A Civilization Addicted to Apology

It is one of the strangest spectacles of the modern West: the same people who built their identity on centuries of exclusion now split into two contradictory camps over those who would exclude or destroy them again. On one side stand the conservative Jews — vigilant, Zionist, anxious — warning that the mosques of Brussels and Brooklyn are incubators of antisemitism. On the other side stand the liberal Jews — urbane, global, sentimental — insisting that every border must open wide to the same Islamic immigration their cousins across the aisle condemn. Each invokes “Never Again,” but one means never again to the Holocaust, while the other means never again to the walls that once kept the Jews out. The result is an intellectual schizophrenia disguised as a moral debate.

Conservative Jews see Islam not as a religion but as a historical nemesis. From the pogroms of Yemen to the farce of modern “Palestinian resistance,” they trace a line of hostility unbroken by time or geography. They read demographic charts the way prophets once read omens: more mosques mean fewer synagogues. And their fear is not unfounded. The majority of antisemitic incidents in France today come from Muslim immigrants, not the old Vichy ghosts of Europe. Yet these same conservatives cheer when America sends arms to Saudi Arabia, or when Israel trains with Arab monarchies to contain Iran. They condemn the Islamic invasion of Europe but court Islamic autocracies for business and security. Their realism turns opportunistic; their warnings against Islam abroad become silence when money or geopolitics intervene.

Liberal Jews, meanwhile, live in a moral hallucination of their own design. They inherited the guilt of Western civilization and baptized it with Jewish suffering. They universalized Auschwitz into a theology of boundless compassion, where every migrant is an Anne Frank and every border guard a Nazi. To them, Islam is not a faith with laws of conquest and submission but simply another victim of Western imperialism. They romanticize hijabs as cultural self-expression while condemning the cross as patriarchy. They see the Qur’an through the lens of multiculturalism, not through the eyes of women stoned in its name. And they believe that if only the West confesses enough sins, the world will forgive both Christians and Jews.

Thus the paradox: the conservative Jew fears Islam but defends Israel’s right to ethno-religious identity; the liberal Jew preaches universalism but supports a theocratic Israel because guilt demands loyalty. Each wants moral exemption from his own logic. One believes in walls for Israel but open gates for America; the other believes in open gates for everyone but excuses Israeli militarism as “defense.” It is the same contradiction in two accents.

The hypocrisy is not incidental — it is structural. Jewish political culture after the Holocaust split along two survival instincts. One said: survive by power. The other said: survive by morality. The first built the nuclear arsenal of Israel; the second built the moral arsenal of the New York Times and Hollywood. One trusts Iron Dome, the other trusts editorial influence. But both spring from the same trauma: centuries of exile taught the Jew that safety comes not from truth, but from control — of weapons or of words. The conservative controls territory; the liberal controls narrative. Both manipulate fear, one of annihilation, the other of moral relapse.

Yet reality no longer obeys either narrative. Europe’s streets tell a brutal truth: the children of the refugees whom liberal Jews defended now march under the banner of jihad against the very civilization that gave them asylum. And in those same streets, right-wing populists whom conservative Jews once denounced as fascists are now the only ones defending synagogues. The tables of history have turned so violently that even irony feels exhausted. Liberal Jews discover that compassion is not a shield, and conservative Jews discover that security alliances with despots do not buy respect. The Holocaust’s moral capital is spent, and no amount of remembrance can refill it.

What makes this hypocrisy particularly poisonous is that both camps accuse each other of betrayal — and both are right. The conservative calls the liberal naïve, suicidal, a collaborator in civilizational decay. The liberal calls the conservative racist, Islamophobic, a betrayer of prophetic justice. Each holds a mirror to the other’s delusion, and each refuses to look. Meanwhile, Europe burns, America divides, and Israel militarizes — all under the shadow of arguments that pretend to be moral but are really tribal. Neither camp can admit that its ideology is merely the continuation of ancient Jewish survival strategy — fear in one form, guilt in another.

At the core lies the old Jewish genius and curse: to moralize every experience until it becomes unrecognizable. Conservative Jews moralize power; liberal Jews moralize surrender. Both wrap self-interest in prophetic language. When the conservative supports walls and deportations, he calls it “defending civilization.” When the liberal supports open borders, he calls it “repairing the world.” Each pretends to speak for humanity while speaking only for his psychological comfort. And the non-Jewish world, caught between their sermons, forgets that the issue is not Judaism or Islam but the absence of reason in public life.

This contradiction will not resolve itself, because it is profitable for both sides. The conservative gains political capital among evangelicals and nationalists; the liberal gains moral capital among academics and progressives. Together they perform a dialectic of guilt and fear that keeps Western discourse paralyzed. No one dares say that both positions are unsustainable: that borders cannot remain open when faiths refuse to modernize, and that fear of Islam cannot coexist with arms sales to its monarchs. To point this out is to invite accusations of antisemitism — the last weapon both camps still share.

And so the debate continues: the conservative Jew builds a fortress, the liberal Jew builds a museum. One guards the future with drones, the other guards the past with memory. Yet the world moves on, less sentimental, less forgiving. Islam expands not because of Jewish liberalism or conservatism, but because both mistake moral theater for strategy. The tragedy is not that Jews disagree about Muslims; it is that their disagreement has become a substitute for thinking itself.

The contradiction between conservative and liberal Jews did not appear out of nowhere. It was born in the ashes of Europe, when the Holocaust destroyed not only Jewish lives but Jewish certainty. For two thousand years, the Jewish mind had been defined by exile, ingenuity, and endurance. After 1945, it became defined by moral trauma. One faction vowed that the world could never again be trusted; the other vowed that the world could never again be condemned. One saw the lesson of Auschwitz as “arm yourself”; the other as “forgive everyone.” Together they remade Jewish identity into a dialectic of fear and guilt—the two currencies that still dominate Western conscience.

Zionism embodied the first reaction. It was tribal realism disguised as liberation theology. It spoke the language of emancipation but practiced the logic of fortress building. The early Zionists—Ben-Gurion, Begin, Jabotinsky—believed in the secular sword, not divine promise. They saw the British, Arabs, and Soviets as pieces on a chessboard, not brothers in Abraham. For them, the Jewish future was concrete, steel, and military discipline. When the Holocaust ended, their realism seemed prophetic. The moral of survival was no longer “turn the other cheek” but “never depend on anyone else’s.” Thus was born the conservative Jewish temperament: suspicious, pragmatic, iron-willed, armed to the teeth yet haunted by history.

Liberal Judaism took the opposite path. It left the ghetto not for the desert of Sinai but for the seminar rooms of Harvard and the editorial offices of Manhattan. Its weapon was not the rifle but the adjective. Having seen the horror of exclusion, liberal Jews transformed inclusion into sacred dogma. They became priests of secular conscience: from the American Civil Liberties Union to the pages of The New York Review of Books, they preached the gospel of empathy as public policy. For them, borders, national identities, and even majority cultures were vestiges of the fascism that killed their grandparents. And so, when Islam knocked at the gates of Europe, they opened them—believing that generosity could atone for centuries of suffering.

But generosity detached from realism is merely guilt with a halo. The liberal Jew’s compassion became an instrument of self-absolution. Each refugee admitted was a symbolic resurrection of a Jewish child denied at Ellis Island or murdered at Treblinka. The immigrant became the mirror through which the liberal Jew forgave himself for surviving. He could not save the six million; he would save the six million more arriving from Damascus or Karachi. Thus humanitarianism became therapy, and policy became penance.

Meanwhile, conservative Jews watched in disbelief. They saw that liberal tolerance empowered the very ideology that condemned Jews in Islamic scripture. They warned Europe that multiculturalism without cultural confidence is surrender disguised as virtue. Yet their own fortress of realism carried its hypocrisy too. The same Israeli strategists who denounce the Qur’an’s call for jihad ally with Wahhabi kingdoms; the same American conservatives who fear Sharia at home celebrate “Abraham Accords” abroad as triumphs of peace. It is transactional morality masquerading as moral clarity. Each side uses Islam as its mirror—one to prove its compassion, the other its vigilance—and neither dares to see the reflection truthfully.

Post-war Jewish politics in the West evolved into a unique double helix: moral universalism intertwined with tribal nationalism. Every major Jewish institution carries both strands. The New York Times editorial board weeps for refugees; the Jerusalem Post demands pre-emptive strikes. American Jewish donors fund civil-rights lawsuits in Atlanta and missile-defense systems in Tel Aviv. One checks the conscience of the West, the other guards its frontier. Together they wield immense cultural power while canceling each other’s credibility. And yet, the contradiction persists because it satisfies both the moral and material appetites of survival.

This schizophrenia spread beyond Jewish circles into the bloodstream of Western liberalism itself. Because Jews disproportionately shaped post-war academia, media, and entertainment, their divided worldview became the West’s divided conscience. The guilt that once haunted survivors now haunts the children of empire. Europeans who once persecuted Jews now emulate their liberal descendants by embracing every migrant as expiation. Americans, schooled by Jewish intellectuals in the ethics of tolerance, recite “diversity” as a creed while building drones for endless war. Thus the Jewish paradox metastasized into Western policy: security for Israel, compassion for everyone else, and incoherence for all.

But underneath the politics lies psychology. The conservative Jew’s obsession with security is the trauma of helplessness transfigured into strategy. The liberal Jew’s obsession with compassion is the trauma of guilt transfigured into morality. Both are understandable; both are human; but both have become dogmas unexamined by reason. They no longer serve humanity; they serve memory. And memory, when canonized, ceases to illuminate—it blinds.

What neither camp confronts is that Islam is not merely another ethnicity but a theology that rejects secular compromise. Its expansion into Europe is not migration alone but metaphysical invasion. To welcome it without conditions is not compassion—it is surrender. To fear it without introspection is not realism—it is projection. The world that produced Spinoza and Freud should know better: contradictions unresolved become neuroses, and neuroses unexamined become policy. That is precisely where the Jewish mind finds itself today—caught between the need to control and the need to confess.

Until both factions recognize that the moral lessons of the Holocaust cannot substitute for rational policy, they will continue to oscillate between paranoia and penance. Neither state is sustainable. Civilizations, like individuals, collapse when their emotions become their ethics. And the Jewish debate over Islam has become an emotional performance mistaken for principle.

The Western conversation about Islam is not guided by facts but by fear—fear of being labeled racist on one side, and fear of being blown up on the other. Both fears are Jewish in origin: one born from the memory of persecution, the other from the anxiety of survival. Liberal Jews inherited the first; conservative Jews the second. And because Jews occupy the moral command posts of Western civilization—media, universities, think tanks—their internal quarrel has become the West’s external confusion. Europe and America are trapped inside a Jewish argument about how to live with the past.

Every newsroom in New York and London carries this invisible fault line. The editors who promote multiculturalism are often descendants of refugees who fled pogroms or camps. They cannot bear the idea that exclusion could ever again be justified. Their liberal Judaism has evolved into a secular religion of atonement. To them, to question mass immigration is to reopen the gates of Auschwitz. And so they censor facts that offend their faith: that honor killings are not isolated; that Islamist networks infiltrate welfare systems; that antisemitism now wears a keffiyeh, not a swastika. Their self-image as moral sentinels blinds them to moral complexity. They have replaced theology with therapy.

On the other side of the same editorial table sit conservative Jewish commentators—columnists and strategists whose worldview is shaped by the defense of Israel. They warn of jihad in Europe and demographic collapse in the West. Yet they, too, distort reality. They conflate every Muslim immigrant with Hamas, every critic of Israel with a Nazi. They justify drone strikes abroad while demanding censorship of campus protesters at home. Their realism curdles into paranoia. The liberal Jew worships inclusion; the conservative Jew worships survival; both mistake their neurosis for virtue.

Nowhere is this schizophrenia more visible than on the university campus—the new synagogue of the secular West. There, Jewish professors teach Foucault by day and donate to AIPAC by night. Their students learn to denounce “white privilege” while ignoring the tribal nationalism of Israel. Liberal departments sponsor “Islamophobia awareness” weeks but never “apostasy awareness” weeks. The result is a generation that mistakes cowardice for tolerance. To question Islam is career suicide; to denounce Christianity is intellectual chic. And when Islamist extremists attack synagogues or French cartoonists, the campus response is silence wrapped in empathy. Liberal Jews dominate these institutions not because of conspiracy but because of culture—they believe ideas, not armies, shape destiny. Unfortunately, their ideas have surrendered to fear of offense.

Meanwhile, conservative Jews dominate the think tanks that write Western foreign policy. Their fingerprints are on every document that justified Iraq, Syria, and Iran containment. They see America as the extended armor of Israel. Yet they, too, refuse to confront their own contradiction: they condemn Europe’s Islamic immigration while promoting wars that create Islamic refugees. They want closed borders and open interventions. They preach realism but practice delusion—the belief that the West can bomb Islam into moderation. In their eagerness to protect the Jewish homeland, they have helped Islam expand everywhere else.

This double bind has turned Western discourse into a hostage situation. Anyone who questions the compatibility of Islam with liberal democracy is branded “far right” by liberal Jews and “antisemitic” by conservative ones. The accusation is the same weapon wielded for opposite reasons: one to protect Islam from criticism, the other to protect Israel from criticism. Between them, reason dies a slow death, smothered by moral blackmail. Even Europe’s police chiefs speak in euphemisms; even America’s presidents quote the Qur’an at prayer breakfasts. The intellectual courage that once defined Jewish modernism—from Spinoza to Freud to Arendt—has vanished into public relations.

The liberal Jew’s hypocrisy is most visible when Islamic intolerance targets his own people. Each time a synagogue is attacked in Paris or New York, he rushes to declare that the assailant is “mentally ill,” not religiously inspired. He organizes interfaith dialogues where rabbis and imams hug for cameras while their scriptures condemn each other to hell. He refuses to admit that Islam, unlike reformed Judaism, has not undergone secularization. For him, moral consistency is less important than emotional safety. The conservative Jew, for his part, demands police protection for synagogues while denouncing similar state oversight of mosques as tyranny. Both want to be victims and victors simultaneously—a psychological impossibility that fuels endless crisis.

Western politicians echo whichever faction funds their campaigns. The Left repeats liberal Jewish talking points about diversity; the Right repeats conservative Jewish warnings about security. Neither side risks examining Islam itself. The Left fears losing moral innocence; the Right fears losing donor approval. And so, the West’s immigration debate is staged as a theater of Jewish trauma: the refugee as Holocaust survivor, the nationalist as Nazi. Islam becomes a prop in someone else’s memory play.

The tragedy is that Jewish moral authority—once earned through suffering and intellect—is now squandered on hypocrisy. Instead of guiding the West toward reason, both factions manipulate it toward paralysis. Liberal Jews use guilt to silence critics; conservative Jews use fear to silence dissenters. Together, they have replaced dialogue with dogma. The West, which once looked to Jewish thinkers for enlightenment, now inherits their neuroses instead of their brilliance. The civilization of Einstein and Spinoza has become the civilization of disclaimers and apologies.

And yet, a small minority of Jewish voices—those faithful to reason rather than tribe—see through this madness. They warn that survival cannot depend on emotional blackmail, and that compassion cannot survive without truth. They argue that the real lesson of Jewish history is neither paranoia nor guilt but the courage to question sacred certainties, including one’s own. But they are shouted down by both sides: the conservatives call them traitors to Israel; the liberals call them reactionaries. To stand for reason today is to stand alone—precisely the position that once produced the best of Jewish genius.

Until this internal Jewish war over Islam is confronted honestly, the West will remain confused about its own identity. It cannot protect free speech if it fears offending the devout, and it cannot defend pluralism if it imports those who reject it. The liberal Jew will continue to moralize surrender, and the conservative Jew will continue to monetize fear. Between them lies a civilization that once worshiped reason and now genuflects to contradiction.

The modern West stands suspended between repentance and realism. Its elites preach compassion as a creed while its governments practice containment as policy. The moral vocabulary of the twentieth century—rights, equality, inclusion—has collided with the strategic vocabulary of the twenty-first—security, sovereignty, survival. The contradiction runs through every debate about migration, identity, and faith. The liberal conscience says welcome; the geopolitical mind says beware. Both speak truth, and both are lying.

This tension is not confined to any people or religion. It is the inheritance of civilizations that have witnessed their own brutality and sworn never to repeat it. Europe carries the guilt of empire and genocide; America carries the guilt of slavery and intervention. Their intellectuals, many of them shaped by Jewish historical experience, universalized that remorse into a moral mission. But nations cannot live on contrition alone. When morality becomes a substitute for policy, borders dissolve, currencies collapse, and citizens lose the vocabulary of self-defense. Compassion without caution becomes chaos.

Yet caution without compassion breeds another disaster: cynicism. The hard-right reaction to mass immigration is not merely nationalism; it is moral exhaustion. People tire of being told that their survival instincts are sins. They rebel against elites who moralize weakness while enjoying its safety from gated neighborhoods and armed escorts. They sense that guilt has become a luxury ideology, affordable only to those insulated from its consequences. And so the pendulum swings—from open borders to barbed wire, from apology to aggression, from self-denial to self-assertion. History always overcorrects.

The deeper problem is metaphysical. Western civilization once balanced faith and reason, Jerusalem and Athens, compassion and clarity. The Enlightenment broke that balance but offered another: moral autonomy guided by evidence. Today that, too, has decayed. The Left replaced reason with empathy; the Right replaced truth with identity. Universities teach that feelings are facts; populists teach that tribe is truth. Between them, the rational center has vanished. The struggle that once played out between theologians now plays out between hashtags.

Religious conflict has merely changed costume. Where priests once claimed infallibility, activists now claim moral purity. Where theologians excommunicated heretics, digital mobs cancel dissenters. The same absolutism that once justified crusades now enforces speech codes. The same sentimentalism that once canonized martyrs now canonizes victims. The West escaped the Church but recreated its psychology: salvation through confession, damnation through disobedience. It is a civilization addicted to guilt and allergic to judgment.

The immigration question exposes this pathology most clearly. Every migrant crisis is treated not as a logistical challenge but as a moral test. To ask who enters becomes taboo; to refuse becomes sin. But nations are not monasteries. They are systems of rights and responsibilities that depend on boundaries—geographical, legal, and cultural. To erase them in the name of compassion is to dissolve the very order that makes compassion possible. Empathy without enforcement is anarchy wearing perfume.

The opposite error—xenophobic panic—is equally destructive. Fear can unify a tribe but destroy a republic. When citizens define themselves only by what they reject, they lose the capacity to create. The task, then, is not to choose between walls and welcome, but to design a civilization that knows when each is necessary. That requires something rarer than empathy or fear: reason. Reason does not moralize; it measures. It asks not who is good or evil, but what works.

To revive that discipline, the West must confront its addiction to moral theater. Public discourse is no longer about solving problems but about displaying virtue. Politicians pose as humanitarians while outsourcing cruelty to smugglers and coast guards. Intellectuals condemn colonialism while enjoying the wealth it produced. Religious leaders preach inclusion from sanctuaries guarded by police. The gap between word and world has become obscene. Every sermon about justice hides an invoice; every apology conceals an agenda. The cure is not cynicism but clarity.

Clarity begins by separating universal ethics from selective guilt. Compassion is a duty toward individuals, not a policy toward systems. Borders are moral when they protect those within and humane when they consider those without. A civilization that cannot distinguish charity from self-preservation will achieve neither. The true lesson of the twentieth century is not “open all doors,” but “never again surrender reason to emotion.” The Enlightenment was not a suicide pact; it was a method for survival.

The West’s future depends on rediscovering that method. It must learn to defend tolerance without tolerating intolerance, to practice generosity without rewarding fanaticism, to honor refugees without importing wars. That balance will not come from guilt or fear but from the courage to think without apology. It is the courage that produced the Socratic gadfly, the Buddhist monk, the Enlightenment skeptic—the minds who understood that compassion must be disciplined by knowledge, and knowledge by conscience.

If the modern world has a sacred duty, it is this: to rescue reason from its sentimental captors. The battle is not between religions or races but between those who use morality as camouflage and those who use it as compass. The former build empires of emotion; the latter build civilizations that endure. Until the West remembers the difference, its debates about immigration, faith, and identity will remain what they are today—a morality play without a mind.

References

Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951.
Ben-Gurion, David. Rebirth and Destiny of Israel. New York: Philosophical Library, 1954.
Berman, Paul. Terror and Liberalism. New York: W. W. Norton, 2003.
Furedi, Frank. The Culture of Fear: Risk-Taking and the Morality of Low Expectation. London: Cassell, 1997.
Gitelman, Zvi. A Century of Ambivalence: The Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union, 1881–1991. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001.
Huntington, Samuel P. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996.
Jabotinsky, Vladimir. The Iron Wall (We and the Arabs). Jerusalem: Jewish Heritage Center, 1923.
Judt, Tony. Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. New York: Penguin, 2005.
Kaufmann, Eric P. Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities. New York: Abrams Press, 2019.
Kepel, Gilles. Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.
Lewis, Bernard. The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror. New York: Modern Library, 2003.
Noll, Mark A. The New Shape of World Christianity. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2009.
Phillips, Melanie. Londonistan. New York: Encounter Books, 2006.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Anti-Semite and Jew. Translated by George J. Becker. New York: Schocken Books, 1965.
Sternhell, Zeev. The Founding Myths of Israel: Nationalism, Socialism, and the Making of the Jewish State. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998.
Taguieff, Pierre-André. The Force of Prejudice: On Racism and Its Doubles. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.
Wistrich, Robert S. A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad. New York: Random House, 2010.
Zakaria, Fareed. The Post-American World. New York: W. W. Norton, 2008.

Post-Holocaust political psychology (Arendt, Sartre, Sternhell)
Zionist realism vs. liberal universalism (Ben-Gurion, Jabotinsky)
Post-war liberal guilt and multicultural ideology (Judt, Furedi, Kaufmann)
Islamic radicalism and Western responses (Kepel, Lewis, Phillips)
Broader civilizational theory (Huntington, Zakaria)