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	ISLAM ISRAEL ISRAEL v. PALESTINE . . . ISLAM see "RELIGION" for related links see also: "TERRORISM" Map: Limits of the Muslim world in 1500 A.D. Islam isn't in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Koran . . . should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on earth. --Council on American-Islamic Relations Chairman Omar M. Ahmad, speech [July 1998] - A Sage in Christendom By FOUAD AJAMI _The Wall Street Journal_ May 1, 2006 Bernard Lewis came to the New World in the nick of time. Fate -- or, more appropriately, history -- decreed his American journey and the direction it would take. The historian, who will turn 90 in a handful of days, had come to Princeton from London, at the age of 58, in 1974, to do the work of Orientalism which had gained him scholarly renown. But there would be no academic seclusion for him in the years after. The lands of Islam whose languages and cultures he knew with such intimacy would soon be set ablaze. And his adopted country, the bearer of the imperial mantle shed by his own Britannia, would in time make an honored place for him, and all but anoint him its guide into those burning grounds of the Islamic world. He would become the oracle of this new age of the Americans in the lands of the Arab and Islamic worlds. In the normal course of things, America is not a country given to excessive deference to historians and to the claims of history, for the past is truly a foreign country here. But the past quarter century was no normal time, and Mr. Lewis no typical historian. He knew and worked the archives, it is true; and he mastered the languages of "the East," standing at the peak of his academic guild. But there is more to him than that: He is, through and through, a man of public affairs. He saw the coming of a war, a great civilizational struggle, and was to show no timidity about the facts of this war. "I'll teach you differences," Kent says to Lear. And Mr. Lewis has been teaching us differences. He knew Islam's splendor and its periods of enlightenment; he had celebrated the "dignity and meaning" it gave to "drab impoverished lives." He would not hesitate, then, to look into -- and to name -- the darkness and the rage that have overcome so many of its adherents in recent times. * * * We anoint sages when we need them; at times we let them say, on our behalf, the sorts of things we know and intuit but don't say, the sorts of things we glimpse through the darkness but don't fully see. It was thus in the time of the great illusion, in the lost decade of the 1990s, when history had presumably "ended," that Bernard Lewis had come forth to tell us, in a seminal essay, "The Roots of Muslim Rage" (September 1990), that our luck had run out, that an old struggle between "Christendom" and Islam was gathering force. (Note the name given the Western world; it is vintage Lewis, this naming of worlds and drawing of borders -- and differences.) It was the time of commerce and globalism; the "modernists" had the run of the decade, and a historian's dark premonitions about a thwarted civilization wishing to avenge the slights and wounds of centuries would not carry the day. Mr. Lewis was the voice of conservatives, a brooding pessimist, in the time of a sublime faith in things new and untried. It was he, in that 1990 article, who gave us the notion of a "clash of civilizations" that Samuel Huntington would popularize, with due attribution to Bernard Lewis. The rage of Islam was no mystery to Mr. Lewis. To no great surprise, it issued out of his respect for the Muslim logic of things. For 14 centuries, he wrote, Islam and Christendom had feuded and fought across a bloody and shifting frontier, their enmity a "series of attacks and counterattacks, jihads and crusades, conquests and reconquests." For nearly a millennium, Islam had the upper hand. The new faith conquered Syria, Palestine, Egypt and North Africa -- old Christian lands, it should be recalled. It struck into Europe, established dominions in Sicily, Spain, Portugal and in parts of France. Before the tide turned, there had been panic in Europe that Christendom was doomed. In a series of letters written from Constantinople between 1555 and 1560, Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, imperial ambassador to the court of Suleyman the Magnificent, anguished over Europe's fate; he was sure that the Turks were about to "fly at our throats, supported by the might of the whole East." Europe, he worried, was squandering its wealth, "seeking the Indies and the Antipodes across vast fields of ocean, in search of gold." But Busbecq, we know, had it wrong. The threat of Islam was turned back. The wealth brought back from the New World helped turn the terms of trade against Islam. Europe's confidence soared. The great turning point came in 1683, when a Turkish siege of Vienna ended in failure and defeat. With the Turks on the run, the terms of engagement between Europe and Islam were transformed. Russia overthrew the Tatar yoke; there was the Reconquista in the Iberian Peninsula. Instead of winning every war, Mr. Lewis observes, the Muslims were losing every war. Britain, France, the Netherlands and Russia all soon spilled into Islamic lands. "Europe and her daughters" now disposed of the fate of Muslim domains. Americans and Europeans may regard this new arrangement of power as natural. But Mr. Lewis has been relentless in his admonition that Muslims were under no obligation to accept the new order of things. A pain afflicts modern Islam -- the loss of power. And Mr. Lewis has a keen sense of the Muslim redeemers and would-be avengers who promise to alter Islam's place in the world. This pain, the historian tells us, derives from Islam's early success, from the very triumph of the prophet Muhammad. Moses was not allowed to enter the promised land; he had led his people through wilderness. Jesus had been crucified. But Muhammad had prevailed and had governed. The faith he would bequeath his followers would forever insist on the oneness of religion and politics. Where Christians are enjoined in their scripture to "render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's and unto God the things which are God's," no such demarcation would be drawn in the theory and practice of Islam. It was vintage Lewis -- reading the sources, in this case a marginal Arabic newspaper published out of London, Al-Quds Al-Arabi, in February of 1998 -- to come across a declaration of war on the United States by a self-designated holy warrior he had "never heard of," Osama bin Laden. In one of those essays that reveal the historian's eye for things that matter, "A License to Kill," Mr. Lewis would render into sublime English prose the declaration of bin Laden and would give it its exegesis. The historian might have never heard of bin Laden, but the terrorist from Arabia practically walks out of the pages of Mr. Lewis's own histories. Consider this passage from the Arabian plotter: "Since God laid down the Arabian Peninsula, created its desert, and surrounded it with seas, no calamity has ever befallen it like these crusader hosts that have spread in it like locusts, eating its fruits and destroying its verdure; and this at a time when the nations contend against Muslims like diners jostling around a bowl of food. . . . By God's leave, we call on every Muslim who believes in God and hopes for reward to obey God's command to kill the Americans and plunder their possessions whenever he finds them and whenever he can." Three years later, the furies of bin Laden, and the cadence and content of his language -- straight out of the annals of older wars of faith -- would remake our world. There would come Mr. Lewis's way now waves of people willing to believe. They would read into his works the bewildering ways and furies of preachers and plotters and foot soldiers hurling themselves against the order of the West. Timing was cruel -- and exquisite. The historian's book "What Went Wrong?" was already in galleys by 9/11. He had not written it for the storm. He had all but anticipated what was to come. This diagnosis of Islam's malady would become a best seller. In a different setting, Mr. Lewis had written of history's power. "Make no mistake, those who are unwilling to confront the past will be unable to understand the present and unfit to face the future." We were witnessing an epic jumbling of past and present. It was no fault of this historian that we had placed our bet on the death of the past. * * * Mr. Lewis has lived a long and engaged life, caught up in the great issues of war and diplomacy -- and may he be with us as far as the eye can see, as long as life and good health permit. Some of his detractors, with an excessive belief in his talismans, have attributed to the historian all sorts of large historical deeds. For some, he is the godfather of the accommodation of years past between Turkey and Israel. For others, he inspired the Iraq war, transmitting to Vice President Dick Cheney his faith in the Iraq campaign as the spearhead of an effort to reform the Arab world. (It will, of course, help confirm this view that Mr. Cheney is set to speak to a conference today, hosted by the World Affairs Council of Philadelphia, in honor of Mr. Lewis.) In more recent writings on the historian, George W. Bush's "diplomacy of freedom" in Arab-Muslim lands is laid at Mr. Lewis's doorstep. The president was seen, in one account, with a marked-up copy of a Lewis article. We have come to a great irony: the conservative Orientalist holding out democratic hope for Iraq and its Arab neighbors, while his liberal critics assert the built-in authoritarianism of the Arab political tradition. For Bernard Lewis, there is something now of the closing of a circle. As a young man, he had been on His Majesty's service during the Second World War, working for British intelligence between 1940 and 1945. The young medievalist had been pressed into modern government work, and that experience had given him his taste for contemporary political affairs. This new war is something of a return to his beginnings. For an immensely gregarious man of unfailing wit and personal optimism, a darkness runs through his view of the future of the Western democracies. "In 1940, we knew who we were, we knew who the enemy was, we knew the dangers and the issues," he told me when I pressed him for a reading of the struggle against Islamic radicalism. "In our island, we knew we would prevail, that the Americans would be drawn into the fight. It is different today. We don't know who we are, we don't know the issues, and we still do not understand the nature of the enemy." The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, which once translated one of Mr. Lewis's books into Arabic, said that his book was "the work of a candid friend or an honest enemy." Either way, the Brotherhood said, it was the work of "someone who disdains falsification." And this, to me and to his countless readers, runs to the core of this historian's craft -- the aversion to falsification. He has been, always, a man of his own civilization and convictions -- a fact that accounts for the deep reservoirs of reverence felt for him in many Muslim and Arab lands. In the American academy, he may be swimming against the currents of postmodernism and postcolonial history; he has given up his membership in the Middle East Studies Association, of which he had been a founding member. But countless Arab and Iranian and Turkish readers recognize their tormented civilization in what he has written. They know that he has not come to the material of their history driven by bad faith, or by a desire for dominion. They take him at his word, a man of the Anglo-Saxon world, convinced that the ways of the West today carry with them the hopes of other civilizations. In one of his many splendid books, "Cultures in Conflict: Christians, Muslims, and Jews in the Age of Discovery," he gave voice to both his fears and to his faith. "It may be that Western culture will indeed go: The lack of conviction of many of those who should be its defenders and the passionate intensity of its accusers may well join to complete its destruction. But if it does go, the men and women of all the continents will thereby be impoverished and endangered." * * * Edward Gibbon once called the historian's "I" the "most disgusting of pronouns." In the main we see very little of that pronoun in Mr. Lewis's work. But in the academy he belongs to the ages. He is the peer, and inheritor, of the great Western scholars of Islam -- the Hungarian Ignaz Goldziher (1850-1921), the Dutchman Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje (1857-1936), the Frenchman Louis Massignon (1883-1962), the British Thomas Arnold (1864-1930), and Mr. Lewis's own teacher, Sir Hamilton Gibb (1895-1971). Mr. Lewis took to the East to understand his own world, because, as he tells us, Western civilization "did not spring like Aphrodite from the sea foam." He wanted to get to the mainsprings of Western civilization. I shall set aside the ban on that "most disgusting of pronouns." I came to know Bernard Lewis the year he made his passage to America, on the Princeton campus. I was then at the beginning of my academic career, justifiably obscure and anxious. Mr. Lewis was one of the academic gods. I approached him with awe. But his grace was our bridge. I was of the old world he studied; he was keen to know the name of my ancestral village in southern Lebanon. I told him it was an obscure place without history, and gave him its name. He offered me an invitation to examine his archives, and said that he had the land deeds of that remote hamlet. It has been like this with Bernard Lewis: We travel by the light of his work. He weaves for us a web between past and present, and he can pick out, over distant horizons, storms sure to reach us before long. Mr. Ajami, Majid Khadduri Professor at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, is author of "The Foreigner's Gift: The Americans, the Arabs, and the Iraqis in Iraq," forthcoming from the Free Press in July. During the Cold War, two things came to be known and generally recognized in the Middle East concerning the two rival superpowers. If you did anything to annoy the Russians, punishment would be swift and dire. If you said or did anything against the Americans, not only would there be no punishment; there might even be some possibility of reward, as the usual anxious procession of diplomats and politicians, journalists and scholars and miscellaneous others came with their usual pleading inquiries: "What have we done to offend you? What can we do to put it right?" A few examples may suffice. During the troubles in Lebanon in the 1970s and '80s, there were many attacks on American installations and individuals -- notably the attack on the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, followed by a prompt withdrawal, and a whole series of kidnapping of Americans, both official and private, as well as of Europeans. There was only one attack on Soviet citizens, when one diplomat was killed and several others kidnapped. The Soviet response through their local agents was swift, and directed against the family of the leader of the kidnappers. The kidnapped Russians were promptly released, and after that there were no attacks on Soviet citizens or installations throughout the period of the Lebanese troubles. These different responses evoked different treatment. While American policies, institutions and individuals were subject to unremitting criticism and sometimes deadly attack, the Soviets were immune. Their retention of the vast, largely Muslim, colonial empire accumulated by the tsars in Asia passed unnoticed, as did their propaganda and sometimes action against Muslim beliefs and institutions. Most remarkable of all was the response of the Arab and other Muslim countries to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. Washington's handling of the Tehran hostage crisis assured the Soviets that they had nothing to fear from the U.S. They already knew that they need not worry about the Arab and other Muslim governments. The Soviets already ruled -- or misruled -- half a dozen Muslim countries in Asia, without arousing any opposition or criticism. Initially, their decision and action to invade and conquer Afghanistan and install a puppet regime in Kabul went almost unresisted. After weeks of debate, the U.N. General Assembly finally was persuaded to pass a resolution "strongly deploring the recent armed intervention in Afghanistan." The words "condemn" and "aggression" were not used, and the source of the "intervention" was not named. Even this anodyne resolution was too much for some of the Arab states. South Yemen voted no; Algeria and Syria abstained; Libya was absent; the non-voting PLO observer to the Assembly even made a speech defending the Soviets. One might have expected that the recently established Organization of the Islamic Conference would take a tougher line. It did not. After a month of negotiation and manipulation, the Organization finally held a meeting in Pakistan to discuss the Afghan question. Two of the Arab states, South Yemen and Syria, boycotted the meeting. The representative of the PLO, a full member of this organization, was present, but abstained from voting on a resolution critical of the Soviet action; the Libyan delegate went further, and used this occasion to denounce the U.S. The Muslim willingness to submit to Soviet authority, though widespread, was not unanimous. The Afghan people, who had successfully defied the British Empire in its prime, found a way to resist the Soviet invaders. An organization known as the Taliban (literally, "the students") began to organize resistance and even guerilla warfare against the Soviet occupiers and their puppets. For this, they were able to attract some support from the Muslim world -- some grants of money, and growing numbers of volunteers to fight in the Holy War against the infidel conqueror. Notable among these was a group led by a Saudi of Yemeni origin called Osama bin Laden. To accomplish their purpose, they did not disdain to turn to the U.S. for help, which they got. In the Muslim perception there has been, since the time of the Prophet, an ongoing struggle between the two world religions, Christendom and Islam, for the privilege and opportunity to bring salvation to the rest of humankind, removing whatever obstacles there might be in their path. For a long time, the main enemy was seen, with some plausibility, as being the West, and some Muslims were, naturally enough, willing to accept what help they could get against that enemy. This explains the widespread support in the Arab countries and in some other places first for the Third Reich and, after its collapse, for the Soviet Union. These were the main enemies of the West, and therefore natural allies. Now the situation had changed. The more immediate, more dangerous enemy was the Soviet Union, already ruling a number of Muslim countries, and daily increasing its influence and presence in others. It was therefore natural to seek and accept American help. As Osama bin Laden explained, in this final phase of the millennial struggle, the world of the unbelievers was divided between two superpowers. The first task was to deal with the more deadly and more dangerous of the two, the Soviet Union. After that, dealing with the pampered and degenerate Americans would be easy. We in the Western world see the defeat and collapse of the Soviet Union as a Western, more specifically an American, victory in the Cold War. For Osama bin Laden and his followers, it was a Muslim victory in a jihad, and, given the circumstances, this perception does not lack plausibility. From the writings and the speeches of Osama bin Laden and his colleagues, it is clear that they expected this second task, dealing with America, would be comparatively simple and easy. This perception was certainly encouraged and so it seemed, confirmed by the American response to a whole series of attacks -- on the World Trade Center in New York and on U.S. troops in Mogadishu in 1993, on the U.S. military office in Riyadh in 1995, on the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, on the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen in 2000 -- all of which evoked only angry words, sometimes accompanied by the dispatch of expensive missiles to remote and uninhabited places. Stage One of the jihad was to drive the infidels from the lands of Islam; Stage Two -- to bring the war into the enemy camp, and the attacks of 9/11 were clearly intended to be the opening salvo of this stage. The response to 9/11, so completely out of accord with previous American practice, came as a shock, and it is noteworthy that there has been no successful attack on American soil since then. The U.S. actions in Afghanistan and in Iraq indicated that there had been a major change in the U.S., and that some revision of their assessment, and of the policies based on that assessment, was necessary. More recent developments, and notably the public discourse inside the U.S., are persuading increasing numbers of Islamist radicals that their first assessment was correct after all, and that they need only to press a little harder to achieve final victory. It is not yet clear whether they are right or wrong in this view. If they are right, the consequences -- both for Islam and for America -- will be deep, wide and lasting. --Bernard Lewis "Was Osama Right?" _The Wall Street Journal_ [16 May 2007] - - For a millennium, the struggle for mankind's destiny was between Christianity and Islam; in the twenty-first century, it may be so again. For, as the Shi'ites humiliate us, their co-religionists are filling up the countries of the West. --Patrick Buchanan (1938- ) Journalist, author, and candidate for U.S. President, in M.J. Cohan and John Major {eds.} _History in Quotations_ [2004] p. 939 Cohan & Major point out: The ultra-conservative Buchanan responds to the hostage crisis and to Moslem immigration into western Europe and North America. Iran subscribed to the Shi'ite wing of Islam. The Iranian Hostage Crisis of 1979-1981 - - Moslem children at a very early age undergo horrific indoctrination to hate Jews and Christians. We all had to go through Islamic education breeding fear, anger, Jihad and extreme criticism and rivalry of other religions. We were told stories beyond belief about Jews. We were told Jews were hated by God and should be eterminated. ... The mother of a suicide bomber said "Because I love my son, I encouraged him to die a martyr's death for the sake of Allah." This woman and many others like her are speaking and living a life that is against the normal impulses of Motherhood. The religious and political indoctrination through tyranny pushed her against herself and her child into insanity. --Nonie Darwish, "Escaping Submission", http://www.noniedarwish.com/pages/745443/index.htm - Western leaders keep saying after every terrorist attack, 'This is not about Islam.' Sorry, but this is all about Islam. It is about a war within Islam between a jihadist-fascist minority engaged in crimes against humanity in the name of Islam, and a passive Sunni silent majority. --Thomas Friedman, "Silence and Suicide," _The New York Times_ [12 October 2005] - Not many years ago the brilliant Orientalist, Bernard Lewis, published a short history of the Islamic world's decline, entitled "What Went Wrong?" Astonishingly, there was, among many Western "progressives," a vocal dislike for the title. It is a false premise, these critics protested. They ignored Mr. Lewis's implicit statement that things have been, or could be, right. But indeed, there is much that is clearly wrong with the Islamic world. Women are stoned to death and undergo clitorectomies. Gays hang from the gallows under the approving eyes of the proponents of Shariah, the legal code of Islam. Sunni and Shia massacre each other daily in Iraq. Palestinian mothers teach 3-year-old boys and girls the ideal of martyrdom. One would expect the orthodox Islamic establishment to evade or dismiss these complaints, but less happily, the non-Muslim priests of enlightenment in the West have come, actively and passively, to the Islamists' defense. These "progressives" frequently cite the need to examine "root causes." In this they are correct: Terrorism is only the manifestation of a disease and not the disease itself. But the root-causes are quite different from what they think. As a former member of Jemaah Islamiya, a group led by al Qaeda's second in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, I know firsthand that the inhumane teaching in Islamist ideology can transform a young, benevolent mind into that of a terrorist. Without confronting the ideological roots of radical Islam it will be impossible to combat it. While there are many ideological "rootlets" of Islamism, the main tap root has a name -- Salafism, or Salafi Islam, a violent, ultra-conservative version of the religion. It is vital to grasp that traditional and even mainstream Islamic teaching accepts and promotes violence. Shariah, for example, allows apostates to be killed, permits beating women to discipline them, seeks to subjugate non-Muslims to Islam as dhimmis and justifies declaring war to do so. It exhorts good Muslims to exterminate the Jews before the "end of days." The near deafening silence of the Muslim majority against these barbaric practices is evidence enough that there is something fundamentally wrong. The grave predicament we face in the Islamic world is the virtual lack of approved, theologically rigorous interpretations of Islam that clearly challenge the abusive aspects of Shariah. Unlike Salafism, more liberal branches of Islam, such as Sufism, typically do not provide the essential theological base to nullify the cruel proclamations of their Salafist counterparts. And so, for more than 20 years I have been developing and working to establish a theologically-rigorous Islam that teaches peace. Yet it is ironic and discouraging that many non-Muslim, Western intellectuals -- who unceasingly claim to support human rights -- have become obstacles to reforming Islam. Political correctness among Westerners obstructs unambiguous criticism of Shariah's inhumanity. They find socioeconomic or political excuses for Islamist terrorism such as poverty, colonialism, discrimination or the existence of Israel. What incentive is there for Muslims to demand reform when Western "progressives" pave the way for Islamist barbarity? Indeed, if the problem is not one of religious beliefs, it leaves one to wonder why Christians who live among Muslims under identical circumstances refrain from contributing to wide-scale, systematic campaigns of terror. Politicians and scholars in the West have taken up the chant that Islamic extremism is caused by the Arab-Israeli conflict. This analysis cannot convince any rational person that the Islamist murder of over 150,000 innocent people in Algeria -- which happened in the last few decades -- or their slaying of hundreds of Buddhists in Thailand, or the brutal violence between Sunni and Shia in Iraq could have anything to do with the Arab-Israeli conflict. Western feminists duly fight in their home countries for equal pay and opportunity, but seemingly ignore, under a façade of cultural relativism, that large numbers of women in the Islamic world live under threat of beating, execution and genital mutilation, or cannot vote, drive cars and dress as they please. The tendency of many Westerners to restrict themselves to self-criticism further obstructs reformation in Islam. Americans demonstrate against the war in Iraq, yet decline to demonstrate against the terrorists who kidnap innocent people and behead them. Similarly, after the Madrid train bombings, millions of Spanish citizens demonstrated against their separatist organization, ETA. But once the demonstrators realized that Muslims were behind the terror attacks they suspended the demonstrations. This example sent a message to radical Islamists to continue their violent methods. Western appeasement of their Muslim communities has exacerbated the problem. During the four-month period after the publication of the Muhammad cartoons in a Danish magazine, there were comparatively few violent demonstrations by Muslims. Within a few days of the Danish magazine's formal apology, riots erupted throughout the world. The apology had been perceived by Islamists as weakness and concession. Worst of all, perhaps, is the anti-Americanism among many Westerners. It is a resentment so strong, so deep-seated, so rooted in personal identity, that it has led many, consciously or unconsciously, to morally support America's enemies. Progressives need to realize that radical Islam is based on an antiliberal system. They need to awaken to the inhumane policies and practices of Islamists around the world. They need to realize that Islamism spells the death of liberal values. And they must not take for granted the respect for human rights and dignity that we experience in America, and indeed, the West, today. Well-meaning interfaith dialogues with Muslims have largely been fruitless. Participants must demand -- but so far haven't -- that Muslim organizations and scholars specifically and unambiguously denounce violent Salafi components in their mosques and in the media. Muslims who do not vocally oppose brutal Shariah decrees should not be considered "moderates." All of this makes the efforts of Muslim reformers more difficult. When Westerners make politically-correct excuses for Islamism, it actually endangers the lives of reformers and in many cases has the effect of suppressing their voices. Tolerance does not mean toleration of atrocities under the umbrella of relativism. It is time for all of us in the free world to face the reality of Salafi Islam or the reality of radical Islam will continue to face us. --Tawfik Hamid "The Trouble With Islam" _The Wall Street Journal_ [3 April 2007] {Dr. Hamid, a onetime member of Jemaah Islamiya, an Islamist terrorist group, is a medical doctor and Muslim reformer living in the West.} - - The most frightening aspect of the present war is how easily our pre-modern enemies from the Middle East have brought a stunned postmodern world back into the Dark Ages. Students of history are sickened when they read of the long-ago, gruesome practice of beheading. How brutal were those societies that chopped off the heads of Cicero, Sir Thomas More and Marie Antoinette. And how lucky we thought we were to have evolved from such elemental barbarity. Twenty-four hundred years ago, Socrates was executed for unpopular speech. The 18th-century European Enlightenment gave people freedom to express views formerly censored by clerics and the state. Just imagine what life was like once upon a time when no one could write music, compose fiction or paint without court or church approval? Over 400 years before the birth of Christ, ancient Greek literary characters, from Lysistrata to Antigone, reflected the struggle for sexual equality. The subsequent notion that women could vote, divorce, dress or marry as they pleased was a millennia-long struggle. It is almost surreal now to read about the elemental hatred of Jews in the Spanish Inquisition, 19th-century Russian pogroms or the Holocaust. Yet here we are revisiting the old horrors of the savage past. Beheading? As we saw with Nick Berg and Daniel Pearl, our Neanderthal enemies in the Middle East have resurrected that ancient barbarity - and married it with 21st-century technology to beam the resulting gore instantaneously onto our computer screens. Xerxes and Attila, who stuck their victims' heads on poles for public display, would've been thrilled by such a gruesome show. Who would have thought centuries after the Enlightenment that sophisticated Europeans - in fear of radical Islamists - would be afraid to write a novel, put on an opera, draw a cartoon, film a documentary or have their pope discuss comparative theology? The astonishing fact is not just that millions of women worldwide in 2006 are still veiled from head-to-toe, trapped in arranged marriages, subject to polygamy, honor killings and forced circumcision, or are without the right to vote or appear alone in public. What is more baffling is that in the West, liberal Europeans are often wary of protecting female citizens from the excesses of Sharia law - sometimes even fearful of asking women to unveil their faces for purposes of simple identification and official conversation. [...] To grasp the flavor of our own Civil War, impersonators now don period dress and reconstruct the battles of Shiloh or Gettysburg. But we need no so such historical reenactment of the Dark Ages. You see, they are back with us - live almost daily from the Middle East. --Victor Davis Hanson (1953- ) American military historian and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, "The Dark Ages -- Live From the Middle East!" - Islam's borders are bloody and so are its innards. The fundamental problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilisation whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power. --Samuel Huntington (1927- ) American political scientist, _The Clash of Civilisations_ The representatives of the Jewish Agency told us yesterday they were not the attackers, that the Arabs had begun the fighting. We did not deny this. We told the whole world that we were going to fight. --Jamal Husseini, to the UN Security Council [16 April 1948] - Did you ever read the Koran? I recommend it. What the Koran teaches people is aggression; and what we [Christians] teach our people is peace. . . . Christianity aspires to peace and love. Islam is a religion that attacks. If you start teaching aggression to the whole community, you end up pandering to the negative elements in everyone. You know what that leads to: Such people will assault us. --Pope John Paul II [Karol Wojtyla] (1920-2005) The first non-Italian Pope since the 16th century. (In Carl Bernstein and Marco Politi's _His Holiness: John Paul II and the Hidden History of Our Time_ [1996]) - I was sent with the sword so that Allah is worshipped alone without any partner. My sustenance has been made below the shadow of my spear. Humiliation and abasement have been laid upon the one who opposes my command. And he who imitates a group of people, then he is one of them.… the intellectual supremacy of Islam alone, is not enough. The intangible must be backed up with a prompt physical defense, and this is the power of the sword. Never through history has a religion or ideology become successful without the might of physical power. Islam during its reign, however, was not only spread by force, but also by the justice of its teachings.… the power of force is needed to serve the interests of the Muslims. --Nida'ul Islam. The Sword and the Spear. - The most important battle in the war for Muslim minds during the next decade will be fought not in Palestine or Iraq, but on the outskirts of London, Paris, and other European cities, where Islam is already a growing part of the West. --Gilles Kepel, French scholar of radical Islam. Quoted by Ross Douthat in _Atlantic Monthly_ [January/February 2005] - The author of the Satanic Verses book [Salman Rushdie], which is against all Islam, the Prophet, and the Koran, and all those involved in its publication who were aware of its content, are sentenced to death. I ask all Moslems to execute them wherever they find them. --Ruhollah Khomeini (1900?-1989) Iranian Shiite cleric who led the revolution that overthrew Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi in 1979 and who was Iran's ultimate political and religious authority for the next 10 years {EB} Islam makes it incumbent on all adult males, provided they are not disabled and incapacitated, to prepare themselves for the conquest of other (countries) so that the writ of Islam is obeyed in every country in the world. But those who study Islamic Holy War will understand why Islam wants to conquer the whole world ... Those who know nothing of Islam pretend that Islam counsels against war. Those (who say this) are witless. Islam says: Kill all the unbelievers just as they would kill you all! Does this mean that Muslims should sit back until they are devoured (by the unbelievers)? Islam says: Kill them (the non-Muslims), put them to the sword and scatter(their armies). Does this mean sitting back until (non-Muslims) overcome us? Islam says: Kill in the service of Allah those who may want to kill you! Does this mean that we should surrender to the enemy? Islam says: Whatever good there is exists thanks to the sword and in the shadow of the sword! People cannot be made obedient except with the sword! The sword is the key to Paradise, which can be opened only for Holy Warriors! There are hundreds of other (Quranic) psalms and Hadiths (sayings of the Prophet) urging Muslims to value war and to fight. Does all that mean that Islam is a religion that prevents men from waging war? I spit upon those foolish souls who make such a claim. --Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini Are we to be trampled under foot by the boots of America simply because we are a weak nation and have no dollars? ... Let the American President know that in the eyes of the Iranian people he is the most repulsive member of the human race today because of the injustice he has imposed on our Moslem nation. Today the Koran has become his enemy, the Iranian nation has become his enemy. Let the American government known that its name has been ruined and disgraced in Iran ... All of our troubles today are caused by America and Israel. Israel itself derives from America; these deputies and ministers that have been imposed upon us derive from America - they are all agents of America, for if they were not, they would rise up in protest. --Ayatollah Khomeini (1900?-1989) speech [27 October 1964]. in in M.J. Cohan and John Major {eds.} _History in Quotations_ [2004] p. 939 Cohan & Major explain: The Shi'ia fundamentalist Iranian religious leader Khomeini was exiled from Iran after making this inflammatory speech. His return in 1978 sparked the revolution that forced out the Shah in Jan. 1979 and put American interests under immediate threat. - Look at the development of the populations in Europe where Moslems are breeding like Mosquitoes. Every western woman produces on average 1.4 children. Every Moslem woman in the same countries produce 3.5 children. In the year 2050, 30 percent of the population of Europe will be Moslems. --Mullah Krekar, Dagbladet [13 February 2006] - The history of Islam in recent times has been one of conflict with the evil machinations of England. Muslims all over the world should unite for a crusade to defeat the Americans and British who are the enemies of religion. It is very fortunate, indeed, that Java lives under the protection of the Dai Nippon Army. Let us, therefore, set up a Muslim volunteer corps on Java, so that it may become the trailblazer in the effort to destroy America and England. --Letter from Javanese Muslims to the Japanese commander-in-chief, in _Djawa Baroe_ [1 October 1943] - It should by now be clear that we are facing a mood and a movement far transcending the level of issues and policies and the governments that pursue them. This is no less than a clash of civilizations - the perhaps irrational but surely historic reaction of an ancient rival against our Judaeo-Christian heritage, our secular present, and the worldwide expansion of both. It is crucially important that we on our side should not be pushed into an equally historic but also equally irrational reaction against that rival. --Bernard Lewis (1916- ) British-born American professor and Middle-Eastern scholar, "The Roots of Muslim Rage" _Atlantic Monthly_ v. 266 [September 1990] p.60. Europe will be part of the Arab west, the Maghreb. Migration and demography indicate this. Europeans marry late and have few or no children. But there's strong immigration: Turks in Germany, Arabs in France and Pakistanis in England. They marry early and have many children. Following current trends, Europe will have Muslim majorities in the population by the end of the 21st century at the latest. --Bernard Lewis (1916- ) British-born American professor and Middle-Eastern scholar, in an interview with _Die Welt_ (German newspaper) "Europa wird am Ende des Jahrhunderts islamisch sein," [28 July 2004] - ...I'm asking Muslims in the West a very basic question: Will we remain spiritually infantile, caving to cultural pressures to clam up and conform, or will we mature into full-fledged citizens, defending the very pluralism that allows us to be in this part of the world in the first place? My question for non-Muslims is equally basic: Will you succumb to the intimidation of being called "racists," or will you finally challenge us Muslims to take responsibility for our role in what ails Islam? --Irshad Manji _The Trouble With Islam_, http://www.muslim-refusenik.com/thebook.html#troublewithislamis - Islam is in its origins an Arab religion. Everyone not an Arab who is a Muslim is a convert. Islam is not simply a matter of conscience or private belief. It makes imperial demands. A convert's worldview alters. His holy places are in Arab lands; his sacred language is Arabic. His idea of history alters. He rejects his own; he becomes, whether he likes it or not, a part of the Arab story. The convert has to turn away from everything that is his. The disturbance for societies is immense, and even after a thousand years can remain unresolved; the turning away has to be done again and again. People develop fantasies about who and what they are; and in the Islam of converted countries there is an element of neurosis and nihilism. These countries can be easily set on the boil. --V.S. Naipaul (1932- ) Trinidadian novelist and travel writer - I've been aware of madness in the Islamic world. I've written about it. The madness of people who have fallen behind technically, and who do not have the will to make the intellectual effort to catch up. I was aware of the religious hatred, I was aware of the indifference to life. I was aware of the anti-civilisation aspect of the new fundamentalism. But [until 9-11] I had no idea it had gone so far - the madness. The idea of their strength is an illusion. Nothing is coming from within. The terrorists can fly a plane, but what they can't do is build a plane. What they can't do is build those towers. I think people have spoken much rubbish about that event. The poor revenging themselves on the rich! It's nothing but an aspect of religious hatred. And that is so hard to deal with, or even contemplate. You can deal with the poor striking out, but you can't deal with the threat of a universal religious war. --V.S. Naipaul (1932- ) Trinidadian novelist and travel writer - Of all the tyrannies that affect mankind, tyranny in religion is the worst: Every other species of tyranny is limited to the world we live in, but this attempts a stride beyond the grave, and seeks to pursue us into eternity. --Thomas Paine [spelled Pane prior to 1774] (1737-1809) English-American writer and political pamphleteer This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades. --Azzam Pasha, Secretary General of the Arab League [1948] - Radical Islam, which proposes that shari'a law be instituted in every Islamic state, is gaining ground in many Muslim countries, in which groups of Christians are also present. It is evident that the institution of shari'a would render the lives of Christians rather difficult, and their very existence would be constantly in danger. This is the cause of the mass emigration of Christians from Islamic countries to Western countries: Europe, the United States, Canada, and Australia. [...] The estimated number of Arab Christians who have emigrated from Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and Israel in the last decade hovers around three million, which is from 26.5 to 34.1 percent of the estimated number of Christians currently living in the Middle East. Furthermore, we must not underestimate grave recent actions against Christians in some Muslim-majority countries. In Algeria, the bishop of Orano, P. Claverie (1996), seven Trappist monks from Tibehirini (1999), four White Fathers (1994), and six sisters from variou religious congregations have been brutally killed by Islamic fundamentalists, although the murders were condemned by numerous Muslim authorities. In Pakistan, which numbers 3,800,000 Christians among a population of 156,000,000 (96 percent Muslim), on October 28, 2001, some Muslims entered the Church of St. Dominic in Bahawalpur and gunned down 18 Christians. On May 6, 1998, Catholic bishop John Joseph killed himself for protesting against the blasphemy law, which punishes with death anyone who offends Mohammed, even only "by speaking words, or by actions and through allusions, directly or indirectly." For example, by saying that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, one offends Mohammed, who affirmed that Jesus is not the Son of God, but his "servant." With this kind of law, Christians are in constant danger of death. --Giuseppe De Rosa S.I., Christians in Islamic Countries "La Civiltà Cattolica" no. 3680 [18 October 2003] - I no longer accept that we are only at war with Islamic fascists or Islamic fundamentalists or whatever the heck we're calling them this week. I believe that we in the West are at war with Islam, period. I have heard any number of politicians, up to and including President Bush, claim, contrary to all reason and evidence, that Islam is a religion of peace. If you buy that load of malarkey, I've got a Brooklyn mosque I'd like to sell you. This is the religion that was founded by the violence-prone Muhammad 1,400 years ago. It was he who established the practice of converting at the point of a sword; a short while ago, two journalists kidnapped by his followers were converted at the barrel of a gun. In 14 centuries, it seems only the technology has changed. --Burt Prelutsky, "Jihad this!" in _WorldNetDaily_ [6 September 2006] - It's ironic. If you don't say Islam is a religion of peace, they will kill you. ... If France just acquiesces to threats and intimidation while allowing radical Muslims to spread their message unhindered, it bodes ill not only for their society, but for the West. --Robert Spencer, on the death threats that led to the cancellation of the French edition of his book, _Islam Unveiled_, in "France's Rushdie Affair", http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=10931 The evil enemies entered the city [Jerusalem] with a rage which resembled that of infuriated beasts and irritated dragons. They gnashed their teeth in fury, bellowed like lions, hissed like serpents. They had no pity in their hearts but raced through the city, tearing with their teeth the flesh of the faithful, respecting neither male nor female, young nor old, priest nor monk ... but slaughtering all. --Antiochus Strategus 7th century Byzantine writer _Chronicle_, in M.J. Cohan and John Major {ed.} _History in Quotations_ [2004]. Cohan & Major add: In 614 occurred the great disaster of the fall of Jerusalem to the Persians under the shah, Chosroes II (r.590-628). The churches were destroyed, the relic of the Holy Cross was taken, and the Christian population was killed or enslaved. - Holy war (Jihad) is an Arabic virtue, and a divine obligation: the Muslim is always mindful that his religion is a Qur'an and a sword ... the Muslim then is forever a warrior. --l-Azhar magazine, Cairo, the opening article by Ahmad Hasan az-Zayat [August 1959] -- Jihad is the highest expression of Islam. Fighting against unbelievers is an act of worship, one of the most supreme forms of devotion to God. Nothing compares with it in merit or reward. It brings material benefit (i.e. through booty), and spiritual merit.- Anyone who takes the path of jihad is guaranteed to be successful: either victory or paradise. Muslim armies in the past spread across the world spreading knowledge of Islam, instilling faith, and crushing the power of evil, so everyone was free to enter Islam. Jihad is essential for the spread of Islam. Fighting against non-Muslims is THE way to call others to God. It was not a contextual response to the needs of the first period of Islam, but is an inseparable part of the invitation to Islam. Jihad is so deeply rooted in the Qur'an and the life and example of Muhammad, that it could not be merely a response to the times in which Muhammad lived. Any position which sets itself up against Islam will, by definition, be violently opposed to Islam, and must be fought against. Evil - defined as opposition to Islam - is inherently militant. Furthermore, the only response to militant evil is an equally militant good: 'Falsehood fortified must be met with truth ironclad.' When Muslims today define jihad in ways other than described above, this is deception. They are diluting the Qur'an and the Sunnah. They are humiliated by their cowardice. Muslims must realize the true meaning of jihad, and 'feel superior' about their faith. --Islamic Information and Services Network of Australasia -- Against whom should Muslims fight? a) Anyone who stands against the message of Islam and rejects it must become the object of jihad fighting. b) If non-Muslims do not accept the truth of Islam, Muslims are obliged to fight them. c) Whenever the freedom of Muslims to proselytize is inhibited, then the governing authorities must be overthrown. --Islamic Information and Services Network of Australasia - Although in Arabic the word jihad means 'struggle' or 'hardship', as a term of Islam, it means 'to struggle against the disbelievers'. Other implications of jihad include struggling against Satan, ignorance and doubt. The struggle against disbelievers must be conducted with all that a Muslim possesses: with body, soul, wealth, words and heart. The world is divided into the powers of Satan and the forces of God. These are in competition for dominance. The one way to dispel power of Satan is to establish the Shari'ah in its totality over all the earth. Fighting against unbelievers (jihad) became normative for Muslims after the migration to Medina. This is a sign of its importance. --Islamic Information and Services Network of Australasia - The Malaya [newspaper] reports that more than 1,000 rifles have been landed at two points in Mindanao. This may be followed by further shipments of mortars and machineguns. [...] For the first time in a century, Muslim rebels have established themselves in force on the Mindanao mainland, away from their traditional strongholds of Sulu, Basilan and Tawi-tawi, island groups in the southwest corner of the archipelago. They are positioned on the west side of Mindanao's breadbasket, the Cotabato valley. The MILF camps guard the the approaches to mountain massifs to the west which then give on the sea, their line of supply. They isolate the predominantly Christian Zamboanga peninsula from Northern Mindanao and essentially cut the huge island in two. [...] The strategic dilemma facing the US is how far to pick up the slack for Manila, which lives in a Byzantine dreamworld fed by the fantasies of a Leftist "intelligensia". American support enabled Manila to recover lost ground in Basilan, Sulu and Tawi-tawi but many of the gains have been thrown away by the "peace lobby" which gave the MILF space to rearm and train thousands of fighters according to the playbook developed in Afghanistan and Iraq. Unless Manila reforms its Armed Forces and reorganizes it as a mobile, offensive force the Philippines faces an eventual and crushing defeat at the hands of the international Muslim militancy. --"The End of the Hudna" - Islam is Allah's religion for all human beings. It should be proclaimed and invite [people] to join it wisely and through appropriate preaching and friendly discussions. However, such methods may encounter resistance and the preachers may be prevented from accomplishing their duty… then, Jihad and the use of physical force against the enemies become inevitable… --_Islamic Culture_, a Palestinian textbook for 11th grade students and see: The logical reason for executing a person who abandons Islam is the following: There is nothing in Islam that comes in contrast to human nature. Whoever joins Islam after recognizing its truth and after tasting its sweetness and then abandons it - is in fact rebelling against truth and logic. Like any other regime, Islam has to protect itself therefore this punishment [execution] awaits the person who abandons it, because he is spreading doubt about Islam… Abandoning Islam is a crime that warrants a severe punishment… [The phases of punishment are]: Urging [the sinner] to recant immediately… Warning him of the implications of his persistence in abandoning Islam, namely warning him that he will be executed. Execute the sinner if he persists in [his decision to] abandon Islam… --ibid - Genocide committed in the name of Allah: 3,000,000 Bangladeshi Hindus Killed during the Pakistan-Bangladesh war in 1971. From 1894 to 1896 Abdul Hamid, Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, killed 150,000 Armenian Christians. In India, Sikh Guru Tegh Bahadur along with his disciples was burned to death by the Moghul ruler Aurangzeb in 1675. Another Sikh, Bhai Mati Das was sawn into right and left halves while he was still alive. In July 1974, 4,000 Christians living in Cyprus were killed by Fahri Koroturk, president of Turkey and his Islamic army. From 1843 to 1846 10,000 Assyrian Christians including women and children were massacred by the Muslims. From 1915 to 1918 750,000 Assyrians were killed in the name of Islamic Jihad. In 1933 thousands of Assyrian villagers were murdered by the Iraqi soldiers in Northern Iraq. Since 1990 more than 10,000 Kashmiri Hindus have been brutally murdered by Islamic fundamentalists. Over 280,000 Ugandans killed during the reign of Idi Amin from 1971 to 1979. Over 30,000 Mauritanians have been killed by the Islamic dictators since 1960. In 1980, 20,000 Syrians were murdered under the rule of Hafez Al-Assad, President of Syria. Since 1992 120,000 Algerians have been murdered by the Islamic fundamentalist army. - We are the soldiers of God and we crave death - Violence will remain our only path. --statement issued by Islamic Jihad, 1980s - JERUSALEM - Reports Syrian-based arch-terrorist leader Ahmed Jibril, widely blamed for the infamous 1998 Pan Am airplane bombing over Lockerbie, is planning to set up shop in the Gaza Strip are accurate, a senior Palestinian official told WND. [...] A Lebanese official told WND, "If Jibril is trying to move to Gaza, it's because he knows he is no longer welcome in Lebanon and he needs to find a new base quickly." Uzi Landau, a senior Israeli lawmaker and anti-withdrawal leader told WND, "We are continuing to reap the disastrous ramifications of Sharon's Gaza withdrawal. All the bad guys are converging in Gaza, where they now have a safe haven, and they are poised to attack us." --Aaron Klein, Accused Pan Am bomber seeks move to Gaza http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=46782 - Ever since the religion of Islam appeared in the world, the espousers of it... have been as wolves and tigers to all other nations, rending and tearing all that fell into their merciless paws, and grinding them with their iron teeth; that numberless cities are raised from the foundation, and only their name remaining; that many countries, which were once as the garden of God, are now a desolate wilderness; and that so many once numerous and powerful nations are vanished from the earth! Such was, and is at this day, the rage, the fury, the revenge, of these destroyers of human kind. --John Wesley (1703-1791) English preacher and founder, with his brother Charles, of the Methodist movement in the Church of England, "The Doctrine of Original Sin" in _Works_ (1841), ix ----- jihad (noun) 1. A holy war against enemies of Islam, undertaken by Muslims as a duty. 2. Any fanatical crusade for an ideal or principle. ISRAEL . . see "PLACES" for related links We 'Palestinians' will take over everything, including all of Jerusalem.... All the rich Jews who will get compensation will travel to America.... We of the PLO will now concentrate all our efforts on splitting Israel psychologically into two camps. Within five years we will have six to seven million Arabs living in the West Bank and in Jerusalem....You understand that we plan to eliminate the State of Israel and establish a purely 'Palestinian' State....I have no use for Jews; they are and remain Jews. --'Palestinian' leader Yassir Arafat [30 January 1996], addressing 40 Arab diplomats at the Grand Hotel in Stockholm. He was speaking under the title, "The Impending Total Collapse of Israel." http://www.unc.edu/~dhoffman/quotes.htm -- His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed in any other country. --Arthur James Balfour (1848-1930) British Conservative statesman and Prime Minister [1920-1925], writing to Baron Rothschild [2 November 1917] -- It was hot here on the streets of Tel Aviv, and hotter still where he was going, of course. The streets were busy with people scurrying about shopping or pursuing business. There was the expected number of police about, but more discordant was the occasional civilian toting a Uzi sub-machine gun, doubtless on his--or her--way to or from a reserve meeting. It was the sort of thing to shock an American anti-gun nut (or warm the heart of a pro-gun nut). Ryan figured that the weapons display probably knocked the hell out of purse-snatching and street crime. Ordinary civil crime, he knew, was pretty rare here. But terrorist bombings and other less pleasant acts were not. And things were getting worse instead of better. That wasn't new either. --Tom Clancy _The Sum of All Fears_ [1991], Ch. 5 - [On the United Nations General Assembly:] If Algeria introduced a resolution declaring that the earth was flat and that Israel had flattened it, it would pass by a vote of 164 to 13 with 26 abstentions. --Abba Eban [Aubrey Solomon] (1915-2002) Foreign minister of Israel [1966-1974] Surrounded by hostile armies on all its land frontiers, subjected to savage and relentless hostility, exposed to penetration raids and assaults by day and by night, suffering constant toll of life among its citizens, bombarded by threats of neighboring governments to accomplish its extinction by armed force ... embattled, blockaded, besieged, Israel alone among the nations faces a battle for its security anew with every approaching nightfall and every rising dawn. --Abba Eban [Aubrey Solomon] (1915-2002) Foreign minister of Israel [1966-1974], on 1 November 1956 when he was Israeli ambassador to the United Nations. In Conor Cruise O'Brien _The Siege_ [1988 edn.] p.391. -- He walked into shul, synagogue. I nodded my acknowledgement, as I always do. He made some strange gesture, which I didn't comprehend. I continued praying. A few minutes later, he walked over to me and said: "Didn't you hear?" "Hear about what?" I replied. He grew impatient, almost frustrated. "Didn't you HEAR?" I understood that he was talking about last night's terror attack on Ben Yehuda Mall, a trendy night spot frequented not only by Israelis, but also Western tourists. I assumed that he obviously was intimating that someone we knew was hurt or killed. I replied: "About who?" He looked at me as if I had landed from another planet. "About who? About everyone who was attacked last night." I nodded. "Yes, of course I heard." "Then why aren't YOU crying?" His words shot through me like a spear piercing my heart. Our sages teach that "Words that come from the heart, enter the heart." He was right, of course. Why wasn't I crying? ... What has happened to all of us, myself included? We have turned to stone. Some would call it "numbness." Some would call it "collective national shock." Some would say that we all have suffered never-ending trauma and it has affected our senses. Frankly, the excuses are worthless. All the reasons in the world don't justify our distance from the real pain that is burning in our midst. When an attack happens, in the heat of the moment, we frantically check to see if someone we know has been hurt or killed. And then, if we find out that "our friends and family are safe," we sigh a deep sigh of relief, grunt and grumble about the latest tragic event and then, we continue with our robotic motions and go on with our lives. We have not lost our minds, my friends. We have lost our hearts. And that is why we keep on losing our lives. --Yechezkel "Chezi" Goldberg, "Because, if you don't cry, who will?" [3 December 2001] http://www.jewishworldreview.com/1201/crying.html [The author, a counselor for youth and families at risk, was among the murdered of yesterday's [2004] Jerusalem bus bombing.] - We're always in the headlines. _The New York Times_. CNN. The BBC. We get more coverage than India. Than China. Than the entire continent of Africa. There's so much news about us, you'd think we're also a billion people, not six million. We're all the time on TV and front pages, so people think they know us. Unsmiling soldiers. Screaming settlers. Crying mourners. Bearded guys in black hats. Well, Israelis are much more than those photos. We complain about our teachers. Worry about exams. Flirt at parties. Wonder if we look good in our bathing suits. We curse at traffic jams and cut in line at the movies. We've got normal fears and dreams. Like young people everywhere, we want to find love and be loved. We're just normal people trying to live in this abnormal, tiny, beautiful country. --Ori Heffetz, in Donna Rosenthal _The Israelis_ [2003] - ...Downstairs, before we left, the head of the hospital, an Israeli named Audrey, was showing me the children's waiting room. I couldn't help but notice, all around, an Arab woman with her son, an Arab family over there checking in, Arab children playing with the toys while waiting. The doctor saw the look on my face and laughed. "Oh, yes, we treat everyone." I guess I was astonished. She just shrugged. "We're Jews. This is how we live. It's also for the future. They're not going anywhere, and we're not going anywhere. There will eventually be peace. There has to be." When? A month? A year? A hundred years? More? She didn't know. I had to say it. You're incredible. You take everyone, you treat everyone, no one goes first, no one goes last, you just go in order of who needs help. That's, like, Mother Teresa stuff. "We're not saints, we're just doing our jobs. It's not easy, I admit. And it gets hard when they cheer when the bodies are brought in." I looked at her. What did you say? She sighed. "Yes, it gets hard when they cheer." This was one of the times during my trip when I held up my hands and said, "Stop. Wait." I turned and walked away to breathe deeply for a minute. I wonder if they've restocked that mini-bar. Yeah, probably. It's a good hotel. I didn't meet one Jew the whole trip who didn't think there would be peace, not one. "We can work it out. We have to. They're not going anywhere. Neither are we." Of course, it gets hard when they cheer. I guess it does. --Larry Holmes, "It Gets Hard When They Cheer", http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/001/568wyhef.asp - Zivit Seri is a tiny woman, a mother, who speaks with clumsy, defenseless gestures as she guides me through the destroyed buildings of Bat Galim-literally "daughter of the waves," the Haifa neighborhood that has suffered most from the shellings. The problem, she explains, is not just the people killed: Israel is used to that. It's not even the fact that here the enemy is aiming not at military objectives but deliberately at civilian targets-that, too, is no surprise. No, the problem, the real one, is that these incoming rockets make us see what will happen on the day-not necessarily far off-when the rockets are ones with new capabilities: first, they will become more accurate and be able to threaten, for example, the petrochemical facilities you see there, on the harbor, down below; second, they may come equipped with chemical weapons that can create a desolation compared with which Chernobyl and Sept. 11 together will seem like a mild prelude. For that, in fact, is the situation. As seen from Haifa, this is what is at stake in the operation in southern Lebanon. Israel did not go to war because its borders had been violated. It did not send its planes over southern Lebanon for the pleasure of punishing a country that permitted Hezbollah to construct its state-within-a-state. It reacted with such vigor because the Iranian President Ahmadinejad's call for Israel to be wiped off the map and his drive for a nuclear weapon came simultaneously with the provocations of Hamas and Hezbollah. The conjunction, for the first time, of a clearly annihilating will with the weapons to go with it created a new situation. We should listen to the Israelis when they tell us they had no other choice anymore. We should listen to Zivit Seri tell us, in front of a crushed building whose concrete slabs are balancing on tips of twisted metal, that, for Israel, it was five minutes to midnight. --Bernard-Henri Levy [2006] - We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you. --Hezbollah leader Hussein Massawi, to the Israelis We intend to remain alive. Our neighbors want to see us dead. This does not leave much room for compromise. --Golda Meir (1898-1978) A founder and the fourth prime minister [1969-1974] of the State of Israel; [17 March 1969] - "Reviewing the Hundred Years' War" By GEORGE MELLOAN _The Wall Street Journal_ January 10, 2006 Ariel Sharon has no peer as a symbol of Israel's 58-year struggle for survival. The 77-year-old warrior, now fighting for his life in a Jerusalem hospital, fought in the 1948 struggle for independence and played key roles in the long string of conflicts that followed. Last year, he conducted a daring maneuver -- perhaps his last -- by withdrawing Jewish settlements from Gaza, not long before a cerebral hemorrhage felled him. His old antagonists are gone. Yasser Arafat, who spent his career futilely trying to drive Israel into the sea, died at age 75 on Nov. 11, 2004. Saddam Hussein is on trial in Iraq. Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian leader who provoked the Six Day War in 1967, passed from the scene in 1970. King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, financier of Arab causes, left us last August. The world is left wondering what comes next in this saga. Ehud Olmert, a former mayor of Jerusalem, has taken the reins as acting prime minister. The Palestinian Authority, which Arafat left in a shambles of corruption and ineptitude, is in total disarray. After parliamentary elections later this month, it may fall under the control of Hamas, one of the territory's most relentless terrorist groups. [. . . ] The Arab-Israeli struggle might be equated -- at least in duration -- to the Hundred Years' War between England and France in the 14th and 15th centuries. One could say it began in the early 20th century when Zionists began arriving in significant numbers in the Holy Lands, fleeing oppression in Europe. They augmented the Jewish population of what would later be called Palestine. Late in the 19th century, according to the most reliable studies, Jews were only about 10% of a population of about 700,000, with Christians a further 10% and Arabs most of the rest. But with the Zionist movement Jewish numbers began to grow. With their socialist ideology and commitment to soul-purifying physical labor the Zionists formed tightly knit, dedicated communities foreign to the natives of the region. Great Britain encouraged the Zionists, issuing the Balfour Declaration in 1917 promising the Jews a homeland in the region even as the British army was driving out the Turks. After the World War I allies destroyed Ottoman rule, the British under a League of Nations mandate further encouraged Jewish settlement. The local Arabs mounted anti-Zionist riots. One of the leaders of these demonstrations was Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, who would later make common cause with Adolf Hitler, imploring the Germans to thwart any British effort to create a Jewish state. Most of the Jews who migrated to Palestine in the '30s and '40s were not Zionists. They were fleeing the Holocaust and had nowhere else to go. But the Zionists formed the hard muscle that overthrew the British mandate in 1948 and defeated the Arabs who tried to block the establishment of Israel. Their kibbutzim collectives produced the tough native-born "sabras," among them Ariel Sharon, who formed the core of the Israeli military forces. With roots going back to the 19th century, the Zionists had an uncommon dedication to the defense of a Jewish state. There would be plenty of fighting. In 1956, Israel, with British and French support, invaded the Sinai after Nasser seized the Suez Canal, but to little avail. In June 1967 came the Six Day War and the IDF's lightning victory over the combined forces of neighboring Arab states that gave Israel control of large territories formerly controlled by Egypt, Jordan and Syria. Then, in October 1973, there was the Yom Kippur War, which Israel might have lost had Gen. Sharon not conducted a bold tank maneuver to neutralize Egyptian surface-to-air missile batteries near the Suez Canal. Now that is all history. Ariel Sharon is finally hors de combat and his long record will go into the history books. Israel will continue to fight. The barren land the Zionists settled so long ago has become a strong state of 6.5 million people, mostly Jews. It has gradually modified the socialism that hampered its economic development. The Hundred Years' War will continue, but casualties are fewer and the U.S. has established a military presence in the region, grounds for hope that the war is winding down. - We are destined to live together on the same soil in the same land. We, the soldiers who have returned from the battle stained with blood. . . we who have fought against you, the Palestinians --we say today to you in a loud and clear voice: Enough of blood and tears! Enough! --Yitzhak Rabin (1922-1995) Israel prime minister, at signing of peace agreement at White House [13 September 1993] The worst thing in the terror attacks, in my point of view, is to see young babies, who have done no harm. If they are alive, shouting, burns all over their body. They are experiencing pain, very big pain. There is no stronger pain than having burns. --Shai Shapiro, Israeli paramedic http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/06/11/israeli.paramedic/index.html - The BBC stated that "the founder and spiritual leader of Hamas" was a "powerful inspiration for young Palestinians disillusioned with the collapse of peace hopes." These labels - "religious leader," "Islamic scholar," "spiritual guide" - are notable for being simultaneously accurate and misleading. Most Western readers will no doubt take from them the idea that Yassin, who was - in the characterization of the BBC - "a frail quadriplegic who could barely see," was merely an otherworldly father figure, an ascetic clergyman whose religious instructions may have been interpreted overzealously by his spiritual children, but after all, boys will be boys. To call Yassin a spiritual guide suggests to Westerners that he had little, if anything, to do with the ugly business of Hamas' incessant targeting of Israeli civilians in suicide-bombing attacks. [...] The BBC notes that while studying at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, Yassin "formed the belief that Palestine was an Islamic land 'consecrated for future Muslim generations until Judgment Day,' and that no Arab leader had the right to give up any part of this territory." This idea is based on traditional Islamic religious concepts - chiefly, the idea that any land in which Muslims have held sway at any point belongs forever after to the dar al-Islam (House of Islam), and cannot legitimately be governed by non-Muslims. It would not be enough, therefore, for Israel to set aside land for a Palestinian state. Israel must be subsumed within - and the Jews subjugated to - an Islamic state. Thus there can be no negotiations: "[Peace] initiatives, the so-called peaceful solutions, and the international conferences to resolve the Palestinian problem, are all contrary to the beliefs of the Islamic Resistance Movement. For renouncing any part of Palestine means renouncing part of the religion; the nationalism of the Islamic Resistance Movement is part of its faith ..." [...] Killing Yassin is no more the murder of a sainted religious figure than the killing of Adolf Hitler would have been in 1944. It speaks volumes about CAIR, AMANA, the European leaders who deplore Israel's action and the journalists who breezily call Yassin a "spiritual leader," that they do not acknowledge this fact. --Robert Spencer, A 'spiritual leader's' worldly evils http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=37722 - The Government has been informed that a Jewish state has been proclaimed in Palestine, and recognition has been requested by the provisional government thereof. The United States recognizes the provisional government of the de facto authority of the new state of Israel. --President Truman, statement. 6:11 p.m. Washington time, 14 May 1948; in M.J. Cohan and John Major {eds.} _History in Quotations_ [2004] p. 932 Cohan & Major explain: Recognition was accorded II minutes after the proclamation of the state of Israel, and Israel thereafter became the protectorate of the United States in the heart of the Arab world. -- While their killers were honored, Voice of Palestine called Tali Hatuel and her daughters "terrorists" in its Monday morning broadcast, Widlanski noted. The radio's initial report on the attack said only that "five settlers" had been killed, but failed to identify the victims as a pregnant woman and four young girls. Nor was the brutal manner in which they were executed reported. Further investigation of the attack this week revealed the two "Palestinian" gunmen first shot at the Hatuel's car from several meters away, and then approached to finish off the family from close range. --Arafat's PA honors killers of Jewish family http://www.jnewswire.com/news_archive/04/05/040504_honor.asp -- Despite claims to the contrary, the Palestinian Liberation Organization has never changed its charter declaring Israel has no right to exist, the PLO's "foreign minister" Farouk Kaddoumi said in an interview today. Speaking to the Jordanian newspaper Al-Arab, the PLO official also said when Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat talks about the need to pursue the "struggle" against Israel, he is referring to the "armed struggle," the Jerusalem Post reported. --PLO: Charter denies Israel's right to exist http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=38172 (April 2004) - States of Terror _The Wall Street Journal_ July 14, 2006 Israel's military invasion and naval blockade of Lebanon is being denounced in European capitals and at the United Nations as a "disproportionate" response to the kidnapping this week of two of its soldiers by Hezbollah. Israel's decision late last month to invade Gaza in retaliation for the kidnapping of another soldier by Hamas was also condemned as lacking in proportion. So here's a question for our global solons: Since hostage-taking is universally regarded as an act of war, what "proportionate" action do they propose for Israel? In the case of Hamas, perhaps Israel could rain indiscriminate artillery fire on Gaza City, surely a proportionate response to the 800 rockets Hamas has fired at Israeli towns in the last year alone. In the case of Hezbollah, it might mean carpet bombing a section of south Beirut, another equally proportionate response to Hezbollah's attacks on civilian Jewish and Israeli targets in Buenos Aires in the early 1990s. We aren't being serious, but neither is a feckless international community that refuses to proportionately denounce the outrages to which Israel is being subjected. That goes also for Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who says "all sides must act with restraint." But Israel's current problems result in part from an excess of restraint in responding to previous Hamas and Hezbollah provocations. Now Israel is confronted with a war on two fronts with proxy terrorists armed and financed by Syria and Iran. Yesterday, medium-range Hezbollah rockets hit civilian targets across northern Israel. Any of those rockets might easily hit the port city of Haifa's oil refineries and chemical plants, causing horrific damage that would give Israel cause, and perhaps the self-preservation necessity, to strike Damascus and Tehran. So far, Israel is limiting its military activities to Lebanon alone, out of the same abundance of restraint that has governed its behavior throughout the crisis. The democratic Lebanese government of Fouad Siniora bears its share of the blame, since it has failed to police its side of the border with Israel and failed to disarm Hezbollah, as required by Security Council Resolution 1559 and the 1989 Taif Accords that ended the Lebanese civil war. Senior Israeli military sources also claim that Lebanon tolerates the presence of hundreds of Iranian military personnel in Lebanon, again in violation of U.N. resolutions. But Mr. Siniora's failings owe to weakness, not malfeasance, particularly in the face of Syria's continued meddling in Lebanese affairs following the departure of its army last year. A larger problem has been the failure of the Bush Administration to press Damascus harder when it had the opportunity to do so in the wake of last year's Cedar Revolution. The U.N. investigation into the murder of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, in which all evidence points to the involvement of senior associates and relatives of Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, seems to have disappeared in a black hole. Nor has the U.S. exacted any price for Syria's ongoing support for the insurgents in Iraq. Critics of the Bush Administration will surely find a way to blame it for the current crisis, on the theory that this is what happens when you push for change in the Middle East. But the real problem is the growing perception among Arab regimes and terrorist frontmen that the U.S. is so bogged down in Iraq, and so suddenly deferential to the wishes of the "international community," that it has lost its appetite for serious reform. This has created openings for the kind of terror assaults on American allies we are now witnessing. Israel can and will handle the immediate military threats on its two borders. But ultimately there will be no resolution in Lebanon and Gaza until the regimes in Syria and Iran believe they will pay a price for the wars they are waging through their proxies. The referral this week of Iran's nuclear file to the U.N. Security Council is a start, although we have little confidence it will lead anywhere. The White House has cited Syria and Iran as the culprits behind this week's events, but more forceful words and action are called for. The Middle East stands on the cusp of its worst crisis in a generation, and this is no time for formulaic statements calling for "restraint from both sides." Europe's Disproportionate Criticism By GERALD M. STEINBERG _The Wall Street Journal_ July 17, 2006 JERUSALEM -- In early 2000, the European Union was an enthusiastic supporter of unilateral Israeli withdrawal from the security zone in southern Lebanon. Paris was about to take over the EU presidency in July and played a dominant role in the discussions. The French foreign and defense ministers pressed Israel to return its military forces to the international border. In detailed talks that took place at the French ambassador's residence in Jaffa, in which I participated as an academic consultant, the Europeans assured us that once Israel retreated, Hezbollah would lose its raison d'être as a "militia" and transform itself into a political party. France and its partners would send peacekeepers to prevent terror and missile attacks against Israel, help the Lebanese army take control of the border, and disarm Hezbollah. In May that year, the Israeli military left Lebanon. The United Nations certified that the withdrawal was complete. But Europe did nothing. Hezbollah's leaders celebrated a great "military victory," and Iranian "advisers" provided intelligence, training and thousands more of missiles, some with ranges of 75 kilometers and more that could penetrate deep into Israeli territory and for the first time hit Haifa, Israel's third biggest city. Instead of the promised transformation, Hezbollah took positions right across Israel's border and prepared for the next round of the war. Fearing international and particularly European condemnation, Israel did nothing to prevent this dangerous buildup. Emboldened by Israeli restraint, Hezbollah staged the first cross-border attack and kidnapping only five months after Israel's withdrawal, in October 2000. Europe's reaction back then was limited to repeating the usual mantras, calling on Israel to "act with restraint" and to "give diplomacy a chance." Now, after steady escalation and attrition to which Israel is particularly vulnerable, Hezbollah triggered a full-scale confrontation by firing another round of missiles at Israeli cities and staging a kidnapping attack, in which eight Israeli soldiers were killed. In tandem with Palestinian assaults from Hamas-controlled Gaza, which also featured missiles and kidnapped soldiers to be traded for terrorists, this opened a two-front war. This time, though, Israel moved quickly to finally dismantle the strategic threat in Lebanon. No state can simply stand by while its citizens are being killed and abducted, its cities routinely shelled, and part of its population forced to live in fear and sleep in bomb shelters. Hezbollah erroneously thought its missiles and the support from Iran and Syria would allow it to continue attacking Israel with impunity. Europe's role, once again, is limited to repeating the same old tired phrases. The EU called Israel's response and attacks on Beirut and in Gaza "disproportionate" and violations of international law. France in particular was outraged. "For several hours, there has been a bombardment of an airport of an entirely sovereign country, a friend of France... this is a disproportionate act of war," French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy said. It may have escaped the minister that the initial act of war originated from Lebanon and that the target of this unprovoked aggression is supposedly also a "sovereign country" and "friend of France." The knee-jerk condemnation of their country was not lost on Israelis who recall the broken promises from 2000 and the visceral antipathy toward them when they had to fight Arafat's terror war. Beyond the rhetoric, European officials offer no framework for a proper and "proportionate" level of force in response to mass terror aimed at the ultimate goal of "wiping Israel off the map." Few in Europe probably realize that the EU's failure to act in response to Iran's nuclear weapons efforts, and the three years that were wasted in negotiations while Iran began enriching uranium, only strengthened Israel's decision to act forcefully against the terror threats posed by Hezbollah and Hamas, who act as Tehran's proxies. Israel's strategy is twofold. The immediate goal is to remove Hezbollah's acute threat by crippling its military capabilities and driving their troops from the border zone. Attacks on Lebanese infrastructure are designed to prevent the resupply of Hezbollah and to pressure the Lebanese government to establish full sovereignty over the country. It is Lebanon, not Israel, that is in violation of international law as Beirut still has not implemented U.N. resolution 1559, which demands that Hezbollah be disarmed. At the same time, and this is Israel's medium-term goal, going forcefully after Iran's prodigy in Lebanon sends a powerful message to Tehran. It restores Israel's deterrence capability, a crucial move in preventing future confrontations with Iran on a much larger scale. But many idealistic European policy makers cannot see that a small war stopped prematurely now may only pave the way for a much larger war later. In order to understand Israel's military actions, it is imperative to consider the two powers standing behind Hezbollah. The larger strategic threat to Israel is the Damascus-Tehran axis. To view Israel's actions in Beirut and Gaza as "disproportionate" means ignoring the radical Islamic regime in Tehran, which threatens to destroy Israel and is bent on acquiring the weapons to actually carry out its threat. At the same time, Europe -- particularly France -- has invested heavily in the reconstruction of Lebanon and the international isolation of the Syrian regime. From this perspective, the damage to Beirut's airport and infrastructure and the strain on the Lebanese government are justifiably worrying. But if European leaders are serious about preventing instability and promoting their own economic and security interests, they will also have to share the costs of containing terror groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas. To help resolve the immediate crisis and prevent further damage to Lebanon's fragile economic and political structure, Europe's leaders can stiffen Beirut's backbone by conditioning aid to the release of the kidnapped Israeli soldiers. Cease-fire initiatives must lead to Hezbollah's disarmament. By tying further economic assistance to an end to terror attacks, Europe can actually help create the basis for long-term stability. And of course, it must pressure Tehran and Damascus. Instead of reflexively labeling Israel's belated use of force as "disproportionate," the leaders of the EU must learn to make their own security policies proportionate and realistic. Mr. Steinberg directs the conflict management program at Bar Ilan University and is a fellow at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. Hezbollah and Pericles By FANIA OZ-SALZBERGER _The Wall Street Journal_ July 18, 2006 War does not preclude clear thinking. When Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon six years ago, to the last inch, and from Gaza one year ago, to the last inch, scenarios of over-the-border hostilities were high on the public agenda. Thus, even as smoke rises over northern Israel, Lebanon and Gaza, some clearheaded points are being made on the Israeli side of the border. Here is a brief selection. First and most crucial, a majority of Israelis consider this sad unleashing of Israeli firepower in Gaza and Lebanon to be, up to now, a just war. It has both a casus belli and a convincing rationale. Hostilities were initiated by militias strongly associated with the elected governments in both regions, targeting IDF personnel strictly on the Israeli side of the border. Since many media consumers have short memories, a reminder is in order: Over the last five months, some 800 Kassam rockets were fired at towns and villages in southwestern Israel. The town of Sderot alone was hit several hundred times. Israel occupied not an inch of Gaza at that time. Israel certainly responded, as any sovereign state would; and it did so not by reinvading Gaza, but with air strikes against militants and launchers. Palestinian civilians were hurt; Europeans vocally reproached us; the rockets kept coming. Then came the recent assault on soldiers stationed within Israel, killing three and kidnapping one. Hezbollah of Lebanon, wholly unprovoked, simply liked the idea and sent a force into northern Israel and two follow-up ambushes, killing a total of eight soldiers and kidnapping two. Both assaults breached a fully legitimate international border, in the aftermath of a full Israeli withdrawal -- just in case some media consumers have forgotten. Possible lesson: A sense of right still counts for something amidst all the smoke. Which leads to a second clearheaded point. Why is Israel's response not "proportional," and why don't we rush to negotiate with the kidnappers, as so many peace-lovers in the Western world would like us to do? Let me be blunt: A "proportional" response would please many Europeans no end, but would scarcely move a hair in the beard of a Hamas or a Hezbollah leader. They are not set to be gently pushed into moderation, or to hammer out an exquisite compromise with the Jewish state, but to wipe it out as soon as they can. If we shoot a little, they will shoot back all the way into Islamic eternity. If we "negotiate," cave in to blackmail and release Hamas and Hezbollah militants held in Israeli prisons in return for our three kidnapped soldiers, they will send them back to bomb schools and buses and pizza parlors in no time at all. Negotiation? For sure. It worked with Egypt and Jordan. It would work with Saudi Arabia. It would work with moderate Palestinians -- as soon as they recapture their own polity from Hamas and Hezbollah. But it would not work with the latter, who along with their Iranian allies openly declare that they want us dead, not merely complacent. Possible lesson: Compromise with ultra-extremists usually misfires. And here is a sad, third clearheaded point: Democracy, in the Middle East as elsewhere, is not just about universal suffrage. The Palestinians brought Hamas to power, and Hezbollah is a coalition partner in the Lebanese government. Please reflect on this, dear Western lovers of democracy: Is majority vote truly the sole gist of it all? Here is a painful truth: Israel is killing civilians -- inadvertently, though arguably too freely -- as it targets militants in Gaza and Lebanon. Yet the hair-raising aspect of it is that many of those civilians voted Hamas, and some voted Hezbollah, into their own governments. Democratically elected, these groups care little for the lives of their own citizens, even less for the Israeli Arabs they have bombed and killed in recent days, and null for Israeli civilians. Yet their voters keep applauding. Gazan and Lebanese children are innocent victims of this policy, and many Israelis -- I must assert this even in the face of disbelief -- truly grieve for them. But the adults? Are these men and women hostages of live-in terrorists, dumb natives managed by shrewd colonialists, or are they perhaps accountable civil agents who made a very bad choice in one of their first democratic performances? Possible lesson: Reread Pericles. Arab democracy is not hopeless, a fourth clearheaded reflection suggests. The Middle East is divided between those who jeer with any rocket hitting Haifa, and those -- in Lebanon, Palestine and Saudi Arabia -- who secretly hope for both Hamas and Hezbollah to vanish into the limbo of lost lunatics and make way for better and saner Arab regimes. In the aftermath of the current war, Ehud Olmert's Kadima-Labor coalition government would promptly talk with a peace-seeking Palestinian government; this is why a majority of Israelis voted them in to begin with. Possible lesson: Moderates don't easily lose their nerve these days. My final point may be news to both friends and foes of Israel: This society is holding strong. Opinions here are divided, for sure, about the wisdom and morality of using force, and about the wisdom and effectiveness of withholding force. The public argument keeps sizzling as the north of Israel, including my own Jewish-Arab university of Haifa, is under fire. For some reason, going beyond Israel and deeply linked to Pericles, I take this to be good news. Ms. Oz-Salzberger is a senior lecturer at the University of Haifa. ISRAEL v. PALESTINE . . The danger lies in Islamic psychology, which cannot integrate itself into the world of efficiency and progress, that lives in a world of illusion, perturbed by attacks of inferiority complexes and megalomania, lost in dreams of the holy sword. The danger stems from the totalitarian conception of the world, the passion for murder deeply rooted in their blood, from the lack of logic, the easily inflamed brains, the boasting, and above all: the blasphemous disregard for all that is sacred to the civilized world ... their reactions - to anything - have nothing to do with good sense. They are all emotional, unbalanced, instantaneous, senseless. It is always the lunatic that speaks from their throat. --Dr A. Carlebach, _Ma'ariv_ (Israeli newspaper) [7 October 1955]. An Israeli view of the Palestinian mentality. Fatah is the armed humanitarian movement whose goal is the freeing of the Jews from their nationalistic and Nazi enslavement and the finding of a final solution for the Jewish problem. --Fatah pamphlet [October 1968]; in Ze'ev Schiff and Raphael Rothstein _Fedayeen_ [1972] p.127. The representatives of the Jewish Agency told us yesterday they were not the attackers, that the Arabs had begun the fighting. We did not deny this. We told the whole world that we were going to fight. --Jamal Husseini, to the UN Security Council [16 April 1948] This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades. --Azzam Pasha, Secretary General of the Arab League [1948] We are the soldiers of God and we crave death - Violence will remain our only path. --statement issued by Islamic Jihad [1980s] It is not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people, and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist. --Golda Meir (1898-1978) A founder and the fourth prime minister [1969-1974] of the State of Israel, in _The Sunday Times_ [15June 1969]. The Government of the State of Israel and the Palestinian team representing the Palestinian people agree that it is time to put an end to the decades of confrontation and conflict, recognize their mutual legitimate and political rights, and strive to live in peaceful coexistence and mutual dignity and achieve a just, lasting and comprehensive peace settlement through the agreed political process. --Oslo Agreement [19 August 1993], brokered by the United States and facilitated by the government of Norway; in M.J. Cohan and John Major {eds.} _History in Quotations_ [2004] p. 937 Cohan & Major explain: The Agreement, which established an autonomous Palestinian authority in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, was sealed by a famous handshake between Rabin and Arafat on the south lawn of the White House. I'll never forget something that my father told me: When he was a teenager in Europe, all the walls were covered with graffiti that said, 'Jews, Go to Palestine.' And when he went back to Europe as an adult, all the walls were covered with graffiti that said, 'Jews, Get Out of Palestine.' And my father understood this message perfectly, the emotional meaning of this message, which was: Get out of here and get out of there. Just don't come to us. Don't be here and don't be there. In other words, don't be. We may not kill you - that's dirty, we're not like that, but you will not be. You will die. --Amos Oz (1939- ) Israeli writer and journalist The Jews ordered all my family to line up against a wall and they started shooting us. I was hit in the side, but most of us children were saved because we hid behind our parents. The bullets hit my sister Kadri (four) in the head, my sister Sameh (eight) in the cheek, my brother Mohammed (seven) in the chest. But all the others with us against the wall were killed: my father, my mother, my grandfather and grandmother, my uncles and aunts and some of their children. --Fahimi Zidan, a 12-year-old Palestinian Arab boy, describes the massacre by a combined force of Irgun and Stern Gang of 254 inhabitants of the village of Deir Yassin in Palestine on 4 April 1948; in M.J. Cohan and John Major {eds.} _History in Quotations_ [2004] p. 932 Cohan & Major explain: The massacre was perpetrated to stampede Arabs out of Palestine in order to clear the ground for Israeli settlement. It succeeded beyond expectation: at the close of the Arab- Israeli war in 1949 some four-fifths of the Arab population of Palestine had fled the territory to become refugees in neighbouring Arab states. The name Deir Yassin has since been branded on Palestinian minds. We are embarking on a course that will greatly endanger any hope of a peaceful alliance with forces who could be our allies in the Middle East. Hundreds of thousands of Arabs who will be evicted from Palestine, even if they are to blame, and left hanging in mid-air, will grow to hate us. --Aharon Zisling, Israeli agriculture minister [16 June 1948]; in M.J. Cohan and John Major {eds.} _History in Quotations_ [2004] p. 932 Cohan & Major explain: The majority of Palestinian Arabs were systemically expelled from their homeland by Israeli forces so that Israelis could outnumber Palestinians in the new state they created during the war of 1948-9. At its end Israel controlled all of Palestine except for the Gaza Strip, which was occupied by Egypt, and the West Bank of the River Jordan, which was held by the Kingdom of Jordan. What Zisling said was all too true, but he represented a minority of Israeli opinion. - "Intransigent and Now in Charge" By DAVID PRYCE-JONES _The Wall Street Journal_ May 2, 2006 Reviewing Matthew Levitt's _Hamas: Politics, Charity, and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad_ In less than 20 years, Hamas has arisen apparently out of nowhere to form the government in the Palestinian Authority. This is an astonishing success for a small group of largely anonymous fanatics. Like al Qaeda, the Taliban, Abu Musab Zarqawi's murder squad in Iraq, and Islamist groups in Egypt and Algeria, Hamas consists of men who will stop at nothing to impose what they consider to be true Muslim beliefs. This general politicizing of Islam is one of the most disturbing portents of our times. When Hamas started, about 1987, Yasser Arafat spoke for the Palestinians through the Palestine Liberation Organization and its military wing, Fatah. In spite of their nationalist rhetoric, Arafat and the PLO undertook no state-building but instead appropriated for themselves the huge sums of money provided for the purpose by well-intentioned but gullible international donors. In contrast, Hamas has raised funds from political Islamists everywhere and distributed them with relative honesty to poor Palestinians. Arafat's corruption was the precondition of Hamas's popularity. At the same time, Hamas has remade the nationalist cause in its own Islamist image. It rejects the two-state solution toward which the PLO and Israel were working in their tentative way, on the grounds that God decreed Palestine to be a Muslim trust in perpetuity. Israel therefore has to dissolve itself; otherwise it will be liquidated by force. Proving its resolution, Hamas has routinely ordered into action suicide bombers, and they have killed several hundred Israelis and injured thousands. Hamas presents them as "martyrs" for the faith and pays money to their families. Persuaded by a combination of welfare and violence, Palestinians voted Hamas into power in January and are now at the mercy of its Islamist regime. The dispute with Israel is no longer about territory and boundaries; it is about the need for all good Muslims to wage jihad until one side is victorious and the other exists no more. Iran, its proxy Hezbollah and Saudi Arabia share this apocalyptic view or at least support it. In the circumstances, mistakes and misunderstandings may well trigger a regional war with unforeseeable consequences. For "Hamas: Politics, Charity, and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad," Matthew Levitt has had access to reports from various official agencies in the U.S., Canada, Britain and, not least, Israel. By its nature, Hamas is a clandestine movement closed to outsiders. It is safe to say that Mr. Levitt offers the fullest picture that can be drawn from available sources. His tone is rigorously analytic and nondramatic. The plethora of Arab names, and the many almost indistinguishable front organizations and charities, real or bogus, are no doubt inevitable aspects of such a subject, but they are also quite a challenge to the reader. Mr. Levitt emphasizes that Hamas is a unified movement with the single purpose of imposing its will. Within its ranks the only open question is whether the cause of Palestine will further politicize Islamism or whether more Islamism is the necessary prelude to Palestinian victory over Israel. Outsiders -- in particular well-intentioned but gullible donors -- like to draw distinctions between the civilian and military wings of Hamas, but it follows that such distinctions are meaningless: Hamas's charity to Palestinians and violence toward Israel are interlocked and mutually sustaining. Hamas's many outreach programs show that it is an organization of skill and cunning, in no way to be underestimated. Mr. Levitt documents how it has sought and found supporters all over the world, primarily in Arab and Muslim governments. Saudi Arabia, he estimates, contributes between $70 million and $90 million annually, a sum that buys a lot of terror. Iran is probably matching it by now. What Mr. Levitt calls "economic jihad" is waged in mosques, meetings and conferences, milking funds from Muslims and especially do-gooding nongovernmental charities in the West. Time and again, Hamas operatives have practiced frauds and ruses -- including money-laundering -- that outwit slow or badly informed Western intelligence agencies. In a chapter on Hamas's terrorism, Mr. Levitt examines how the movement's operatives knowingly radicalize young men (and a few young women) by desensitizing them to violence, portraying it to be an imperative of the faith. This process begins in primary schools and continues in youth movements and mosques and universities. Sacrificing the young in this ruthless way amounts to a death cult that is unbalancing the whole society and prejudicing its future. What is to be done? Israel has no choice except to defend itself. Hamas might not attack the U.S. or Europe for fear of losing the money it extracts from them one way or another, but Mr. Levitt tends to think that one day Hamas will be unable to resist launching suicide bombers in the West. He recommends cutting the ground from under Hamas by providing Palestinians with humanitarian aid on a larger scale. But this is really another counsel of despair. As needy as Palestinians certainly are, the Western aid that Mr. Levitt calls for would merely allow Hamas to claim that its extremism is rewarding. In sad fact, Palestinians voted in Hamas. Only when they realize that such a vote has its costs are things likely to get any better for them or everyone else. Mr. Pryce-Jones's "Betrayal: France, the Arabs and the Jews" will be published in the fall by Encounter Books - We 'Palestinians' will take over everything, including all of Jerusalem. [. . .] All the rich Jews who will get compensation will travel to America.... We of the PLO will now concentrate all our efforts on splitting Israel psychologically into two camps. Within five years we will have six to seven million Arabs living in the West Bank and in Jerusalem....You understand that we plan to eliminate the State of Israel and establish a purely 'Palestinian' State....I have no use for Jews; they are and remain Jews. --'Palestinian' leader Yassir Arafat [30 January 1996] , addressing 40 Arab diplomats at the Grand Hotel in Stockholm. He was speaking under the title, "The Impending Total Collapse of Israel." - We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you. --Hezbollah leader Hussein Massawi, to the Israelis - We -- with Allah's help -- call on every Muslim who believes in Allah and wishes to be rewarded to comply with Allah's order to kill the Americans and plunder their money wherever and whenever they find it. We also call on Muslim ulema, leaders, youths, and soldiers to launch the raid on Satan's U.S. troops and the devil's supporters allying with them, and to displace those who are behind them so that they may learn a lesson. --Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders World Islamic Front Statement [23 February 1998] Shaykh Usamah Bin-Muhammad, Bin-Ladin et al 980223-fatwa.htm end page | ABORTION - ARABS | ANTI-AMERICANISM | ANTI-SEMITISM | BALI - BUSH | CAPITAL PUNISHMENT - CLINTON (HILLARY) | ELECTION [AMERICAN PRESIDENTIAL - 2004] & FOX NEWS | GLOBAL WARMING & GUANTANAMO | GUN CONTROL & GUNS | HEALTH CARE (CANADIAN) - HOMOSEXUALS | HURRICANE KATRINA | IRAN | IRAQ 1 | IRAQ 2 | ISLAM - ISRAEL v. PALESTINE | LEFTISTS | MEDIA (THE) & MEDIA BIAS | MOORE (MICHAEL) & NEW YORK TIMES | NORTH KOREA - PATRIOT ACT | RADICAL THOUGHT | RAP MUSIC | STEM CELL RESEARCH | TERRORISM 1 | TERRORISM 2 | TERRORISM 3 | TERRORISM 4 | TERRORISM (PREVENTING) | UNITED NATIONS | | Return Home | The Credits | The Cast | Act 1 | Act 2 | Act 3 | The End | The Reviews | Photos |

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