Apparently, civilisation is saved! Some 3 million people took to the streets of Paris last Sunday to declare "Je suis Charlie" and that they would fight off the threat to freedom just like the French resistance. "We are not afraid," shouted the crowd.
Oh, but they are. If anyone really thinks the Paris march means Europe is now going to save itself, they are living on a different planet. Virtually nobody is Charlie, because virtually nobody will publish a condemnation of Islam. Some papers gingerly reproduced this week's cover of Charlie Hebdo with its cartoon of a tearful Mohammed holding a "Je suis Charlie" sign. Others refused, out of fear.
Virtually no mainstream media has analysed, let alone condemned, the threatening doctrines and assumptions in Islamic religion and culture. They are not going to start now.
Yes, it was heartening that so many turned out to protest their attachment to freedom of speech. But surely, the real issue is barbaric slaughter?
True, the demonstrators also mourned the slain police officers and Jewish shoppers. But if all 17 victims had been Jews gunned down in that kosher deli, does anyone really think 3 million would have marched through Paris declaring "Je suis Juif"?
The Islamic war against the free world is driven by Jew-hatred
In January 2006, Islamic radicals in Paris kidnapped, tortured and murdered 23-year-old Ilan Halimi. In 2012, Mohammed Merah murdered four people, including three children, at a Jewish school in Toulouse.
Muslims repeatedly single out French Jews for stabbings, fire-bombings, robberies and rapes. I don't recall the European media voicing outrage over those. Freedom of speech would therefore seem more important than Jewish lives.
France's President Hollande has now ordered protection for Jewish schools. But this is the same Hollande who rewarded terrorism by voting for the Palestinians' UN manoeuvre to force Israel into a trap - and grotesquely invited Mahmoud Abbas to the Paris rally. Since Abbas repeatedly honours Palestinian terrorists for murdering Jews, his presence made a mockery of this "resistance" to terror.
And amplifying the false Arab narrative about "Palestine" helps keep at boiling point the murderous hysteria among young western Muslims vulnerable to radicalisation.
But then, the western approach to Islamic terrorism is utterly incoherent. Indeed, western leaders won't even call it Islamic terror. Hollande said the attacks had "nothing to do with Islam". David Cameron said of Islamic State that no religion ever lent itself to such barbarities. President Obama said Islam couldn't be the cause of terror since its victims included Muslims.
What demonstrable inanity. Are 9/11 and 7/7, the beheading of Daniel Pearl and the Muslim forced conversions, destruction of churches and butchery of thousands of Christians in Africa, also "nothing to do with Islam"?
Muslims are victimised in turn because Islamism sets out to restore the purity of the faith by ridding it of any taint of secularism. Even observant Muslim societies are therefore to be purged of their "impurity". Hence, the Muslim-on-Muslim carnage.
The Islamists aim to destroy secular modernity and its vehicle, the West. And they see the Jews, hatred of whom is threaded through their religious texts, as the creators and manipulators of modernity, the West and America.
In his 1950 diatribe, Our Struggle With the Jews, the founder and inspirer of modern Islamism, Syed Qutb, declared that the Jews were the adversary of God: "the enemies of the Muslim community from the first day…"
They were, he wrote, conspiring to penetrate governments all over the world to "perpetuate their evil designs," including a plan to take control of all the "wealth of mankind".
Alluding to Marx, Freud and Emile Durkheim, he wrote: "Behind the doctrine of atheistic materialism was a Jew; behind the doctrine of animalistic sexuality was a Jew; and behind the destruction of the family and the shattering of the sacred relationship in society . . . was a Jew…"
According to Professor Robert Wistrich, it was Qutb's invective that fixed antisemitism as the marker of Islamist movements and turned the Jews into a metaphor for Western domination.
These beliefs are mainstream within Muslim society and animate Islamic terror. The Hamas Charter, for example, rants that the Jews
"… stood behind the French Revolution, the Communist Revolution and most of the revolutions we hear about . . . They stood behind World War I, so as to wipe out the Islamic Caliphate.... and formed the League of Nations through which they could rule the world. They were behind World War II, through which they made huge financial gains . . . They inspired the establishment of the United Nations and the Security Council …in order to rule the world by their intermediary. There is no war going on anywhere without them having their fingerprints on it…"
In 2009, a tirade by the Egyptian cleric Muhammad Hussein Ya'qoub made explicit the fact that the real reason for the Muslim war against the Jews was nothing to do with Israel:
"If the Jews left Palestine to us, would we start loving them? Of course not … It is Allah who said that they are infidels …They are enemies not because they occupied Palestine. They would have been enemies even if they did not occupy a thing.
"You must believe that we will fight, defeat, and annihilate them, until not a single Jew remains on the face of the Earth. It is not me who says so. The Prophet said: 'Judgment Day will not come until you fight the Jews and kill them. The Jews will hide behind stones and trees, and the stones and tree will call: Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him…Oh Jews, may the curse of Allah be upon you'."
In 1998, Osama bin Laden said: "There is no question that war between us is inevitable...The hour of resurrection shall not come before the Muslims fight Jews."
What the West doesn't grasp is that the Islamic war being waged against the free world is driven by hatred of the Jews. That's why, as the Indian authorities discovered after the multi-faceted 2008 Mumbai massacre, the tiny Chabad house was, in fact, the principal target.
That's why the Paris kosher deli attacker said he specifically targeted Jews. That's why for years the Jews of France have been singled out.
And that's why Israel is under permanent siege. The Muslim world doesn't hate the Jews because of Israel. The Muslim world hates Israel because of the Jews.
Yes, many Muslims abhor extremist terror; indeed, a number of shoppers trapped in the Jewish grocery were saved by a Muslim employee. But to deny this terror is rooted in a grounded and currently dominant interpretation of Islam is clearly delusional.
The West is ignoring the key lesson of the Holocaust: that antisemitism is not some marginal horror affecting a statistically insignificant fraction of the world's population, but a psychic derangement that drives the whole civilisation show off the road.
