It didn’t take long. Zohran Mamdani invoked it in New York with the slogan “Globalize the intifada.” But it is everywhere now. It took just three years, beginning on Oct. 7, 2023.
What was Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg doing outside the Paul Éluard high school in Saint-Denis, declaring herself “proud” of demonstrators who smash and burn? What was she doing aboard the flotilla bound for Gaza?
Nothing, really. Except globalizing the intifada.
Now she and her companions may find themselves confronting its consequences. The world is paying a high price for the masses who denied or minimized the Oct. 7 massacre, embraced Hamas and the accusation of “genocide,” and turned hatred of Israel into hatred of Western democracy and culture itself.
Young Europeans are right to demand prospects for employment and decent schools. But that has nothing to do with vandalizing a synagogue or waving the Palestinian flag beside Marianne, the symbol of the French Republic.
Yet the Palestinianization of political consciousness has become an integral—and increasingly substitutive—part of European and Western identity. Europe’s leaders have helped bring this about through their contemptuous attitude toward Israel’s defensive war, through sanctions and condemnations, and through repeated invocations of an impossible Palestinian state that, as French President Emmanuel Macron knows perfectly well, has increasingly become a euphemism for the elimination of Israel.
In Milan, it appears that a majority of those arrested are second- or third-generation immigrants. Behind a revolt characterized by looting, arson, stone-throwing, injuries and the destruction of shops and public institutions lies another reality: the imperative of conquest that Islamism does not conceal as one of its goals.
Italian, French and British schoolchildren and young people are being swept up in this violent tide. The smashing, the burning and the ripping up of paving stones are symptoms of a new front that is tearing at the European Union itself.
At the Place d’Italie in Paris, a 65-year-old woman named Sylvie, a supporter of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, waves a Hamas flag. The message is unmistakable: These struggles have merged into a single front.
The road to this moment has been long.
From the 2006 kidnapping, torture and murder of Ilan Halimi in the Paris suburbs to the massacres at “Charlie Hebdo” and the Hyper Cacher supermarket; from the murder of a teacher and three children at a Jewish school in Toulouse to attacks against synagogues; and, in Italy, the harassment of Jews in schools, universities, sports and tourism—the trajectory leads directly to the mindless roar of “From the river to the sea.”
And to destruction.
Europe is burning amid contempt for democracy and for the cause of a country fighting tooth and nail against murderous authoritarian regimes that persecute women and homosexuals, while the atrocities committed against children and young women on Oct. 7 were filmed by the Hamas terrorists themselves.
Antisemitism, cultivated with billions of dollars, serves the interests of powers that, like Greta Thunberg, may have nothing to do with the original conflict but want to appropriate all of it.
As German pastor Martin Niemöller famously warned after the Holocaust, when people remain silent as others are persecuted, eventually there may be no one left to speak for them.
First they came for others. Then they came for the Jews. And eventually, they came for everyone else.
With your complicity.
