“Kiss My Foot, O Lowly Infidel!”

Muslims are at it again — forcing the despised “other,” in this case, Jews, to kiss their feet.

On Dec. 1, two Palestinian teenagers accosted, threatened, and ordered a Jewish (Haredi) man to kiss their feet in Jerusalem’s Old City. They videotaped and posted the incident on TikTok, to the audio of an Arabic rapper who, among other vulgarities, employs the notorious Arabic insult kuss umak (“your mama’s vagina”), which was presumably directed at the Jew in question, as he kissed the hand and foot of one of the Muslims.

This is hardly the first incident of its kind. According to a Dec. 2 report devoted to this incident:

The phenomenon of Palestinians filming themselves assaulting or humiliating ultra-Orthodox residents sparked outrage and clashes last year, leading to several arrests. In one particularly viral video, a Palestinian was filmed pouring hot coffee on an Orthodox man, leading to a two-year prison sentence.

Nor is this despicable phenomenon limited to the Middle East. According to a 2019 report from Australia:

A 12-year-old Jewish student was forced to kneel down and kiss the shoes of a Muslim classmate, while a five-year-old boy was allegedly called a “Jewish cockroach” and repeatedly hounded in the school toilets by his young classmates.… The older boy’s act of kissing another student’s shoes, under threat of being swarmed by several other boys, was filmed, photographed and shared on social media …. One of the boys who watched on was later suspended for five days for assaulting the Jewish student in the school locker room.

Some might argue that Muslim “grievances,” in the above cases, the Arab-Israeli conflict, is the driving force behind Muslims trying to degrade and humiliate Jews. In reality, however, this form of abject “obeisance” was always expected of non-Muslims, for no more of a “grievance” than that they were non-Muslims — infidels.

For example, in The Adventures of Thomas Pellow, an Englishman (d.1747) who wrote of his experiences in Morocco as an abducted slave, references to European slaves being compelled to kiss their Muslim master’s feet are not uncommon.

Sultan Muley Ismail — who enforced sharia and regularly prayed — went one step further, according to Pellow: Abducted Europeans were required to “pull off their shoes, put on a particular habit they have to denote a slave, and when they approach him fall down and kiss the ground at his horse’s feet.” Those not conforming to such abject behavior — the “lucky” ones — instantly lost their heads. The rest were slowly tortured in ways that beggar belief.

Perhaps this is the only “good news” regarding the recent, modern-day foot-kissing incidents. As vile as they may be, they underscore an important fact: few things are as reliably consistent as Muslim behavior — particularly the sort we are regularly assured has “nothing to do with Islam.” Otherwise, why does one keep finding the same “disquieting” behavior in regions that widely differ in both time and space, such as contemporary Israel and Australia and premodern Morocco?

Incidentally, and as another parallel, Pellow and other European slaves in Africa were regularly and consistently called “Christian dogs” — including before they were beheaded by scimitars. This characterization of subhuman infidels as animals remains a fixture today, and for the same reason. For instance, another persecuted Jewish pupil, age 5, at the same aforementioned Australian school, was called a “Jewish cockroach.”

Such is the great irony: even in the minutest of details, and whether in word or deed, the negative behavior that Muslims exhibit today has a long and unwavering paper trail, one that crosses centuries and continents. The only difference — the only discontinuity — between now and then is how the West responds.

In both the recent incident in Israel and the 2019 one from Australia authorities would not even admit that an ideological factor — Islamic supremacism — might have motivated those Muslims who forced Jews to kiss their feet.

The disconnect is evident in another, especially ignoble manner: whereas Muslims have long forced non-Muslims under their power to kiss their feet, both figuratively and literally, today the man who holds an office that for centuries sponsored the West’s staunch resistance to Islam — the Catholic pope — willingly prostrates himself and kisses Muslim feet.