In October 1648, after thirty years of the most catastrophic warfare Europe had ever seen, the exhausted nations of Central Europe signed the Peace of Westphalia. A third of the population of what is now Germany had died. The great military commanders — Wallenstein, Tilly, Pappenheim, Gustavus Adolphus — were all dead. Cities had been sacked, fields salted, populations scattered. The cause? A religious war between Christians who agreed on nearly everything but could not tolerate their small differences.
Europe learned its lesson. Nation-states agreed to mind their own theological business. Wars of religion were finished, a relic of a barbaric past.
Except that nobody told Islam’s most violent faction.
Today, the same ideological virus that burned half of Europe persists in one place and one place only: the jihadist conception of the world as divided between the Dar al-Islam, the House of Submission, and the Dar al-Harb, the House of War. Under this framework, everyone who has not submitted belongs to the House of War. That includes peaceful Muslims who simply want to pray and raise their families. It includes Christians, Jews, Hindus, and anyone else who refuses to organize their civilization around submission to a political-theological system that glorifies death.
This is not “Islam.” It is a totalitarian ideology that has hijacked a religion’s vocabulary. And the response of the free world has been, to put it plainly, embarrassingly confused.
Here is what the confusion misses: Jews and Christians do not need to agree on theology to stand together against those who want to destroy them both. We never did. We respect one another’s faiths, and those of others; the totalitarian ideology respects no dogma but its own. If there are no infidels handy to kill, the terrorists will even turn on each other like the rats in a barrel depicted in the James Bond movie Skyfall. ISIS and Al Qaeda put this into practice against each other, as well as against Shia militias.
The Hebrew Bible, the scripture shared by Jewish and Christian traditions, declares plainly that there is one God, one moral law, and therefore one standard by which civilizations rise or fall. “You cannot break the Law,” the great filmmaker Cecil B. DeMille once said. “You can only break yourself against the Law.” He was talking about the Ten Commandments, but he was describing something older and more universal: the reality that moral order is not invented by human beings, and that civilizations that violate it collapse. Hindus, Chinese, and Japanese have names for the moral order as well. They call it Dharma (the Right Way), Tao (the Way) and Do (also the Way) respectively. The principle is indeed universal across all human societies, regardless of the theology involved–until we come to the jihadist ideology.
The jihadist ideology targeting synagogues in Pittsburgh, churches in Nigeria, and temples in Bali is not making theological distinctions. It sees the entire edifice of Judeo-Christian civilization as the enemy, along with Hindus and peaceful Muslims–the Dar-al-Harb. The civilized world must accordingly stand united, with all people of genuine faith and goodwill, regardless of our theologies, against an ideology that is the sworn enemy of civilized Humanity (hostis humani generis).
There is a historical precedent worth remembering here. For much of Jewish history, the relationship between Jews and the Church was defined by forced conversions, Inquisitions, and expulsions. That was long ago, along with the Thirty Years’ War and the fight between Catholic Spain and Protestant England. Sep. 11 2001 was less than 25 years ago, Paris in November 2015, a little more than ten years ago, and Oct. 7, 2023 less than three years ago. The ayatollahs are hanging their own people for what they call “crimes against God,” the same reason used by the long-defunct Inquisition. In the meantime, the foundational moral code of Western civilization, including the very concept that all human beings bear the image of God, was built jointly on the Hebrew Bible and its reception into Christian culture. However fraught the relationship, the common inheritance was real.
That inheritance is what is under attack today.
The Westboro Baptist Church, with its theatrical hatred, is a marginal embarrassment that most Christians rightly disown. But the ideology driving Hamas, Hezbollah, ISIS, and the Iranian ayatollahs is not marginal. It governs states, commands armies, and has declared its intentions openly for decades. Its targets are not limited to Jews in Israel or Christians in the Middle East. They are anyone, anywhere, who refuses to live under their rule; Hindus, Baha’is, peaceful Muslims, women, and LGBT people, among others. This ideology is what cancer is to healthy tissue, a pestis humani generis (plague on the human race) with which there can be no compromise, tolerance, or accommodation.
What defeats this ideology is a coalition of civilized peoples who know what they believe, who do not compromise on their beliefs but respect those of others, and who recognize that their survival is bound together.
The Torah records God’s promise to Abraham: “I will bless those who bless you, and curse those who curse you” (Genesis 12:3). Christian Zionists have taken that promise seriously for generations. The alignment is not accidental. Jews and Christians share a scripture, a God, and now, in this era, a common set of enemies. The theological differences between us are dwarfed by what stands on the other side of the line.
Europe figured this out in 1648, at an almost unimaginable cost. The free world is being asked to learn the same lesson again, this time, one hopes, without repeating the body count.
Bill Levinson is the author of numerous articles and books on manufacturing, quality, and industrial productivity, and a student of history and psychological warfare. He played a role in exposing antisemitic content at MoveOn.org in 2006.
