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I am not a suspicious kind of guy. I like to give people the benefit of the doubt.
But what is the appropriate response as we watch Democratic politicians appeasing, excusing and deflecting in the face of one of the greatest threats of our age: radical Islam?
You will remember in the aftermath of 9/11 how many “progressives” insisted that these iniquities were caused by American foreign policy, or western colonialism, or the one Jewish state. Anything, in fact, to avoid taking these men at their word, who made videos explicitly stating that they were murdering to “bring glory to Allah.”
And yet what is amazing 25 years later — despite the Mumbai atrocities, the Charlie Hebdo massacre, the 7/7 London bombings, and what security analysts tell us would have been dozens, perhaps hundreds more attacks on American soil had it not been for the diligence of the security services — is that many liberals are still singing the same grotesque song.
You have seen it. I have seen it.
Dems delusional
In the hours following the murder, rape and mutilation of hundreds of Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023 — many of them young people doing nothing more than dancing as the sun rose — Michigan Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib managed to say: “suffocating, dehumanizing conditions . . . can lead to resistance.”
In other words, the responsibility for the October 7 massacre lies not with Hamas but Israel.
Zohran Mamdani — now mayor of a city with almost a million Jews — engaged in the same moral subterfuge. “The path toward a just and lasting peace can only begin by ending the occupation and dismantling apartheid,” he said.
This isn’t just a pattern; it’s a pathology. I could give you dozens of further examples, but let me offer just one. In March this year, after a man drove an explosives-laden vehicle into a synagogue in Michigan, hoping to massacre 140 people, mostly children, Abdul El-Sayed reached for perhaps the most sinister phrase in the modern political idiom: “Hurt people hurt people.”
This is the Senate candidate for Michigan, ladies and gentlemen, the favorite to take his place within the font of political power. Does he not realize (or does he realize only too well) that the fanatics are laughing at him, using him, wielding his eloquence for their own advantage, a form of geopolitical jujitsu that should make us weep?
Beware extremism
I have seen Islamic fundamentalism up close. My late, beloved father grew up as a Shia in Pakistan, and many in his extended family remain of that faith. Most, I am glad to say, are moderates who live and let live. But a small number are implacable fanatics, believing that my father’s conversion to Christianity — after he came to London to study law in the 1960s and met my mum in church soon afterwards — was an act of apostasy deserving of death.
You won’t be surprised to hear that we keep our distance from these cousins.
So let me say to credulous Democrats: These radicals are not amenable to negotiation. They are not seeking compromise. They are not animated by poverty or alleged “suffocation.” You could have handed ISIS the entire GDP of America and carved out a space in the wider Levant larger than 10 Alaskas, and they would not have said “thank you” but used every advantage — financial or otherwise — to do what they have said is their animating purpose: to escalate bloody jihad.
Similarly, whatever you think of the Netanyahu government or its prosecution of the war in Gaza, do you really think that if they handed Hamas a few billion dollars over and above what they have already squandered on terror tunnels and weapons, they would have been sated? Or would they have moved to do what is written in their founding charter: to wipe the Little Satan from the pages of history before turning on the Big Satan?
Wake up, folks. The problem is not the West. It is not American foreign policy. It is not poverty. It is not colonialism. It is fundamentalism itself. A virus that is spreading. A virus that means synagogues and Jewish schools must be protected by armed guards. A virus that will greedily exploit any vector, Democratic politicians most of all, to replicate. A virus whose adherents lack that most civilizing of human virtues: doubt.
Psychopathic
And doubt, let me emphasize, is no small thing. I believe it lies at the heart of what has made our civilization great. It sat behind the scientific revolution, figures like Newton and Boyle questioning the prevailing dogma, performing experiments, testing hypotheses, a thrilling culture of discovery that contrasts vividly with the Islamic caliphates of the age where “innovator” was a term not of praise but — as the scholar Toby Huff has put it — a “heretic, subject to death.”
It is central to our political culture, too, the notion that no one has a monopoly on what constitutes a worthy life and thus we should live in peaceful coexistence with one another. The philosopher John Stuart Mill talked of “experiments in living,” a phrase that I have always felt rather wonderfully describes the tapestry of this great continent, the genius of millions of disparate people living under a common law.
And it is why I shudder when beholding those who cut the throats of their hostages, who video themselves as they rape and mutilate their victims, whose eyes brook no doubt in their psychopathic self-certainty.
And I look, no less fearfully, at the smooth, articulate, handsome men and women whose families have benefited so mightily from the society that has adopted them, while giving succor to those who wish to destroy it.
Can we continue to put this down to naivety? To complacency? Or is it time to give it a more apposite name: complicity?
One thing is certain: Left unchecked, this threat could destroy us.