The far-Right sweep in the recent election results shows that the European Union has started addressing the elephant in the room. The beast called radical Islam had entered meekly, in boats from devastated habitats, seeking asylum in liberal democracies and open societies.
It has since gone on a rampage, seeking to recreate in its host country the very hell it had escaped.
Whether it is the grooming gangs of Birmingham, the Charlie Hebdo massacre, the Nice beheading, Sweden riots over the Quran, the Mannheim knife attack, or the gang rape of a 12-year-old French girl in Courbevoie, Europe’s patience has been seriously tested over the decades.
Israel’s war on Hamas after the October 7 massacre has given Islamists and communists the perfect excuse to manufacture anger and set European streets and American campuses on fire.
All this while, ordinary, law-abiding citizens of the West watched spectacle after gruesome spectacle without speaking a word, their conscience chloroformed by political correctness.
But now, voters in nation after nation are speaking out through the ballot. The ‘far-Right’ — a Leftist-liberal label for anybody speaking the inconvenient truth about Islamism — is ruling from Hungary to Italy, Poland to the Netherlands. It is on the rise in France, Germany, and the UK.
But there is another, less evident movement afoot. Thanks to the reach of social media, people and their representatives from across the world are reaching out to one another and have started forming an informal coalition against radical Islam.
So, you will find Indians and Indian politicians vocally supporting Israel against Hamas’s barbarism. Or Donald Trump supporters lending a voice to the outrage against the French girl’s gang rape.
Interestingly, a very wealthy and influential section of the Islamic world — Arab states like Saudi Arabia, UAE, Jordan, Oman, and even Egypt — has been silently part of the coalition against Islamist extremism.
Arab nations have steadfastly refused to take Palestinian refugees, convinced that violent Hamas flotsam will come with it. And that will mean trouble. Most Arab states have unequivocally condemned the October 7 massacre, while making perfunctory noises about a two-state solution to the Palestinian problem.
Saudi has banned extremist groups like Tablighi Jamaat which freely roam in its birthplace, India. UAE, Bahrain and other countries have such strict anti-terror laws that they have long been under attack from Left-leaning human rights groups. Experts and politicians from the Gulf have long been warning the West to keep away its bleeding heart and take Islamist terror seriously.
In the coming days, this global cooperation will deepen. Georgia Meloni may differ from Marine Le Pen on support for Russia, but they are almost certain to be on the same page over immigration and Islamisation.
Narendra Modi’s third innings as Prime Minister has started. India is unlikely to go soft on Islamists. Donald Trump is leading Joe Biden in the opinion polls by a seemingly unassailable margin, and if he becomes President again, he will certainly get tough on who gets to settle in America.
Israel is in no mood to relent against jihad. Argentina’s Javier Milei is blunt on the subject as well. And in Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro is breathing down on the Leftist President Lula De Silva. Even Fumio Kishida’s Japan is not leaving anything to chance and is pumping millions of dollars in counterterrorism in the Asia-Pacific region.
In the past, 87 countries had come together in a global coalition against ISIS. Such coalitions will become more formal, focused and ferocious against a savage enemy which burns down cities over real and imagined insults to its Prophet, lynches helpless men and women over blasphemy, or grooms ‘kafir’ girls for mass rape and conversion.
Radical Islam is a brutal and determined imperialistic force that the civilised world will have to at some point shed its political correctness and deal with. It is going to be a matter of survival, not sanctimoniousness.
The rise of the Right across the planet is a sign of that.
Abhijit Majumder is a senior journalist. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.
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