We are all hostages

by Phyllis Chesler

The global jihad has abused and slaughtered Jews and non-Jews across the West.

Every Jew, both inside and outside of Israel, has been held hostage for 40 days. In the Holy Land, Israelis—Jews, Christians, Muslims and Druze—have been bombed, kidnapped, tortured, murdered, forced into bomb shelters and cast into internal exile.

Because Israel has dared to fight back, Jews around the world are being “punished” for Israel’s alleged “crimes.” Jews everywhere are being verbally harassed, demonized, threatened, physically attacked and sometimes murdered. Visibly Jewish students no longer feel safe in their classrooms, at gatherings or on the street in Europe, the United States, Canada and beyond.

The Jewish state was created to protect Jews from their 2,000-year-old vulnerability to pogroms and genocide while in exile. The existence of that very state is now being used as the excuse for a monstrous “intifada” against all Jews in the West. It is driven by the lethal propaganda against Israel that has been disseminated for at least 60 years. It may take that long to drain this swamp of lies.

But, as ever, this is far bigger than the Jews.

Right now, more than one billion Westerners are being surrounded on their streets and in the media by the war cries of “Allahu Akbar.” Everyone, everywhere has been held psychologically and often physically hostage by the “globalized jihad.”

Traffic has been stalled. Visible Jews have been physically attacked. Anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian rallies, marchers and random ranting individuals have frightened or attacked passengers on buses and trains with their aggressive propaganda.

When will the West wake up to the fact that we and our way of life are under siege?

From both a jihadist and Western leftist point of view, killing the Jews will redeem the West’s sins of racism, imperialism, colonialism and slavery. Indoctrinated Westerners refuse to acknowledge that the West is not the only or even the major sinner in world history.

Muslim countries have a very long history of gender and religious apartheid, anti-black racism and black slavery, imperialism, colonialism, conversion via the sword and more. I doubt that destroying the only democracy in the Middle East—Israel—will liberate Muslim women from being forcibly veiled or honor-killed.

Western “useful idiots” refuse to understand that all the crimes attributed only to Israel are actually crimes that Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad have alone and continuously committed.

Psychologically speaking, the media, college professors, the United Nations and the surging swarms in the streets have projected the atrocities committed by Islamic terrorists on to Jews and the Jewish state.

For decades, decent people, Jews and non-Jews, have been bombarded with slogans like “Death to the Jews,” “Nazi Israel,” “Hitler did not get the job done,” “Zionists are criminals” and every other hideous libel one can imagine. We have been subjected to non-stop lies in the elite media. Whatever Hamas terrorists tell journalists is reported as fact. Whatever instantly verifiable footage the IDF shows is reported as “Israel says.”

Imagine the psychological and traumatizing effect that such non-stop hatred has on all Westerners.

What must we do? In the short run, President Joe Biden must stop appeasing and funding Iran—the main supporter and financier of global jihad.

If we don’t act, they will come for all of us sooner rather than later. Israel alone cannot be expected to fight the battle for Western civilization.

First published in JNS.