Imagine visiting a democratic country where young people dressed in military clothes, carrying machine guns, and eager to defend their country are ubiquitous. There are also children everywhere, as it is the country with the highest birth rate in the developed world. The cities are vibrant, and everyone you meet tells you what a wonderful place it is to live.
Former Australian deputy prime minister John Anderson shared these impressions on his recent trip to Israel. He explained that his reason for the visit was that he despises racism, especially the oldest and most pernicious hatred, antisemitism. He also said that his history degree gave him enough knowledge to know that when you see a rise in antisemitism, worse trouble is always brewing.
Anderson interviewed Israeli national security expert Dan Schueftan in Tel Aviv to discuss the future of Israel and the West. Schueftan, whom Anderson praised for having a track record of calling things right since the Yom Kippur War in 1973, said that the essential question facing us today is, “Can civilized people defend themselves against barbarians even when the barbarians are defended by stupid people in the mainstream of Western civilization?”
Schueftan noted that the number of Israelis who prepare to qualify for a combat unit has more than doubled in the last three years. Anderson contrasted that with the situation in most Western countries, particularly America. He said:
Because in most Western countries, particularly in America, they’ve got a massively demoralized sort of young community that won’t have babies, that are having vasectomies because they don’t want to bring children into the world. And here you have, outwardly it appears to somebody looking in, a tough set of circumstances, a challenging set of circumstances, one where, you know, shrinking violets might have said I don’t want to bring children into this world. But that’s not the story at all.
Schueftan replied, “My children will make the world better. It’s not they will be the burden. They will carry the burden.”
Schueftan takes no comfort in that negative contrast with America, for if there’s one thing he fears more than the destruction of Israel, it’s the decline of America. He warned Anderson, “If America becomes what the Democratic Party is today, my concern about the existence of Israel is the smallest of my concerns, because freedom in the world is over. Yeah. If the Americans become progressives, the world will be dominated by people who will destroy freedom in the world.”
Another person who worries about the future of America and the West is columnist Douglas Murray, whose book The Strange Death of Europe came out in 2017. Michael Gove of The Spectator interviewed Murray this week, and their discussion focused on whether Western civilization can still be saved. In contrast to an Israel that is willing, even eager, to defend itself, Murray described a European continent that is basically committing suicide.
One piece of evidence for that is the declining birth rate in European countries, which are not reproducing at replacement level. But Murray pointed out that Japan also has a low birth rate but doesn’t have open borders and hasn’t “welcomed in unassimilable levels of migration.” He blamed the UK’s migrant problem on politicians’ ineptitude and short-term thinking, noting that he first heard that there were at least a million illegal immigrants in the UK 15 years ago, yet only a few hundred have been removed since then. Instead, the government escorts them in, as Murray described:
Essentially everybody knows, as with the small boats crisis on the south coast, with people coming from France illegally every day, that nothing is done to stop them. On the contrary, the British authorities act as part of the smuggling gangs. Our own government’s boats go out and meet a small dinghy, or a quite large boat sent by a smuggling gang, a little way off the coast of France, and then carefully escort the relevant men, and they’re almost always young men, into the UK. The reason they come is that they know they’ll stay, and they do stay.
Murray said that politicians, including those in the Conservative Party, worry they will look unkind and inhumane if they deport illegal immigrants. As an example of something truly inhumane and unkind, he mentioned the family of 2017 Manchester bomber Salman Abedi, who killed 22 people: “I still want to know, and I’ve asked for many years, why several people in the Home Office allowed in a family of jihadists who had fallen out with Colonel Gaddafi, to live first in London, then in Manchester. One of their two boys blew up young girls at the Manchester Arena in a suicide bombing.”
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After pointing out that successive British governments have pursued members of the British armed forces for prosecution while leaving jihadists unbothered, he quipped that “if you really want to meld into Britain in the 21st century, the best thing to do is to join a jihadist group.”
Israelis have learned the hard way, from the intifadas to October 7, that you can’t have peace with enemies that want to kill you. Brits and other citizens of Western nations have forgotten this, Murray lamented:
There’s a passage in, I think, the Gospel of St Matthew: the men of violence take it by force. We have completely forgotten that lesson. The men of violence will take this country by force, and they will take France by force. They will burn down your holy places. They will desecrate your holy sites. They will destroy your heroes. We’re sitting here in Westminster, and one of our heroes in this nation, Winston Churchill, who is not just a hero but represents our parents’ and grandparents’ generation and all the sacrifices of that generation, can now be graffitied and desecrated in Parliament Square, and you’ll be let off by the courts if you’re taken to court, as happened the other week. So our holy places will be despoiled or burned, and we will have to decide, as I say in my column this week, whether we want to be observers at our own funeral or not.
Gove asked Murray why so many of the rioters in France were either wearing the keffiyeh or waving the Palestinian flag, which, he said, is more prominent than the Union Jack in some parts of Britain. Murray added to what Schueftan said about Israel’s enemies celebrating death: “Palestinianism is a celebration of purported victimhood.”
He gave the perfect example to show why he’s unapologetically on the side of Israel and the West more broadly, explaining that after the Israelis and the Americans bombed one of Iran’s nuclear reactors, the Iranians struck the Weizmann Institute in Israel. The wing that they blew up was researching cancer treatment. He shared the lesson all in the West should learn: “On the one hand there are the mullahs trying to create a bomb that is deliverable in order to kill millions of people, and on the other is an institute in Israel looking for cancer treatments that will be beneficial to people around the world.”
It’s not just Muslims rioting in Europe while wearing keffiyehs; leftists like Greta Thunberg and others are right next to them chanting Hamas slogans as they loot buildings. Schueftan worries about the U.S. becoming progressive, but Murray warned about what the Islamists will do to the progressives with whom they are now allied solely for pragmatic reasons: “The Islamists will shoot the leftists in the head, and I’m not speaking metaphorically.”
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Surprisingly, Murray ended what was a rather pessimistic conversation about the decline of Western civilization with a note of hope. He said he learned from the poet T.S. Eliot that “a culture can be saved even at the 13th hour and that time can be reclaimed.” Eliot lived through the years 1914-1918, which Murray said seemed even more catastrophic than what is happening across Europe right now, with “great cities smashed to pieces” and “a generation wiped out.” Yet Eliot had a vision of renewal that came through in his writing. Murray stressed that this revival can come only through “spiritual renewal,” not through “government diktat.”
For all of us worried about the future of the West, Murray finished by offering some encouragement we can all act on right now: “You can only do it from your heart and hope that that goes outwards.”
Editor’s Note: Thanks to President Trump, illegal immigration into our great country has virtually stopped. Despite the radical left's lies, new legislation wasn't needed to secure our border, just a new president.
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