Yes, Islam Is at War with the West

On Tuesday, four Jews, including three Americans and a British citizen, were murdered in Jerusalem’s Har Nof neighborhood while praying at synagogue. The murderers: Palestinian Muslims shouting “Allahu Akhbar” as they attacked the worshipers with machetes and a pistol.

Secretary of State John Kerry immediately condemned the attacks:

Innocent people who had come to worship died in the sanctuary of a synagogue. They were hatcheted, hacked and murdered in that holy place in an act of pure terror and senseless brutality and murder. I call on Palestinians at every single level of leadership to condemn this in the most powerful terms. 

But, of course, Palestinian Muslims do not condemn such violence. They celebrate it. Hamas – the terrorist group running the Gaza Strip, and in doing so, receiving American aid – cheered the attack, and Palestinian Muslims in the Gaza Strip handed out candies to children. While headlines stated that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas condemned the attack, his Fatah called the attacks “a natural response to the recent events.” And everyone in both Israel and the Palestinian territories knows that Fatah’s response reflects the official Palestinian position far better than the English comments designed for public consumption.

Nonetheless, Kerry will likely declare Abbas’ statements sufficient, and call for a renewed peace process. President Obama has already called on Israel to “work cooperatively…to lower tensions, reject violence, and seek a path forward towards peace.”

That’s because the West refuses to see the truth about the Muslim war on Israel and the United States: it is a religious war for our enemies.

Just a week ago, left-leaning Israeli politician Tzipi Livni suggested that the Arab-Israeli conflict was becoming a “religious conflict.” But the reality is that for Muslims across the world, the struggle to destroy Israel has always been a religious conflict. This latest attack, according to “moderate” Abbas, was a reaction to “incursions and provocations by settlers against the Aksa Mosque.”

Just three weeks ago, Rabbi Yehuda Glick was shot in Jerusalem during a rally to restore the Jewish right to pray on the Temple Mount, the holiest site in Judaism – neither he nor any other Jew has ever suggested Jewish prayer inside the Aksa Mosque. For Muslims, the thought of a Jew praying on Jewish land at a Jewish holy site is repulsive and must be stopped, whether the Temple Mount or Har Nof.

Even worse, the Israeli government goes along with such evil, handing control of the Temple Mount to the Islamic Waqf, and checking Jews who visit the Temple Mount for “forbidden religious items” so that the Jews do not pray. Prime Minister Netanyahu has said the rules will not be changed anytime soon.

Meanwhile, on Friday, the National Cathedral hosted a Muslim prayer service on Friday. A protester interrupted the service, shouting “Get out of our church. Leave our church alone.” She was ejected. The event was sponsored by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Islamic Society of North American (ISNA), and the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), among other groups. This week, the United Arab Emirates labeled CAIR a terrorist organization, given its ties to the Muslim Brotherhood; CAIR was also an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation case, a case revolving around funding for terrorist groups. ISNA, too, is a Muslim Brotherhood offshoot; ISNA has repeatedly defended terrorists, and is another unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation case. MPAC says that Israel was “established by terrorism,” a “racist, chauvinistic and militaristic” state, and fights to remove all critical material regarding radical Islam from state materials.

Christians generally do not seek to hold prayers inside mosques. Under Islamic law, such services are forbidden; in many Muslim countries, Christians are jailed or executed for attempting to convert Muslims to Christianity. And yet America’s most prominent church does not merely host Islamic services, it hosts them in coordination with terror-supporters.

This is Western blindness at its finest. 

But never fear: President Obama, like Tzipi Livni, believes that the worldwide violence of radical Muslims isn’t a religious problem. After ISIS beheaded American citizen Abdul-Rahman Kassig (aka Peter Kassig), Obama stated, “ISIL’s actions represent no faith, least of all the Muslim faith which Abdul-Rahman adopted as his own.” “Least of all”? Which faith, exactly, ranks ahead of Islam in terms of correlation with beheadings? Should we be concerned about the Jainists?

President Bush spouted the same nonsense about Islam for years, even as American troops were killed by the hundreds by radical Muslims. Six days after September 11, Bush idiotically told the world, “These acts of violence against innocents violate the fundamental tenets of the Islamic faith….Islam is peace.”

The West does not have a religious conflict with Islam. But Islam as currently followed by a bulk of Muslims surely has a religious conflict with the West, and any attempt to obscure that truth will end with more dead Westerners. Obsequious Western leaders, like President Obama, who pretend that the anti-Israel conflict is all about territorial boundaries, or that the Iranian desire for nuclear weapons is about balance of power, or that ISIS’ drive throughout the Middle East is about economic dislocation, lend support to those who seek to destroy the West in the name of Allah.

Ben Shapiro is Senior Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News and author of the new book, The People vs. Barack Obama: The Criminal Case Against The Obama Administration (Threshold Editions, June 10, 2014). He is also Editor-in-Chief of TruthRevolt.org. Follow Ben Shapiro on Twitter @benshapiro.