For a year now Palestinians have been killing Israeli civilians at random – knifing them, shooting them, driving cars into them, especially in and around Jerusalem. Nothing different from what the Muslim terrorist did when he drove a truck into a crowd of people celebrating Bastille Day in Nice, France. Except that when this happens in Israel there is an immediate chorus of statements from western foreign ministries urging Israel to show restraint and take steps to increase the chances of peace with what passes for a government in Ramallah. The European Union, often with France leading the charge, is one of the worst offenders in this regard, for it goes above and beyond these platitudes to increase its support for the Palestinians and their narrative. Thus France and other European countries recently voted in UNESCO to remove all traces of Jewish history from Jerusalem, helping the Palestinians kill Jews culturally as well as physically. Thus France and other European countries continue to funnel money to the Palestinian Authority in the face of that body’s ongoing incitement of its population to attack and kill Jews as much as they can. A recent statement by one of Abbas’ top aides urging Palestinians to slit the throats of Israelis wherever they find them seems not to deter the EU from its blatant support for a gang of thugs whose raison d’être is the liquidation of Jews and the Jewish state. Indeed, when Abbas recently addressed the European Parliament only to accuse Israel of poisoning the Palestinian water supply at the behest of some rabbis, the EU parliamentarians saw fit to greet this slander with a standing ovation.

This wilful blindness to what goes on in Israel is mirrored in the wilful blindness of European elites to what goes on inside Europe’s own borders. Their refusal to recognize that Palestinian homicidal attacks on Israelis are the result of persistent incitement on the part of Palestinian religious, cultural and political elites parallels their inability to recognize that the terrorist attacks on European soil similarly bathe in a culture of incitement that goes far beyond what ISIS dreams up and cultivates. Much is made these days of lone wolf attacks. It is said of the homicidal perpetrator in Nice that he had no known links to ISIS, drank alcohol, divorced his wife, may have been depressed. But depressed people don’t go out and commit random murder on hundreds of people and usually have friends who counsel them not to do that. This man had other friends, friends in the Muslim community who turned his supposed depression into a purpose, friends who may have hooked him up with ISIS, but if not ISIS then other Muslim organizations that could steel him to murder infidels. For Islam itself feeds on resentment, has been feeding on it ever since Christian Europe pushed back against it in Spain in the fifteenth century and then proved totally triumphant in the nineteenth century.

The media and the political elites love to scream about ISIS, but the problem of the Muslim world runs far beyond that. ISIS may be gruesome, but so is Hizbollah, Hamas, Boko Haram, the muscled Syrian opposition, Saudi justice, the Iranian mullahs, Pakistani clerics and ordinary citizens, the list goes on and on. And so too are many of the no-go Muslim zones in Europe, where police, fire, ambulance and welfare personnel are afraid to enter. In those Muslim communities the hatred of all things western are fanned to the point of murder. Remember the atrocious killing of the young Jewish boy, Ilan Halimi, by a gang of Muslims in a Paris suburb a few years back? These no-go zones where clerics mobilize youths and not so youths whose veins flow with lust and alcohol are not much different from the towns of the Palestinian Authority where Abbas and his henchmen, religious and secular, turn the pulsating desires of men to wanton murder. And even less than the Israeli Defense Forces enter towns under Palestinian control do the European forces of law and order penetrate these areas.

The cavalier way in which western elites dismiss the murder of Jews in Israel and falsely attribute it to Jewish settlements rebounds against them when faced with the facts of their own, homegrown and imported terrorism. Unable and unwilling to support Israel, they are equally unable and unwilling to confront the danger that they have created domestically. The policy of open migration recently adopted by the EU is but the latest in a strategy going back to de Gaulle when he opted to pit Eurabia against the United States and turn his back on Israel. With the recent massive inflow of Muslim migrants, most of whom are male, most of whom bring with them a culture that is fundamentally hostile to western liberalism and its open society, the cities of Europe have been transformed into hotbeds of rape and murder, directed especially against Christians and Jews, the infidel peoples of Islam. Even in the refugee centers Christians are not safe, while in Sweden the number of law-abiding people purchasing guns has skyrocketed. At the same time no political leader dares call out the enemy by its name, while judges hand the criminals suspended sentences, as happened recently in Germany.

It would seem that western elites, and the right-thinking people who support them, have learned nothing from history. Chamberlains everywhere hold office, clinging to the thought that appeasement of Islam will bring peace. It will not. That they justify this approach by claiming that to act otherwise would be to betray liberal values is specious in the extreme. There is nothing about contemporary Islam that is ready to embrace John Stuart Mill, let alone developments since he wrote. It is perhaps a blessing that most veterans of World War II are no longer alive to witness the pusillanimous drift of the democracies they so valiantly fought to save. But then, as one famous philosopher said, people who ignore their history are condemned to repeat it.

It is ironic that Europe, which emptied itself of its Jews, has now replaced them with Muslims. The Jews showered Europe with cultural, scientific and economic accomplishment and six million were burned in ovens in exchange. The Muslims have given them murder and mayhem and received indulgence in return. Surely it is time for Europe to wake up. Some stirrings can be seen in the British vote to leave the EU. Another would be if the European Union decided to back Israel to the hilt and withdraw its support for the PLO and the two-state solution. The same holds for America and other western powers. No boots on the ground, but clear and forceful diplomacy to defend liberal democracy, of which Israel is a beacon. Surely the world does not need another gangster state in the Middle East, and certainly not one that originated and honed all the criminal techniques of Muslim outrage that have now reached the Cote d’Azur.