vast majority of Palestinians are not Hamas. And Hamas does not represent the Palestinian people.
Isn’t it pretty to think so? In point of fact, 57% of Gazans in a recent poll expressed at least a somewhat positive view of Hamas. In 2021, in the wake of armed conflict between Hamas and Israel, 53% of Palestinians affirmed that Hamas is “most deserving of representing and leading the Palestinian people.”
The U.S. president is telling himself something that he wants to believe, and that he wants others to believe. We have been here before. In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush beclowned himself by insisting in public statements that “Islam means peace.” His motive—to head off bigotry against Muslims—was laudable, but it was a therapeutic lie.
It was a lie with consequences. Many Americans, deceived by this rosy take on Islam, which the media repeated incessantly, failed to grasp how difficult it would be to make liberal democracies of the Arab world. In fact, when some American observers on the political right cautioned against rushing into Iraq with grand nation-building plans, saying that Arab Islamic culture was antithetical to liberal democracy, loud neoconservative voices accused them of bigotry.
Thus did the good intentions of the United States lead to a folly costing between $4 trillion and $6 trillion, as Washington’s grand plan to transform Iraq and (non-Arab) Afghanistan into liberal democracies, came to nothing. Not only that, but the universalist crusade cost thousands of lives, both American and foreign, destroyed the ancient Christian communities of the region, and radically destabilized the Middle East. This is what happens when you prefer to believe a pleasing lie to the unpleasant truth.
This is not to demonize Muslims, but only to recognize that ideas have consequences—and that means religious ideas too. We all know that the kind of person who believes all Muslims are bad is someone who is deluded by bigotry.
That conclusion is neither accurate nor just. But we ought to know too that the person who believes that Islam and its followers are wholly unproblematic within liberal democratic societies is deceived by a different kind of bigotry—one that leads to inaccurate conclusions that are unjust to the peoples who have to live with the consequences of such foolish generosity.
In the great migration crisis of 2015, perhaps no European country was as generous as Sweden in welcoming Muslims claiming to be war refugees. It took in more refugees per capita than any other EU nation. This was in keeping with Sweden’s open-door policy of the last two decades, which has resulted in an astonishing 20 percent of its population today being foreign-born.
Crime and social unrest skyrocketed. Last year, then-Swedish prime minister Magdalena Andersson said that assimilation and integration has failed. This week, after an Islamic terrorist murdered two Swedes in Brussels, current Swedish leader Ulf Kristersson said bluntly, “Sweden has in modern times never been under as big a threat as now.”
With the Middle East on the verge of a wider war, European cities face the very real prospect of a sustained campaign of Islamic terrorism. The sheer idiocy of the continent’s decades of lax immigration policies have created a potentially catastrophic security situation. And yet, incredibly, there is serious talk that Europe may have to absorb vast numbers of Hamas-loving Gazans displaced by war.
Humza Yousaf, the left-wing Muslim politician who leads Scotland as its First Minister, said this week that the world community must offer refuge to the one million displaced Gazans—and said that Scotland would open its doors to them.
This is insanity. What reasonable liberal democratic country would import radicalized Palestinians into their midst? Egypt and Jordan know better. The Egyptians, who could far more easily absorb the refugees from next door, has said it absolutely would not take them—and would instead send them to Europe if they came. Hamas is a part of the Muslim Brotherhood, the radical Islamist group founded in Egypt, and which is a mortal enemy of the current Egyptian regime.
Jordan, which has generously accepted large numbers of refugees from the Syrian war, has taken the same line. King Abdullah no doubt remembers the Black September war in 1970, when displaced Palestinians tried to topple the government of his father, King Hussein. The Jordanian king knows that he can’t afford to be a sentimentalist about these matters. Importing into Jordan a large population of young Gazans who support the Hamas butchers would all but guarantee violence, even war.
European leaders have to be loud and unequivocal: no Gazans in Europe. Let their Arab co-religionists take them. If the Arab governments won’t, then we ought to ask ourselves what they know that we don’t. To this day, many Lebanese Christians, whatever negative feelings they may have towards Israel, despise the Palestinians. They blame the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians kicked out of Jordan after Black September for creating a ‘state within the state’ in Lebanon, and starting the civil war that wrecked the country.
How did I learn this? When I was attending a Lebanese Catholic church in New York in the year 2000, and brought back literature from a Palestinian Catholic parish in the West Bank, inviting Catholics to donate money to buy school supplies for Palestinian Catholic children. I assumed that there would be natural solidarity between these Arabic-speaking Catholics. The sharp, forceful history lesson from a couple of Lebanese parishioners sent into exile by the war educated me out of my naivety.
The point is not that Lebanese Catholics ought not to give charity to Palestinian Catholics. The point is that Westerners project our ideals onto the world beyond, and fail to account for its complexity and tragedy. Europeans love to look down on Americans for our innocent optimism, but the huge and alienated Islamic populations Europeans harbor in their major cities are testimony to the same thing.
(Nota bene, the United States has done far better than Europe at assimilating Muslim migrants. That said, the huge pro-Hamas protests that have taken place recently in some American cities are a chilling rebuke both to the diversity-is-our-strength nitwits, and more conventional believers in the American melting pot.)
President Biden announced on Wednesday his plan to send $100 million in aid to Palestinians in both Gaza and the West Bank. Couldn’t he have at least made the aid conditional on getting the hostages Hamas took out of Gaza? If the money is so important to the Palestinians, they could part with the Israelis, Americans, and citizens of other nations their fighters kidnapped.
Similarly with Europe. Brussels just announced that it is tripling its humanitarian aid to Gaza. Could they not have made those funds contingent on hostage release?
Gaza shouldn’t receive a single cent from the West until the hostages are free. But you watch: we’re all going to throw money down that sinkhole. The Telegraph reports that the European Union has spent nearly 100 million euros in the past decade in pipeline projects in Hamas-controlled areas. Hamas recently released a propaganda video showing its men digging up these pipes and turning them into rockets they later fired at Israel.
What guarantees does Joe Biden have that American taxpayer dollars won’t be used in the same fashion by Hamas, which governs Gaza? He says there are “mechanisms” to prevent the aid from going to Hamas. I don’t believe him.
Meanwhile, EU ministers are attempting to force all member states to accept asylum seekers as part of a ‘mandatory solidarity’ policy. Hungary and Poland blocked the move, with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban comparing it to rape. European publics have seen in recent days the cost to public order of importing unassimilable radical Muslims—and incredibly, EU leaders are trying to keep the pipeline open.
Maybe European peoples fed up with their elites should start digging up the pipes, so to speak, and turning them into (metaphorical) rockets to fire at Brussels, and at their own national capitals. How much more of this suicidal humanitarianism can Europe take? When is enough going to be enough? If the Egyptians and the Jordanians, Muslim states living in the neighborhood of Gaza, don’t want the Hamas-loving refugees, rightly fearing the radicalism and instability they would bring, why are Europeans once again prepared to play the fool?
Hamas and the Lies Westerners Tell Ourselves
Portraits of people killed, missing, or abducted during the Hamas attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023 are placed on the seats of the Smolarz Auditorium at Tel Aviv University, in a memorial exhibition titled “United Against Terrorism” on October 19, 2023.
Photo by AHMAD GHARABLI / AFP
Will the wishful thinking of Westerners never cease? President Biden tweeted this week:
Isn’t it pretty to think so? In point of fact, 57% of Gazans in a recent poll expressed at least a somewhat positive view of Hamas. In 2021, in the wake of armed conflict between Hamas and Israel, 53% of Palestinians affirmed that Hamas is “most deserving of representing and leading the Palestinian people.”
The U.S. president is telling himself something that he wants to believe, and that he wants others to believe. We have been here before. In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush beclowned himself by insisting in public statements that “Islam means peace.” His motive—to head off bigotry against Muslims—was laudable, but it was a therapeutic lie.
It was a lie with consequences. Many Americans, deceived by this rosy take on Islam, which the media repeated incessantly, failed to grasp how difficult it would be to make liberal democracies of the Arab world. In fact, when some American observers on the political right cautioned against rushing into Iraq with grand nation-building plans, saying that Arab Islamic culture was antithetical to liberal democracy, loud neoconservative voices accused them of bigotry.
Thus did the good intentions of the United States lead to a folly costing between $4 trillion and $6 trillion, as Washington’s grand plan to transform Iraq and (non-Arab) Afghanistan into liberal democracies, came to nothing. Not only that, but the universalist crusade cost thousands of lives, both American and foreign, destroyed the ancient Christian communities of the region, and radically destabilized the Middle East. This is what happens when you prefer to believe a pleasing lie to the unpleasant truth.
This is not to demonize Muslims, but only to recognize that ideas have consequences—and that means religious ideas too. We all know that the kind of person who believes all Muslims are bad is someone who is deluded by bigotry.
That conclusion is neither accurate nor just. But we ought to know too that the person who believes that Islam and its followers are wholly unproblematic within liberal democratic societies is deceived by a different kind of bigotry—one that leads to inaccurate conclusions that are unjust to the peoples who have to live with the consequences of such foolish generosity.
In the great migration crisis of 2015, perhaps no European country was as generous as Sweden in welcoming Muslims claiming to be war refugees. It took in more refugees per capita than any other EU nation. This was in keeping with Sweden’s open-door policy of the last two decades, which has resulted in an astonishing 20 percent of its population today being foreign-born.
Crime and social unrest skyrocketed. Last year, then-Swedish prime minister Magdalena Andersson said that assimilation and integration has failed. This week, after an Islamic terrorist murdered two Swedes in Brussels, current Swedish leader Ulf Kristersson said bluntly, “Sweden has in modern times never been under as big a threat as now.”
With the Middle East on the verge of a wider war, European cities face the very real prospect of a sustained campaign of Islamic terrorism. The sheer idiocy of the continent’s decades of lax immigration policies have created a potentially catastrophic security situation. And yet, incredibly, there is serious talk that Europe may have to absorb vast numbers of Hamas-loving Gazans displaced by war.
Humza Yousaf, the left-wing Muslim politician who leads Scotland as its First Minister, said this week that the world community must offer refuge to the one million displaced Gazans—and said that Scotland would open its doors to them.
This is insanity. What reasonable liberal democratic country would import radicalized Palestinians into their midst? Egypt and Jordan know better. The Egyptians, who could far more easily absorb the refugees from next door, has said it absolutely would not take them—and would instead send them to Europe if they came. Hamas is a part of the Muslim Brotherhood, the radical Islamist group founded in Egypt, and which is a mortal enemy of the current Egyptian regime.
Jordan, which has generously accepted large numbers of refugees from the Syrian war, has taken the same line. King Abdullah no doubt remembers the Black September war in 1970, when displaced Palestinians tried to topple the government of his father, King Hussein. The Jordanian king knows that he can’t afford to be a sentimentalist about these matters. Importing into Jordan a large population of young Gazans who support the Hamas butchers would all but guarantee violence, even war.
European leaders have to be loud and unequivocal: no Gazans in Europe. Let their Arab co-religionists take them. If the Arab governments won’t, then we ought to ask ourselves what they know that we don’t. To this day, many Lebanese Christians, whatever negative feelings they may have towards Israel, despise the Palestinians. They blame the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians kicked out of Jordan after Black September for creating a ‘state within the state’ in Lebanon, and starting the civil war that wrecked the country.
How did I learn this? When I was attending a Lebanese Catholic church in New York in the year 2000, and brought back literature from a Palestinian Catholic parish in the West Bank, inviting Catholics to donate money to buy school supplies for Palestinian Catholic children. I assumed that there would be natural solidarity between these Arabic-speaking Catholics. The sharp, forceful history lesson from a couple of Lebanese parishioners sent into exile by the war educated me out of my naivety.
The point is not that Lebanese Catholics ought not to give charity to Palestinian Catholics. The point is that Westerners project our ideals onto the world beyond, and fail to account for its complexity and tragedy. Europeans love to look down on Americans for our innocent optimism, but the huge and alienated Islamic populations Europeans harbor in their major cities are testimony to the same thing.
(Nota bene, the United States has done far better than Europe at assimilating Muslim migrants. That said, the huge pro-Hamas protests that have taken place recently in some American cities are a chilling rebuke both to the diversity-is-our-strength nitwits, and more conventional believers in the American melting pot.)
President Biden announced on Wednesday his plan to send $100 million in aid to Palestinians in both Gaza and the West Bank. Couldn’t he have at least made the aid conditional on getting the hostages Hamas took out of Gaza? If the money is so important to the Palestinians, they could part with the Israelis, Americans, and citizens of other nations their fighters kidnapped.
Similarly with Europe. Brussels just announced that it is tripling its humanitarian aid to Gaza. Could they not have made those funds contingent on hostage release?
Gaza shouldn’t receive a single cent from the West until the hostages are free. But you watch: we’re all going to throw money down that sinkhole. The Telegraph reports that the European Union has spent nearly 100 million euros in the past decade in pipeline projects in Hamas-controlled areas. Hamas recently released a propaganda video showing its men digging up these pipes and turning them into rockets they later fired at Israel.
What guarantees does Joe Biden have that American taxpayer dollars won’t be used in the same fashion by Hamas, which governs Gaza? He says there are “mechanisms” to prevent the aid from going to Hamas. I don’t believe him.
Meanwhile, EU ministers are attempting to force all member states to accept asylum seekers as part of a ‘mandatory solidarity’ policy. Hungary and Poland blocked the move, with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban comparing it to rape. European publics have seen in recent days the cost to public order of importing unassimilable radical Muslims—and incredibly, EU leaders are trying to keep the pipeline open.
Maybe European peoples fed up with their elites should start digging up the pipes, so to speak, and turning them into (metaphorical) rockets to fire at Brussels, and at their own national capitals. How much more of this suicidal humanitarianism can Europe take? When is enough going to be enough? If the Egyptians and the Jordanians, Muslim states living in the neighborhood of Gaza, don’t want the Hamas-loving refugees, rightly fearing the radicalism and instability they would bring, why are Europeans once again prepared to play the fool?
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