During the Cold War, when America and the West took their national survival more seriously, a key part of the Soviet Union’s global terrorist network was the Palestinian Liberation Organization. The PLO, and various off-shoots, were supported in their efforts by their Islamic allies in Libya under Muammar Gadaffi, the Red Brigades in Italy, the Sandinista National Front in Nicaragua, the Baader-Meinhoff Group in West Germany, and the Provisional Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland. Even Communist China, though not the superpower it is today, supplied the Palestinians with military equipment and logistical support. Such was the unity of the Communist world and its allies.

But whereas it was once the Soviet Union that served as chief organizer of this terrorist network, that role is now played by an exceedingly capable Chinese Communist Party and Chinese intelligence. Xi Jinping has positioned Communist China as an enemy of the United States. He declared a People’s War against us in 2019 and seeks to marginalize and demoralize anyone who stands with the United States against China’s march toward global domination.

China’s support today of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Islamic Republic of Iran demonstrates their role as leader of a global Communist movement, allied with the Islamic World, which seeks to destroy America and the West. They have little reason to doubt that they are winning. In London, 100,000 protestors, most of them Muslim immigrants, defended the attack by Hamas on Israel. American cities have seen similar displays.

It bears repeating for this generation that the goal, now as then, is the destruction of the West. Israel was, and is, an outpost of the West and a defender of human freedom. Terrorist campaigns to destroy Israel were useful to animate certain parts of the Islamic world on behalf of the protracted war the Communists were waging against human freedom. These were once well-understood features of the ideological and political war between the Soviet Union and the United States. They have somehow been forgotten.

Indeed, the very idea of the West has largely been abandoned. At its best, the West presented to the world an intellectual defense of freedom of the mind, freedom of religion, and the freedom of peoples to determine how they would govern themselves. It represented man’s highest aspirations. It is the thing for which men crossed oceans. It was the thing for which men fought and died.

Although these beliefs are still held by the American people, they appear to have largely been rejected by U.S. elites. Witness the rejection of American principles in the modern university and the administrative state that runs our country.

The difference between the Cold War and today is that the Soviets and the Chinese could not, back then, contemplate a United States that would open its borders to millions of people from all over the planet, regardless of their country of origin or political views. There was always immigration of course, including illegal immigration. But the seriousness of the Cold War required that new citizens were mostly of a certain kind, even if most came for economic reasons. The opening of the U.S. border today reveals an America engaged in a kind of national suicide.

Given such weakness, we should not then be surprised that America’s major cities and her capitol have been filled with protesters who march in solidarity with Hamas and their deadly attack on Israel. It makes no difference that these protests purport to be in support of the Palestinian cause. Their practical effect is the support of terrorism and murder.

Some of the protestors are themselves Palestinians who have imported their grievances to the United States. Others are Communists, Marxists, Leninists, Muslims, and Muslim immigrants who are emboldened to defend openly the use of terrorism as a legitimate political act. It should be perfectly clear they have rejected the principles of the United States and embraced the nihilistic death cult that is global Islamic terrorism.

One of the first acts of the Biden Administration was to restore $200 million in funding to the Palestinian Authority, which had been cut off by the Trump Administration because it was being used to support the terrorist activities of Hamas. That fact will not be lost on any of these leftist groups. Nor will the fact that the Biden Administration facilitated billions of dollars in direct money transfers, oil sales, and forward contracts to Hamas’s central ally, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and Iran’s central ally, the Chinese Communist Party.

The Biden Administration made the decision to support a global alliance led by Communist China that was antithetical to the interests of the United States. In so doing, President Biden has not only turned against one of America’s closest friends, the state of Israel, but has signaled to the Communist movements within the United States on whose side he stands. Needless to say, Israel must be prepared to go it alone under these circumstances.

Why should this be so?

At an important level, the Biden Administration—despite Joe Biden’s pronouncements about the need for greater U.S. support of Israel and his embrace of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—shares ideologically the broad animus that the pan-Islamic world has for the West in general and the United States and Israel in particular. Whether President Biden himself understands it this way is another matter. He has surrounded himself with a State Department and National Security Council who share the American Left’s disdain for what America represents. What else is to explain the support of Communist China, Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah? And what is to explain the knowing importation of 5.1 million new illegal immigrants during the past two and a half years, on top of the 13 to 20 million illegal immigrants that were already here?

By some estimates almost 100,000 military-age Chinese men have entered the country. And even if the vast majority of the other illegal immigrants were from Central and South America, it would be more than certain that roughly a million of these come from the Islamic world—including Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the like. If, as it appears, we are at war with a global force led by Communist China in concert with the elements of the Islamic world, we can expect that included in that million would be members of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iranian IRGC forces. Taken together, they make up a deadly guerilla army poised to tear American society apart. If we think this is not possible, we are deeply delusional.

At the heart of our confusion is the simple fact that we have not defeated Islam as a political cause. We have not fundamentally disabused the millions of Muslims who have flooded into Europe and the United States of the idea that Islam will conquer the United States and the West.

Put simply, America presented to the Islamic world the clear view that we would not challenge them ideologically. While bodies were still burning inside the World Trade Center, our leadership classes insisted again and again that Islam was a religion of peace. This was a knowable falsehood given both the text of the Koran and the belief of its adherents. We continually presented this lie to both the American people and to the Islamic world. We presented it knowing it was not true and knowing that the Islamic world would see such a lie as an admission that the West no longer believed in the goodness of its own civilization. This is the very definition of demoralization.

Today, there are within Europe and the United States so-called “No-Go Zones” where the local police cannot deal effectively with Islamic populations. In the case of America, such Islamic populations do not respect the United States, it laws, or its principles. They are persuaded that they are on the winning side, that it is only a matter of time before either the United States submits to the dictates of Islam or they will have the opportunity to take power. That these populations have recently received a new influx of radical adherents, if not direct foreign military operatives whose purpose is to start an American civil war, has gone largely unnoticed.

During the Cold War, many well-intentioned people did not want to believe that the Soviet Union would sponsor terrorism. Likewise, they will not today want to believe that the Chinese Communist Party had a hand in the attack on Israel by Hamas or have actively placed military personnel in the United States. To believe such things is to establish a blood unity between the great Communist states and the world of Islamic terrorism—an allegiance born not of kinship but of murder and the cold ideological commitment that both have toward the destruction of the free world.

This blood unity is not to be underestimated. For whatever else is true, if our enemies believe that the United States has been demoralized, the stage has been set for a direct attack on the American homeland. The exact form this will take we do not yet know. But Americans must be prepared to meet this enemy here in the United States, for we do not have the luxury of fighting this war abroad. The open borders of the Obama and Biden Administrations have seen to that.

Now is the time for the American people to take their national defense seriously. They must engage politically, and they must be prepared to defend their homes against this foreign invasion. Nothing else will suffice.