On October 8, 2023, a day after Israel’s Operation Iron Swords against Hamas in the Gaza Strip began, Hezbollah opened another front against Israel from Lebanon. The Palestinian terrorist organizations in Lebanon and pro-Iranian militias operating from the Syrian-Israeli border also participate in the fighting.
Former Grand Mufti of Egypt Sheikh Dr. Ali Gomaa posted a video on his YouTube channel on November 11, 2023, in which he claimed that the destruction of Israel will lead to the battle of Gog and Magog. He said that with “divine intervention” described by the Prophet Muhammad, Jesus will descend and kill Gog and Magog, and the Muslims will vanquish the Byzantines.
After Hamas militants attacked southern Israel on October 7 this year and after Israel’s fierce counterattack in the Gaza Strip, where the number of dead Palestinians far exceeded the number of dead Jews in the Hamas attack, anti-Semitism throughout the world experienced a drastic rise. The old evil is back at the big door again. Current trends – the flare-up of the war in the Gaza Strip and the mass suffering of Palestinians – are the driving fuel of anti-Semitism, the rise of which favors the deepening or revival of social conflicts in many communities.
European lawmakers approved plans on Wednesday to remove the national veto for EU member states in the latest attempted power grab by Brussels to wrestle control away from national governments.
A total of 291 MEPs supported the proposal put forward by the “Verhofstadt Group,” a group of MEPs led by the arch-federalist Guy Verhofstadt to amend the European Union treaties in favor of greater centralization and limiting the sovereignty of member states.
The North Caucasus has always been and remains a strategically important object of global geopolitics and geopolitical competition. Throughout Russia’s history, the Western political system has wanted to destabilize the North Caucasus in order to disintegrate the territorial integrity of the state. In the strategy of Western intelligence services in the North Caucasus, special attention is paid to the religious and ethnic factor.
Iran aims to reinforce its forces in its areas of presence in Syria, according to Baladi News.
Informed sources have disclosed that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard militias have withdrawn thousands of Syrian members affiliated with them from the Aleppo governorate. These members were relocated to positions in the governorates of Hama, Deir-ez-Zor, and Homs.
Le Général de Brigade Abdourahamane Tiani, à la tête du Conseil National pour la Sauvegarde de la Patrie (CNSP), effectue une visite officielle à partir de ce jeudi 23 novembre 2023, à Bamako, au Mali, puis Ouagadougou, au Burkina Faso. Cette sortie marque le début de ses engagements officiels à l’étranger depuis sa prise de fonction.
Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger explained in an interview recently that Europe had made a serious mistake by creating within itself, through mass immigration, populations that reject all its norms, values and a “constitutional basis”.
To many on the so-called “Left”, it sometimes appears as if there is no insurmountable conflict between Islam and the West, or between any differing cultures, just old bits of conflict inherited from an obscure past, which will eventually be overcome by greater material equality.
This thesis, which is in fact Marxist — wherein any conflict is always caused by unequal material situations — also is based more on wishful thinking than on historical evidence. Muslims do not massacre Christians, Jews and Hindus because they are richer, but because they are non-Muslims. At least, that is what many mass murderers have been stating for more than ten centuries…
The “clash of civilizations” seems to be about religion, a topic that many in the West thought had been put to bed ages ago.
The “no-go” Islamic zones in Europe, the attacks on 9/11, London’s 7/7 attacks… the murder of Theo Van Gogh, the massacre at the Bataclan, the constant censorship (blasphemy laws), and more: a brief look at recent history of the immigrants bears witness to what seems a pervasive inability, or lack of desire, to adapt to the values of their new host countries.
That, sadly, may be one of the reasons multiculturalism in the West has been such a failure — a failure of the West. When westerners stopped having children, they started importing people en masse, indiscriminately, as if people were all the same. People are not all the same. Many Muslims, or at least a significant proportion of them, seem to have no intention of integrating, or of discarding the values they brought with them, which they appear to prefer to Western values.
Samuel Huntington’s insight into the clash of civilizations is brilliant and true, but a few details in his thesis might benefit from a bit of updating. Moreover, some of his critics, especially on the “Left”, might wish to rethink a few of their “conclusions”.
According to Huntington, since 1989 the clash between civilizations has been essentially cultural, rather than economic or political. The collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 marked the transition from a world dominated by ideological oppositions — between communism and capitalism, imperialism and its counter-movement — to an era of cultural divergence, with the international political scene simultaneously verging on the multipolar and multicultural.
Huntington, in support of his conjecture, explained that the decadence of ideologies has coincided with a revival of aspirations to identity, both in the Muslim world, which has witnessed a revitalization of radical Islam, in Asia, and in Eastern Europe, such as Poland, where revolutions took place in tune with their national and cultural heritage.
Huntington’s thesis of a “clash of civilizations” has been shown to be true. The opposition between Islam and the West is an obvious example; the uninterrupted massacre of Christians by Muslims is another, and the re-awakening of China and Chinese cultural pride is a third. From this point of view, Huntington is right: we live in a world structured by tensions between profoundly divergent cultures.
Huntington, however, may have overlooked that the core of the global economic and cultural world is Western. The globalization of trade has not taken place by using categories and means that are equally derived from different civilizations, as if each culture had contributed its share. Even though China and Egypt were trading before there was a ‘West’, modern globalization is based solely on the categories, modes and means of Western civilization, down to the smallest detail. To take just one example, the new generation of Russian or Chinese international action films is a simple iteration of the Hollywood concept, with an absence of local specificity that can be embarrassing and does not do justice to the three thousand years of the rich and specific Chinese culture. Other Chinese films, however such as those by Zhang Yimou and others, are glories of which China should be immensely proud.
It is not true, therefore, that the world is divided up between different civilizations, as we would speak of equal, or even unequal, partners, like parts of a cake, one with pineapple, the other with strawberry. The common language of this world, which is indeed fragmented for the most part, still seems strictly Western. Perhaps that is one of the reasons Communist China’s President Xi Jinping would openly like to upend it.
This circumstance does not alter the truth of Huntington’s findings, which lie in what the ancient Greeks called the antagonistic, or oppositional, character of the world. The ancient Greek world was defined as much by the conflict between cities as by the commonality of its culture.
To many on the so-called “Left”, it sometimes appears as if there is no insurmountable conflict between Islam and the West, or between any differing cultures, just old bits of conflict inherited from an obscure past, which will eventually be overcome by greater material equality.
This thesis, which is in fact Marxist — wherein any conflict is always caused by unequal material situations — also is based more on wishful thinking than on historical evidence. Muslims do not massacre Christians, Jews and Hindus because they are richer, but because they are non-Muslims. At least, that is what many mass murderers have been stating for more than ten centuries, starting with the Quran:
"But once the Sacred Months have passed, kill the polytheists ˹who violated their treaties˺ wherever you find them, capture them, besiege them, and lie in wait for them on every way. But if they repent, perform prayers, and pay alms-tax, then set them free. Indeed, Allah is All-Forgiving, Most Merciful." – Surat At-Tawbah, 9:5In his book Histoire de l’Inde, Alain Danielou writes:
"From the time Muslims started arriving [in India], around 632 AD, the history of India becomes a long, monotonous series of murders, massacres, spoliations, and destructions. It is, as usual, in the name of 'a holy war' of their faith, of their sole God, that the barbarians have destroyed civilizations, wiped out entire races."Perhaps we should finally listen to them? Give them credit for honesty? Read the fiqh, the legal schools of Islam, where all agree on celebrating the future hegemony of Islam. It is hard to argue that Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which are extremely rich, are motivated by envy. The economic, Marxist thesis, which has been discredited by history, is now only being bandied about by the Left. The “clash of civilizations” seems to be about religion, a topic that many in the West thought had been put to bed ages ago.
To return to Huntington’s thesis, the values of Islam and those of the West, unfortunately, do appear irreconcilable. Even if the Arab, Turkish and Persian Muslim worlds have been welcomed into the Western culture, many of those immigrants to the West retain their own Islamic identity, which they apparently do not intend to dim or negotiate, as can be seen from Europe’s many “no-go zones”.
This movement to “return to true Islam” seems, sometimes, an illusion. Without oil and gas, in today’s world Islam is, sadly, often a religion of poverty, misery and defeats. There may be a wish to “return” to the old Islam, but what we are witnessing is the galvanization of an idealized vision of the old Islam, the Islam of the first conquest, the Islam of the Taj Mahal, the Alhambra and the Ottoman Empire.
Even this reinvention of radical Islam, however, seems radically incompatible with the West. The “no-go” Islamic zones in Europe (here, here and here), the attacks on 9/11, London’s 7/7 attacks , Berlin’s Christmas Market terror attack, the violence triggered by the Muhammad cartoons, the slaughter at Charlie Hebdo, the murder of Theo Van Gogh, the massacre at the Bataclan, the constant censorship (blasphemy laws), and more: a brief look at recent history of the immigrants bears witness to what seems a pervasive inability, or lack of desire, to adapt to the values of their new host countries.
That, sadly, may be one of the reasons multiculturalism in the West has been such a failure — a failure of the West. When westerners stopped having children, they started importing people en masse, indiscriminately, as if people were all the same. People are not all the same. Many Muslims, or at least a significant proportion of them, seem to have no intention of integrating, or of discarding the values they brought with them, which they appear to prefer to Western values.
There are 45 million Muslims in Europe. Some have chosen and will choose the West. Others — possibly the vast majority – will, in the event of conflict, remain faithful to Islam at the moment of truth.
As has traditionally been the case throughout history, Polish sovereignty is once again in the process of being sacrificed as part of the Great Powers’ games, but this time its borders will remain intact even though the country is poised to functionally become a German vassal in the coming future.