By Esti DeAngelis, Staff Writer
One night before the 86th anniversary of Kristallnacht, there was a pogrom on the streets of Amsterdam. As night fell in the hours following Maccabi Tel Aviv’s soccer match against AFC Ajax, mobs chased Israeli fans through the roads and alleyways of Anne Frank’s former hometown. They were beaten, kicked, chased with knives and run over. Five were hospitalized.
Though early reports indicate that the attack was mostly perpetrated by Islamist Middle Eastern and North African migrants, it was not only radical Islamists who justified it. The same radical young people who skipped class to go camping in support of terrorist violence against Jews in Israel have failed to denounce terrorist violence against Jews in Amsterdam.
The pogrom in Amsterdam should have been a wake up call for the West. It should have served as a terrifying reminder that the West is not immune to radical Islamist terror. Instead, nothing changed.
To those paying attention, this is not shocking at all. Terror attacks are not new to Europe. These young radicals throughout the Western world seem not to understand that “globalizing the intifada” results in not just attacks on “Zionists” but on people like them too. Radical Islamists did not ask those in the Twin Towers on 9/11 or at the Manchester Arena in 2017 what their thoughts were on Palestine.
Terror supporters in the West are cheering for their own demise.
This can only be explained by a supreme ignorance, both of history and of the non-Western world. Though it is hard to believe that college students supporting Hamas and Hezbollah could be so clueless about these groups’ ideologies, it is impossible to understand their support for terrorism any other way. “Zionists,” i.e. Jews, may be their first victims, but they are never their last.
The “enlightened” Westerners supporting terror groups must learn about the Taliban’s new “vice and virtue” laws in Afghanistan, which, among other things, ban women’s voices from being heard in public. Those waving the flag of Hezbollah must put it down long enough to learn about the crimes against humanity committed by the group against the Syrian population. Just this month, the IDF discovered and released footage of Hamas torturing innocent Palestinians.
This puts terror groups’ supporters in the West in an awkward situation. Unless they consider the average Syrian or Palestinian to be a raging Zionist, they are forced to confront the reality that maybe they have misunderstood this whole conflict. They have been duped. “Dear university students in the United States of America,” wrote the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei himself on X. “You are standing on the right side of history.”
I would have assumed that liberal feminists would be horrified by an endorsement from the regime that has a habit of disappearing young women who protest against it. It turns out, such an assumption is false.
Not only is the far left in the West ignorant of what goes on in the places where their terrorist friends exert their influence, they seem to be just as ignorant of how dangerous this ignorance is. It actually does matter when large swaths of Western youth outwardly support terrorism. It’s all fun and games until the wife of a convicted terrorist shows up at Columbia University’s encampment. They may dress up and cosplay revolutionaries for woke brownie points, but if the terrorists they support have their way, things will blow up. Literally. Idiotic and ignorant ideology can become dangerous fairly quickly.
Ultimately, no one will be immune. If history has taught us one thing, it’s that thinking hateful ideologies are just a “trend” is probably a bad idea. These ideologues don’t know history either, or else they would have realized ages ago that they sound exactly like the Nazis they claim to despise.
An understanding of both history and the world around us is the bedrock of a functioning society. People in the West must understand that liberty and freedom are an anomaly in human history. Often, when big world events momentarily threaten to uproot the lives of even those in the Western world, I see the phrase “nothing ever happens” trend on social media. Westerners believe that what happens in the rest of the world will never impact them. The status quo will prevail, and nothing consequential to their lives will ever really take place.
A West that feels immune to the effects of cancerous ideologies is a West that is killing itself slowly. And what a strange suicide that will be.
Photo Caption: The 9/11 memorial in NY
Photo Credit: Flickr