Giulio Meotti, INN

“The Jewish religion is under attack in Europe”, declared the Conference of European Rabbis president Pinchas Goldschmidt. Many polls (such as the study on behalf of the German Social Democratic Friedrich Ebert Foundation) bring an iconic number measuring the disaster: 150,000,000 Europeans have a delegitimizing and demonizing view of the State of Israel and its citizens.

For a large sector of Europe, the cities, skyscrapers, hospitals, cinemas, and schools on that tiny sliver of land named “Israel” are merely real estate that will be restored to Islam once this malefic Jewish form is swept away.

This is a popular mobilization against Israel in the “Raus mit Uns” spirit. 150,000,000 Western citizens believe that Zionism is a misconceived project to be brought to an end as soon as possible. It is the consequence of the Palestinian-Islamic psychological war (note: the European Union has just contributed 20 million euros to the payment of salaries and pensions for April of nearly 76,000 Palestinian Arabs).

See what happened to Europe’s Jews in little more than a week.

In Hungary, where Adolf Eichmann obsessively hunted down all the Jews, a wave of fascist Judeophobia is poisoning the social cohesion and the head of the Raoul Wallenberg Association was injured in anti-Semitic attack.

A Labour party member in the UK, Nazir Ahmed, resigned after anti-Jewish remarks made on television.

A scientific genius, Stephen Hawking, embraced the racist boycott of the State of Israel.

The BBC planned a “documentary” claiming that the Jewish exodus from Jerusalem was a myth.

Dozens of French mayors rallied for the liberation of the Palestinian terrorists.

A Scottish Christian document erased the Jewish links with to the holy land.

In the French town of Villeurbanne, a rabbi and his son were stabbed.

It was an ordinary week of anti-Semitism in Europe.

The threat against Israel’s existence has become strategic in Rome, Berlin, London, Paris, Budapest, Amsterdam and Stockholm. Indiscriminate hatred against the Jews pervades European parliaments as much as in the Muslim madrasses. The call for Israel’s destruction echoes through Europe’s schools and mosques, textbooks and newspapers, TV series and pseudo “documentaries”.

It is today’s greatest manipulation of opinion, of the kind immortalized by George Orwell in 1984 as a “Two Minute Hate”: Europe’s publicists, civil servants and educators incite violence directly when they describe Jews as “bloodsuckers”, “colonialists”, and many similar epithets. One step at a time, Europe is subverting the legitimacy of the Jewish people once again.

I have always felt an affinity with European intellectuals. But, it is with pain and surprise that I witness, one lifetime after Hitler’s Holocaust, the willingness of all too many to collaborate in the monstrification of the Jews. This is how Europe built an anti-Semitic public opinion of 150,000,000. This is how Israel has become an expendable myth among the European educated classes.

“Peace” can come only with the recognition in the Middle East of Israel as a national state of the Jewish people; the addition of the State of Israel to all the maps used in schools in the Islamic world; the elimination of the extensive anti-Israeli propaganda campaigns in the Muslim media and schools; the promotion of interactions among scientists, scholars, artists, and athletes; the abandoning of the delegitimization of Israel at the United Nations; the outlawing of terrorist groups devoted to the killing of Israelis and the destruction of Israel; the end of the economic boycott against Israel; the institution of full diplomatic relations with Jerusalem as Israel’s indivisible capital; and last but not least, the proclamation of theological fatwas prohibiting the murder of “infidels”.

Europe is working hard to prevent all these necessary steps.

Because according to Europe’s mainstream, “peace” will prevail when Israel is dismantled, just like tranquility will prevail in the “Holy Land” when Zionism has been eliminated.

Europe is witnessing the creation of a majority according to which Israel is a superpower with extraordinary military power and wealth and os a committed and merciless enemy of humanity.

Europe’s public opinion has been persuaded to believe that Israel is a state that ought to be dismantled forthwith. Europe’s population count today is 730,000, 000 citizens. What would happen if the anti-Semitic worm infected the mind of all of them?

Can Israel really remain immune from that eruption of psychotic anti-Jewish illness?

The writer, an Italian journalist with Il Foglio, writes a twice-weekly column for Arutz Sheva. He is the author of the book “A New Shoah”, that researched the personal stories of Israel’s terror victims, published by Encounter. His writing has appeared in publications, such as the Wall Street Journal, Frontpage and Commentary. He is at work on a book about the Vatican and Israel.

The Fatah activists who are threatening Palestinian teenagers for talking to Israelis and playing football with them are the same people who claim, at least in public, that they support the peace process with Israel. But how can there ever be a peace process when anyone who meets with an Israeli is immediately denounced as a traitor? It is worth noting that most of these denunciations are coming form the “moderate” Fatah, and not from Hamas.

While Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was meeting in his office in Ramallah with Shelly Yacimovich, chairwoman of Israel’s opposition Labour Party, his Fatah faction was busy threatening Palestinians who meet with Israelis.

That Abbas continues to meet with Israelis on a regular basis in Ramallah does not seem to bother Fatah.

Nor does Fatah seem to be bothered that Palestinian security officers work closely together with their Israeli counterparts in the West Bank. That is called “security coordination” between the Palestinians and Israel.

But when Palestinian youths are invited to meet with Israelis as part of an interfaith dialogue project, Fatah is quick to issue denunciations and threats.

When Palestinian and Israeli teenagers are invited to play football together as part of a project to promote peace and coexistence, Fatah is also quick to react.

But Fatah has no problem when Abbas or any top Palestinian official meets with Israelis.

Nor does Fatah have a problem with some of its senior representatives carrying Israeli-issued VIP cards that grant them various privileges that are denied to most Palestinians, such as permission to enter Israel and avoid waiting at Israel Defense Force checkpoints.

Palestinian youths from Hebron, though, who met with Israelis near Bethlehem to share their problems and insights have been forced to issue a statement distancing themselves from the meeting.

Following threats from Fatah, which condemned the event as a form of “normalization” with Israel, the Palestinian participants claimed that they had been “misled” regarding the true goals of the meeting.

This claim was clearly issued because of the “anti-normalization” campaign waged by Fatah over the past few years. This is a campaign that — in the context of “peace” and “coexistence” projects that are often sponsored and funded by the European Union and the U.S. — aims at banning meetings between Israeli and Palestinians.

The most recent victims of the anti-normalization drive are Palestinian boys and girls who committed the “crime” of playing in a football match against Israeli teenagers. When pictures of the match appeared in the media, Fatah rushed to issue threats against the Palestinian players and those behind the tournament.

Organizers of the “anti-normalization” campaign, most of whom belong to Abbas’s Fatah faction, have been boasting that, in recent years, they have succeeded in thwarting dozens of planned meetings between Israelis and Palestinians.

But Fatah has not condemned its own leader, Abbas, for meeting with Yacimovich and other Israelis.

The real problem here is that Abbas himself has not come out against Fatah’s campaign of intimidation and threats. By remaining silent, Abbas in fact appears to have endorsed the “anti-normalization” campaign — at least so long as its does not affect him personally.

The Fatah activists who are threatening Palestinian teenagers and youths for talking to Israelis and playing football with them are the same people who claim, at least in public, that they support the peace process with Israel.

But how can there ever be a peace process when any Palestinian who meets with an Israeli is immediately denounced as a traitor? It is worth noting that most of these denunciations are coming from the “moderate” Fatah, and not from Hamas.

It now remains to be seen how Fatah will react if and when U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry persuades Abbas to return to the negotiating table with Israel. Will Fatah condemn Abbas for advocating “normalization with the Israeli enemy” when he sits at the negotiating table? Or will Fatah continue to go only after Palestinian boys and girls who just want to have fun and play football?

International Criminal Court prosecutor Fatou Bensouda announced on Tuesday that she was opening a preliminary examination based on the Comoros Islands’ complaint against Israel regarding the 2010 Mavi Marmara flotilla incident.

Who? That’s right – not the Palestinians and not Turkey, but the Comoros Islands. Or at least the Turkish law firm Elmadag (it’s unclear whether it is acting independently, or secretly in conjunction with the Turkish government), filing “on behalf” of Comoros (also unclear how much of the impetus for the filing came from Comoros and how much from the law firm.)

For those who have not memorized all of the world’s smaller countries, the Comoros Islands are off the southeastern coast of Africa, near Madagascar. They, or Elmadag, have catapulted from obscurity onto the big-time stage of the Israeli-Palestinian- Turkish conflict, because technically they say that since the Marmara registered and flew the flag of Comoros about two weeks before the incident, the incident actually occurred on Comoros’s “territory.”

So four years after starting a still-unsuccessful campaign to bring Israel before the ICC – including achieving statehood recognition from the UN General Assembly – the Palestinians and their supporters may have found an unlikely end-run to give Israel legal headaches.

How worried should Israel be? Well, Comoros’s filing gets past the statehood threshold problem that has been holding up the Palestinians so far; no one says Comoros is not a state.

But the statehood issue is only one of several jurisdictional- threshold questions that can stop a case from going from a preliminary examination to a full investigation, an on to an indictment.

So there are many preliminary legal issues that could stop this train before it leaves the station, such as whether registering and placing a flag on a ship from Turkey some two weeks before an incident can really make the ship Comoros’s “territory.”

Another major difficulty is Comoros’s claim that Israel has failed to investigate itself.

The ICC does not intervene where a country impartially and promptly investigates allegations of crimes in its territory (even if the investigation does not result in convictions).

Comoros cites the vital nature of the IDF to Israel as evidence that Israel cannot investigate itself. It also cites the allegations of possible war crimes from the UN Human Rights Council Report on the flotilla, arguing that these are allegations the ICC must investigate.

The problem is that the UN Palmer Report, sponsored by the Secretary-General’s Office, came to very different conclusions than the UN Human Rights Council Report did – such as declaring Israel’s blockade of Gaza legal.

The Palmer Report does say that Israel used excessive force, but it also recognizes that IDF soldiers were under attack, making war crimes arguments difficult.

Besides the Palmer Report, the Turkel Commission Reports I and II investigated the flotilla in detail, including calling the prime minister, defense minister, IDF chief of staff and others to testify. Along with independent observers, it found that the mistakes Israel may have made were not criminal. The second part of the report, while recommending 19 changes to the country’s system of self-investigations, overall pronounced Israel able to investigate itself objectively.

Comoros ignores these documents, which could undermine its credibility with the ICC prosecutor.

There is also a “gravity” requirement, meaning the ICC only investigates the most serious war crimes, such as murder on a massive scale, usually arising out of extended and widespread hostilities.

Comoros tries to enlarge the volume of the alleged crimes by focusing not only on the small number of dead activists, nine, but also on the 600 activists it says were otherwise victimized.

It cites recent ICC cases saying that the gravity requirement is subjective, not objective, and that drafters of the Rome Statute – which governs the ICC – specifically left out the number of dead victims required to open a case.

But reference to the cases the ICC has taken show that there are no similar cases with as few as nine dead in one situation, and the allegations regarding the 600 passengers appear to mix and match alleged crimes that might be ICC-worthy, with allegations that sound closer to inconvenience than to a reason for a war crimes trial.

With all of these question marks, Israel probably does not have much to worry about, and the bigger question is why Comoros- Elmadag has chosen this moment to essentially re-file old claims that were filed in 2010 and went nowhere.

How Bensouda handles the case may reveal more, but with the wind blowing against the sails of Comoros’s legal attack, the most likely motive for the move is a desperate attempt to undermine the Turkey-Israel deal that is on the verge of putting the entire incident in the past.

Recently, a Pakistani religious leader, Pirzada Muhammad Raza Saqib Mustafai, said: “When the Jews are wiped out … the sun of peace [will] begin to rise on the entire world.” The same preaching is routinely done not only by clerics, but by politicians — in Iran, Saudi Arabia , Egypt , and elsewhere.

This is not just Ahmedinijad; it is at the heart of Islamic theology that world peace will be established only when all the Jews are wiped from the earth. But few people in Western media are alarmed by this kind of rhetoric or care to expose this dreadful dark side of Islam’s obsession with Jew-hatred.

I do not believe that one has to be an authority on human behavior or group thinking to find out the obvious pathology in Islamic Jew-hatred. It is time for all of us to uncover and expose this atrocity against the Jewish people. We owe that to humanity and the truth.

No true Muslim can see that such hatred is unbecoming and unholy for a world religion to focus on and that the credibility of Islam is tarnished by such hatred. No Muslim is allowed to go far enough to self-analyze or ask why such hatred. Muslims defend Jew-hatred by claiming that Jews betrayed Muhammad and thus deserve of this kind of treatment.

Even when I was a Muslim, I believed that the one-sided story against Jews by Islam was enough to justify all the killing, terror, lies, and propaganda by Islamic leaders against Jews. To the average Muslim, routinely cursing Jews in mosques feels normal and even holy!

After a lot of thinking, analysis, research, and writing, I discovered that Jew -hatred in Islam is an essential foundation to the Islamic belief system that Muslims cannot seem to be able to rid themselves of. Jew-hatred masks an existential problem in Islam. Islam is terrified of the Jews, and the number-one enemy of Islam is the truth, which must be constantly covered at any cost.

It does not matter how many Muslim men, women, and children die in the process of saving Islam’s reputation. The number-one duty of Muslims is to protect the reputation of Islam and Mohammad. But why would a religion burden its followers like that? This is why:

When Mohammed embarked on his mission to spread Islam, his objective was to create a uniquely Arabian religion, one created by an Arab prophet, which reflected the Arabian values and culture. Yet to obtain legitimacy, he had to link it to the two previous Abrahamic religions, Judaism and Christianity. He expected the Jewish tribes who lived in Arabia to declare him their Messiah and thereby bring him more legitimacy with Arabs, especially with his own tribe in Mecca, the Quraish.

Because his own tribe had rejected and ridiculed him, Mohammed needed the approval of the Jews, whom he called the people of the book. But the conversion of Jews to Islam was part of the scenario that Mohammed had to accomplish in order to prove to Meccans that they had made a mistake by rejecting him.That was one of the reasons Mohammed chose to migrate to Medina, a town that had predominantly been settled by Jewish tribes and a few impoverished Arabs who lived around the Jews. The Jews allowed Mohammed to move in. At the beginning, the Koran of Mecca was full of appeals to the Jews, who were then described as “guidance and light” (5:44) and a “righteous” people (6:153-154), who “excelled the nations” (45:16).

But when the Jews declined the appeasement and refused to convert to Islam, Mohammed simply and completely flipped. The Quran changed from love to threats and then pure hatred, cursing, and commandments to kill Jews. Rejection by the Jews became an intolerable obsession with Mohammed.

Not only did the Jews decline Mohammed’s offer, but their prosperity made Mohammed extremely envious. The Jewish Arabian tribes earned their living from legitimate and successful business, but Mohammed earned his living and wealth through warfare — by attacking Arab tribes, some of whom were from his own tribe — and trade caravans, seizing their wealth and property.

That did not look good for a man who claimed to be a prophet of God. The mere existence of the Jews made Mohammed look bad, which led Mohammed to unspeakable slaughter, beheading of 600 to 900 Jewish men of one tribe, and taking their women and children as slaves. Mohammed had the first pick of the prettiest woman as his sex slave.

All of this senseless slaughter of the Jews was elaborately documented in Islamic books on the life of Mohammed — not as something to be ashamed of, but as justified behavior against what he called an “evil” people.

One does not have to be psychiatrist to see the obvious: that Mohammad was a tormented man after the massacre he orchestrated and forced his fighters to undertake to empower and to enrich himself and his religion. To reduce his torment, he needed everyone around him, as well as future generations, to participate in the genocide against the Jews, the only people whom he could not control.

An enormous number of verses in the Koran encouraged Mohammed’s fighters to fight, kill, and curse Muslim fighters who wanted to escape fighting and killing Jews. The Quran is full of promises of all kinds of pleasure in heaven to those who followed Mohammed’s killing spree and curses and condemnation to those who chose to escape from fighting. Muslims were encouraged to feel no hesitation or guilt for the genocide because it was not they who did it, but rather “Allah’s hand.”

Mohammed never got over his anger, humiliation, and rejection by “the people of the book” and went to his grave tormented and obsessed that some Jews were still alive.

On his deathbed, Mohammed entrusted Muslims to kill Jews wherever they found them, which made this a “holy commandment” that no Muslim can reject. Muslims who wrote sharia understood how Mohammed was extremely sensitive to criticism, and that is why criticizing Mohammed became the highest crime in Islam that will never be forgiven even if the offender repents.

Mohammed’s message on his deathbed was not for his followers to strive for holiness, peace, goodness, and to treat their neighbors as themselves, but rather a commandment for Muslims to continue the killing and the genocide against the Jews. Killing thus became a holy act of obedience to Mohammed and Allah himself.

Mohammed portrayed himself as a victim of Jews, and Muslims must avenge him until judgment day. With all Arab power, money, and influence around the world today, they still thrive at portraying themselves as victims. Sharia also codified into law the duty of every Muslim to defend Mohammed’s honor and Islam with his own blood, and allowed the violation of many commandments if it is for the benefit of defending Islam and Mohammed. Thus, Muslims are carrying a huge burden, what they call a holy burden, to defend Mohammed with their blood, and in doing so they are allowed to kill, lie, cheat, slander, and mislead.

Mohammed must have felt deep and extreme shame after what he had done to the Jews, and thus a very good reason had to be found to explain away his genocide. By commanding Muslims to continue the genocide for him, even after his death, Mohammad expanded the shame to cover all Muslims and Islam itself.

All Muslims were commanded to follow Mohammed’s example and chase the Jews wherever they went. One hundred years after Mohammed’s death, Arabs occupied Jerusalem and built Al Aqsa mosque right on top of the Jewish Temple ruins, the holiest spot of the Jews. Muslims thought they had erased all memory of Jewish existence.

Mohammed’s genocide of the Jews of Arabia became an unholy dark mark of shame in Islamic history, and that shame, envy, and anger continues to get the best of Muslims today. In the eyes of Mohammed and Muslims, the mere existence of the Jewish people, let alone an entire Jewish state, delegitimizes Islam and makes Mohammed look more like a mass murderer than like a prophet.

For Muslims to make peace with Jews and acknowledge that Jews are humans who deserve the same rights as everyone else would have a devastating effect on how Muslims view their religion, their history, and the actions of their prophet.

Islam has a major existential problem. By no will of their own, the Jews found themselves in the middle of this Islamic dilemma. Islam must justify the genocide that Mohammad waged against the Jews. Mohammad and Muslims had two choices: either the Jews are evil sub-humans, apes, pigs, and enemies of Allah, a common description of Jews still heard regularly in Middle Eastern mosques today, or Mohammad was a genocidal warlord not fit to be a prophet of God — a choice that would mean the end of Islam.

Then and now, Mohammad and Muslims clearly chose the first worldview and decreed that any hint of the second must be severely punished. Jews must remain eternally evil enemies of Islam if Islam is to remain legitimate. There is no third solution to save the core of Islam from collapsing; either Mohammed was evil, or the Jews were evil.

Any attempt to forgive, humanize, or live peacefully with Jews is considered treason against Islam. How can Muslims forgive the Jews and then go back to their mosques, only to read their prophet’s words, telling them they must kill Jews wherever they find them? It does not add up, if someone wants to remain Muslim.

That is why the number-one enemy of Islam is, and must remain, the truth. If the truth exposes Islam’s unjustified Jew-hatred, Muslims will be left with an empty shell of a religion, a religion whose prophet was a murderer, a thief, and a warlord. Without Jew-hatred, Islam would self-destruct.

Nonie Darwish author is the author of The Devil We Don’t Know.

“There’s nothing more shortsighted in Western capitals in our time than the softening of support we’ve seen for Israel around the globe,” he said, calling the country “the one stable, democratic ally in this part of the world.”

Speaking during a visit to New York City, Harper also touched on Syria as he urged “extraordinary caution” on the idea of arming the opposition.

“We should not fool ourselves about what’s happening in Syria,” he said, saying there is “brutality and extremism on both sides.”

“To start talking about arming unnamed people whose objectives we don’t understand, I think, is extremely risky,” Harper said.

Later today, President Barack Obama will sit down with Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the Oval Office. It will be a friendly reunion. Obama has said Erdogan is one of the few foreign leaders with whom he has developed “friendships and the bonds of trust.” Speaking to the Turkish parliament four years ago, on his first trip abroad as president, Obama declared, “Turkey is a critical ally. Turkey is an important part of Europe. And Turkey and the United States must stand together — and work together — to overcome the challenges of our time.” These challenges are many — among them, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

While Turkey and America partnered for the greater good throughout the Cold War, no amount of White House praise can hide the fact that Turkey today is less a bridge between the West and the Islamic world and, increasingly, a force undermining trust and cooperation.

— Michael Rubin (@mrubin1971) is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a senior lecturer at the Naval Postgraduate School.