On September 26, a Pakistani-born teenager injured two people with a meat cleaver outside of the former Paris offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. And on Friday, a French history teacher was decapitated after receiving threats for showing students cartoons of Mohammad in the context of a discussion of freedom of speech. France’s President Emmanuel Macron, shortly before the beheading, had given a forceful speech about the dangers of Islamism to French society. Praising his words, Ayaan Hirsi Ali urges Macron to put his money where his mouth is:

In his speech, Macron . . . said that the “challenge is to fight against those who go off the rails in the name of religion . . . while protecting those who believe in Islam and are full citizens of the republic.” If he really means this, perhaps he could provide security and support to those French Muslims courageously speaking out against radical Islam? . . . In the effort to combat the extremists, it is vital to distinguish the Muslims pushing for real change from the Islamists with silver tongues. A great many French Muslims are fighting against the Islamists, and Macron could do far more to support them.

French law [already] allows the government to reject naturalization requests on grounds of “lack of assimilation, other than linguistic.” So in the spirit of this law, Macron should start to repatriate asylum-seekers who engage in violence or the incitement of violence—particularly against women.

In foreign policy, he could tackle the ideological extremism that is disseminated by the governments of Qatar and Turkey—among others—through their support of Islamists. . . . He could take a much stronger stand against the Iranian regime—bilaterally as well as at the EU level—for its hostile activities on European soil, its vicious cruelty towards its own population, and its efforts to export revolutionary Islamism throughout the Middle East. This would also mean further strengthening France’s ties to Israel, the UAE, and Egypt and demanding that Saudi Arabia stop funding Wahhabi extremists abroad.

In 2001, in the immediate wake of al-Qaeda’s attacks on America, Jonathan Rosen was asked to write something about anti-Semitism. So many of the points he raised in the resulting essay, reproduced in full at the link below, ring true today, and make clear just how predictable so much of the global reaction to October 7 has been. Rosen reflects on what he wrote then from the standpoint of 2024:

It is worth remembering that the Nazis saw the Holocaust as self-defense, though Jews were a minuscule fragment of a giant militarized nation. This was irrational, of course, even as they spoke the language of science, redefining Jews as a biological menace, like a virus, making the murder of babies and the elderly necessary, too, because like a microbe only extermination was the cure. It was the existence of Jews that made them a provocation, just as the existence of Israel, in any borders, inspired the Hamas massacre, as its 1988 covenant, never revoked, makes abundantly clear. The towers were a similar provocation.

It was back in 2001 that Rosen found himself “awakened to anti-Semitism,” as he wrote at the time:

I am not being chased down alleyways and called a Christ-killer. . . . But in recent weeks I have been reminded, in ways too plentiful to ignore, about the role Jews play in the fantasy life of the world. Jews were not the cause of World War II, but they were at the metaphysical center of that conflict nonetheless, since the Holocaust was part of Hitler’s agenda and a key motivation of his campaign. Jews are not the cause of World War III, if that’s what we are facing, but they have been placed at the center of it in mysterious and disturbing ways.

I felt this in a different form reading coverage of Israel in European papers. Though public expressions of anti-Semitism are taboo in a post-Holocaust world, many Europeans, in writing about Israel, have felt free to conjure images of determined child killers and mass murderers. Earlier this year, the Spanish daily La Vanguardia published a cartoon depicting a large building labeled “Museum of the Jewish Holocaust” and behind it a building under construction labeled “Future Museum of the Palestinian Holocaust.”