Understanding the Mideast 101
Islam's War on Israel is based on 1,400 years of Islamic doctrine which in essence says, kill the Saturday people (Jews), then when you are done, kill the Sunday people (Christians). Political Islam is a proselytizing system - an overarching political, cultural, social, and religious system that dictates sharia law: stoning for adultery, death for apostasy, how many wives you may have, which parts of a woman's anatomy must be cut off, and when and how you may beat your wife.
Westerners are loathe to acknowledge the seriousness of the threat of Islam. They don't understand how political Islam represents the antithesis of Western values and expresses an agenda of global conquest. They can't comprehend how Muslims in the West simply do not think and act in accordance with Western values and legal standards.
One of the most lucid explanations of the current Mideast situation is presented in the article, Why I Won’t Debate Critics of Israel, by Sam Harris, 5 June 2026. Excerpts follow:
... the global preoccupation with the Jewish state, as though it were the worst villain among nations, is contemptible, being the product of perennial lies and delusions...
I think militant Islam is ten times worse than you think it is. When I talk about "jihadists" and their various groups - Hamas, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, the IRGC, etc. - I'm talking about people who I consider to be worse than Nazis (jihadists being, essentially, Nazis who are certain of Paradise). My views about the conflict in the Middle East will not fundamentally change unless my critics produce evidence that Israel has become as evil as her enemies...
... there remains a world of difference between the two sides, and I believe that we should focus on how brutalizing it is for any free society to confront enemies that can sincerely claim to "love death" more than everyone else loves life - for this has been Israel's predicament for the better part of a century...
The problem in the Middle East is not, and has never been, the existence of the state of Israel. The problem is jihadism, Islamism, Islamic extremism, Islamofascism, militant Islam* - or whatever words you want to use to describe the belligerence and triumphal lunacy of those who take the most pernicious doctrines of Islam too seriously...
If the Palestinians laid down their arms, there would be peace... If the Palestinians simply stopped killing Jews and stopped building a culture that celebrates pointless murder and martyrdom as its highest values, there could be a diverse, tolerant, and prosperous society between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea... But if the Israelis laid down their weapons, there would be a genocide. This was obviously true on October 7th, 2023. And for anyone who has been paying attention, it has been true on every other day since the founding of the state of Israel...
What would each side do if it had the power to do whatever it wanted?...
If Hamas had the power, it would perpetrate a real genocide in Israel...
The world simply does not care when Muslims kill other Muslims - amazingly, it doesn’t much care when they kill Christians either - but it does care, enormously, when Jews do it...
There is only one nation on Earth that must continually argue for its right to exist, even when the very survival of its people is threatened by avowedly genocidal enemies...
The atrocities committed by Hamas revealed a level of Jew hatred, globally, that shocked even those of us who have been students of antisemitism for much of our lives...
Why does antisemitism matter?... It matters because when you look at what antisemites also hate, you find they hate everything that makes culturally rich, diverse, open societies possible...
Notes
* Clarification: Islam. Just Islam.
Islam's Shell Game and America's Institutional Enemy, by Elias Cohen, American Greatness, 6 June 2026.