Once again, Muslims are at it — humiliating the despised "other" by forcing them to kneel and kiss their feet.

An August 17, 2023, video from Belgium shows a throng of "migrant youth" surrounding a trembling Belgian boy, forcing him to kiss their feet while they beat him on the head.  The post adds, "In Brussels, the country's capital, Muslims already make up 25% of the population."

A few days later in Finland, on August 20, 2023, another video captured another Muslim gang forcing a hapless Finnish girl onto her knees to "apologize" to them (for what is unclear).

These two back-to-back incidents are hardly an aberration.  On December 1, 2022, two Palestinian teenagers accosted, threatened, and ordered a Jewish (Haredi) man to kiss their feet in Jerusalem's Old City.  They videotaped and posted the incident on TikTok, to the audio of an Arabic rapper who, among other vulgarities, employs the notorious Arabic insult kuss umak ("your mama's vagina"), which was presumably directed at the Jew in question, as he kissed the hand and foot of one of the Muslims.

Nor was this the first incident of its kind in the Holy Land.  According to a later report discussing this late 2022 incident,

The phenomenon of Palestinians filming themselves assaulting or humiliating ultra-Orthodox residents sparked outrage and clashes last year, leading to several arrests. In one particularly viral video, a Palestinian was filmed pouring hot coffee on an Orthodox man, leading to a two-year prison sentence.

Then there was this 2019 report from Australia:

A 12-year-old Jewish student was forced to kneel down and kiss the shoes of a Muslim classmate, while a five-year-old boy was allegedly called a "Jewish cockroach" and repeatedly hounded in the school toilets by his young classmates. ... The older boy's act of kissing another student's shoes, under threat of being swarmed by several other boys, was filmed, photographed and shared on social media. ... One of the boys who watched on was later suspended for five days for assaulting the Jewish student in the school locker room.

Some might argue that Muslim "grievances" — in the above cases, the Arab-Israeli conflict — is the driving force behind Muslims trying to degrade and humiliate Jews.  In reality, however, this form of abject "obeisance" was always expected of non-Muslims — as the more recent Belgian and Finnish examples show — and for no more of a "grievance" than that they were non-Muslims — infidels.

For example, in The Adventures of Thomas Pellow, an Englishman (d. 1747) who wrote of his experiences as an abducted slave in Morocco references that European slaves being compelled to kiss their Muslim masters' feet was not uncommon.

Sultan Muley Ismail — who enforced sharia and regularly prayed — went one step farther, according to Pellow: abducted Europeans were required to "pull off their shoes, put on a particular habit they have to denote a slave, and when they approach him fall down and kiss the ground at his horse's feet."  Those not conforming to such abject behavior — the "lucky" ones — instantly lost their heads.  The rest were slowly tortured in ways that beggar belief.

Perhaps this is the only "good news" regarding the more recent spate of foot-kissing.  As vile as they may be, they help underscore an important fact: few things are as reliably consistent as Muslim behavior — particularly the sort we are regularly assured has "nothing to do with Islam."  Otherwise, why does one keep finding the same "disquieting" behavior in regions that widely differ in both time and space, such as modern Israel, Australia, Belgium, and Finland—and pre-modern Morocco?

Incidentally, and as another parallel, Pellow and other European slaves in Africa were regularly and consistently called "Christian dogs" — including before they were beheaded by scimitars.  This characterization of subhuman infidels as animals remains a fixture today, and for the same reason.  Recall that the five-year-old Jewish student was called a "Jewish cockroach."

Such is the great irony: even in the minutest of details, and whether in word or deed, the negative behavior that Muslims exhibit today has a long and unwavering paper trail, one that crosses centuries and continents.  The only difference — the only discontinuity — between now and then is how the West responds.

In all of the modern incidents, authorities refuse to admit that an ideological factor — Islamic supremacism — motivated "migrant youth" to force "infidels" on their knees to kiss Muslim feet.

The disconnect is evident in another, especially ignoble manner: whereas Muslims have long forced non-Muslims under their power to kiss their feet, both figuratively and literally, today the man who holds an office that for centuries sponsored the West's staunch resistance to Islam — the Catholic pope — enthusiastically prostrates himself before and literally kisses Muslim feet, further reinforcing this abject relationship to Muslims who do not understand acts of humility.

In short, Muslims demanding that lowly infidels kiss their feet is normative.  The only thing to change is how the West responds — in a word, capitulation.

Raymond Ibrahim, author of Defenders of the West and Sword and Scimitar  is the Distinguished Senior Shillman Fellow at the Gatestone Institute and the Judith Rosen Friedman Fellow at the Middle East Forum.

Image via Pxfuel.