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Source: https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1995731/intifada-protesters-palestine-terror
An Ideological Islamic War Against Those Deemed Infidels
(Daily Express-UK) Jonathan Sacerdoti - As chants of "globalize the intifada" reverberate through the streets of Western cities, a Saudi-born psychiatrist ploughed his car through a Christmas market in Magdeburg, Germany, claiming five lives, and an American-born ISIS terrorist charged a pickup truck through a crowd in New Orleans, killing 15. The intifada - a word tied to Palestinian uprisings against Israel - was never merely a localized rebellion. It was a blueprint for ideological Islamic warfare. Christmas markets, public celebrations, bars, churches, Jewish centers, and music venues have become the favored stages for terror. They are the inheritance of a playbook honed during Israel's first and second intifadas, with public bombings, shootings, and stabbings. The West finds itself living a delayed echo of Israel's reality. Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the founder of Hamas and a chief architect of the intifadas, was explicit about their purpose. They were not simply protests against Israeli policies but a totalizing religious war against those deemed infidels. Yet Yassin's unambiguous message was never fully grasped by a Western audience. The result is a profound failure to understand the forces at work to destroy our way of life. Western societies search the attacker's life for clues - a bad childhood, economic hardship - as though terror were the inevitable by-product of social failure rather than a weapon of ideology. This approach obscures the reality that these attacks are part of a larger ideological conflict, one that views the very existence of Western society - its freedoms, its values - as an affront to the Muslim Ummah, to be answered with violence. If Europe hopes to withstand this ongoing wave of terror, it must learn from Israel's experience. How many more lives must be lost for us to stop responding as though each attack were the first? When will we finally acknowledge the war we are already in, and start to fight back?