The looming new Islamist front

Melanie Phillips

When al Qaeda blew up the train station in Madrid in 2004, the Spanish — along with legions of western useful idiots — concluded that they had been targeted because of their government’s support for the coalition in Iraq. So they threw out the government of the wise and heroic Jose Maria Aznar and replaced it with one that duly took an anti-American line. Much good it did them. As I reported here, within a few months the Spanish foiled another al Qaeda multiple terrorist attack. Now, Jonathan Halevi of the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs points out that al Qaeda’s number two, Ayman al Zawahiri, spoke last month once again of the duty to recover Andalus, or Spain, for Islam.
Al Qaeda and other jihadist circles have repeatedly referred to their aim of reconquering Spain — indeed, it was perfectly obvious that the Madrid atrocity was part of that agenda and nothing to do with Iraq. Spain is a prime target for the jihad because Andalus was an important part of the medieval Islamic caliphate. Even a children’s magazine published by Hamas, the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, called on Palestinian children to restore the city of Seville to Islamic rule as well as the rest of what was once Islamic Spain — underscoring the fact that Hamas, for all that it poses as a Palestinian nationalist movement, is first and foremost an Islamist movement for which the conquest of Israel is merely part of the broader agenda of re-establishing an Islamic empire that will dominate the world.
As I wrote here, the Palestinian territories are steadily being Islamised. That means the west is going to have to shift its focus very radically. If the West Bank along with Gaza fall to the Islamists, the two-state solution is over. The Arabs have had seventy years to agree to it; all that time they have refused to do so; and now they seem to have blown it. A state of Palestine would be another Islamist front and a further strategic threat to the west. Israel’s position as the forward salient of the west’s defence against the Islamist world thus becomes absolutely explicit. Far from a state of Palestine providing the west with greater peace and stability by ending the Middle East impasse, as so many in the west so naively believe, an Islamic state of Palestine would pose a mortal threat not just to Israel but to Europe. As Halevi writes:
Israel, therefore, is a small link in the greater confrontation between radical Islam and the West. Accepting the Arabs’ terms for a Middle East settlement or even going so far as ‘liberating’ Palestine from Israeli rule will not be the last stop in the radical Islamic journey being led by the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda, which share the vision of spreading Islam all over the world and establishing a global organizational infrastructure under a new caliphate to make this possible.
Indeed, for the West, Israel constitutes a dike against the great wave of radical Islam. The very same principle invoked for waging war against Israel — recovery of what was once Islamic territory — is being applied to Spain, the Balkans, Southern Russia, and India. Gustavo de Aristegui, a conservative Spanish parliamentarian, has disclosed that former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer once said that if Israel were to fall and be defeated, the next in line would definitely be Spain.
European pressure on Israel to make political concessions that endanger its security will only bring closer the next stage of Islam’s offensive, this time aimed at the heart of Europe.
Palestinianism, the creedal cause of Europe’s leftist elites, is in other words a dagger pointing at Europe’s heart.