One of the best fringe benefits of blogging is the opportunity to befriend outstanding individuals, the type of persons who when the times get tough, they get going. The eminent Rabbi and historian, Richard L. Rubenstein is such an activist prince amongst men, octogenarian or not. He has just notified me that the English version of the book he has been working on has just been published and the French edition is due in the spring.

It could not be more timely for it is time that we face reality that Islamism is on the rise, the West wishes to pacify it and if another Jewish genocide is the price of peace, it will pay it just as it had paid it in the Forties. Indeed, recent efforts to delegitimatize Israel is nothing but a way to make such repeated mass murder palatable. As an eminent Holocaust scholar, Rubenstein understands the stakes and the process. In her excellent review of the book published in the New English Review, Bar Ye'or writes:

Using primary sources, religious injunctions, and related modern literature, Rubenstein exposes the universality of the jihad threat. Muslims are under the religious obligation to expand the abode of Islam by war, by peaceful means such as immigration, and da’wa (proselytism). Islamists believe global peace can only be achieved through the worlwide domination of Islam. With scholarly objectivity and balanced arguments, the author analyses the structure and implementation of jihad deployed in time and space.

He underlines the two opposing interpretations of jihad, the Muslims and the non-Muslim. The Muslim sees jihad and its consequence – Islamization – as a benefit for humanity. They judge resistance of non-Muslims to Muslim forces to be a criminal war against Islam that prevents universal obedience to Allah’s injunctions. That principle dominates contemporary Islamist international policy and is used to justify its hatred against Israel, regarded as guilty of defending itself, as well as its accusation that America is itself guilty of 9/11 for its “sinful” opposition to Islamist imperialism. Similarly, western opposition to Islamization and the alleged sin of “Islamophobia” are condemned as crimes. . . .

Rubenstein pleads for recognition that the world is engaged in a religious conflict. Here he candidly touches on the great taboo, the truth hidden at all costs: neither Israel nor the West have been willing to recognize the religious dimension of the conflict. Given the nature of their societies, they fear that they have no viable solution. But falsehoods do not change the nature of the conflict; they only enable it to simmer and strengthen from Chechnya to India, from Nigeria to Finland, from Spain to Armenia.

Meanwhile we see the Islamist Turkish regime loosening its ties with Israel and joining the OIC Islamist front in view of bringing the restoration of the Caliphate that dominates already at the UN and has taken Europe hostage. Blinded by a vicious repressed antisemitism, the West supported jihad against Israel and consequently failed to suppress an ideology that targets itself and the world with the same, if not greater, violence. Riddled with an immigration that fuels social conflicts within its population, surviving on disinformation and security ransoms, it has become at best the auxiliary of the OIC.

Agree or disagree, it is a thought provoking book by a first rate scholar and as such worthy of a careful examination.