You can moralize about “Islamophobia” all you want, but for the Jewish people—and for anyone paying attention to the trajectory of the 21st century—the fear people feel did not emerge out of a vacuum of ignorance. It followed repeated, visceral exposure to mass-casualty terrorism, systemic religious extremism, and an ideological commitment to the erasure of the "Other" that many recognize as more than incidental. As the late Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the father of Revisionist Zionism, observed in his 1923 essay The Iron Wall: "Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of them. This is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing, and what they will persist in doing." Jabotinsky understood that we are not dealing with a misunderstanding, but a fundamental clash of wills.
The issue is not that every Muslim is dangerous; to suggest so is a generalization. The issue is that Islam has historically retained potent strains of thought in which religion, law, and political authority are inextricably fused. In its more politicized forms—what we must call Islamism—that fusion is not peripheral; it is the core. When these forms become militant, the desire for domination or the "cleansing" of perceived infidels is not a distortion added from the outside. It is justified from within the framework itself, often citing the same texts that are used for prayer.
For the Jew, this is not a theoretical debate. It is the lived reality of the Dhimmi—the historical "protected" yet second-class status of Jews under Islamic rule. To ignore the resurgence of this supremacist impulse is to ignore history. As Maimonides wrote in his Epistle to the Jews of Yemen nearly a millennium ago, regarding the pressures of his time: "No nation has ever done more to harm Israel. None has gone to such lengths to debase and humiliate us." While the world has changed, the theological roots of that hostility have, in many corners, remained unaddressed and unreformed.
None of this justifies retaliation against innocent Muslims, collective blame, or the harassment of individuals. Those responses are immoral, counter-productive, and a violation of the very values we seek to defend. But neither does that mean the fear itself is wholly irrational or "bigoted." People are reacting to something real upstream: a pattern of violence, coercion, and a theological-political absolutism that has repeatedly made itself known—from the streets of Sderot to the concert halls of Paris.
What is exhausting is being told by the secular elite that naming this reality is a greater offense than the reality itself. We are subjected to what Natan Sharansky calls the "3D Test" of modern antisemitism—demonization, double standards, and delegitimization—often applied to Israel because it refuses to be a passive victim of this ideology. The Jewish state is the front line of a civilizational struggle, yet we are lectured on "tolerance" by those who would not survive a day under the regimes they inadvertently apologize for.
For years, the approach of the global "chattering classes" has been to suppress the conflict, minimize the deep-seated theological differences, shame the response of the threatened, and leave the underlying issues intact. They treat fear as a moral failure of the person experiencing it, rather than a rational response to a threat. But for a people who have survived by keeping their eyes open to the shifts in the wind, pretending the fear has no intelligible object is a luxury we can no longer afford. We must insist on a reality-based discourse: one that protects the individual but remains unyielding in its opposition to any ideology that seeks our submission or our disappearance.
The problem is not that people don’t understand Islam. The problem is that they do.
