Protesters in London call for an intifada (Image: Getty)
As chants of “globalise the intifada” continually reverberate through the streets of Western cities, a Saudi-born psychiatrist ploughed his car through a Christmas market in Magdeburg, Germany, and an American-born terrorist charged a pickup truck through a crowd in New Orleans, killing 15.
Many who gleefully shout that brazen, much misunderstood demand do not grasp its full implications, but its meaning has been written in blood for decades.
The intifada — a word tied to Palestinian uprisings against — was never merely a localised rebellion. It was a blueprint for ideological Islamic warfare that combined terror, symbolism, and unrelenting zeal. And as we grieve two more atrocities in Europe and the USA, it becomes impossible to ignore the grim reality that the intifada has already gone well and truly global.
The attack in Magdeburg targeted festive crowds just days before Christmas, claiming five lives, including that of a toddler. Over 200 others were left injured, many gravely so. The motives of the suspected attacker, identified as Taleb Al Abdulmohsen, remain the subject of ongoing investigation and speculation, but the method and the timing of the attack speak with a clarity that biographical details cannot obscure.
Similarly, despite his ISIS flag literally strapped to his rented attack vehicle, the New Orleans attacker named by the FBI as Shamsud-Din Jabbar, is the subject of back and forth about his all-American background and upbringing. Yet both savage acts bore the unmistakable marks of an ideological script — a script that has played out repeatedly in Berlin, Nice, Strasbourg, London, , and beyond.
Protesters demand globalised intifada in Manchester (Image: Getty)
The West, however, remains fixated on the attackers’ personal histories. Was Abdulmohsen driven by resentment toward Saudi society, which he had renounced as an “ex-Muslim”? Was Jabbar embittered by the breakup of his marriage, or his time in the US military? Such questions, while tempting, risk narrowing our vision to the incidental and the immediate. To linger on the peculiarities of any one attacker is to focus on a single thread while ignoring the tapestry of violence to which recent events bear a stark resemblance.
It belongs to a pattern of violence that has taken root across Europe and America in recent years which targets not only lives but symbols. Christmas markets, public celebrations, bars, churches, Jewish centres, and music venues have become the favoured stages for terror, where the innocuous rhythms of Western life are transformed into scenes of horror. What unites these attacks is not merely their brutality but their ideological resonance.
They are the inheritance of a playbook honed during ’s first and second intifadas. The public bombings, shootings, and stabbings that plagued in the late 20th and early 21st centuries were carefully calibrated to erode both security and the psyche, turning the mundane into the mortally dangerous.
The West finds itself living a delayed echo of ’s reality which has crossed borders not merely as a set of tactics but as an ideological export. Terror need not involve armies or complex infrastructures; a car, a knife, or even a rock, wielded with ideological conviction, can achieve devastating ends.
Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the founder of Hamas and a chief architect of the intifadas, was explicit about their purpose. They were not simply protests against Israeli policies but a totalising religious war against those deemed infidels. Yassin’s message was unambiguous, yet it was never fully grasped by a Western audience inclined to interpret such conflicts through the prisms of politics or economics. The result is a profound failure to understand the forces at work to destroy our way of life.
Western societies, steeped in secularism and individualism, have a habit of reducing terrorism to a pathology. We search the attacker’s life for clues — a bad childhood, a sense of alienation, economic hardship — and treat these factors as if they fully explain the horrors they commit. We catalogue grievances and disconnections, as though terror were the inevitable by-product of social failure rather than a weapon of ideology.
This approach is not just mistaken; it is dangerous. It obscures the reality that these attacks are part of a larger ideological conflict, one that views the very existence of Western society — its freedoms, its values, its cultural celebrations — as an affront to the Muslim Ummah, to be answered with violence.
This ideology envisages a global community of Muslims, united by their shared faith, spiritual brotherhood, and collective responsibility, transcending ethnic, national, and cultural boundaries. We are in the way.
Take the Magdeburg attacker: an ex-Muslim, a critic of Saudi Arabia, a man who shared distorted images of Angela Merkel online. These details seem contradictory, even perplexing. But the choice of target — a bustling Christmas market — is anything but random. Similarly, killing Americans on New Year’s day is a decision steeped in symbolism.
They are both strikes at the heart of our Western identity, symbols of joy, tradition, or Christian heritage. To focus exclusively on the killers’ personal grievances is to miss the ideological forces that, consciously or unconsciously, shape their actions and determine their focus.
If Europe hopes to withstand this ongoing wave of terror, it must learn from ’s experience. This requires more than reactive policing; New Orleans can erect as many barriers as it likes to shield pedestrians. We need a proactive understanding of how terror networks operate, how ideologies spread, and how societal vulnerabilities are exploited as part of an ideological drive to destabilise and destroy Western society.
The West must also find the courage to address uncomfortable truths about immigration and integration. Europe’s failure to integrate immigrant communities has left entire populations isolated, aggressive, and estranged from the societies they live in.
Those of us who are the products of successful immigration have a duty to speak up; my own family’s story, as Jews who came to Britain, is one of respect, adaptation and gratitude, not one of rejecting integration and seeking domination.
“Globalise the intifada” does not invoke resistance, it endorses the tactics of terror — the same tactics has faced for decades and that now haunt our streets. Lighting candles and laying flowers may offer solace, but does nothing to confront the forces behind these attacks. Endless “no to hate” and “they will not divide us” marches only show how lost and weak our society has become.
How many more lives must be lost in this way for us to stop responding as though each attack were the first? When will we finally acknowledge the war we are already in, and start to fight back?