Last week, Joe Biden issued a schoolmarmish warning to Israel, which he has been browbeating for months to placate his party’s anti-Israel left and Muslim American voters in Michigan, a critical swing state. Speaking to the press, he threatened, “There’s got to be a ceasefire because Ramadan – if we get into circumstances where this continues to Ramadan, Israel and Jerusalem could be very, very dangerous.”

This solicitude for Muslims’ sensitivity about their faith bespeaks the West’s long bad habit of caring more about Islam––the faith that conquered and occupied, and to this day still occupies, much of the Christian Roman and Byzantine empires––than they do about their own civilization’s foundational religion, whose adherents today are being persecuted and massacred in Islamic lands.

This cultural tic does not demonstrate, as many “citizen of the world” globalists believe, a superior morality based on both an uncritical tolerance for the exotic “other,” and a haughty disdain for alleged parochial American nationalism and jingoist patriotism. Rather, it signals to the world a civilizational failure of nerve so widespread and intense that it has become a form of geopolitical masochism, manifested in conspicuous displays of cringing apologetics and shameful guilt for the West’s alleged historical sins.

For example, Biden’s foreign policy crew, products of this ruling class sensibility, seem to think that Muslims view Ramadan the way Christians do Easter, and so will be deeply offended by Israel besmirching this sacred time by continuing to fight. Actually, as Bassam Tawil writes, “‘In the holy month of Ramadan,’ according to fatwa 1566/10013/L=1431, ‘the reward of virtues is increased.’” And martyrdom while waging jihad against infidels is a theological virtue par excellence.

Moreover, jihadists have only contempt for Christian and Jewish holy days, rituals, churches, and temples, even as they demand universal obeisance to every jot and tittle of Islamic doctrine. Tawil continues, “Hamas and other Palestinian terror groups have never hesitated to use Jewish holidays to wage war, carry out terrorist attacks and murder Jews, including October 7, 2023, which was the Jewish Sabbath and the Simchat Torah holiday––not to mention the launch of the Yom Kippur War by Egypt and Syria” in 1973.

This is just one example of the shameless double standard the self-loathing West has adopted in regard to Islam and Muslims. Christianity and Judaism, in contrast, are regularly disrespected, dismissed, blasphemed, and mocked by our cognitive elites, but few are offended or troubled about the feelings of those faiths’ adherents. Such insults are the cost of living in the secular Western world where religion has been banished from the town square, and free speech is privileged––unless, of course, Muslims, including sadistic butchers and brutal rapists like Hamas, are the targets.

Indeed, this blatantly appeasing double standard has increasingly characterized Western sensibilities since the Iranian revolution of 1978-79. A key consequence of that foreign policy disaster was the global empowerment of modern jihadist assaults on the West. One early example of the aggression against the West’s defining rights and principles such as free speech, was the fatwa that Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued against Indian novelist Salman Rushdie for his “blasphemous” 1989 novel The Satanic Verses.

Across the world violent protests and riots erupted, while “cosmopolitan” Westerners sided with the Ayatollah. Celebrated British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper sniffed that he “would not shed a tear if some British Muslims, deploring Mr. Rushdie’s manners, were to waylay him in a dark street and seek to improve them.”

The Rushdie fatwa, however, is just one of many Muslim assaults on the postwar West and its principles. In 2004, Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was stabbed to death on the street by a Moroccan immigrant angered over van Gogh’s film Submission and its criticism of sharia laws that subordinate women. His collaborator Ayaan Hirsi Ali had to go into hiding to escape threats to her life for that offense, and for writing Infidel, which also criticized Muslim misogyny.

Much of the European response to these murderous reactions to Westerners practicing the foundation human right to free speech blamed the victims rather than supporting free speech. In England, for example, the Index on Censorship, supposedly a champion of free speech, called van Gogh a “free speech fundamentalist” who deserved death because he “roared his Muslim critics into silence with obscenities.”

Similarly, in 2005 after a Dutch newspaper published cartoons depicting Mohammed, 139 people died in subsequent rioting. The reaction of Europe likewise blamed the newspaper’s free speech rights for provoking the violence. A Dutch justice minister proposed to strengthen illiberal blasphemy laws to facilitate “integration” of Muslim immigrants, and to censor “possible explosive material in society to avoid reactions,” a euphemism for murder and mayhem.

More shameful, President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, leaders of the “free world,” condemned the cartoons, and the EU proposed a “media code” to censor speech about religion. Of course, offenses against Christians or Jews and their faiths were not included. The EU justice minister further proclaimed that  “we can and are ready to self-regulate that right” of free speech, and admitted that fear of violence justified censorship.

This masochistic support for violations of core Western principles even as they were under attacked, created what Daniel Pipes called the “Rushdie Rules,” the imperative that Westerners grovel before violent, illiberal theocrats, and even support their terror, as the current administration and its “red line” is doing in the case of Israel’s management of the defensive war against Hamas. Meanwhile, Christians and Jews remain fair game for insult and ridicule by the West’s sophisticated “brights”–– on the cheap, since they know that Christians and Jews aren’t going to murder them for exercising their right to speak freely in the town square.

Given such a record of sacrificing core Western values to gratify traditionalist Muslims, 20 years later we shouldn’t be surprised that our prestigious universities, media, and progressive politicians have supported Hamas’ sadistic, genocidal crimes against Israeli civilians; or that the U.S. president is actively undercutting Israel’s efforts to end decades of terrorist murder and bombardments; or that the Senate Majority Leader has interfered in Israel’s politics by calling for new elections, explicitly in order to remove Prime Minister Netanyahu.

Lame duck Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell got it right: “‘It is grotesque and hypocritical for Americans who hyperventilate about foreign interference in our own democracy to call for the removal of a democratically elected leader of Israel,’ he said. ‘This is unprecedented. We should not treat fellow democracies this way at all.’”

Finally, betraying a liberal-democratic ally to gratify brutal terrorists and their American fellow-travelers, is also a sign of a civilization in decline. As the 1^st B.C. Roman historian Sallust wrote about the decaying Republic, “decadence and hubris—the natural dividends of prosperity” have come to dominate Western civilization. Even as we speak, ruthless enemies like Russia, China, and Iran are watching and waiting to try conclusions, as we indulge ourselves with dangerous distractions like DEI, anthropogenic global warming, “net-zero carbon” schemes, “systemic racism curricula,” and limitless fabricated “genders.”

Worse, while those rivals spend big bucks on their militaries, ours is dwindling both in men and materiel, caught in a state of “managed decline,” as the Wall Street Journal put it. Butter, not guns is the highest bipartisan priority: “The federal government gives more cash to state and local governments (e.g., Medicaid money) than it spends on its own defense. These are the priorities of a peacetime welfare state, not a nation serious about defending itself in a world of determined enemies and new technology that will put the U.S. at increasing risk.” We’re a few years away from spending more on entitlements than we do on defense. Such bad choices are another sign of a civilization in decline.

Our current malaise and dysfunctions are not just about our appeasement of modern jihadism. We are closing out a century of relentlessly sawing the civilizational branches we are sitting on, by discarding our Constitutional foundations, common sense, tradition, and the authority of nature and nature’s God in order to pursue impossible utopias.

We are swiftly approaching the consequences of such suicidal blindness––and, as George Orwell put it, we’re heading for a fall not into “a bed of roses, but a cesspit filled with barbed wire.”