When you go to the US Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, you can read on the right hand side wall a poem written by the German anti-Nazi activist Martin Niemoller, and the poem reads:

"THEY CAME FIRST for the Communists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.

THEN THEY CAME for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.

THEN THEY CAME for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.

THEN THEY CAME for me
and by that time no one was left to speak up."

I have said before that in today's world Israel has functioned and continues to function as the proverbial canary in the mine shaft. The current wave of anti Western terrorism emerges from deep seated rejection of the very concept of Modernity as defined by European society, a definition that revolves around the main concept of separation between private and public matters. It was thanks to Modernity that the Founding Fathers were able to enshrine in our Constitution the separation of Church and State. Those in the Muslim world who have chosen to subscribe to an irredentism version of their religion are definitely opposed to the very idea that you can have a society in which the law is dictated by anything other than the religious authorities. For those subscribing to this violent form of Islam, Shari'a (Muslim religious law) must be imposed first in Muslim countries and then in the rest of the world. Israel confronts these people with a serious problem, for it is a non Muslim western democracy surrounded by Muslim countries, sharing history and geography with the Arab world, and yet incredibly more successful in providing for its citizens than any Muslim country can dream of being under the current conditions. Therefore, in their minds it needs to be exterminated because it represents an affront to God (as interpreted, of course, by them). Paraphrasing Niemoller with admiration and respect for his courage:

They first came for the Jews,

and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew

Then they came for the secular intellectuals in the Arab world

and I didn't speak up because I wasn't one of them

Then they came for European intellectuals

and I didn't speak up because I wasn't one of them

Then they came for the Western values

and I didn't speak up because I didn't believe it affected me

Then they came for me

and I was only allowed to say "Allah is my God and Muhammad is his Prophet"

And in the XXII Century some historian will wonder who allowed the West to fall...