Clash of Civilizations
To judge from today’s (16 February 2025) news headlines, the global clash of civilizations – between the Islamic world and the West – is alive and kicking, but few people, at least in the West, are connecting the dots. Sky news reported that a 23-year-old Syrian émigré stabbed to death a 14-year-old boy and injured five more people in a random attack in the Austrian town of Villach while in a Munich hospital a mother and her two-year-old daughter died of wounds sustained Thursday in a car-ramming of a crowd by an Afghan émigré in the town center. From Iran, the news was that the authorities had arrested a British couple, Craig and Lindsay Foreman, on “security” grounds, while in Israel, three hostages taken in the October 7, 2023 fundamentalist Hamas attack on the south of the country have been released (in exchange for the release of some 370 convicted Palestinian terrorists and administrative detainees). All are aspects of that clash of civilizations which, in effect, with ups and downs, has featured in world history since Islam arose in Arabia in the 7th century and conquered the Middle East and North Africa, reaching as far as southern France.
The clash changes shape, character and geography but, the bloodletting it engenders is a constant in today’s world. The attacks in central Europe featured knife- and car-wielding Muslim emigres because firearms are difficult to access while the attack in southern Israel, in which Hamas fighters murdered 1200 Israelis and took hostage 251, most of them civilians, displayed a plethora of Kalachnikov assault rifles and RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades). And the arrest of the Western couple in Kerman, Iran displayed a different, official version of hostage-taking, by an Islamic state – but all these incidents are parts of this both organized and unorganized assault by the Muslim world on the West.
The knife and car used in the attacks in central Europe were not provided by Iran – but the ideology behind them, with hatred of the West and all it stands for at its core, was. So was the attack on southern Israel and the 497 days of barbaric incarceration of the Israelis in underground dungeons in Hamas-ruled Gaza. The Muslim world views Israel as an illegitimate outpost of the West that has taken root on sacred Islamic soil and views Christian Europe, in which waves of Muslim refugees have resettled in the past two decades, ejected from their countries by war and poverty, as their principal, immediate historic targets. Once Europe falls, the Western Hemisphere will follow because Islam, as, the great Muslim philosopher of the 14th century, Ibn Khaldun, put it, the mission of Islam is “universal” and its goal is to Islamize all mankind.
The innocence of the West was highlighted by a post the Foreman couple sent their family before traveling to Iran in a tour of the region: “[We are going] despite the advice of friends, family and the [British Foreign Office which has advised Britons not to travel to the Islamic Republic] … Why [are we going]? Because we believe that, no matter where you are in the world, most people are good …” Lindsay Foreman was described as “a life coach with a doctorate in psychology.”
A "life coach" who travels to Iran in the manner she did - the West is officially a parody of itself.
This is shockingly naive and shoddy; Morris is conflating two very different forms of terrorism: 1) violent, expansionist jihadism on the one hand; and 2) Palestinian terrorism in the context of the Palestinian Israeli conflict. We should deplore both, but we should also understand them.
The former - as represented by recent terrorist attacks in Europe, and groups like ISIS - is ideologically and theologically driven, and is supported by a small but dangerous fringe of Muslims. For example, polling from the Wilson Center in 2014 found that between 1 to 5 percent of Arabs (depending on the country) were pro-ISIS. https://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/survey-finds-little-support-for-isis-arab-countries
The second type of terrorism enjoys mainstream support in the Arab and Islamic worlds. And its motivation is different; it is much more akin to terrorism/mass killing committed by the Viet Minh against the French or Mau Mau against pro-British African and British civilians. As with the Vietnamese and Kenyan violence I mention, this was carried out with a basically anti-colonial, anti-occupation motive. (Israelis can dispute the characterisation of Israel as a colonial imposition, but that is how the Arabs see it, and what motivates them).
Certainly in contemporary times this terrorism and violence is shaped and intensified by Hamas' Islamist ideology, but that is not the core motivation, any more than the Viet Minh's Communist ideology was its more motivation. The core motivation is the same that animated secular Palestinian terrorists such as George Habash and Nayef Hawatmeh a generation ago.
That the core motivation of anti-Israeli terrorism is not ISIS-style expansionist jihadism can be shown by the fact that the overwhelming majority of Muslims in the Arab world, including not only extremist Muslims but loads of secular and Christian Arabs, support it. For example polling indicates a majority of Lebanese Christians supported the 7 October massacre: https://www.timesofisrael.com/80-of-people-in-lebanon-support-hamass-oct-7-massacres-in-israel-poll-finds/.
You also see secular Western Leftists, of the sort who would have supported the Mau Mau, Viet Minh (and later Viet Cong) in the 1950s and 1960s, supporting Hamas terrorism. This is deeply regrettable, but the motivation is obviously not a sympathy for expansionist jihadism.
Final note. The fact that the jihadist threat is proportionally small in its base of support doesn't mean it isn't a problem. It is a grave problem. It kills, over and over again, including in Europe. However, these are still different phenomena, and Morris is sloppy and tendentious to conflate them.