Being an Italian who grew up in Israel, I'm increasingly caught in between two very different worlds. Half my friends now serve in the Israeli army, a veritable melting pot of rich and poor, black and white. For my other friends, danger is avoiding a hangover after a late night of partying in Rome. I returned to Italy recently. What I find is frightening. Europeans no longer take for granted principles I came to understand in Israel. I assumed that anyone growing up in a democracy would understand that democracies are always superior to dictatorships. I never thought Italians who suffered so horribly during war and dictatorship would ever again find terrorism — the deliberate slaughter of civilians for political gain — acceptable. But increasingly they do. I can no longer speak about the importance of freedom, liberty, and democracy in Italy without attracting the condescending sneers of a generation schooled by Europe's media, statesmen, and left-wing intelligentsia to look beyond such "simplistic" concepts. To my European classmates, any suggestion that there is a connection between Islam and terror — even as self-identified Islamic groups slaughter schoolchildren in Israel, tourists in Egypt, and revelers at a Bali nightclub — is more racist than Islamists' targeting of civilians because of their religion. European politicians — Jacques Chirac, for example, unabashedly honors Hezbollah's Shaikyh Nasrallah, the same man who last month suggested that he would welcome the return of all Jews to Israel "to save the trouble of hunting them down later." In Italian classrooms, political ethics are reversed. Terrorism is justified, but and defense of democracy is not. Military campaigns are roundly condemned, even though it was the military and not political appeasement that freed Western Europe from the worst tyranny. For many Italian students, professors, journalists, and politicians, there can be no justification for war. When the Baath party seized power in a coup, Saddam Hussein purged hundreds of political competitors. But to a new generation of Europeans schooled by Sixties radicals and liberal elites, Saddam is a legitimate nationalist leader and masterful tactician, while President George Bush, leader of the world's strongest democracy, is simply dismissed as stupid. European arrogance has grown so great that even the most-ignorant student emerging with a failing grade feels justified in mocking the president of the United States. No countervailing arguments are needed to address those who understand the necessity of war, the right of self-defense, or the fragility of liberty in the face of tyranny. I don't know whether the gap between Europe and America has ever been so great. No one I know identifies himself as pro-American. Despite recent waves of anti-Semitic and racist violence, and Le Pen's strong showing in the French elections, Europeans believe Americans to be racist, while they themselves are culturally tolerant. Europeans believe themselves to be empathetic while Americans are merciless and ruthless. They see no irony in the fact that it is the United States that is standing with Iraqis and Iranians against murderous dictators, while the European Union seeks to expand its business ties to Saddam Hussein and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. They do not see any problem with Mary Robinson's legitimization of suicide bombings, nor the European Union's subsidization of the al-Aqsa Martyr's Brigade. For my European teachers, Saddam is more a representative of a different culture than a dictator set on accumulating weapons of mass destruction. In many ways, the widening ideological gulf between Western European countries like Italy and the United States is due to deep ideological mark of communism. Eastern Europe suffered under Communism and knows the evil of Leftism gone awry. In Italy, Communism has never fallen out of vogue. Under U.S. military protection, successive generations of young Italians have grown up unable to conceive of what tyranny actually means while taking liberty for granted. They demonize power and believe that the underdog must always be right. Accordingly, in the Middle East, Israel's military prowess makes the Jewish state worthy of contempt, and proponents of the slaughter of Israelis and Jews worthy of honor. More broadly, the power of the United States makes America public-enemy number one. Thus, American efforts to feed Muslims in Somalia, or liberate Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo are ignored. Despite the sacrifice of American lives for freedom in Korea, Grenada, Kuwait, and Haiti, they believe Washington is just cynically seeking control of Iraq's oil. The inability of Europe to truly separate religion from state compounds the problem. No Italian politician can afford to ignore the Catholic Church. British politicians still look toward the Church of England for their moral guidance. When religion and politics mix, it can breed two extremist outcomes: One of fundamentalism as afflicts the Islamic world, and the other of irresponsible pacifism that now afflicts Europe, with an effect equally dangerous. Europe is now facing a devaluation of the same fundamental values that allowed it for more than 300 years be the world's most-prosperous and powerful region. The cultural relativism that increasingly reigns supreme in Europe serves as a powerful justification for treating as allies and equals the most corrupted and anti-democratic regimes on the globe. Terror becomes as legitimate as the decisions of a democratically elected government. Europe must have to awake from its sleep if it wants to play a relevant role in the world's future balance, and it does. The question I ask myself when I am studying in Rome is whether my European friends must see terror with their own eyes before it can stop wondering "why these crazy Americans are going to war?" — Benny Irdi Nirenstein is completing a political-science degree at Luiss University.
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ast week in Florence, 300,000 Europeans — many waiving Palestinian flags and sporting t-shirt images of Che Guevara, Stalin, and Mao Tse-Tong — marched to denounce the possibility that the United States will liberate the Iraqi people. In the upside-down world of these European demonstrators, democracies are to be condemned and dictatorships coddled.