Howard Epstein – AN OPEN LETTER TO THE CLOSED MINDS OF EUROPE
My dear fellow Europeans
I write this infinitely more in sorrow and empathy than in anger.
Christian Europe: Goodwill to All Men – Except Jews
“I wish that the wounded Israeli tourists were dead.”
These were the tweeted words of Irem Aktas, a board member in the women’s branch of the ruling Turkish AK Party (read Muslim Brotherhood), following a bomb attack in Istanbul on Saturday, March 19, 2016, in which five were people killed — three of them Israelis — and 36 were injured — including 11 Israelis. She wished the Israeli eleven well over their injuries, provided they were also well over the River of Lethe.
In Europe today, there will be many — following the twin Da’esh ordered and executed attacks on Brussels last Tuesday (22/3, as it will doubtless be dubbed by the Americans), by Sunni Muslim-Arabs — who are thinking:
If only it could have been Jews/Israelis who died, there would not have to be so much gnashing of teeth, wailing and panic over the loss of human life, or fear as to what may be coming next. Would that we could say: “It’s only Jews.”
And had it been “only” Jews, I can imagine the headline: “Two Arabs killed in Brussels airport outrage involving [Israeli] passengers.” Do you think me extreme, or paranoid? Then you have not been following the international reportage of the current Intifada here in Israel[1]. My fictional verbal distortion is tame compared to foreign media reports about the way some of our people have had the audacity not to lie down and die, steak knife protruding from neck, but to take the fight back to the attacker, often fatally.
Europe’s Thousand Year War Against The Jews
It is not for nothing that, on the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in January 2015, Charles Krauthammer wrote of Europe’s “Thousand Year War Against The Jews”. From blood libel and blood-letting (including by the Crusaders en route to Jerusalem, of all places), through pogroms, expulsions, rapes, deportations, concentration camps, all the way to the extermination camps, Europeans have through the centuries been energized by the desire to make life a living hell, and/or a cruelly-foreshortened one, for their fellow citizens who were born Jewish. The soil of Europe is stained with their blood.
Then, when Hitler’s Final Solution of the Jewish Problem ended in failure — the snuffing out of six million lives not having been sufficient to achieve the Nazi aim — the European Jews had the temerity, not only to have survived in small part, but also for the remnant to have gone on to establish their own state, Israel. Further, their chutzpah knowing no bounds, they gathered in their people from Arab lands, and repeatedly refused to be defeated, but prevailed, sometimes enlarged, in war after war visited upon them.
Worse yet for you Europeans, the unspoken but well-understood truth: the Zionist experiment is flourishing, and Israel is putting other countries to shame with its success in every field of endeavor on which it embarks — including running a solvent and liquid economy (unlike the USA, the UK and the EU) and a healthy, European-style democracy. It was not supposed to be like this. What a living embarrassment is Judeo-Christian culture if you can never junk the “Judeo” prefix? So you sought another way to defeat the Jews and their abominable creation, Israel, even at the price of expunging the European heritage (as we shall shortly examine).
Meanwhile in the Muslim World
Whilst Jews were being persecuted over the centuries in Europe, what do you think was going on in the Ottoman Empire and the Arab world? Do you suppose the Jews there were celebrated for their industriousness, their bookishness and their religiosity? No. They were subjected to Dhimmitude, a term coined by Bat Yeor (see below) to denote the legal and social conditions of Jews, and (please note) Christians, subjected to Islamic rule. You may have guessed that this means a classification of citizenry that is somewhat below first-class.
Europa – Eurabia
In Europe, Globalization and the coming Universal Caliphate[2], Jewish-Egyptian born, later British academic, Gisèle Littman (aka Bat Yeor), provides a highly-authoritative narrative of the morphing over many years of Europe into Eurabia – the Islamization of Europe. (The title of the book alone shows the percipience and brilliance of Bat Yeor, for she presages Da’esh self-declared caliphate by several years.)
Painstakingly, Bat Yeor explains Europe’s nasty little open secret: the EU has for long been establishing formal alliances with the Arab and Muslim states, setting out her thesis by reference to three issues:-
- The European Union (EU) policy of globalization, which consists of reinforcing the United Nations world power, weakening both American influence and European cultural/national identities through multiculturalism. ….
- The multileveled geo-strategy of the Organization of the Islamic Conference[3] (OIC) conceived for the West on Muslim immigration; the penetration of Muslim influence and culture in the West; academia and the media; “Islamophobia”; globalization, and the establishment of a world Muslim body rooted in the Koran and the Sunna in anticipation of the coming universal caliphate.
- The instruments, mechanisms, and networks created by the EU, and now also the US, binding them with the OIC in a policy aiming to enforce security, defense, and globalization. These instruments provide the channels and cogs for the progressive Islamization of the West; they establish the major elements of a new global system of totalitarian social and political domination impervious to Western democratic institutions. ….
As Bat Yeor explains, the Islamization of Europe is not a new idea. She references Marshall Pétain and Maurice Papon as being in on the start of the paradigm. (The former kept the French docile during the Nazi years by running Vichy France for Hitler, whilst the latter, a notorious Nazi collaborator, was convicted in 1998 of crimes against humanity for facilitating the deportation of more than 1,500 French Jews to Auschwitz.)
Bat Yeor shines a spotlight on deep-rooted solidarity between European adherents of Nazi ideology and Arab networks. Then she maps out in excruciating but essential detail the route from Europe to Eurabia, via unstinted support for the Palestinians and male fides towards Israel. (As to the rest of Bat Yeor’s magnificent work, there is no substitute for buying and reading it for yourself. You are unlikely to regret it.)
The Arab Mind-set
Being Arab is a mind-set. As Bat Yeor explains, and Bernard Lewis before her: Arabs see the whole world as theirs, they do not see boundaries or frontiers, nor do they expect to have any need of them. When they have liberated Jaffo, Vienna and Cordoba (all the subjects of declared intentions of recovery and subjugation) and beyond, all lines on world maps will disappear. There will be a universal caliphate.
Further, Arabs and Muslims, and especially Islamists, see other human beings, non co-religionists, as inferior to them. So, imagine the perceived gall of those Dhimmi Jews! Always second-class citizens in Arab lands, they use their empty Holocaust self-pity to insert their Zionist entity, as a dagger into the heart of Arab lands. Then they twisted the knife.
Following Israel’s unexpected and, to some, impudent, success in the Six Day War of June 1967, it then had the temerity to pretend that they were equals and put out peace-feelers to their recently-defeated Arab neighbours. In response to Israel’s magnanimity, the Arab League held a summit conference the following September in Khartoum. It made its position crystal clear with its “Three NOs”: “No peace with Israel. No recognition of Israel. No negotiations with Israel.” Why bother with peace when world domination, in (please note) a Europe-first strategy, is the ultimate goal.
The Barbarians are Coming
One of the many reasons given for the fall of the Roman Empire was, as Edward Gibbon remarked: the Roman world was overwhelmed by a deluge of Barbarians. A shock bounty (no need of a Trojan horse) for the Islamists arrived in Syria in 2015 in the form of an express invitation to all-comers into Europe, with its open internal borders, from German Chancellor Angela Merkel — let us call it “the Merkel Indulgence”. The time will come when some-one will write, in the vein of Gibbon: Europe was overwhelmed by a deluge of Barbarians.
Am I a racist who believes that all Arabs and Muslims are barbarians — like the Barbarians: uncivilized and primitive? Of course not. I believe that human beings are the same the world over: some good, some bad, and most somewhere in between. But there will be sufficient suffused with Islamist nihilistic tendencies, amongst the millions who have reached, and will in the future reach, Europe, by reason of the Merkel Indulgence, for Europe to be overwhelmed by a deluge of those of a barbaric disposition.
In support of this thesis, I suggest that those who attacked the Madrid railway in March 2004, London Transport on 7/7 2005, the Paris of Charlie Hebdo, the Bataclan and the Rive Gauche, Borgeois-Bohèmes in 2015, and, in Brussels, the airport and metro this week, are universally seen, outside the Arab/Moslem world (and perhaps by some within it, though for the sake of their well-being they had better not say so) as barbaric — uncivilized and primitive. You do not have to be racist to hold to that view. You have to be merely a realist.
Lebensraum for the Psychopaths
Here is some more reality. The incidence of psychopaths in society (any society) is generally accepted by the psychiatry/psychology and criminology communities to be 1% (and 25% amongst prison populations). Whilst in her 2005 book The Sociopath Next Door: The Ruthless Versus the Rest of Us, psychologist Martha Stout claims that the number of psychopaths at large in society is closer to 4%, even 1% is not an insignificant percentage, so we shall rest on that.
Taking 1% of society as psychopathic means that, if the young male constituents of the immigration to Europe in the past year of one million people constitute (say) 40% of the incomers, ie 400,000, then 4,000 of them will be psychopaths, just by reason of being averagely human. There are, however, two buts:-
- there is an unknown number of radicalized youths amongst that assumed 400,000 (some being naturally psychopathic and some only after having been radicalized). Since we must avoid double-counting, but as we do not know, we can only hazard a guess at an aggregate 6,000 who need to go onto the watch-lists of the multifarious European security forces[4]; and
- in the UK alone (which is semi-detached from Europe), the police and special branch forces hold the biometrics of nearly terrorist 8,000 suspects.
Now try to imagine what it will take, from here on in, to control the radicalized, the psychopaths and the other barbarians within Europe’s gates. To appreciate the logistical problem, bear in mind that, amongst the Paris terrorists, were several who had used the cover of the Merkel Indulgence to come and go between the EU and Syria more than once. Below the radar? Would that there were a radar system for this.
A European Own Goal
It should be dawning on you by now that you Europeans have brought this on yourselves. You do not see that? Let me assist. Bearing in mind the Eurabia project, so expertly described by Bat Yeor, we have also observed the Merkel Indulgence. Yet there is more.
Ignoring the old adage about how it is better to give a man a fishing rod than a herring, the Europeans have been piling fish upon the Palestinians for decades now. They have long been bank-rolled, in the hope that it could not go on forever because at some point Israel would surely fail. After all, it was no secret that, whatever EU money inflows to the PLO/PLA/PA did not go into the Swiss bank accounts of Arafat and his cronies, was spent on guns and explosives, the better to harry the Israelis. (Precious little went to improving the lot of the ordinary Palestinian, as we shall see later.)
There was always the hope, that beat within European breasts, that Israel would be blasted into surrendering land to its neighbour, thereby giving life to the much-trumpeted “Two-State Solution” that emanated from Oslo in 1993/5, staggering on even until now.
Israel, in a reminder of the Stockholm Syndrome, assisted this view, even aware that its incipient neighbour was also its would-be usurper. Indeed, ever-willing to assume the role of the turkey naïve enough to vote for Xmas, Israel put to the back of its collective mind the Palestinian intention, often expressed, that anything that may be accepted would be merely the first step to taking “back” the whole of Palestine. Nevertheless, escalating offers were made, through Rabin, Barak and Olmert, that (one might have thought) the Pals could not refuse. Yet the Pals rejected the best offers they were ever going to get. (This is as lucky as Britain got when Hitler abandoned Operation Sea Lion, to invade England, and instead launched Operation Barbarossa, on the Soviet Union. How did the Brits and the Israelis get so lucky? Britain was saved by winning the Battle of Britain (denying the Germans of supremacy in the air). Israel was saved (not quite so heroically on its part) by God hardening pharaoh’s heart, repeatedly (as with the Golan, too), manifest in Palestinian intransigence.
Israel, forced to remain in control of the West Bank, which it was constrained to occupy in a war forced on it in 1967, has had the good sense to maintain the integrity of its post-June 5, 1967 borders (minus Sinai, which it exchanged for a peace with Egypt, and Gaza, which it unilaterally evacuated — but that is another story). And Israel has grown ever stronger. Europe, meanwhile, broke and bust fiscally, as it now is, can be seen (as you may never admit) merely to have financed nihilism, and, in terms of an Israeli capitulation, for no gain.
So much for the fish, rank and reeking by now. How would the fishing rod approach have looked? Let us try this hypothesis:-
Cher Honourable Chairman Arafat. We don’t want to be, ‘ow you say, “chien en crèche”, for our sympathies are with you, of course, and we are completely confident that in the fullness of time you will achieve your aim of pushing the Jews into the sea. Nevertheless, whilst it sticks in our craw to admit it, the Jews, oh, err, sorry, the Israelis, have a democratic state and we (reluctantly) accept that our culture and theirs are not a million miles apart – closer at any rate than yours and theirs. And, since the European Project is all about democracy, we think you had better sit down with them and talk it through. In any event, we are sorry. No, really, we cannot apologise enough, but we cannot support you if you are a one-trick pony and that trick is terrorism.
Never once did that script or any variation of it, present itself to the European mind. And now we see that even self-interest failed to motivate such an approach. Why self-interest, you ask? Take a look at the images of Brussels airport. What is the disconnect between Sunni ISIS/ISIL/Da’esh terrorism and that initiated, developed and “refined” over many years by the Sunni PLO/PLA/PA variety? Answer: there is no disconnect. They are not even two sides of the same coin. They are both on the same side of the one, blood-stained, coin.
Terrorism Made Acceptable by the Palestinians
The attack at Lod (later, Ben-Gurion) airport in May 1972, perpetrated by the PLO’s Japanese mercenaries, every Second Intifada bomb attack within Eretz Yisrael, every cowardly bombing of every “soft” Jewish target anywhere in the world — by way of, let us not forget the Munich Olympics outrage, just weeks after that at Lod airport — every knifing in the streets of Israel in 2015/6, all these set the scene for Belgium, March 2016. You might say, if the irony is not too nauseating for you, that the PLO/PLA/PA made terrorism respectable. They certainly made it sufficiently common-place that, to the psychotic or radicalized young Muslim/Arab, it is (how do the young put it?) no big deal. It’s a tried and tested way of making life hell for the infidel (and that includes you). Europe financed all that.
One matter that is rarely spoken of: it is much easier for people to hate, than to understand, the other. That is how people who have never met a Jew can hate all Jews. Not to do so takes the effort of investigation or study, and a little empathy. And if you are an Arab/Moslem child, it is going to be especially difficult to empathize with Jews, given your school books are full of bile about them, and the publications your parents read are decorated with cartoons that would put Der Stürmer’s to shame for their flaccidity.
Just as it has always been PLO/PLA/PA policy to brutalize the people — their own people — and ensure that they acquire nothing, so they have nothing to lose, the fuelling of hatred is an easy trick to pull off. It is but one limb of the one-trick pony.
The European Contribution to Terror
When did the EU ever condition aid on the abandonment of the policy of telling Arab kids from birth that Jews are to be hated and killed, and martyrdom in doing so is the natural end of the Muslim’s life? Sorry. I cannot hear your reply. I shall take that whisper as “never”. The gratuitously unnecessary part, therefore, has been the Europeans signing up to all this, when what they should have told the Pals was:-
Don’t teach your kids hatred. We saw what that did to Europe seventy years ago and we decided that, just as virtue is its own reward, hatred is its own punishment. We formed the EU to end our regional wars. You should learn from our mistakes – and our redemption.
But, as we know, the Europeans did not say that.
Now the wheel has turned, and it has turned on the Europeans. What became common-place in Israel is becoming commonplace in the EU. By now it should be becoming clear that Europe has brought this horror, this terror, upon itself. By financing the PLO/PLA/PA, the EU has financed a continuum of terror — Sunni Arab terror — which stretches directly from Israel through Syria to Europe.
Still holding the few tattered shreds remaining of the fig leaf with which Europe has tried to hide Arab/Muslim manhood, and the truth about their all-or-nothing nihilism, I fear that the Europeans will stagger on, still driven by their hatred of the Jews, still unable to identify with them.
Indeed, I regret that Europe can be depended upon to remain in denial of the essential truth: In the battle of competing cultures — Arab-Muslim v Judeo-Christian — they have been backing the wrong horse. And not only backing it but feeding it, clothing it, financing and thereby arming it, and morally supporting it (with, for example, the West Bank labelling issues — a Neroesque self-indulgence if there ever was one). Last year in Paris and now this week in Brussels — and I am sorry to put this so indelicately (so you make wish to look away for a moment) — the horse you have been backing just vomited all over you.
It must have swallowed too much fish.
© Howard Epstein 2016
[1] See, for example the CBS February 2, 2016 headline “3 Palestinians killed as daily violence grinds on” in the aftermath of the terrorist attack that took the life of Hadar Cohen. Jerusalem Post, March 3, 2016
[2] By Bat Yeor, Farleiegh Dickinson University Press, 2011
[3] The OIC’s motto is: “To safeguard the interests and ensure the progress and well-being of Muslims“, which, as Bat Yeor explains (in case we did not know it), necessarily involves, in the fullness of time, the destruction of Israel.
[4] It transpires that there are dozens of such agencies operating in Belgium alone. Patently, coordination is not their strong suit.
