The Real Threat to Israel – and to the Rest of Us

Since the latest round in the Israel/Palestine conflict we have seen a phenomenon arise that is cause for great concern. “Protest rallies” have been held against Israel that would be better described as riots than peaceful demonstrations. Recently in Calgary, for example, an anti-Israeli mob gathered on the steps of the Alberta city’s City Hall to protest Israel’s airstrikes. What, exactly, they thought the city of Alberta could do about it, is unclear. At any rate, the “demonstration” broke out into violence as the mob turned on a small handful of Israel supporters who, perhaps unwisely, were also present. Several of them were injured and hospitalized as a result. Mercifully, nobody was killed.

The Calgary riot is far from being the only example. The same thing has happened in other major Canadian cities such as Toronto and across the rest of the Western world. Indeed, while this sort of things is new to us for the most part here in Canada, in some countries, such as France, it is both old hat and far more extreme. The riots in France have been aptly compared to the Kristallnacht, the pogrom in Nazi Germany in 1938 in which Jewish homes, synagogues, and stores were vandalized and ransacked. The biggest difference between the two events was that in 2014 Paris, the rioters who were smashing windows and attacking Jews were not Aryan supremacists but Arabs who mixed praises to Allah, with their gutter level, Nazi-era, anti-Semitism.

This sort of thing does a huge disservice to the Palestinian Arabs living in the Gaza Strip and West Bank in whose name these protests are ostensibly being held. So, of course, does the actions of Hamas, the despicable terrorist group that hurls rockets at civilian neighbourhoods in Israel from launchers that it hides in schools, nurseries, and hospitals in an utterly evil attempt to maximize the deaths of non-combatants on both sides (for the most part ineffective when it comes to Israeli citizens). This is not what I wish to focus on here, however.

The fact that we are experiencing this sort of nonsense throughout the West is indicative of a much deeper problem, one which very few commentators seem willing to address. Some go out of their way to avoid addressing it. Arthur Weinreb, for example, recently writing in the neo-conservative Canadian Free Press, said that the police and not pro-Palestinian protestors were the problem. Now much of what he said is valid. In a country like Canada, peaceful protests and demonstrations are and should be legal, and it is the job of the police to ensure that when they occur they occur in a lawful and orderly fashion and do not breakdown into violent riots of this sort. The police seem to have abdicated that responsibility to a certain degree in the case of Calgary.

Weinreb attributes this abdication to political correctness on the part of the police, an unwillingness to investigate Muslims. That may very well be the case but placing all the blame on the police and virtually exonerating the protestors is itself a form of political correctness. For the elephant in the room here, the issue which commentators are unwilling to touch, is the fact that these riots would not be a problem were it not for liberal, multicultural, policies that encourage mass immigration from the Third World while discouraging assimilation to the established cultures, institutions, and ways of Western countries.

Forty one years ago, a distinguished writer in the country that has seen the worst of these riots, addressed this issue in a prophetic novel. In The Camp of the Saints, Jean Raspail, a traditionalist French Catholic and royalist, depicts Western civilization on the verge of collapse, threatened by an invasion of Third World immigrants armed with nothing but their own wretchedness, against which the West, weakened by generations of liberal guilt, finds itself powerless to resist. When European countries close their consulates, ending a program whereby impoverished parents in India could improve the lots of their children by putting them up for adoption in Europe, a horde of millions of the poorest of the poor, climb aboard an armada of decrepit ships in heed to the words of an unlikely prophet, who declares that the day has come for “Buddha and Allah” and all the Hindu gods to cross the seas and take for themselves the kingdom of the “nice little god of the Christians”, and set sail for the coast of France where they are due to arrive on Easter morning. The French media, in a frenzy of self-loathing, propagate the welcoming of the armada, which they dub the “last chance for mankind”, uttering banalities like “we are all from the Ganges now”. When France fails to summon up sufficient will to live in order to resist this invasion, the rest of the West falls too. Towards the end of the novel, the Grand Rabbi is depicted as joining in the surge of antiracist sentiment that dooms France and the West, “in spite of the fact that Israel herself was doomed not to survive it.”

Raspail, although the armada he depicts is laden with Hindus from India, showed a great deal of insight into the true nature of the threat that Western countries, including Israel, face. Needless to say, in a West dominated by liberalism, his insights have gone ignored. This is true of mainstream conservatives as much as anybody else for they have opted to concentrate on military threats that are for the most part non-existent. As the Cold War drew to an end and the Soviet Union collapsed Francis Fukuyama argued that the world was progressing towards an “end of history” in the form of universal, liberal, capitalist democracy. More realistically, Samuel P. Huntington argued that history would continue to be shaped by the “clash of civilizations”, with the next clash being between the America-led West and the Islamic world.

Since the jihadist attack on the United States on September 11, 2001, this clash has been mostly conceived of in military terms. The knee-jerk tendency is to think of the threat in terms of terrorist bombs and the solution in terms of high-tech military hardware, wreaking death and destruction upon Arab and Muslim countries or alternatively, imposing liberalism, feminism, and democracy upon them (one result of which was the electoral victories of Hamas). It would make more sense to think of the threat in demographic terms, as Patrick J. Buchanan did in The Death of the West. In this 2002 book, Buchanan argued that Israel could be seen as a metaphor or microcosm of the West as a whole. Noting the high fertility rates of Palestinians in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, as well as in the surrounding Arab countries, he pointed out that over the next twenty-five years her population, including both Jews and Arabs, could be predicted to grow by 2.1 million while her neighbours would grow by 62.2 million, while the Palestinian population in the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel herself would grow to 25 million, vastly outnumbering the number of Jewish Israelis. In the long run, this and not Hamas’ rockets, is what threatens Israel’s existence. Similarly, it is the low fertility rates of Western countries, combined with the mass immigration of people with much higher fertility rates, that threatens Western civilization – or what is left of it – and which is importing into the West, a problem with jihadist violence that we otherwise would not have to put up with.

Of course liberals will have nothing to do with any proposals that take that diagnosis of the problem into account and neither will mainstream conservatives. A couple of years ago, the man who is now being spoken of as likely to succeed Stephen Harper as leader of the Conservative Party and possibly Prime Minister of Canada, Jason Kenney, banned Serbian-American scholar Dr. Srdja Trifkovic from entering Canada. Dr. Trifkovic’s strategy for victory in the war against jihadism is a combination of keeping the jihadists out of Western countries while letting them be in their own countries, a refreshing opposite strategy to that of George W. Bush and one which rests squarely on the diagnosis of the problem that we have just considered. Mr. Kenney, however, appears to prefer the failed strategy of appeasing them here, while bombing them to death over there. So problems of this sort are likely to continue for the foreseeable future.