Rising Again To The Historical Moment

Memri

24-07-2025

Although he deservedly prides himself on being a dealmaker, President Trump is an ideological leader defending Western civilization and its values.
Realizing that he was facing an historical moment, he understood that he needed to make an ideological decision against Iran, and bombed the Iranian nuclear project – despite the opinion of Europeans who are collaborating with evil, and despite some opposition from his isolationist supporters. Thus, he set the ideological principle that a country ruled by jihadi ayatollahs cannot have nuclear weapons.
This was a leadership decision. Like Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill in World War II who decided to fight the ideological ambitions of Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and Fascist Italy, President Trump decided to fight the jihadi ayatollahs in Iran who openly strive to become a world power confronting the West.
Now, President Trump needs to rise again to the historical moment, and make an ideological decision against Islamist powers – despite the Westerners who are collaborating with Islamism and despite the supporters of isolationism at home.
It was relatively easy to rise up against Iran, which has incessantly proclaimed its hatred of America (even planning to assassinate him) and which built itself up with nuclear capabilities, missiles that reach America, and proxies that will attack American bases.
It is far more difficult to do this when your Islamist enemies – Erdoğan, Qatar, and now Al-Sharaa, aka Al-Jolani – pretend to be your allies.
There is no propaganda trick that they would not play to pretend to be America's friends. By now, Qatar's trick is well known: Create a problem, like supporting the Taliban for years up to their takeover of Afghanistan with American casualties, then help move American troops to safety, in what Trump called the "the greatest foreign policy humiliation" in U.S. history.
Qatar does this everywhere on the planet. It supports Hamas, which committed the atrocities of October 7, and then presents itself as a mediator. Qatar supports every Islamist terrorist organization against its Westernized opponents.
Erdoğan is an Islamist who seeks to revive the Ottoman Empire – note his occasional clashes with Greece and Cyprus, his enabling of foreign fighters to cross Turkish territory to reach the Islamic State, his hosting of the Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood headquarters in Turkey, his dispatch of troops to Libya to support the Islamist ruler in Tripoli, and more.
Erdoğan acted like an ally of Trump by helping him eliminate the ISIS commander Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, and thereby won Trump's trust. However, Erdoğan did it for his own sake, because Al-Baghdadi had claimed the role of leader of the believers (amir al-mu'minim ) – which Erdoğan saw as unnecessary rivalry. He was not doing Trump any favors.
In the same way, Qatar's hosting of the CENTCOM base is no favor to Trump – on the contrary, it guarantees the very survival of the Qatari ruling family. Without the CENTCOM base, they would be wiped out by their neighbors in no time.
As soon as they took over Syria, Al-Jolani's extremist jihadis in the guise of a legitimate army showed their fundamental ideology, putting into motion a process of massacring the country's minorities. First, the Alawites, then the Christians, and now the Druze. Next, it will be the Kurds – and, finally, the Jews in Israel. This is deeply entrenched in the Islamist DNA of jihadi terrorists like ISIS, Al-Qaeda, and, most recently, Pakistani jihadis in Kashmir.
To the Islamists' bad luck, it blew up in their faces. The news of the horrible massacre of the Druze in Syria went viral all over the West, showing President Trump that he had perhaps been duped by Erdoğan, Qatar, and Al-Jolani.
The massacre in Syria was no tribal accident, as the Islamists will probably tell Trump. Al-Jolani praised the jihadi perpetrators in his speech. They had carried out a deliberate Islamist attack on minorities. Earlier, in March, Al-Jolani had already penned a "constitutional" declaration setting out the ideological-religious grounds for such massacres.
The isolationists in Trump's camp hastened to criticize Israel for its stopping of the massacre, calling Netanyahu a madman. How can Netanyahu be criticized for stopping a massacre? It is only isolationists who would criticize such a thing. But Trump is not fooled; he understands that something here stinks – that he has been duped by Erdoğan, Qatar, and Al-Jolani who posed as his allies and as guardians of human rights.
President Trump will probably give Al-Jolani another chance. But the next massacre is already on its way. The Christians in Syria are seeking Trump's support, after they were bombed in their church in Damascus. They have already paid with their blood – and they know more is coming.
Sometimes historical events are symbolized by individual cases. The real Al-Jolani, Erdoğan, and Qatar are represented by the execution of Hosam Saraya, a Syria-born Druze from Oklahoma, by Syrian government forces.
American Druze Hosam Saraya executed by Syria government forces.
President Trump now realizes that he must make a tough historical decision against Islamists who, unlike Iran, masquerade as allies of America. He already knows the bitter price he has to pay with his own supporters for rising up yet again to make an ideological historical decision for Western civilization.
* Yigal Carmon is President and Founder of MEMRI.