Re-Zionization of the West

To defend Israel is to defend the West’s capacity to renew itself — because the real war is not about land. It is about whether the West still believes in its own foundations.

photo: Cole Keister/Unsplash

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This is a guest essay by Dan Burmawi, author of the Amazon #1 bestselling book, “Islam, Israel and the West: A Former Muslim’s Analysis.”

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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On September 11, 2001, the world watched as nineteen men turned commercial airliners into weapons of mass murder. Nearly three thousand people died in the space of a few hours.

The perpetrators left no ambiguity: they acted in the name of Islam, citing the Qur’an and the example of Muhammad as they struck what they saw as the heart of unbelief. For a brief, clarifying moment, the mask slipped. The ideology that had animated centuries of conquest, subjugation, and doctrinal absolutism stood exposed in the dust and fire of Manhattan, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania.

Within days, U.S. President George W. Bush stood before the Islamic Center of Washington and declared, “Islam is peace.” Western leaders echoed the sentiment. The message was uniform: the attacks had nothing to do with Islam itself. A fringe of extremists had hijacked a noble religion. True Muslims were victims too — of misunderstanding, prejudice, and of the terrorists who claimed to speak for them.

This exoneration was not born of ignorance. Intelligence agencies had tracked jihadist networks for years. Scholars of Islamic texts knew the doctrinal foundations — offensive warfare, abrogation, the division between Dar al-Islam (House of Islam) and Dar al-Harb (House of War, a classical Islamic legal term referring to territories not under Muslim rule).

Yet fear overrode clarity. Fear of backlash, as anti-Muslim hate crimes spiked and media coverage amplified every incident. Fear of geopolitical rupture, as the United States needed Muslim allies for wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt — none could be alienated by suggesting the problem ran deeper than a terrorist network. So a fiction took hold: the enemy was “al-Qaeda,” not the theology that produced it.

The script followed. Terrorism became “radical,” “extremist,” the work of deviants who had twisted a peaceful faith. Islam was innocent. Muslims were innocent. The West owed not just tolerance but active protection and accommodation.

The consequences unfolded. Immigration accelerated. Muslim populations grew across the United States and Europe. Mosques multiplied. Islamic schools proliferated. Demands for accommodation — halal food in public institutions, prayer spaces in workplaces, gender-segregated programs, curricular exemptions — became routine in the politics of inclusion.

This was not mere demographic drift. It was reparation dressed as compassion. The West had briefly entertained the possibility that Islam might be the issue; having rejected that thought, it compensated through policy. Criticism became taboo. The faith itself was placed beyond scrutiny.

And the attacks kept coming.

Madrid 2004. London 2005. Paris 2015. Brussels. Nice. Manchester. Orlando. San Bernardino. Across continents and decades, tens of thousands of attacks and hundreds of thousands of deaths. Yet each atrocity triggered the same ritual: condemn the act, exonerate the religion. “This has nothing to do with Islam.” The perpetrators were always “lone wolves,” “radicalized,” “mentally ill” — anything but what they claimed to be.

To sustain this, Western institutions performed a linguistic sleight of hand. They formalized the distinction between Islam and “Islamism.” The faith was pure; the violence was a distortion. The framework allowed policymakers and intellectuals to condemn outcomes while shielding causes. Question the distinction and you were no longer a critic of terrorism; you were the problem.

By the mid-2010s, the inversion was complete. Islam had been granted near-total immunity. Tens of thousands of attacks across dozens of countries, and still the default position in polite society was that Islam bore no responsibility. The West had convinced itself the problem was everywhere except the one place the perpetrators kept naming.

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October 7, 2023, was the day Islamic terrorism finally hit its perfect target: Jews.

Not office workers. Not commuters. The one people against whom no justification has ever been required. Hamas delivered its attack in full view — mass murder, torture, abduction — barbarism so absolute it should have ended every conversation. Instead, it marked the moment the mask dropped completely.

For more than two decades, the West clung to the fiction that jihad was the work of “Islamists,” a distortion rather than an expression of the faith. On October 7th, that distinction collapsed. The perpetrators were not disowned. They were celebrated.

The chants were not “not in our name.” They were “from the river to the sea,” “globalize the intifada,” open calls for repetition. Hamas was not framed as a deviation but as authenticity. For the first time since 9/11, the theology was not denied. It was embraced.

The radical Left followed immediately. The same movement that had insisted on separating Islam from violence now claimed Hamas as resistance. Because the target was Israel. And Israel, to them, is not just a country but a symbol: of the West, its strength, its refusal to apologize for existing.

So the Left supplied the language. What Hamas framed as jihad, the Left reframed as “liberation,” “anti-colonialism,” “decolonization.” Atrocity became resistance. Violence became justice.

This was not alliance but convergence. Two anti-Western projects found a common target. Demonize Israel, and you delegitimize the West itself.

The proof came quickly. Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to America” resurfaced and spread among young Western audiences, reframed as insight rather than propaganda. September 11 was retroactively interpreted as justified “blowback.” October 7th did not just justify itself; it reached backward and justified everything that came before it.

Israel, meanwhile, was cast as the villain. Its response became “genocide.” Its existence became “colonialism.” Support for Israel became evidence of complicity in every Western sin.

In that inversion, both ideologies won. Islam’s violence gained open validation. The radical Left gained moral language to mainstream it. Together they produced a hybrid: jihad articulated in the vocabulary of human rights.

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October 7th did not just expose this convergence. It exposed fractures within the American right.

Some who once supported Israel folded under pressure. As public sentiment shifted, they pivoted — less denial than silence. They reframed themselves as “consistent” or “anti-interventionist,” but in practice abandoned the one state confronting the same enemy on its own soil.

Others required no shift. Longstanding antisemitism found new legitimacy under the banner of “anti-Zionism,” borrowing language now mainstreamed by the Left.

A third group believed the narrative outright. They saw Hamas as “blowback,” Israel as the cause, and imagined that removing American support would dissolve the conflict. They mistook tactical grievances for strategic truth.

There were also those influenced by money — foreign funding shaping discourse not through overt lies but through selective emphasis.

And finally, the naïve: those whose personal experiences with moderate Muslims led them to dismiss doctrine altogether.

Different motivations, same conclusion. All treated Israel as the cause rather than the symbol. The real conflict is not territorial. It is civilizational.

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Zionism began as a desperate survival project: a people seeking refuge after centuries of exile, persecution, and dispossession. It succeeded beyond expectation. Israel became a democracy, a technological powerhouse, a state built on resilience.

But it did not remain only that.

Israel now embodies something larger: the Western civilization project itself.

What it defends is not just land, but principles — the rule of law, individual sovereignty, the right to self-defense, the refusal to submit to either theocracy or relativism. It exists, thrives, and wins under conditions designed to destroy it. In doing so, it proves that these ideas are not accidents. They work.

This is why it is targeted with such intensity. Islam sees a theological defiance: a people who refused submission. The radical Left sees a philosophical rebuke: a nation that rejects victimhood and deconstruction.

Both require the West to kneel. Israel refuses.

That refusal is the point.

The “re-Zionization” of the West is not about Judaism or territory. It is about rediscovering civilizational confidence: the belief that some values are worth defending, that not all cultures produce the same outcomes, that strength is not a sin.

To defend Israel is to defend the West’s capacity to renew itself.

Because the real war is not about land. It is about whether the West still believes in its own foundations.

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