Os Guinness on Israel, the West, and Islamism

The Middle East and the crisis in the West:

For decades now Os Guinness has been one of our leading Christian thinkers and cultural commentators. His many important books have often been discussed on these pages. I happen to own 24 of them, and his latest volume is another brilliant examination of where we are at, and how things might pan out in the days ahead.

I refer to Our Civilizational Moment: The Waning of the West and the War of the Worlds (Kildare, 2024). Guinness believes the West is at a critical juncture, and its very existence might be in real jeopardy. How we respond to the major crises facing the West will determine what sort of future we have – indeed, if we will even have a future.

His brief (190-page) volume contains seven main chapters. The first three look at our current place in history, our Christian past, and how the Enlightenment was in many ways a great disrupter to what had gone before. The next four chapters look at the main waves crashing over us:

The Red Wave: Radical Marxism
The Rainbow Wave: The Sexual Revolution
The Black Wave: Radical Islamism
The Gold Wave: Corrupt Elitism

The entire book deserves careful treatment, but with the current turmoil in the Middle East, I want to limit myself to the Black Wave of Chapter 6. Future articles will discuss some of the other very worrying flash points that confront us.

Guinness starts his chapter this way:

The Black Wave is the myriad of radical Islamist movements whose avowed common aim is to destroy the “Little Satan” in their midst, Israel, and then go on to bring down the “Great Satan,” America in the West. “Death to the two Satans” was proclaimed by the Ayatollah Khomeini himself during the Iranian Revolution in 1979. It is the Islamist way of setting out the apocalyptic enemies that must be defeated if the universal and millennial hopes of the Islamists are to be fulfilled.

Thus the ongoing global intifada to see the West wiped out and replaced by a universal Islamic caliphate. But the really incredible thing is how many clueless wonders in the West are happy to be strange bedfellows with the Islamists. Indeed, it is the nexus between Western woke Marxists and the Islamists that is the real problem today. The Red and Black Waves have come together in an act of all-out war against the West:

Let there be no confusion. The nexus between Islamism and the progressive left is where the Long March through the institutions meets the open border crisis in both Europe and America, and where the Red Wave of radical Marxism converges with the Black Wave of radical Islamism. It represents an incalculable danger to America and the West, as well as to Israel in the Jews. All Americans who heard American protesters supporting Hamas and shouting “Death to America” are now without excuse. Both the Great Satan and the Little Satan and are now in the crosshairs of the radicals’ sights. To defend the Jews and Israel now is to defend America, the West, and civilization itself.

Of course as Guinness makes clear, to stand up for Israel and Jews around the world is not to suggest they are above criticism and assessment: “Needless to say, to defend the Jews is not to give Israel a carte blanche rationale for whatever they do, any more than it would mean defending our mothers, right or wrong.”

He reminds us of the REAL Hamas, including its constant use of propaganda and fake news, its use of human shields, its use of “pay for slay” stipends to families of terrorists, its stated aim of eradicating Israel, and so on. And he reminds us that Palestinians have always rejected any “two-state” solutions. Iran and Hamas have made it perfectly clear that only one state can exist, and one must go: Israel.

After looking at the longstanding history of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish sentiment and practice, Guinness writes:

One unassailable conclusion confronts anyone who takes all this history into account. Hatred of the Jews and Israel is the cause and not the consequence of the conflicts in the Middle East. As Dennis Prager sums up the age-old problem succinctly, “The conflict may be the hardest to solve, but it is the easiest to explain. In a nutshell, it’s this: One side wants the other side dead.” . . . For the radicals, the two-state solution is irrelevant. For them, the final solution is the only solution. Jew-hatred is the longest ongoing hatred in history and an openly exterminationist and genocidal hatred, but in the modern world, Naziism and Islamism were the chief incubators of this hatred of the Jews. When finally allied later with left-wing progressive radicalism in the success of the Long March through the institutions of the West, this toxic amalgam now fuels the dangerously mounting antisemitism across to America, across Europe, and across the world, thereby fueling the “new anti-Jewish war” and underlying assault on the West that is the target behind them both.

This includes all of us. ‘We are all Jews today’ is no mere trite phrase, but the reality in which we live, if we care at all for western civilisation. Their struggle is our struggle. Enmity against Israel and the Jews is enmity against the West. Guinness closes his chapter with these words:

The defense of Israel and the Jewish people will always be first and foremost the defense of Israel and the Jewish people. But the defense of Israel and the Jewish people has immense global significance too. It is critical to peace in the Middle East, critical to the defense and preservation of the ideas and ideals of Western civilization, and critical for the very future of humanity in the possibility of a human-friendly world. For those who understand, the reality is that “We are all Jews now.” Israel is not just fighting Hamas and the different expressions of radical Islamism. Israel is fighting the enemies of the West and fighting for civilization itself. The menace of the Black Wave of Islamism is extremely grave, above all when it coincides with the Red Wave of radical Marxism and dominates the intellectual, political, and cultural centers of the West. The illiberal left-Islamist axis can only be ignored at the peril of America and the West.

Not just Jews and Christians, but anyone concerned about the fate of the West needs to get this book, digest it, and share it with a friend.

[1080 words]