Leaders Fail When the Threat of Radical Islam Is Ignored

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. We’ve had a lot of incidents worldwide of Islamic terrorism or threats of Islamic terrorism. The most egregious is in Bondi Beach, Australia, where two gunmen, a father and son, killed 16 people and wounded 40.

How that happens in front of police who reacted very quickly I don’t know. They were only stopped by a heroic Syrian immigrant who tackled one of the shooters and disarmed him.

The problem with all of this is that there was no needed reaction from the prime minister of Australia. We didn’t hear: We have to be very careful about radical Islam. These two people got two guns legally that they should not have had since they were on a watch lists with terrorist activity, and there was no reason that he, this one shooter, the father, had six guns, among them semi-automatic weapons.

One of the most gun-controlled societies in the world. We didn’t hear that.

Instead, we heard that they condone all extremism. This is not who we are. In the utmost—you know, the whole boilerplate. And then they said, we oppose all extremism. And it was a nanosecond before they said white extremism that had nothing to do with this.

The second incident was in the Champs-Élysées in Paris, they canceled the annual Christmas celebration because they were afraid of radical Islamic protests. This is a French, predominantly at one time, Catholic country, and they’re afraid of 10% to 12% of their population, can cancel the entire celebration.

Would they ever do that for an Islamic celebration? Would the majority say, “We’re the majority and you can’t—” no, they wouldn’t.

And then we come to the United States, we lost two soldiers overseas, stationed in Syria, that were executed, ambushed by a supposedly ISIS murderer. Details are still out.

Back home, Brown University had a shooter who went into a classroom, yelled something—people are disagreeing whether it was “Al Akbar,” what it was—but he executed two students and may have wounded nine others.

And again, the same mystery. How can a university with thousands of feet taking a video every hour not have him on their video records? How did he know where the classroom was? How did he know his way around Providence, Rhode Island? Why did they get another suspect who was a white male, former army recruit, blasted his name everywhere as a likely suspect? He had nothing to do with it. And now we’re told to be very, very careful about this suspect. He may, may, may, allegedly, allegedly, be a Palestinian student.

What am I getting at with all of these situations? I could multiply them tenfold. They are indicative of three or four pathologies in the West right now.

No. 1, the borders of, it’s hard to say Australia because it is an island continent, but they are open. Europe’s are open. Ours had been open until President Donald Trump. By open, I mean thousands of people are coming from the poorest and sometimes the most antithetical of societies into Western countries. And they are not assimilating, not acculturating, and not integrating. In fact, they’re creating enclaves of resistance mostly.

In the case of those from the Middle East, the Oct. 7 slaughter of Jews and the reaction against the perpetrators in Gaza set off a whole new round where our Western university campuses were literally taken over by foreign nationals on student visas that were rooting for Hamas, a terrorist designated organization, or chanting “River to the sea,” the erasure of Israel and the Jews entirely in the Middle East, etc., etc.

So, there are no borders.

Second problem was there was a diversity, equity, inclusion ideology in the West that said that society is binary and 30% of the non-white population is a perpetual victim of these victimizers. There’s no proof needed that the 70% victimizers have done anything. It’s just that their heritage was oppressive and therefore the 30% deserve reparatory action.

That can be affirmative action. It can be DEI admittance, preference in hiring. It can mean awards are given disproportionately. It can mean that merit will not be a criteria. It can mean a lot of stuff. But in the case of these incidents, it means, if the perpetrator is from the Middle East, there’s a feeling, a general feeling, that you cannot identify him.

Or, if you do identify him or you say it’s a radical, Muslim, you have to then say, “We deplore all violence. We don’t—we deplore antisemitism”—which is the case in point in Australia—“but we also deplore Islamophobia, of which there is no examples of people mass shooting Muslims in the case that we have seen.”

The third catalyst for all this is, let’s be honest, it’s Western decline.

The West is in spiritual, emotional, psychological, sociological, economic decline. The fertility rate is 1.4 in Europe, 1.7-something in the United States. Green energy, ideology, and zealotry has made energy almost unaffordable in Western Europe and, to a degree, in the United States, partly on the prompt of the Chinese, who sell cheap solar, wind, and green advocacy so they can build nuclear plants, coal plants, import embargoed oil, and have an edge competitively in economic rivalry.

In addition to that, the West is not defended. The military budget in Europe, until recently, was anemic. And I think Germany at one time recently had only eight operable tanks, as we see in Ukraine. And the world doesn’t stop because Europe says it’s going to disarm. And we, to a greater extent, under the Obama and Biden administration, were disarmed. We were short almost 50,000 recruits.

I could go on. But the combination of a lack of confidence in the West—in their culture, their tradition, their values, their heritage, their ancestors—coupled with this utopian idea that you’re gonna change the demographic by bringing in poor people from antithetical societies, with the false multiplier that you’re gonna be racially and sexually and gender-fixated and oppressed and dole out special beneficia to people based on their superficial appearance, it was a perfect storm. And if we didn’t have these catastrophes, we’d have to invent them.

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