We come, in this last article of the series, to a subject that concerns not the enemies of Israel but the friends who fail her, and the failure is one of sight before it is one of will. For the most dangerous weakness of the Western world in the face of political Islam has not been a lack of power—the West commands power beyond the dreams of any age—but a lack of comprehension, a persistent inability or unwillingness to see the thing in front of it for what it is. Again and again the democracies have misread the movements we have examined in these pages, explaining away their stated doctrines, mistaking their nature, and extending to them the assumptions that hold among reasonable secular actors but do not hold here. This blindness is itself a danger to Israel and to the West, and it is the fitting close to our study, for to understand the enemies of Israel is of little use if those who should stand with her cannot bring themselves to understand them too.

We must define our terms at the outset and hold a line carefully, for this is ground on which honest people stumble in two opposite directions. By political Islam we mean the ideological project that seeks to order state and society by a particular and totalizing interpretation of Islamic law and authority, and especially its militant forms, which pursue that project by coercion and violence. We do not mean Islam as the faith of more than a billion people, the great majority of whom seek only to live their lives in peace; we do not mean the Muslim as such; and nothing in this article is a license for suspicion of ordinary Muslims, who are far more often the victims of political Islam than its agents. The distinction between a faith and a totalizing political ideology that claims that faith is the very distinction the West has failed to make—in both directions—and recovering it is the whole burden of what follows.

The Category Error

At the root of the Western blindness lies a category error, a habit of mind that files political Islam under headings where it does not belong and so never sees it clearly. The secular Western mind, having largely privatized its own religion, tends to assume that religion everywhere is what it has become in the modern West—a personal and private matter of conscience, walled off from the public business of law and state. Confronted with a movement that refuses that wall, that insists on ordering the whole of public life by religious law and recognizes no division between the sacred and the political, the Western mind does not know where to file it, and so it files it under something familiar: under nationalism, or anti-colonial grievance, or economic frustration, or any category that does not require taking the religious claim seriously on its own terms.

This misfiling is not harmless, for one cannot rightly answer what one has not rightly named. A movement driven by a totalizing religious-political vision will not be satisfied by the remedies appropriate to a grievance over land or wages or representation, and a West that keeps offering such remedies—more aid, more territory, more inclusion—while the movement pursues an aim those remedies cannot touch will find its every concession pocketed and its every expectation disappointed. The category error guarantees a policy that misses, because it aims at a target other than the real one. To see political Islam clearly, the Western mind must first overcome its own provincial assumption that its private, depoliticized religion is the universal form of religion, and grant that here is a vision that means exactly what it says about law and state and does not regard its faith as a private affair.

The Twin Errors

The path to clear sight runs between two errors, and the West has tended to fall into one or the other rather than to walk the narrow way between them. The first error is the bigotry that collapses the distinction we have insisted upon, treating the faith of a billion peaceable people as though it were identical with its militant political perversion, and so regarding every Muslim with suspicion and every mosque as a threat. This error is unjust, untrue, and self-defeating, for it slanders the innocent, alienates the very Muslims who are political Islam’s first opponents, and confirms the propaganda that casts the West as the enemy of Islam as such. The believer rejects it without reservation, for it violates both truth and charity, and it is no part of the clear sight we are commending.

The second error is the opposite one, and in the contemporary West it is by far the more common and, just now, the more dangerous: the naïveté that, in its anxiety to avoid the first error, denies that there is any distinct problem at all, that refuses to name political Islam as a phenomenon, that explains its every manifestation as a response to Western provocation, and that treats any attempt to examine its doctrines as itself a species of bigotry. This error disarms the West before a real threat by making the very naming of that threat taboo. Between the bigot who sees a terrorist in every Muslim and the naïf who will not see political Islam even when it announces itself, the believer takes neither road; he holds the distinction the bigot collapses and names the reality the naïf denies, and he finds that holding both at once is the hardest and most necessary discipline of all.

The Refusal to Believe They Mean It

If one had to name the single deepest root of the Western blindness, it would be this: the refusal to believe that people mean what they plainly and repeatedly say. The movements we have examined have not hidden their aims; they have published them—in charters, in sermons, in textbooks, in the speeches of their leaders—and they have stated, with a candor that ought to be disarming, that they seek the destruction of the Jewish state, the subjugation of the unbeliever, and the rule of their law over all. And the West, hearing these declarations, has again and again decided that they cannot really be meant—that they are rhetoric for domestic consumption, or bargaining postures, or the froth of extremists who will moderate once their grievances are addressed. The plainest evidence, the stated word of the movement itself, is the evidence the West is least willing to credit.

This refusal is a strange and almost willful thing, for in most affairs we take a man at his word, especially when he repeats it under oath and acts upon it. Yet faced with movements that declare their genocidal intent and then act to carry it out, the sophisticated Western observer reaches reflexively for the interpretation that the declaration is not sincere—as though sincerity in such matters were too dreadful to be believed. There is a kind of innocence in this, but it is a guilty innocence, for it has been corrected by catastrophe again and again and has not learned. The charter said what it would do; the event confirmed it; and still the next charter is read as though its words were not quite serious. To believe that the enemies of Israel mean what they say is the beginning of Western wisdom, and it is precisely the step the West has been most reluctant to take.

The Grievance Theory and Its Limits

The Western mind, reaching for a category it can manage, has settled above all on the theory of grievance—the conviction that violence is always and everywhere the product of legitimate complaint, that the militant is at bottom a man wronged, and that the cure for his violence is therefore the redress of his wrong. There is truth in this as far as it goes, for grievances are real and injustice does breed violence, and the believer does not deny that the peoples of the region have suffered and that much of their suffering is real. But the grievance theory, made into a total explanation, becomes a blindness, for it cannot account for movements whose stated aims exceed any grievance that could be redressed—movements that do not seek a state beside Israel but instead of it, that do not seek the end of an occupation but the end of a people, and whose charters root their war not in a border dispute but in a theology of annihilation.

The limits of the grievance theory are exposed by a simple test: what concession would satisfy the movement? Where the aim is a redressable grievance—a border, a right, a recognition—a concession can in principle satisfy it, and peace becomes possible. Where the aim is the elimination of the Jewish state as such, rooted in religious conviction, no concession short of that elimination will satisfy it, and the offer of lesser concessions only funds and emboldens the pursuit of the real aim. The West, wedded to the grievance theory, keeps searching for the concession that will satisfy, and keeps being astonished when each concession is taken and the war continues. It is astonished because its theory cannot accommodate an enemy whose aim is not a grievance to be redressed but a people to be removed, and so it cannot see what is plainly before it.

The Open Society and Its Uses

Political Islam has proven adept at turning the very institutions and freedoms of the open society against it, and the West’s blindness extends to this exploitation, which it has been slow to recognize and slower to counter. The freedoms of speech, assembly, and religion; the protections of the law; the openness of the academy and the generosity of the asylum system—these goods of the liberal order have been used, by the more sophisticated currents of political Islam, as instruments to advance an agenda hostile to the order that grants them. The movement that despises the open society shelters within its protections; the ideology that would abolish free speech invokes free speech to silence its critics; the cause that rejects the equality of all before the law deploys the law against those who would examine it. This is not a paradox the movements find troubling, for the freedoms are, to them, not principles to be honored but tools to be used.

The West has been peculiarly defenseless against this exploitation, for its own commitments make it reluctant to deny to any the freedoms it holds dear, even to those who would use those freedoms to destroy them. A society built on tolerance struggles to know what to do with the intolerant who claim tolerance’s protections, and a society built on free inquiry struggles to defend itself against those who use the language of grievance to place whole subjects beyond inquiry. The believer does not counsel the abandonment of these freedoms, which are real goods and part of the West’s glory; he counsels the clear sight to recognize when they are being exploited by those who hold them in contempt, and the resolve to defend the open society against those who would use its own openness to close it. The first step, again, is simply to see—to recognize the exploitation for what it is rather than mistaking it for the ordinary exercise of the freedoms it abuses.

The Multicultural Blind Spot

A particular feature of the contemporary Western mind has deepened the blindness into something like a principled refusal to see, and it is the doctrine, widespread in the academy and the institutions, that forbids the judgment of other cultures by any standard outside themselves. On this view, to evaluate the practices or doctrines of another culture—to call some illiberal, some cruel, some incompatible with the dignity of women or the freedom of conscience—is an act of cultural arrogance, a relic of the colonial mind, forbidden to the enlightened. The doctrine is advanced in the name of humility and respect, and it contains a genuine caution against the arrogance that once dressed conquest as civilization. But carried to its conclusion it produces a moral paralysis, an inability to say that anything done in the name of another culture is wrong, and so a defenselessness before the worst that any culture may produce.

This blind spot falls with particular irony upon the victims of political Islam, for in its anxiety not to judge the oppressor’s culture, the multicultural mind abandons the oppressed within it—the women, the dissenters, the religious minorities, the very people whose protection the liberal order exists to secure. The believer, who holds that there is a moral law above all cultures because there is a God above all cultures, is freed from this paralysis; he can honor what is good in every culture and still name what is evil in any, including his own, because his standard is not the culture but the Author of the moral law. He does not judge political Islam by the parochial preferences of the West; he judges it, and the failures of the West alike, by the unchanging standard of the God who made every people and gave to all the same law written on the heart. And that standard permits—indeed requires—the judgment the multicultural mind forbids.

The Useful Innocents

We have traced, in earlier articles, the laundering by which the eliminationist slogan and the annihilationist charter are made palatable to decent Western opinion, and here we name the human mechanism of that laundering: the recruitment of the West’s own idealists to causes whose true aims they do not grasp. The movements of political Islam have learned to speak to the West in the West’s own moral vocabulary—the vocabulary of justice, liberation, anti-colonialism, human rights—and by speaking it they enlist the genuine moral energies of students, activists, and clergy who would be horrified by the aims those words are made to serve. The idealist marches for what he believes is justice; the movement harvests his march for what it knows is something else. The innocence of the marcher is real, and so is his usefulness to a cause that has deceived him.

The existence of these useful innocents is among the clearest proofs of the Western blindness, for it shows the category error operating at the level of the individual conscience. The student who chants for a Palestine from the river to the sea, believing he chants for justice, has filed political Islam under the heading of liberation, exactly as his professors and his culture have taught him, and has thereby made himself the instrument of an aim he does not share. To free him is not to condemn him but to give him the sight his education denied him—to restore the history, the charters, the plain meaning of the words, so that he may choose in knowledge rather than serve in ignorance. The believer’s task with the useful innocent is the patient labor of un-blinding, and it is among the most important labors the times require, for the innocents are many and their energies are real and have been turned, by the blindness of a whole culture, against the very people they ought to defend.

The Cost to Israel

All of this bears directly and heavily upon Israel, for the Western blindness is not a private failing of the West but a danger exported to the Jewish state, which lives on the front line of the reality the West will not see. When the West misreads political Islam as mere grievance, it presses Israel to satisfy grievances that are not the real aim, and treats her refusal to make herself defenseless as intransigence. When it refuses to believe the movements mean what they say, it discounts the threats Israel takes with deadly seriousness, and counsels her to take risks for a peace the other side has openly disavowed. When it launders the eliminationist slogan into a cry for justice, it turns its own moral authority against the survival of the Jewish state. The blindness of the West thus becomes a steady pressure upon Israel to disarm before an enemy whose nature the West denies—a pressure to act as though the threat were what the West imagines rather than what it is.

There is a bitter pattern in this that the believer must name plainly, for it recurs in every crisis. When the war that political Islam wages against Israel erupts into violence, the Western blindness tends to resolve the complexity by the simplest of moral pictures—the strong against the weak—and to cast Israel, because she is militarily capable, as the strong oppressor, and her attackers, because they are militarily weaker, as the weak oppressed, without regard to who seeks whose destruction. The category error and the grievance theory and the inverted morality of the slogan all converge upon the single people who must actually live with the consequences, and they converge as pressure upon the victim to accommodate the aggressor. Israel pays, in blood and in legitimacy, for the West’s refusal to see; she is the nation on whom the cost of the Western blindness most directly falls.

The Cost to the West Itself

The blindness is costly not only to Israel but to the West that suffers from it, for a civilization that cannot name a threat cannot defend against it, and the same incomprehension that endangers Israel abroad erodes the West at home. The refusal to distinguish the faith from its political perversion leaves the West unable to support the Muslim reformers who are its natural allies and unable to resist the Islamists who are its declared opponents, for it can see neither clearly. The multicultural paralysis that forbids judgment leaves it unable to defend its own hard-won goods—the equality of women, the freedom of conscience, the rule of one law for all—against those who would erode them in the name of a culture that may not be judged. A civilization that has lost the confidence to affirm its own goods and to name their enemies is a civilization in the early stages of surrender, whatever its material power.

Israel, in this light, is something more to the West than a distant ally; she is a warning and a witness, the place where the West may see, written in sharp and undeniable form, the reality it prefers to blur at home. The threats Israel faces openly are the threats the West faces in subtler form; the clarity Israel is forced into by her exposed position is the clarity the West has the luxury of evading. To stand with Israel is therefore, for the West, not only an act of justice toward an ally but an act of self-preservation, a refusal of the blindness that endangers the Jewish state and the Western world alike. The nation on the front line sees what those in the rear may still pretend not to see; and the wisdom of the rear would be to learn from the front rather than to lecture it.

The Defenders’ Case

Honesty requires the strongest contrary case, and it is a serious one, pressed by thoughtful people and not to be waved away. They argue that the very category of political Islam is a Western construct that lumps together vastly different movements, that talk of an Islamic threat is inflated by alarmists and exploited by bigots, and that the real and present danger to Muslims in the West is not their supposed radicalism but the suspicion and hostility they face from a fearful majority. They point, rightly, to the peaceableness of the overwhelming majority of Muslims, to the long record of Western aggression in Muslim lands, and to the genuine bigotry that does cast every Muslim as a suspect. They warn that articles such as this one, whatever their intent, feed a climate of fear that falls upon the innocent. These warnings are not frivolous, and the believer must weigh them with care.

The believer grants what is true in them, and it is much. The category of political Islam can be abused to slander the innocent, and has been; the threat can be inflated by those who profit from fear, and is; the bigotry against ordinary Muslims is real and evil, and the believer condemns it without qualification. He has labored throughout this series to hold the distinction the defenders rightly insist upon—between the faith and its political perversion, between the people and the ideology, between the many peaceable and the few violent. But the concession does not dissolve the reality. That bigots abuse a category does not mean the category names nothing; that the threat is sometimes inflated does not mean it is nothing; that most Muslims are peaceable does not mean the movements we have examined do not exist, have not published their aims, and have not acted upon them. The honest course is neither the bigot’s exaggeration nor the naïf’s denial but the clear sight that holds both the peaceableness of the many and the menace of the few, and refuses to let either truth erase the other.

The Clear and Loving Eye

What, finally, is the sight the believer is called to, and the spirit in which he is to hold it? It is a sight that is at once perfectly clear and perfectly loving, and the union of those two is the whole achievement. He sees political Islam exactly as it is—its doctrines, its aims, its methods, its threat—and he does not blink, does not launder, does not file it under a comfortable category, does not refuse to believe it means what it says. And at the same time he loves the people caught in it and around it—the ordinary Muslim who is its first victim, the reformer who resists it at the risk of his life, the useful innocent who serves it in ignorance, even the captive child taught to long for death. The clarity does not cancel the love, and the love does not cloud the clarity; they are held together, as they are held together in the heart of God, who sees the evil of the world with a clarity no human can match and loves the world He sees with a love no human can equal.

This union of clear sight and love is exactly what the West, in its blindness, has been unable to achieve, falling instead into one half or the other—the bigot who sees a threat everywhere and loves no one, or the naïf who loves indiscriminately and sees nothing. The believer is given, in the God of Israel and in the gospel of His Son, the resources to hold both at once: to name evil without hating the people in its grip, and to love the people without excusing the evil. It is the rarest and most necessary of disciplines, and it is the one the times demand of those who would stand rightly with Israel—not the blindness that endangers her, nor the hatred that dishonors the God in whose name they claim to stand, but the clear and loving eye that sees the danger whole and loves the imperiled all the same.

The Believer’s Response

So this study of the enemies of Israel ends where it must, not in fear and not in hatred but in the clear-eyed confidence of those who have looked the danger full in the face and looked, beyond it, to the One who keeps the nation against whom the danger is arrayed. We have traced, across these articles, the doctrines and the movements and the slogans set against the Jewish state—the jihad, the antisemitism of the texts, the dhimmi subjugation, the Wahhabi export, the Brotherhood’s long war, the charter of annihilation, the forward army of Tehran, the cult of death, the slogan of erasure, and now the blindness of the West that fails to see them. We have refused, throughout, both the bigotry that condemns a people and the naïveté that denies a threat, and have sought the harder honesty that names the evil and loves the imperiled. And we have found, at the end of every article, the same immovable ground: that the God of Israel keeps Israel, and that no doctrine, movement, slogan, or blindness shall prevail against the people He has sworn to preserve.

Let the West recover its sight if it will, and the believer labors and prays that it may; but Israel’s security has never finally rested on the clear sight of the West, and it does not rest there now. It rests on the covenant of the God who called Abraham, who brought the nation out of Egypt, who scattered her and gathered her, who has carried her through every empire and ideology that ever swore her end, and who has promised that she shall not be removed from the land He gave her from the river to the sea. The enemies are real, and we have not made light of them; the blindness is real, and we have named it without flinching. But the Keeper of Israel is more real than all of them, and He neither slumbers nor sleeps, and He will not fail nor forsake the people of His covenant. The watchmen of the earth may sleep at their posts; the Watchman of Israel does not. And so the believer ends not in alarm but in worship, standing with Israel because the God of Israel stands with her, and will stand with her, until the day when every blind eye is opened and every enemy stilled, and the nations that did not understand His counsel come at last to know that He is the LORD.