October 2023

In light of what is happening now in Israel, I've decided to repost “First the Saturday people, then the Sunday people” which I first ran on January 2, 2016. I'm running it again because I've seen a number of comments here and elsewhere, that boil down to: "it's not our problem." I disagree. What happens in the Middle East, or Europe, or elsewhere with our close allies is our problem - what we do about it is a different matter. Something being our problem doesn't mean we have to invade and occupy another country, we could decide to do nothing or something less than going to war. But pretending "it's not our problem" is just pretending. The war against the Jews is also the war against the Christians - the U.S. is the "Great Satan" to the Islamists, and Israel is the Little Satan. Anyway, here's the post, again: ------------ I'm surprised I had not heard the phrase in the title of this post before today. Though I'm certainly familiar with the concept, it's one we've explored here many times when discussing (i) that the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the inability of Muslims to accept any non-Muslim entity in the Middle East, but particularly not a Jewish national entity; (b) the plight of Christians in the Middle East who are on the receiving end of what would happen to the Jews in Israel if Israel ever lost a war; and (c) the Islamist-Leftist anti-Israel coalition, in which useful Western leftists are oblivous (at best, giving them the benefit of the doubt) to the threat they would be under if forced to live under the rule of their coalition partners as they demand of Israeli Jews. I got to the phrase in a round-about way. First, I saw Martin Kramer's Tweet linking to his Facebook post:

Exactly 40 years ago, Commentary published Bernard Lewis’s landmark article, “The Return of Islam.” Remember, in January 1976, the Shah was still firmly on his throne, the Muslim Brothers were nowhere to be seen, and there was no Hamas, Hezbollah, or Al Qaeda. So how did Lewis discern the “return”? He saw that regimes, including secular ones, were beginning to invoke Islam. This, he surmised, must be a reaction to a more profound trend. Perhaps the most prescient article ever written about the Middle East.