RUTHFULLY YOURS

“My mother said that Arabs are born to hate Jews.” — Abdelghani Merah (brother of Mohamed Merah, a French Muslim terrorist who murdered seven people), speaking on French television.

“I heard with my own ears, Mohamed Merah’s mother saying: “in our religion it is permitted to kill Jewish children.” — Mohamed Sifaoui, journalist and director of a documentary on the Merah family, on Canal+ TV.

Incidentally, while Abdelkader Merah’s trial was underway, the headstone of Ilan Halimi — a Jew tortured to death in 2006 — was desecrated and broken. By whom? Guess.

In France, any public mention of Muslim anti-Semitism can lead you to court. In February 2017, the scholar Georges Bensoussan was sued for “incitement to racial hatred” because he mentioned in a radio debate how vastly widespread anti-Semitism is among French Muslim families.

Now, however, two types of Muslim anti-Semitism are being highlighted by the media. These two types could be called “hard anti-Semitism” and “soft anti-Semitism”.

Hard Muslim anti-Semitism is the anti-Semitism of murderers. Soft Muslim anti-Semitism is anti-Semitism of “anti-Zionists” and harrassers of various stripes.

The recently concluded trial of terrorist Abdelkader Merah is a clear and pathetic illustration of hard Muslim anti-Semitism. Abdelkader Merah is the brother of Mohamed Merah, a French Muslim extremist who murdered seven people, including three Jewish children and their teacher at a Jewish school, in Toulouse. Mohamed Merah was killed in a shoot-out with police on March 22, 2012. Abdelkader Merah, Mohamed’s brother, was on trial during the past few weeks. He was accused of being a member of a terrorist organization and to have closely monitored his brother during his murder spree. Abdelkader’s trial ended on November 2, 2017; he was convicted and sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Abdelkader’s Merah’s trial illustrated the atmosphere in a Muslim family where hatred for Jews was like a bond in the family culture. L’Express writes:

“A sinister little music hovers above all this tragedy: visceral anti-Semitism. In their indictment, investigating judges noted that Abdelkader Merah approved the ‘chosen targets’ of his brother, including ‘the Jews, against whom he seemed to be angry’. In the absence of love and attention, the Merah couple indeed fed their children with the hatred of Jews.”

Abdelghani Merah, Abdelkader’s brother, is the only member of the family who succeeded in climbing out of his family’s culture of hate: hatred of France, hatred of Jews, hatred of everyone who is not Muslim. “My mother said that Arabs are born to hate Jews” Abdelghani said on television.

The world equates American military power with the maintenance of the postwar global order of free commerce, communications, and travel.

Sometimes American power leads to costly, indecisive interventions like those in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya that were not able to translate superiority on the battlefield into lasting peace.

But amid the frustrations of American foreign policy, it is forgotten that the United States also plays a critical but more silent role in ensuring the survival of small, at-risk nations. The majority of them are democratic and pro-Western. But they all share the misfortune of living in dangerous neighborhoods full of bullies.

These small nations are a far cry from rogue clients of China and Russia — theocratic Iran, autocratic North Korea, and totalitarian Venezuela — that oppress their own people and threaten their regions.

In the Middle East, there are two places that consistently remain pro-American: the nation of Israel and the autonomous region of Iraqi Kurdistan. Both show a spirit and tenacity that so far have ensured their survival against aggressive and far larger neighbors. Both have few friends other than the United States. And both are anomalies. Israel is surrounded by Islamic neighbors. The ethnic Kurds live in the heart of the Arab Middle East. Quite admirably, the U.S. continues to be a patron of both.

For some 500 years, the Ottoman Empire terrified the Christian Middle East and Mediterranean world. Almost every country in its swath was Islamicized. Two tiny unique places were conquered but not transformed: Armenia and Greece. Both suffered terribly at the hands of the Ottomans and their successors, the early-20th-century Turkish state.

Yet both Armenia and Greece remained Christian and kept their languages and cultures. Today, both are still quite vulnerable to renewed neo-Ottoman Turkish pressures.

America has been a friend to both Armenia and Greece, although their histories with the U.S. were often controversial. In turn, they have sent millions of talented and skilled immigrants to the U.S. The world is a far better place because there are 11 million Greeks who keep the legacy of Hellenism alive. Armenia still remains a Western outpost — the first country to formally adopt Christianity as a state religion, and a nation that has preserved its faith under centuries of cruel foreign persecutions.

After a humiliating defeat in Syria and Iraq, thousands of European jihadis are set to return home. Western governments seem set to roll out the red-carpet for them as if they were heroes rather than turncoats.

The UK has launched an integration program, Operation Constrain, for its homecoming jihadis to provide them with assistance in finding a job and living a “normal” life.

Such theatrics, however, are not expected to deter determined terrorists, unless the authorities are equally determined with brutal honesty to see what is being said extremist mosques and seminaries and know their sources of funding.

When a minister from the Gulf warns European countries that their mosques or imams should be licensed, you know you have a problem on your hands.

While France and Germany marked memorial days for the 2015 Paris and 2016 Berlin terrorist attacks, many Islamists seem to remain undeterred. The October 31 terror attack in New York and the arrest of three suspected ISIS militants in Germany are merely reminders of how determined many Islamists are to rattle the foundations of modern civilization and move their plans forward inch by inch.

As ISIS retreats in Syria and Iraq, its adherents show up in the West as “inspired” home-grown or would-be terrorists. Anyone believing that these homecoming terrorists were merely hostages of ISIS or were only given air-guns is misinformed.

So many terrorist attacks this year have made people in the West doubt the ability of governments to counter terrorist aggression. Some political leaders, such as London’s Mayor Sadiq Khan, have said that people will just have to get used to terror attacks — a response the public might understandably find less than satisfactory.

Meanwhile, President Trump’s tweet after the October 31 attack in New York — “We must not allow ISIS to return, or enter, our country after defeating them in the Middle East and elsewhere. Enough!” — resurfaced skepticism about how terrorism is being handled.