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The West was shaped by Christianity. It is sometimes said that ours is a Judeo-Christian civilisation — and that is simply true. I share those roots, and if anything is difficult, it is seeing your own roots clearly, prejudices and all.

Man as an individual

Drawing on these Judeo-Christian roots, we believe in the human being as an individual. For those who have a caricatured view of the contrasts between ‘the Christian herd’ and the ‘free individual of the Enlightenment’, I shall quote a few Bible passages to support this view.

‘Parents are not to be put to death for their children, nor children put to death for their parents; each will die for their own sin.’ (Deuteronomy 24:16)

‘The child will not share the guilt of the parent, nor will the parent share the guilt of the child. The righteousness of the righteous will be credited to them, and the wickedness of the wicked will be charged against them.’ (Ezekiel 18:20)

Responsibility for one’s own choices

These passages are about personal accountability. They draw a sharp line between the human being as an individual and the human being as a member of a group. The implication is that people can make their own choices — and both the Old and the New Testament, the Jewish and the Christian parts, are saturated with exactly this idea.

Most Christians are familiar with the New Testament’s calls to repentance: ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.’ (Matthew 3:2) ‘In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent.’ (Acts 17:30)

But that summons to personal choice is already present in the Old Testament: ‘This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live.’ (Deuteronomy 30:19)

Choose life

From this flows what so many Israelis are saying to one another right now: ‘Am Yisrael Chai’— the people of Israel live. This is why Jews celebrate life precisely when death seems to be everywhere. It also explains the exuberant joy under rocket fire that Olaf Koens (a Dutch correspondent in Israel) found so baffling.

Translation tweet: Olaf Koens October 10, 2023: I went to live there, started learning the language, and read endlessly about it. But understanding Israel… no. This is while rockets are flying overhead. Maaike van Charante October 11, 2023: You lived there. Then you must have heard the phrase: Am Yisrael Chai. Especially while rockets are flying overhead, Jews will celebrate life — that is their victory over the death cult of their adversaries.

The roots of our civilisation

Of course, there are also biblical passages that emphasise the importance of the group and even collective punishment. But the texts quoted above do indeed contain the seed from which the conviction could grow that every human being matters as an individual. Not the collective — the individual.

Many of us in the West have left religion behind, yet our civilisation was formed by these Judeo-Christian roots. Sometimes individualism has tipped so far that mutual solidarity has dissolved and people are left to fend for themselves. But this insistence on the value of the individual has also given us a great deal.

Our fundamental rights — which we rightly regard as the bedrock of our civilisation — flow from the recognition that every human being has worth. Not because that person is useful to the whole, but because that person possesses inherent dignity. This is why every individual is endowed, as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states, with inalienable rights.

Fundamental rights for Muslims

I too grew up in that Western civilisation. In 2019, I wrote a piece on Muslims in the Netherlands after it became clear that Dutch Quran schools were teaching children to hate. The question I set out to answer was: Can we as a Western society extend to Muslims the same rights we extend to other citizens?

My conclusion at the end of that piece was steeped in the values of our civilisation, because I genuinely believe in individual choice — including for Muslims who come to live here:

‘It is often said that Islam cannot reform, that no Islamic Enlightenment is possible — but those who say this are missing something crucial. The question is not whether Islam can reform. The question is whether Muslims can change.
Muslims are people. And certainly within our Western society, people can make their own choices. That might be the choice to leave Islam, the choice to become a Salafist, or the choice to become a liberal Muslim.’

The choices Muslims make

But however much I believe in individual choice — including for Muslims — it would be naïve to suppose that all Muslims opt for human rights and mutual respect. The evidence to the contrary is unfortunately abundant. Antisemitism among Muslim communities in the Netherlands is one example.

Although the Quran also has Jewish roots, a large part of the Islamic world has taken a completely different path. The individual does not matter; human rights are a sign of weakness; death is preferable to life.

The death cult of Hamas

Hamas proclaims this ideology openly. This week, a Hamas leader said in an interview with Russia Today: ‘The Israelis are known to love life. We, on the other hand, sacrifice ourselves. We consider our dead to be martyrs. The thing any Palestinian desires the most is to be martyred for the sake of Allah, defending his land.’

This is the death cult I referred to in my response to Olaf Koens’s tweet. It is a subject with which we in the West are profoundly ill-equipped to deal — because it is so utterly alien to everything we stand for. We simply cannot bring ourselves to believe that people genuinely think this way, that it is not some isolated madman but an enormous group.

That explains why so many Westerners flatly refuse to take seriously what these extremists tell us, again and again. Hamas’s founding charter dates from 1988, yet it is routinely dismissed as a formality, rather than acknowledged as the expression of a deeply held conviction.

The Western lens

Even after the savage massacre of 7 October — accompanied, as usual, by cries of ‘Allahu Akbar’— Western media were once again out in force, viewing everything through a Western lens. This terrorism did not stem from genocidal Jew-hatred — no, it was the product of Palestinian oppression! If we simply stand up for their rights, everything will sort itself out.

This is self-deception. This hatred cannot be neutralised by hammering on human rights and pretending Palestinians are driven solely by despair over Western colonialism. This conflict runs deeper than that. Looking for solutions without taking the religious dimension seriously is pointless.

The West must face the monstrous truth: that large parts of the Islamic world are driven by hatred. Not only Jew-hatred — though that is the most virulent — but also hatred of the West. How many more Islamic leaders must tell us they want to destroy us before we take them at their word?

My own Western lens

Anyone who has genuinely grasped this reality has a moral obligation to say so. And here I come up against my own Judeo-Christian roots. This week I was a guest on Peter Vlemmix’s podcast, and though it was a good conversation, afterwards I felt that I had failed.

Translation tweet: Special episode of our new podcast ‘Ongehoord #DeVerkiezingen’ — entirely devoted to Israel, the pro-Palestinian demonstrations, and that Saturday. With Maaike van Charante @Repelsteeltje21 and Israel expert Kees van Velzen. Presented by @petervlemmix

We covered much that the general public rarely hears; we gave extensive background on the history of Israel and the Palestinians. But I missed the opportunity to make clear how decisive Hamas’s Islamic roots are. I failed to spell out the role Islam plays in this Jew-hatred.

Why this conflict is so intractable

It is very Western — as we did in that conversation — to emphasise the value of every human being, including every Muslim. And indeed, we need not adopt Hamas’s values and declare a jihad against Gaza; of course we may be troubled by the suffering of Palestinian children.

But that is not where it should have stopped. In that conversation, I should have explained why this conflict is so intractable. It persists because Hamas will never settle for anything less than the genocide of all Jews. And Hamas draws that conviction from radical Islam.

Turning the other cheek

Many Dutch people — as the responses from most political parties also show — persist in stubbornly trying to explain Palestinian atrocities through a Western framework. They search almost desperately for a victim narrative, because they cannot — or will not — conceive of absolute evil.

They turn the other cheek to these terrorists, in the thoroughly Christian belief that hatred cannot really be the primary motive. But this is a catastrophic mistake. Turn the other cheek to these people and you will not receive a second slap. You will receive a knife to the throat.

Let us in the West be clear-eyed about what we are dealing with.

 

This article first appeared in Dutch.

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