East Vs. West

You’re living in the middle of a war and you probably don’t even realize it. 

I don’t mean that war you see on the news—what the West calls war. That version includes going in all at once with force. You can’t miss it. It’s shock and awe and the winners are the ones with the most targets taken down and the top guy taken out.

I also don’t mean a spiritual war—while that dynamic is very important, we’ll save it for another conversation. I’m talking about the other war. The war waged by people who don’t think like you, so they don’t fight like you. They are masters at bloodless coups. They can flip a society in a generation or less. And if it takes longer, they’ll patiently sit back and have a dozen kids per wife until there are enough minds who think like them. 

For simplicity’s sake, we’ll call the two mindsets West and East.

Once you understand how the Eastern mindset works, you may find you recognize the patterns all around you. Suddenly, the strange social narrative that came out of nowhere and became the new status quo will make sense. 

Each mindset has its strengths and weaknesses however, currently the East has a unique advantage over the West because the East studies the West extensively. They learn what Westerners value, what they dread, what aspirations make them tick—and what keywords trigger their emotions before they logically process the situation. The average Westerner, on the other hand, won’t spend five minutes trying to understand the other side of the political aisle—let alone someone on the other side of the world. 

The East and West are fighting different battles and you can identify each side by their end goals. If your country went to war, what would your government prioritize if they won: replacing the leadership or winning over the people? The West fights top down, the East battles from the ground up.

Who’s Who

If you think about it, the West has built incredible things. It is self-sustaining and inspiring. It is the force behind the industrial revolution. From lightbulbs to air-conditioning, from cars to planes and from computers to the internet, Western ingenuity and rugged individualism are responsible for much of the world’s development in the past century. The West’s modern ideology also places high value on each human life. And its Judeo-Christian foundations have played a central role in the spread of freedom to more people alive today than in all of human history combined. 

If there were no outside threat to our beautiful bubble, I’d say ignore the naysayers. Keep innovating and address the problematic areas of society as they arise. 

But there is an outside threat. The East is in a bitter war with the West.

 The East is deeply religious, tribal and honor-driven. It is also ideologically primitive in the way it views human life as easily expendable for “the greater good.” It views Western thought as an invasive species that promotes godless “science” and egocentric debauchery that dismembers the traditional family.

They’re not entirely wrong, seeing that the East is mostly exposed to the West via pop-culture, movies, music and social media. 

“But Hollywood doesn’t represent us!” you may say. Even if you could convince them of this, the East—specifically, the Middle East—is predominantly Muslim. Their stated greatest obstacles to world domination are Jews and Christians. For those who have ears to hear, the worship of the God of Israel is the greatest defense against an Islamic utopia. 

Too Slow to Catch

The West’s ability to foster curiosity and creativity gives it an almost constant upper hand over Eastern powers that stifle personal creativity for the sake of social uniformity. The East shines, however, in time, patience, strategy—and an affinity to reproduce. The West can sprint faster, but the East can run longer.

In 1998, my (soon-to-be) husband Kobi visited Wales with our college professor. They came back white-faced as they shared what a local Christian leader there had shown them. “Islam has its eyes on Europe,” he recounted. The Pastor there showed us an entire blueprint of an Islamic plan to take over Europe. “They’re basically going to trickle into Europe and conquer it within a few decades by having lots of kids.” They’ll frame this invasion as a much-needed cultural enrichment experience—since post-Christian Europe is dry, stale and its youth are bored and lack purpose.

The simplicity of the plan was what was so scary. No one in the Western world could envision a foreign society with innumerable families who would collectively move to another country so their kids and grandkids could take over that country a generation or two later. 

Europeans for their part, had been taught to be polite and tolerant of people different than themselves. They believed the primitive Middle Easterners who fled the brutality of Islam would see the light. They would see the beauty of freedoms in the West; they would be filled with gratitude and assimilate. Europe had no idea whole cultures around the world viewed the West as evil. They had not been taught to survive in the jungle. They saw a tiger, mistook it for a fluffy house cat, and invited it in.

The mission took on turbo speed when Middle Eastern unrest sent millions of Muslim refugees flooding Europe’s unmanned borders. They did not attempt to assimilate. They filled Europe’s headlines with barbaric acts of violence, brutal assaults on women and children and open disregard for things sacred to the local culture. And when enough Muslims settled in a neighborhood, they would set up a neighborhood watch to enforce their own Sharia Laws and shun anyone who would object. This is always how the scenario plays out with Islam.

The panic in Europe by those who could see where this was heading was shrugged off by the media and weak-kneed leaders who praised the idea of multiculturalism. But for those who continued to try and take action, two factors make it difficult to beat the spread. First, the majority of native Europeans no longer hold deep spiritual convictions, and as such, have little to fight a new religion attempting to fill that vacuum. Second, Western minded societies do not know how to combat slow moving threats. 

Imminent vs. Important

If I told you a meteor was heading straight for Earth and would arrive a hundred years from now, what would you do about it? Pour your resources into a plan of how to blow it up? Or make a side note to tell the next generation to deal with it at some point? If you shared the meteor example with the East, they would immediately begin plans to work on a rocket that would knock the meteor off course, long before it became a realistic threat to their grandkids.

When Westerners hear of a faraway land where people ride camels, wear robes and dream of building a weapon to destroy the modern world—it does not register as a viable threat. This is why so many in America were stunned when Iran was suddenly designated a necessary war target. Debates in the news and online forums centered largely around whether the threat was imminent or not. Because if it wasn’t—they charged—initiating hostilities with them would be illegal, unethical, a waste of taxpayer money and so very definitely not “America First.” 

But, for almost 50 years, a country began their collective work and school day by declaring, “Death to America, Death to Israel, Death to the West”—in that order. For 50 years, a government spent billions and publicly flaunted its ambitions to create nuclear bombs to attack its enemies. They are not afraid of a world war. In fact, they embrace it. Mass death and world chaos is a must to bring their Mehdi (Messiah)—whose description is eerily similar to the Bible’s Anti-Christ. As Islamists, dying as a shahid (martyr) for the cause is their highest honor.

And still millions of intelligent Americans could not recognize this as a problem that should be addressed. Iran’s incremental progress was taking place thousands of miles away. The threat felt like the distant bark of a toothless dog, precisely because they had been threatening the West for ages and done nothing. 

But the bark wasn’t actually toothless. There were terror attacks that targeted and killed Americans and other Westerners. But they were just “small” enough to keep from massive reaction. As Iran worked on their “Destroy the West” passion project, they invested in terror groups and universities. Not their universities. Your universities.

Reframe Your Reality

The New York Post broke a story this month showing how Iran (among other anti-West countries) had been injecting its ideology into US culture for years. They sent their loyalists to study in Western colleges and then sent their professors to teach in them. 

Impressionable minds and youthful energy make universities fertile soil for anti-West/anti-Israel/pro-Islamic protests. For Americans who didn’t attend college, Iran inserted its messaging into social media, blogs and podcasts. And for the Gen Z and Alpha crowd, Iran’s regime is pumping out clever AI music and short videos with disparaging messages. Meme warfare, dubbed Slopaganda (low budget AI propaganda), is the latest battleground.

This is the war of the East. They will sacrifice their people and their buildings to create a space to get in your head. That is why at the end of each round of fighting, both East and West will declare victory.

We all saw this at the end of the October 7th war when Israel celebrated the victory of bringing all their hostages home—and Hamas celebrated their victory over Israel. Hamas didn’t care about the tens of thousands of their fighters and civilians killed. They didn’t care that more than 60% of buildings in Gaza had been bombed to clear out Hamas’ tunnel system.

Their goal was to turn the world against Israel. Israel knew how to defend against the rockets, but they do not know how to defend against the narrative of high-quality manipulative, skewed and often entirely fake videos about Gaza that were pumped into people’s minds. It’s the slow game, because propaganda works best on the young and uninformed. But the young grow up and when it’s their turn to decide where they stand, the status quo can change very quickly.

The West’s Achilles’ Heel

The two-fold assault strategy proven to capitalize on the “West’s weakness”

1. Attack a symbol of the West.

2. The attack creates an emotional response and people want to talk about it.

3. Be ready to insert your narrative. People are most open when they are upset.

4. Bring up an unrelated social trigger topic and discuss it in context of the attack.

5. People will now irrationally associate the attack as a response to that social trigger word.

6. The strategy has succeeded when the Westerner now considers you as the hero who was “only fighting for the values they hold dear,” when in fact, the opposite is true.

Who’s in Your Boat

We’re all in a boat full of people. Some we love, others we don’t agree with. But once we realize there’s a completely different boat full of people out there who want to sink our boat entirely, we have to make a choice. We have to focus on things we have in common with those in our boat. We have to work together to stay alive. 

The catch in this analogy is that in real life you can’t always tell who’s in which boat. Who is the annoying person who is worth fighting alongside to stay alive—and who is the nice person who is actually waiting for the opportunity to sink our ship entirely?

Things aren’t always clear when waves roar. But the Bible is our anchor. And the Bible gives us distinct markers that highlight His path. Israel is one of those reference points. So, whether or not we think Israel is perfect or ideal, watching the choices Israel makes (and especially Israeli believers) is one of our most reliable telltale signals to point us to the right side of history. 

Not because Israel is always right, but because God decided He would shine His light through them to the world. This was His forever decision—with a grand finale that will make it worth the bumpy ride getting there. Kingdoms and empires will rise and fall, but it is written, Yeshua is coming back to Jerusalem as the Savior of the world—and the King of the Jews.