The West — and Israel — cannot reason with utopian fanatics

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From the October 7 massacre by Hamas to the slaughter at Bondi Beach in Sydney on Sunday, Islamists would have the world believe that the cause of all the mayhem is the existence of Israel. For Islamists and their apologists, the problem is simple: are you with the oppressor or the oppressed?

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The oppressor is, of course, the “Zionist entity.” The oppressed are the Palestinians. This is an updated version of Marx’s expectation of an apocalyptic final conflict between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.

For Islamists, the events at Bondi — 16 killed and 40 more in hospital — express what “globalizing the intifada” entails. The shooters were a father-and-son team, of Pakistani origin — globalization in action. Should a similar event take place in Canada, the meaning for Islamists will be the same.

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For more or less commonsensical liberal-democratic journalists and politicians it was the culmination of rising antisemitism in Australia since October 7. True enough, but ask yourself: how did the 2023 Hamas terrorist attack and the Israeli response turn into righteous (or self-righteous) antisemitism in Australia? Again, the commonsensical answer seems obvious: tolerating antisemitism invites terrorism because, where liberals see antisemitism as an embarrassing “prejudice,” Islamists see it as weakness and an opportunity to be exploited.

Critics of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese linked the attack to his government’s intention, announced earlier this fall, to recognize a Palestinian state. The same logic of appeasement would explain something similar taking place here.

Alas, common sense only takes you so far — about as far as the pieties uttered by Canadian politicians. They were appalled, and so on. In the words of the Australian Prime Minister: “the........

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