On October 22, a French-Chechen Muslim beheaded a schoolteacher in a Paris suburb for showing cartoons of Mohammad. Since then, there have been several other acts of terror in France. (It is not yet clear, as of this writing, whether last night’s murderous attack near a Vienna synagogue is related.) Meanwhile, Islamist leaders around the world have responded with further incitement. Jonathan Michanie urges the West to stand firm:

Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan claimed that Emmanuel Macron’s [condemnation of Islamic extremism is] comparable to [the behavior] of the Nazi party during the 1930s and to the propaganda preceding the 1995 massacre of Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica. Putting their geopolitical disputes aside, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei tweeted in solidarity: “Why is it a crime to raise doubts about the Holocaust? Why should anyone who writes about such doubts be imprisoned while insulting the Prophet (pbuh) is allowed?” It should be noted that neither of these leaders condemned the brutal murder of [the schoolteacher]—condoning and excusing terrorism is nothing out of the ordinary for these regimes.

Similar condemnations of the French government were made by the Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan, . . . and on October 29, Malaysia’s ex-prime minister claimed that “Muslims have a right to kill millions of French people,” [even if they have demonstrated admirable restraint in not exercising this right].

[Such] rhetoric is not just an assault on Western values, but [also] serves as ammunition for the atrocious human-rights violations that are being carried out by these extremist regimes.

[I]mmediate and harsh targeted sanctions need to be placed on Iranian, Turkish, and Pakistani officials. Every antagonizing action by these radical regimes will not only perpetuate the human-rights abuses they are carrying out but will weaken the West’s ability to deter the rising aggression by Islamic authoritarian regimes. Silence and complacency are not an option.

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.”