The aforementioned Bat Ye’Or exhorts and urges: protect Israel, because it is the spiritual foundation of all of Europe. If Israel falls, you will lose everything that stands on Israel’s foundations, that is, your entire civilisation.
That is actually quite a common construction. In order to maintain contemporary morality and contemporary rationality, we have to maintain what it has historically grown out of. That is, Christianity, the Ten Commandments, etc. If the older thing disappears, so does everything that grew out of it.
If we have to defend contemporary morality by protecting Christianity, we should also defend Christianity by protecting Judaism…
And it is actually logical that if we have to defend contemporary morality by protecting Christianity, we should also defend Christianity by protecting Judaism, and we should defend Judaism by protecting some archaic Semitic cults and…
In fact, the whole logic of this presupposes that every day history is going on all over again, and every day contemporary ideas grow out of their historical roots. Is that really the case? Isn’t the metaphor more to the point that we climb a staircase to a higher floor, and then we stop needing the staircase? I don’t know the answer.
