America is attempting to clean up its house. Europeans are burning theirs down.
Within hours of his re-election as president of the United States, Donald Trump started the process of rolling back the influence of the left on American society.
In a series of uncompromising statements, Trump announced that he would reclaim the universities from “Marxist maniacs,” deport Hamas sympathizers and haters of America, and tear up the entire “climate change” agenda.
His picks for government positions have been no less uncompromising. One after another, his senior appointments have been of people who take absolutely no prisoners in their support for Israel, in their attachment to core Western values, including biblical faith, and in their commitment to uphold and defend America’s interests at home and abroad.
It’s an electrifying turnaround following four years of America’s defeatism, self-destruction and dumping on its allies. Israel is daring to wonder if, at long last, it might be allowed to win its war of survival and if, even more amazingly, an elusive peace might actually be brought to the whole region.
Others are more cautious, viewing Trump as the ultimate loose cannon and observing uneasily that a couple of his administration picks have controversial and even obnoxious records.
Nevertheless, his victory has given hope to those who have watched aghast as America has steadily immolated itself in the flames of cultural division, national self-hatred and unreason—the bonfire of Western identity and constitutional order that was lit and relentlessly stoked by the left.
In that process, the mainstream media have been active players by reflexively pushing the falsehoods and distortions of anti-American, anti-West and anti-Israel ideology.
Trump’s stunning victory was as much as anything an emphatic repudiation of those media outlets by millions of Americans who just aren’t buying it anymore and are instead getting their information—for good and ill—from X, podcasts and other social media.
Parts of the media appear to understand this and are also going in for some house cleaning. Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times, has announced that he will revamp his “very left” editorial board in order to include more conservative and centrist opinions in the paper.
And CNN is reportedly about to make sweeping layoffs, including some of its biggest stars, in a bid to save the network’s crashing reputation and ratings.
These are promising developments but will scarcely scratch the surface of the problem. The cultural malevolence in the “progressive” world, of which the media is its propaganda arm, is deeply ingrained and extends way beyond American politics.
This was illustrated, once again, by the way much of the media reported last week’s shocking events in Amsterdam. Hundreds of Israeli soccer fans who had been at a match between Maccabi Tel Aviv and the Dutch team Ajax were set upon by mobs of Arabs and other Muslims who declared they were on a “Jew hunt.”
The Jewish victims were beaten, stabbed and run over; others hid in hotels and some jumped into the city’s canals to save themselves from the mobs. “Say Free Palestine!” some of the attackers demanded as they beat them.
Despite evidence that this was preplanned, a number of media outlets actually blamed the Jews. They reported that the day before the match, some Maccabi fans had chanted insults about Arabs, shouted support for the Israel Defense Forces and set fire to a Palestinian flag.
Some Dutch authorities said this had provoked the violence. This ignored the fact that the Maccabi fans had arrived in the city to be greeted by anti-Israel demonstrators shouting inflammatory insults and waving the Palestinian flag.
Evidence that the post-match attacks were part of the broader Islamic war against Jews and the West was provided the following day when the same pro-Hamas mobs attacked the Amsterdam police, who had belatedly banned the continuing hate fest.
The same night that Jews were being hunted down in Amsterdam, a Jewish youth soccer team in Berlin needed protection to escape a game played in the Neukölln area of the city, which has a significant Arab and Muslim population. In Paris this week, where a gala was held in support of the IDF the night before Israel was to play the French soccer team, anti-Israel mobs rioted against the French police with injuries on both sides.
In Britain, a man walking to synagogue last Shabbat was assailed by a driver who slowed his car, started to film him and demanded he say, “Free Palestine,” an echo of what happened during the Amsterdam onslaught.
The British government’s independent adviser on political violence, Lord Walney, has warned that the danger of such copycat attacks is particularly acute in Britain because of a “permissive environment for violent antisemitism” that has been exacerbated by inadequate policing of the Gaza protests.
The head of Britain’s security service MI5, Ken McCallum, said the war in Gaza had led to more hate crime and increased challenges to public order and community safety, with “plot after plot” of threatened attacks coordinated by Iranian forces. He said the spy agency had “one hell of a job on its hands.”
It’s now very clear that a ratchet effect is occurring in British and European Muslim communities. On Oct. 7, 2023, even while the pogrom in Israel was still going on, Muslims in London and elsewhere staged instantaneous demonstrations exulting in the mass slaughter of Jews.
The pogrom had fired a starting gun for what Islamists believed was the final push against the West, whose principal strategic defense in the State of Israel had been so devastatingly breached.
The absence of any pushback to the threatening, inflammatory and often illegal behavior of the subsequent anti-Israel demonstrations confirmed the Islamists’ belief that Britain and Europe are theirs for the taking.
Astoundingly, despite the threat this triumphalist and sustained Islamist aggression poses to the West and the safety, in particular, of its Jewish citizens, the media doesn’t think this is worth reporting or analyzing.
That’s because nothing can be allowed to challenge the narrative on the left that Israel and Western society are innate oppressors who can do nothing right, while the Palestinian Arabs, and Muslims in general, are their victims who can do nothing wrong.
The West’s elites simply refuse to acknowledge the nature and scope of the Islamist threat to their own societies. It’s not just Israel at war. Open season has been declared upon the Jews worldwide by Islamists and their credulous or malevolent Western fellow travelers, masking the broader jihadi aim to conquer and subjugate the West itself.
Which brings us back to Trump. He’s said he will deport or lock up terrorists and stop more from coming into the country.
Even if he achieves his stated goals, Britain and Europe are in the grip of a civilizational emergency that’s being made even more severe because they won’t acknowledge its nature and extent.
We don’t know how Trump’s agenda will play out in the Islamic world or against the enemies of the West in Russia, China or North Korea.
At home, however, he has effectively put himself at the head of a counter-revolution to rescue America from its internal enemies who are out to erase Western culture and replace it with a culturally coerced utopia.
The challenge is huge because the issues are far deeper and wider than merely getting rid of the “deep state,” restoring border controls or practicing the “art of a deal,” which Trump has made his own.
However, if America does become a standard-bearer for the restoration of muscular Western self-belief, then Britain and Europe might just learn the appropriate lessons and finally engage in the battle they must join if their civilization isn’t to fail.
But whether they fight or give up the ghost, for the Jews of Britain and Europe, this won’t be an easy ride.