ISIS and an antisemitic Europe: Looking for the good news buried in the bad

Sorry for the blog silence, but for the past few days, everyone has wanted not just a piece of me, but several pieces of me.  I’m telling myself that this was just an end-of-the-year frenzy and will have no impact whatsoever on the year to come. As it is, though, I’ll be glad to see the last of 2014 and am hopeful that 2015 will be better. Nevertheless, I’m mindless of something that Robert Avrech says: “[W]e try to remain optimistic. However, after six years of Obama, this state of mind becomes increasingly difficult to maintain.”

Okay, in that spirit of optimism, here’s some blood-thirsty, rather weird good cheer for you. I have a friend who is very Jewish and very conservative. He is rooting for, of all things, ISIS. Why? For starters, he thinks of Europe as the Amalekites. The Amalekites were intractably hostile to ancient Israel.  Their perpetual war against the Jews ended only when David finally annihilated them. The takeaway lesson, which is something Jews are reminded of every year, before Purim, when they read the chapter, “Remember what Amalek did unto thee” (Deut. xxv. 17-19), is that when you have an enemy dedicated to your destruction, your only hope for survival is to destroy that enemy first.

For a 60 year period after WWII, we deluded ourselves into thinking that WWII had, once and for all, wiped antisemitism from the European map. As the last few years have shown us, that was a false hope. Antisemitism in Europe is roaring back with ferocity. They turn on Jews on their streets and they turn on them in Israel.

It’s no excuse, either, to say that Europe’s renewed antisemitism comes from the Muslims in Europe. Even if one says the problems started with Muslims, the fact remains that Europe has embraced, rather than rejected, the Muslim approach to Jews and Israel. For Europe, antisemitism is bred deep in the bone.

To my friend, both the Europeans and the Muslims are Amalekites. The only way to deal with either is to see them destroyed. Right now, with ISIS and radical Islam ascendant, it looks as if radical Islam is on its way to destroy Europe. And as my friends said, ISIS’s escapades show that radical Islam has no compunction about destroying its enemies root and branch.

I protested, asking “What about the innocent?” My friend said “There’s nothing stopping them from leaving as they see Europe slipping back into genocidal antisemitism. They stay. They accept the consequences.”

“Okay,” I said, “but even if Europe as we know it is gone, we in America are still facing radical Islam, as is Israel.”

My friend wasn’t too perturbed. First, he said, we all know what happens when a nation goes fully Muslim: it becomes a third world entity, which makes it less of a risk to a nation such as America that still has the trappings, despite six years of Obama, of a first world nation. Second, he said, ISIS is currently on the bottom of the list of Israel’s worries. Israel is infinitely more worried now about America under Obama, Iran, and those Hezbollah missiles aimed at her. She’ll deal with ISIS when the time comes — and, if ISIS and Iran are busy fighting it out, she might not need to worry at all. In other words, don’t trouble Trouble until Trouble troubles you.

I did warn you that my friend’s view was blood-thirsty. His point, though, is an old one: Our enemies are on the verge of engaging with each other. Let them.