Historically, Amir Taheri notes, the U.S. has compiled an exemplary record of defending Muslims, from Woodrow Wilson’s efforts to ensure Arab independence after World War I through the defense of Kosovo and Bosnia-Herzegovina in the 1990s. Yet this history has engendered little affection, and neither have contemporary efforts to combat the supposed danger of “Islamophobia”:

[N]o major power in recent history has gone out of its way as has the United States to help, respect, please, and, yes, appease Islam. And yet, no other nation has been a victim of vilification, demonization, and violence on the part of the Islamists as has the U.S. . . .

[In modern times], the politically correct crowd has turned Islam into a new taboo. They brand any criticism of Islam as racist, ethnocentrist, or simply vile, all crammed together in the new category of “Islamophobia.”

Is it Islamophobia to question a religion whose Middle Eastern leaders often preach “Death to America” and hatred for Western values? More prevalent than Islamophobia is Islamophilia, as leftists treat Muslims like children whose feathers should not be ruffled.

The Islamophilia crowd does great disservice to both Western democracies and to Islam itself. It invites Americans and Europeans to sacrifice part of their own freedom to atone for largely imaginary sins against Muslims in the colonial and imperialist era. It also invites Muslims in the West to learn how to pose as victims and demand the rewards of victimhood as is the fashion in Europe and America. To the Muslim world at large, the message of Islamophilia is that Muslims need no criticism, although their faith is being transformed into a number of conflicting ideologies dedicated to violence and terror. . . .

All that Western intellectuals or leaders need to do is stop flattering Islam, as President Obama has been doing for the past seven years. . . . Many Muslims resent that kind of flattery, which takes them for idiots at a time that Islam and Muslims badly need to be criticized.

On Wednesday, a double bombing in Jerusalem left two dead, and many others injured—an attack the likes of which has not been seen since 2016. In a Jenin hospital, meanwhile, armed Palestinians removed an Israeli who had been injured in a car accident, reportedly murdering him in the process, and held his body hostage for two days. All this comes as a year that has seen numerous stabbings, shootings, and other terrorist attacks is drawing to a close. Yaakov Lappin comments:

Unlike the individual or small groups of terrorists who, acting on radical ideology and incitement to violence, picked up a gun, a knife, or embarked on a car-ramming attack, this time a better organized terrorist cell detonated two bombs—apparently by remote control—at bus stops in the capital. Police and the Shin Bet have exhausted their immediate physical searches, and the hunt for the perpetrators will now move to the intelligence front.

It is too soon to know who, or which organization, conducted the attack, but it is possible to note that in recent years, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) has taken a lead in remote-control-bombing terrorism. Last week, a car bomb that likely contained explosives detonated by remote control was discovered by the Israel Defense Forces in Samaria, after it caught fire prematurely. In August 2019, a PFLP cell detonated a remote-control bomb in Dolev, seventeen miles northwest of Jerusalem, killing a seventeen-year-old Israeli girl and seriously wounding her father and brother. Members of that terror cell were later arrested.

With the Palestinian Authority (PA) losing its grip in parts of Samaria to armed terror gangs, and the image of the PA at an all-time low among Palestinians, in no small part due to corruption, nepotism, and its violation of human rights . . . the current situation does not look promising.