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Islam Is Calling

If we refuse to pay attention to Islam’s organizing principle of absolute submission, our destiny is to one day recall, with deep regret, that there was a time when it was not too late to reclaim the West.
[additional-authors]
March 15, 2026
Caution tape near the front entrance of Temple Israel a day after an active shooter incident on March 13, 2026 in West Bloomfield, Michigan. (Photo by Emily Elconin/Getty Images)

The baby steps we have been taking toward the Islamization of the West is hitting full stride. And if you’re Jewish and living almost anywhere, you should be feeling run over by now.

If you’re not, if you have somehow misjudged the jihadist calling cards—the firebombs and vans filled with explosives; the hailstorm of bullets; and, of course, the defiant intolerance of religious pluralism—then you’re either dead or braindead.

Over the past several weeks, Islamists have declared open hunting season on Jewish houses of worship worldwide. Synagogues in New York, Los Angeles, and Miami were targeted with vandalism or arson; the same with synagogues in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver; and in such far-flung jihadist destinations as France, Germany, Chile, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Italy, and the outback urban centers of Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney.

In Holland, an explosion at an orthodox Jewish school in Amsterdam. Hours earlier an arson attack at a Rotterdam synagogue. Four teenage Islamists belonging to The Islamic Movement of the Companions of the Right claimed responsibility.

In Norway, in the city of Trondheim, an armed Islamist conducting reconnaissance outside a synagogue was arrested after a high-speed car chase.

A bomb was set off in a synagogue in Liège, Belgium. The Belgian Jewish community has been especially besieged as of late. Since 2024, a nation otherwise known for chocolate has seen a surge of antisemitic incidents owing mostly to its large Muslim population. According to a recent poll in Brussels, where 20 percent of the population is Muslim, nearly half the city believes that Jews dominate banking and manipulate markets.

In Azerbaijan, police foiled terrorist plots against a synagogue and the Israeli Embassy in Baku.

Three synagogue shootings took place in Toronto, Canada, all within 10 miles from one another. Bullets shattered the glass entrance at Beth Avraham Yoseph with two maintenance workers inside. A half hour later shots were fired at the entrance of Shaarei Shomayim. Days earlier another synagogue and a Jewish restaurant were pelted with gunfire.

In the United States, an armed Islamist rammed a truck filled with explosives into Temple Israel in West Bloomfield Township near Detroit. At the time, 140 children were inside the synagogue’s preschool. One of the largest synagogues in the United States, and of the Reform denomination, chances are that most congregants at Temple Israel were nominally critical of Israel’s war in Gaza.

No matter. All the Lebanese-born assailant with terrorist ties to Hezbollah needed to know was that there were Jews inside the synagogue. (One TV news analyst insisted that having the name “Temple Israel” makes it “an Israeli temple.”) No matter their age, or whether they were even Zionists, it was a target-rich environment for any self-respecting Islamist.

The New York Times—and morons on social media—were quick to come to the terrorist’s defense. After all his two brothers, one a Hezbollah commander and the other a mere henchmen, were recently killed, along with their children, in an Israeli airstrike. Jews living in the diaspora must realize that Israel’s defense of its homeland will, from now on, serve as a pretext for permissive antisemitism worldwide. “Resistance by any means necessary” means Jews, living anywhere—and regardless of age, gender or ideology—become justifiable targets.

“Resistance by any means necessary” means Jews, living anywhere—and regardless of age, gender or ideology—become justifiable targets.

If you believe that Israeli teenage girls should be gangraped, infants set aflame and others beheaded, then of course 140 Jewish daycare children in Detroit deserve to die because Israel struck terrorists in Beirut.

That’s the kind of perverse moral judgment that has become the coin of the realm these days among antisemites and self-hating Jews, alike.

Back in January, in the Deep South of Jackson, Mississippi, an Islamist set fire to the Beth Israel Congregation. When asked his motive for committing the crime, the Islamist, without any recognition of irony, replied: The synagogue had “Jewish ties.”

The targets have not all been synagogues. A Jewish man was beaten in San Jose, California for speaking Hebrew. A spate of bias crimes against Jews in Teaneck, New Jersey who were fired upon by jihadist teenagers shooting gel pellet guns. In New York City, two Muslim teenagers scrawled 73 swastikas on a playground in a Jewish neighborhood. A rabbi was assaulted on International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Yet another Islamist rammed his car into an entrance of the Chabad headquarters in Brooklyn.

Since Mayor Zohran Mamdani has brought the Religion of Peace to City Hall, antisemitic incidents have spiked by 182 percent.

These signature acts of violence straight from Hamas handbooks are not always directed at Jews. Anyone with a whit of common sense surely knows by now that Islamists are merely testing the resolve of Western nations by persecuting its Jews first. How obtuse and unsuspecting can democracies possibly be?

Anyone with a whit of common sense surely knows by now that Islamists are merely testing the resolve of Western nations by persecuting its Jews first. How obtuse and unsuspecting can democracies possibly be?

The Islamic Rapture is only achieved by shattering Western Civilization and Judeo-Christian solidarity.

There was the gunman in Austin, Texas wearing a “Property of Allah” T-shirt. He wasn’t aiming at Jews. This past week we saw a convicted ISIS-supporter yell, “Allahu Akbar,” before opening fire at an ROTC classroom in Old Dominion University, killing the instructor.

Two Pennsylvania teenagers, radicalized online by ISIS, threw homemade explosive devices at a rally protesting the Islamic takeover of New York City. It took place outside of Gracie Mansion, where Mayor Mamdani, and his wife, Lady Macbeth, live.

Why the sinister Shakespearean reference? Well, we have since learned that immediately after the October 7, 2023 massacre in southern Israel, the future First Lady of NYC responded enthusiastically to social media postings celebrating the carnage and glorifying the terrorists. She seemingly Loved a post referring to the “mass rape hoax.”

While celebrating Eid al-Fatir, the end of the Ramadan fast, she and her husband hosted the leader of Columbia University’s pro-Hamas protests—at Gracie Mansion! Taxpayer funds spent on a terrorist sympathizer who the Secretary of State is in the throes of detaining and deporting from the United States.

No wonder Mamdani was more agitated by constituents protesting lawfully outside Gracie Mansion than he was with jihadists from Philadelphia hurling bombs.

Days later, on Al Quds Day, the anti-Israel event established by the Ayatollah in 1979, hundreds gathered in Times Square chanting, “Death to America; Death to Israel!” and “We support Hezbollah and Hamas here!” and, “Khaybar, khaybar, O Jews,” which is always a prelude to antisemitic violence.

The call to prayer these days is looking more like a call to arms. If we refuse to pay attention to Islam’s organizing principle of absolute submission, our destiny is to one day recall, with deep regret, that there was a time when it was not too late to reclaim the West. Our freedoms could have been preserved. Our traditions salvaged.

Islamophobia is no misnomer. Islam deliberately instills fear in the hearts of infidels. The feeling is not prejudice. It’s a suppressed survival instinct—shamed and ignored.


Thane Rosenbaum is a novelist, essayist, law professor and Distinguished University Professor at Touro University, where he directs the Forum on Life, Culture & Society. He is the legal analyst for CBS News Radio. His most recent book is titled, “Beyond Proportionality: Israel’s Just War in Gaza.

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