One year ago, I offered the starkest of warnings to those malicious or misguided enough to side with Hamas and other Iranian terrorist proxies in the war against Israel.
"You're dead to us," I said – meaning: We Israelis, we Jews, and the friends of Israel and the Jews will not forget or forgive those who choose genocidal Islamist barbarism over the only liberal democracy in the Middle East.
I was blunt and furious because my heart was broken at the atrocities of October 7 – mass murder, pillaging, abductions, and rape on a level not seen since the Holocaust – and because, much like the Holocaust era, too many people in the supposedly civilized West were content to explain away or even celebrate the horror while blaming the Jewish victims.
I knew that my homeland, Israel, would be turning that same bluntness and fury into an iron fist, a sweeping counter-offensive against the fanatics on its borders and beyond that would ensure the post-World War Two vow "Never Again" was finally enforced. And I knew that this would require a mobilization of Israel's allies in the West.
One year later, Israel is winning the war. On that front, my worries have abated.
But I worry all the more for the West.
Because unlike the Jewish state, whose citizens rushed into battle within hours of the Hamas rampage and have fought on in Gaza, southern Lebanon, and as far away as Yemen and Iran, too many Westerners are sleepwalking into their own extinction. Unlike Israelis who risked lives and livelihoods for their collective survival, too many Westerners are content to look the other way as their homelands are ravaged by invaders.
Witness Amsterdam. In this most permissive of European cities, a pogrom took place on the night of November 6-7. Hundreds of Israelis who had flown out for a soccer match found themselves chased through the leafy lanes by well-organized anti-Semitic mobs. As police vanished into the darkness, dozens of Israelis were cornered, forced to show their passports or profess their religion, and assaulted. One was tossed into a near-freezing canal.
Their assailants were not the drunken Cossacks of Czarist Russia. They were predominantly Muslim men, immigrants, or the sons of immigrants, unleashing an imported Jihad in the name of "anti-Zionism."
The horrible irony of it all was that, all of a sudden, Israelis were less safe in Amsterdam than they were at home at the height of a Middle East war. They were airlifted back to Tel Aviv within hours – because that's what a responsible country does for its citizens. But the Netherlands and much of Europe were left to reckon with what the events spelled for their own future.
This is not a problem that will solve itself. Unbridled Muslim immigration has long passed the demographic tipping point. It will not go away. It will only get worse.
A continent whose indigenous white, Christian population is contracting, with birth rates dropping as standards of living rise, cannot brook an influx of foreigners whose religious extremism is so often adversarial and encouraging of large families. Unless compelled to adopt the values of their host countries, these immigrants will inevitably bring in patriarchy and chauvinism, antisemitism, and violent illiberalism.
And when the Jews are gone, they will turn their mayhem on others: Christians, moderate Muslims, women, and the LGBT community.
It is no accident that terrorism is virtually unheard of in countries like Hungary and Poland. They have the good sense to seal out border-jumpers from the Middle East, sensing immediately the demographic and cultural threat. But from the Netherlands to Norway, Belgium to Great Britain, policymakers must waste no more time on suicidal virtue-signalling. Migrants who do not adapt and comply with the nation's standards must go. It's that simple.
Israel is the homeland of the Jews, a community with a 4,000-year history there. Europe has been Christendom for nearly two millennia. By contrast, Islam is fairly young – a 7th-century religion spread by conquest. And what was once achieved by the sword is now being achieved by radical Islamists through mass immigration and social welfare exploitation.
Stand up, Europe! Israel is doing you the service of blunting some of the Middle East's worst exporters of chaos. Now, do your part by shutting the gates to it.
Dr. Miriam Adelson is the publisher of Israel Hayom. This article was published in Forbes Israel.
