Summary
The article claims that postcolonial thought, influenced by figures such as Frantz Fanon, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Edward Said, reshaped Western institutions by reframing anti-Western violence as resistance rather than terrorism. It argues that this worldview now dominates parts of European politics and international organizations, influencing attitudes toward Israel and Islamist movements alike. The piece further asserts that this framework prevents Europe from directly confronting Islamist extremism and social fragmentation within its own societies. According to the argument presented, this ideological lens has led to moral and political distortions both domestically and internationally.
Key Takeaways
- The piece argues that postcolonial ideology has fundamentally shaped European political and institutional attitudes toward terrorism, legitimacy, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
- It contends that European institutions apply a moral framework that categorizes groups primarily as “oppressors” or “oppressed,” leading to what the author views as distorted interpretations of violence and extremism.
- The argument links Europe’s handling of Islamist extremism and migration-related social tensions to the same ideological framework used in its foreign policy toward Israel, claiming this prevents honest recognition of internal security and cultural challenges.
Europe’s Blind Spot
In his 2009 book “Blandt Kriminelle Muslimer” (“Among Criminal Muslims”), Danish psychologist Nicolai Sennels described years of clinical work with young Muslim inmates at Copenhagen’s Sønderbro facility. His central finding was that standard Western rehabilitation frameworks failed because they presumed equality between the individual and society. Sennels argued many of his subjects held a different premise: a cultural and religious sense of inherent superiority over Western host societies, where equality is not the norm—a society or person either commands authority or is subjected to it.
Sennels’s observations create discomfort in Europe’s dominant intellectual framework. He notes a cultural-supremacist dimension within Islamist movements. This dimension is not the product of Western oppression and does not respond to Western accommodation. The framework cannot name it because it codes Muslim populations as oppressed. Anything contradicting that coding is filtered out, reframed, or attributed to the host society’s failure. This is the blind spot. It connects the EU’s paralysis at home to its moral inversion abroad. They are the same phenomenon.
The Framework That Replaced International Law
That framework is postcolonial ideology. It did not emerge from European foreign ministries. It emerged from the post-war academy and reached international institutions through a generation of activists, advisers, and staff trained in its categories. Its lineage runs through Frantz Fanon, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Edward Said. These three figures transformed how Western elites think about violence, legitimacy, and the non-Western world.
Fanon, in “The Wretched of the Earth” (1961), argued that anti-colonial violence is not just instrumental but also psychologically cleansing. It is a means by which the colonized recover their humanity. Sartre, in his preface to that book, extended the argument. He said violence by the colonized against the colonizer is not a crime to be judged, but a historical necessity to be understood. Said’s “Orientalism” (1978) supplied the epistemological move that completed the structure. He recast Western scholarship on the Middle East as an instrument of domination. This move disqualified the analytic categories—terrorism, jihad, religious supremacism—that Western observers had used to describe the region.
The result was a binary that replaced liberal categories. The world split into oppressors—Western, capitalist, colonial, and, by extension, Jewish-Israeli—and the oppressed, whose violence became resistance. Within this binary, asking “Is this act terrorism?” is impossible.
This framework entered international law through the United Nations in the 1960s and 1970s. The Soviet bloc, the Arab states, and the Non-Aligned Movement built a General Assembly majority. They translated postcolonial theory into resolutions. UNGA Resolution 1514 (1960) declared a universal right to end colonialism. Later resolutions extended that right to the means of pursuing it. These changes effectively exempted designated “national liberation movements” from the international prohibitions against political violence that applied to everyone else. The 1974 platforming of Yasser Arafat at the General Assembly—in military uniform, with a holster at his hip—was the public ratification of the shift. Terrorism, when committed by the correctly coded actor, was now a legitimate form of political expression.
Everything in international institutions follows this inherited framework: the 2016 UN Human Rights Council database of businesses linked to Israeli settlements, the steady expansion of that list, and now the EU’s May 2026 sanctions. The framework makes the equivalence between Hamas and Israeli civic organizations feel coherent to officials who adopt it. Hamas is branded as resistance; Israeli settlers are branded as the leading edge of the last colonial project. The empirical record of what each actually does is processed through that filter.
The Problem Europe Cannot Name
This is where the framework meets the facts on the ground in Europe itself. For two decades, Europe has absorbed a wave of Islamist terror and unassimilated migrant crime that “oppressor-oppressed” cannot process. The Bataclan, Nice, Berlin, Manchester, the Samuel Paty beheading, the Vienna shootings, the Brussels football attack, and the Eiffel Tower stabbing. The grooming-gang scandals across northern England that local authorities ignored for a decade out of fear of being called racist. The no-go neighborhoods in Malmö and the Paris banlieues, where the state’s monopoly on force has quietly lapsed. The surge of antisemitic assaults has made Jewish life untenable in parts of France and Sweden. None of this fits a framework in which Muslim populations are coded only as oppressed, so none of it can be named for what it is.
What cannot be named must be displaced. Europe’s political class cannot confront the cultural-supremacist dimension Sennels documented inside its own cities. So, they project the category of “extremism” onto a target the framework permits: Israeli civilians in Judea and Samaria. The May 2026 sanctions are a mechanism. By placing Hamas and four Israeli civic organizations on the same list, the EU creates symmetry. This lets European officials denounce “extremism” in the abstract—without ever having to identify the specific extremism degrading their own societies.
The cost of the displacement falls in both directions. Israel is asked to absorb the moral burden of a crisis that is not its own. Europe loses, with each round of projection, the conceptual tools it needs to confront its actual crisis. A continent that cannot distinguish a Jewish farmer in Area C from a Hamas operative in Gaza will not be able to distinguish, when the moment requires it, between a citizen and a jihadist in its own cities.
