Surviving in a post-American world.

 

by  Caroline Glick

Like it or not, the United States of America is no longer the world's policeman. This was the message of Barack Obama's presidential journey to Britain, France, the Czech Republic, Turkey and Iraq this past week.

Somewhere between apologizing for American history — both distant and recent; genuflecting before the unelected, bigoted king of Saudi Arabia; announcing that he will slash the US's nuclear arsenal, scrap much of America's missile defense programs and emasculate the US Navy; leaving Japan to face North Korea and China alone; telling the Czechs, Poles and their fellow former Soviet colonies, "Don't worry, be happy," as he leaves them to Moscow's tender mercies; humiliating Iraq's leaders while kowtowing to Iran; preparing for an open confrontation with Israel; and thanking Islam for its great contribution to American history, President Obama made clear to the world's aggressors that America will not be confronting them for the foreseeable future.

Whether they are aggressors like Russia, proliferators like North Korea, terror exporters like nuclear-armed Pakistan or would-be genocidal-terror-supporting nuclear states like Iran, today, under the new administration, none of them has any reason to fear Washington.

This news is music to the ears of the American Left and their friends in Europe. Obama's supporters like billionaire George Soros couldn't be more excited at the self-induced demise of the American superpower. CNN's former (anti-)Israel bureau chief Walter Rodgers wrote ecstatically in the Christian Science Monitor on Wednesday, "America's... superpower status, is being downgraded as rapidly as its economy."

The pro-Obama US and European media are so pleased with America's abdication of power that they took the rare step of applauding Obama at his press conference in London. Indeed, the media's enthusiasm for Obama appeared to grow with each presidential statement of contrition for America's past uses of force, each savage attack he leveled against his predecessor George W. Bush, each swipe he took at Israel, and each statement of gratitude for the blessings of Islam he uttered.

But while the media couldn't get enough of the new US leader, America's most stable allies worldwide began a desperate search for a reset button that would cause the administration to take back its abandonment of America's role as the protector of the free world.

Tokyo was distraught by the administration's reaction to North Korea's three-stage ballistic missile test. Japan recognized the betrayal inherent in Defense Secretary Robert Gates's announcement ahead Pyongyang's newest provocation that the US would only shoot the missile down if it targeted US territory. In one sentence, uttered not in secret consultations, but declared to the world on CNN, Gates abrogated America's strategic commitment to Japan's defense.

India, for its part, is concerned by Obama's repeated assertions that its refusal to transfer control over the disputed Jammu and Kashmir provinces to Pakistan inspires Pakistani terror against India. It is equally distressed at the Obama administration's refusal to make ending Pakistan's support for jihadist terror groups attacking India a central component of its strategy for contending with Pakistan and Afghanistan. In general, Indian officials have expressed deep concern over the Obama administration's apparent lack of regard for India as an ally and a significant strategic counterweight to China.

Then there is Iraq. During his brief visit to Baghdad on Tuesday afternoon, Obama didn't even pretend that he would ensure that Iraqi democracy and freedom is secured before US forces are withdrawn next year. The most supportive statement he could muster came during his conversation with Turkish students in Istanbul earlier in the day. There he said, "I have a responsibility to make sure that as we bring troops out, that we do so in a careful enough way that we don't see a complete collapse into violence."

Hearing Obama's statements, and watching him and his advisers make daily declarations of friendship to Iran's mullahs, Iraqi leaders are considering their options for surviving the rapidly approaching storm.

Then there is Europe. Although Obama received enthusiastic applause from his audience in Prague when he announced his intention to destroy the US's nuclear arsenal, drastically scale back its missile defense programs and forge a new alliance with Russia, his words were anything but music to the ears of the leaders of former Soviet satellites threatened by Russia. The Czech, Polish, Georgian and Ukrainian governments were quick to recognize that Obama's strong desire to curry favor with the Kremlin and weaken his own country will imperil their ability to withstand Russian aggression.

It is not a coincidence, for instance, that the day Obama returned to Washington, Georgia's Moscow-sponsored opposition announced its plan to launch massive protests in Tblisi to force the ouster of pro-Western, anti-Russian Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili. And as for Russia, like Iran, which responded to Obama's latest ode to the mullahs by opening a nuclear fuel plant and announcing it has 7,000 advanced centrifuges in operation, so Moscow reacted to Obama's fig leaf with a machine gun, announcing its refusal to support sanctions against North Korea and repeating its false claim that Iran's nuclear program is nonaggressive.

Finally there is Israel. If Obama's assertions that Israel must support the immediate establishment of a Palestinian state, his declarations of support for the so-called Saudi "peace plan," which requires Israel to commit national suicide in exchange for "peace" with the Arab world, and his continuous and increasingly frantic appeals for Iran to "engage" his administration weren't enough to show Israel that Obama is sacrificing the US's alliance with the Jewish state in a bid to appease the Arabs and Iran, on Tuesday Vice President Joseph Biden made this policy explicit.

When Biden told CNN that Israel would be "ill-advised" to attack Iran's nuclear installations, he made clear that from the administration's perspective, an Israeli strike that prevents Iran from becoming a nuclear power is less acceptable than a nuclear-armed Iran. That is, the Obama administration prefers to see Iran become a nuclear power than to see Israel secure its very existence.

 

AMERICA'S BETRAYAL of its democratic allies makes each of them more vulnerable to aggression at the hands of their enemies — enemies the Obama administration is now actively attempting to appease. And as the US strengthens their adversaries at their expense, these spurned democracies must consider their options for surviving as free societies in this new, threatening, post-American environment.

For the most part, America's scorned allies lack the ability to defeat their enemies on their own. India cannot easily defeat nuclear-armed Pakistan, which itself is fragmenting into disparate anti-Indian nuclear-wielding Islamist and Islamist-supporting factions.

Japan today cannot face North Korea — which acts as a Chinese proxy — on its own without risking a confrontation with China. Russia's invasion of Georgia last August showed clearly that its former republics and satellites have no way of escaping Moscow's grip alone. This week's Arab League conference at Doha demonstrated to Iraq's leaders that their Arab brethren are incapable and unwilling to confront Iran.

And the Obama administration's intense efforts to woo Iran coupled with its plan to slash the US's missile defense programs — including those in which Israel participates — and reportedly pressure Israel to dismantle its own purported nuclear arsenal — make clear that Israel today stands alone against Iran.

 

THE RISKS that the newly inaugurated post-American world pose for America's threatened friends are clear. But viable opportunities for survival do exist, and Israel can and must play a central role in developing them. Specifically, Israel must move swiftly to develop active strategic alliances with Japan, Iraq, Poland, and the Czech Republic and it must expand its alliance with India.

With Israel's technological capabilities, its intelligence and military expertise, it can play a vital role in shoring up these countries' capacities to contain the rogue states that threaten them. And by containing the likes of Russia, North Korea and Pakistan, they will make it easier for Israel to contain Iran even in the face of US support for the mullahs.

The possibilities for strategic cooperation between and among all of these states and Israel run the gamut from intelligence sharing to military training, to missile defense, naval development, satellite collaboration, to nuclear cooperation. In addition, of course, expanded economic ties between and among these states can aid each of them in the struggle to stay afloat during the current global economic crisis.

Although far from risk free, these opportunities are realistic because they are founded on stable, shared interests. This is the case despite the fact that none of these potential alliances will likely amount to increased support for Israel in international forums. Dependent as they are on Arab oil, these potential allies cannot be expected to vote with Israel in the UN General Assembly. But this should not concern Jerusalem.

The only thing that should concern Jerusalem today is how to weaken Iran both directly by attacking its nuclear installations, and indirectly by weakening its international partners in Moscow, Pyongyang, Islamabad and beyond in the absence of US support. If Japan is able to contain North Korea and so limit Pyongyang's freedom to proliferate its nuclear weapons and missiles to Iran and Syria and beyond, Israel is better off. So, too, Israel is better off if Russia is contained by democratic governments in Eastern and Central Europe. These nations in turn are better off if Iran is contained and prevented from threatening them both directly and indirectly through its strategic partners in North Korea, Syria and Russia, and its terror affiliates in Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan. For the past 16 years, successive Israeli governments have wrongly believed that politics trump strategic interests. The notion that informed Israel's decision-makers — not unlike the notion that now informs the Obama administration — was that Israel's strategic interests would be secured as a consequence of its efforts to appease its enemies by weakening itself. Appreciative of Israel's sacrifices for peace, the nations of the world — and particularly the US, the Arabs and Europe — would come to Israel's defense in its hour of need. Now that the hour of need has arrived, Israel's political strategy for securing itself has been exposed as a complete fiasco.

The good news is that no doubt sooner rather than later, Obama's similarly disastrous bid to denude the US of its military power under the naive assumption that it will be able to use its new stature as a morally pure strategic weakling to win its enemies over to its side will fail spectacularly and America's foreign policy will revert to strategic rationality.

But to survive the current period of American strategic madness, Israel and the US's other unwanted allies must build alliances with one another — covertly if need be — to contain their adversaries in the absence of America. If they do so successfully, then the damage to global security induced by Obama's emasculation of his country will be limited. If on the other hand, they fail, then America's eventual return to its senses will likely come too late for its allies — if not for America itself.

Caroline B. Glick is the senior Middle East Fellow at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, DC and the deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post.

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

What Iran Really Thinks About Talks.

 

by Michael Rubin

On Apr. 9, Gholam Reza Aghazadeh, the head of Iran's atomic energy agency, announced that the Islamic Republic had installed 7,000 centrifuges in its Natanz uranium enrichment facility. The announcement came one day after the U.S. State Department announced it would engage Iran directly in multilateral nuclear talks.

 

Proponents of engagement with Tehran say dialogue provides the only way forward. Iran's progress over the past eight years, they say, is a testament to the failure of Bush administration strategy. President Barack Obama, for example, in his Mar. 21 address to the Iranian government and people, declared that diplomacy "will not be advanced by threats. We seek engagement that is honest and grounded in mutual respect."

 

Thus our president fulfills a pattern in which new administrations place blame for the failure of diplomacy on predecessors rather than on adversaries. The Islamic Republic is not a passive actor, however. Quite the opposite: While President Obama plays checkers, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei plays chess. The enrichment milestone is a testament both to Tehran's pro-active strategy and to Washington's refusal to recognize it.

Iran's nuclear program dates back to 1989, when the Russian government agreed to complete the reactor at Bushehr. It was a year of optimism in the West: The Iran-Iraq War ended the summer before and, with the death of revolutionary leader Ayatollah Khomeini, leadership passed to Ayatollah Khamenei and President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, both considered moderates.

 

At the beginning of the year, George H.W. Bush offered an olive branch to Tehran, declaring in his inaugural address, "Good will begets good will. Good faith can be a spiral that endlessly moves on." The mood grew more euphoric in Europe. In 1992, the German government, ever eager for new business opportunities and arguing that trade could moderate the Islamic Republic, launched its own engagement initiative.

 

It didn't work. While U.S. and European policy makers draw distinctions between reformers and hard-liners in the Islamic Republic, the difference between the two is style, not substance. Both remain committed to Iran's nuclear program. Former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami, for example, called for a Dialogue of Civilizations. The European Union (EU) took the bait and, between 2000 and 2005, nearly tripled trade with Iran.

 

It was a ruse. Iranian officials were as insincere as European diplomats were greedy, gullible or both. Iranian officials now acknowledge that Tehran invested the benefits reaped into its nuclear program.

 

On June 14, 2008, for example, Abdollah Ramezanzadeh, Mr. Khatami's spokesman, debated advisers to current Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the University of Gila in northern Iran. Mr. Ramezanzadeh criticized Mr. Ahmadinejad for his defiant rhetoric, and counseled him to accept the Khatami approach: "We should prove to the entire world that we want power plants for electricity. Afterwards, we can proceed with other activities," Mr. Ramezanzadeh said. The purpose of dialogue, he argued further, was not to compromise, but to build confidence and avoid sanctions. "We had an overt policy, which was one of negotiation and confidence building, and a covert policy, which was continuation of the activities," he said.

 

The strategy was successful. While today U.S. and European officials laud Mr. Khatami as a peacemaker, it was on his watch that Iran built and operated covertly its Natanz nuclear enrichment plant and, at least until 2003, a nuclear weapons program as well.

 

Iran's responsiveness to diplomacy is a mirage. After two years of talks following exposure of its Natanz facility, Tehran finally acquiesced to a temporary enrichment suspension, a move which Secretary of State Colin Powell called "a little bit of progress," and the EU hailed.

 

But, just last Sunday, Hassan Rowhani, Iran's chief nuclear negotiator at the time, acknowledged his government's insincerity. The Iranian leadership agreed to suspension, he explained in an interview with the government-run news Web site, Aftab News, "to counter global consensus against Iran," adding, "We did not accept suspension in construction of centrifuges and continued the effort. . . . We needed a greater number." What diplomats considered progress, Iranian engineers understood to be an opportunity to expand their program.

 

In his March 24 press conference, Mr. Obama said, "I'm a big believer in persistence." Making the same mistake repeatedly, however, is neither wise nor realism; it is arrogant, naïve and dangerous.

 

When Mr. Obama declared on April 5 that "All countries can access peaceful nuclear energy," the state-run daily newspaper Resalat responded with a front page headline, "The United States capitulates to the nuclear goals of Iran." With Washington embracing dialogue without accountability and Tehran embracing diplomacy without sincerity, it appears the Iranian government is right.

 

 

Michael Rubin is editor of the Middle East Quarterly and a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

 

Multiculturalism, self-inflicted defeat of the West and the triumph of Islam.

 

by Fjordman

  

I will defend all Western countries but I feel especially close to Britain, which makes it all the more sad to see how humiliated this once-great nation currently is. The English language once conquered the world. Now the rest of the world is conquering the English-speaking countries. If current trends continue, people in Singapore will know English while the nation that created the English language will cease to exist.

 

At the same time as sharia law has gained official recognition as a part of the British legal system and Muslims proudly talk about conquering the Western world, a British woman was arrested because of a supposedly "racist" doll she kept in her window. In al-Britannia a Muslim man can claim benefits for children with multiple wives and brag about subduing the country and reducing its traditional inhabitants to second-rate citizens or worse, but you cannot have a "racially insensitive" doll in your own home, at least not if you're white.

 

In my book Defeating Eurabia, I have a chapter about the situation in Britain. Since I'm already here I can again repeat that the book, which is available online as well in a printed version, can be republished for free online or in print and translated to other languages by anybody who wants to, as long as they do not represent a totalitarian ideology. I actively encourage people to do so.

 

In a survey published in April 2008, one in three medical doctors in Britain said that elderly patients should not be given free treatment if it were unlikely to do them good for long. At the same time, Muslim men with multiple wives have been given the go-ahead to claim extra welfare benefits. Baroness Warnock, an influential government "ethical" adviser suggests that elderly dementia sufferers may have a "duty to die" because they are a financial burden to the state. Elderly Brits have to die, with or without "encouragement," so that the state can afford to pay for all the Nigerians and Bangladeshis who flood the country. The "welfare state" now means that the natives should watch grandma die because she's getting old anyway and we need the money to pay Muslims with multiple wives and numerous children so that they can feel comfortable while they colonize the country.

 

These incidents may seem unrelated, but they are not. Make no mistake about it: Harassing the natives in order to crush them mentally and destroy any ideas they might harbor about defending their country against foreign colonization is a deliberate strategy on the part of the authorities and the ruling Multiculturalist oligarchy, whether you identify this as the British Labour Party or the European Union (both are correct). Of course, this is about the entire Western world, not just Britain, but Britain is arguably the worst example of all. I am not aware of arrests for "racist" dolls even in Sweden, Belgium or al-Canada, and they are bad cases of suicidal Multiculturalism. Britain in 2009 is no longer the nation that gave us Shakespeare, Newton or Adam Smith; it is the world's largest open-air prison, an enlarged Marxist reeducation camp, a horror story where the authorities wage cultural and demographic warfare against the indigenous people of the country. The only good news is that I sense that native Britons are getting angrier by the day, and will not go quietly into the night.
 

These destructive trends are not limited to Britain, however. In a comment to Takuan Seiyo's latest essay in his terrific series "From Meccania to Atlantis" at The Brussels Journal, American blog reader Queen made the following comment about the situation in California:

 

"San Francisco is a Third World toilet. It has a higher per capita murder rate than New York, and one almost as high as Chicago's. It smells bad (the sewers have been malfunctioning for years), and is dirty and shabby. The city budget is 450 million dollars in the red, but they recently spent several hundred thousand dollars on a campaign to provide illegal immigrants with a city ID card so that they could 'access' free city services. Seiyo doesn't mention the worst aspect of the Bologna family slaughter: the illegal immigrant killer was protected from deportation by a taxpayer funded program that paid to ship under-age illegal immigrant crack dealers/gangbangers to 'group homes' in other parts of California so that the feds could not find them and deport them. Those in the 'group homes' simply walked away from them and returned to a life of crime and murder in SF. Too bad for the Bologna family which lost their father and two sons. One wonders how a city that depends on tourism for most of its economy cannot see that it won't survive its descent into Third World toiletude."

 

It used to be said that trends that start in California today will be evident in the rest of the United States tomorrow. If this remains true, I guess that means that the United States will soon be a Third World entity. I see no reason to expect that this decline will stop under the administration of President Obama, who has for a generation been a member of an organization of anti-white Marxists dedicated to hating the majority population of the country. This only happens in white majority Western countries, since white people have been publicly demonized for so long that many of them believe that they deserve this kind of abuse.

 

Contrary to the absurd claims about "Eurocentrism," Europeans are traditionally the least ethnocentric people on the planet, which is why we invented sciences such as archaeology because only we possessed the scholarly objectivity to do so. So we are the least ethnocentric peoples on Earth, yet the only ones constantly attacked for ethnocentrism.

I could add that I don't gloat over the plight of the United States. As indicated in my essay Barack Hussein Obama and the Triumph of Marxism, I was apparently one of few Europeans who didn't support the election of Obama. I'm tired of seeing Europeans gloat over the fact that the USA is sinking, just as I am tired of seeing some Americans gloat over Europe's decline. The entire Western world is currently in decline, not just in relative terms as a percentage of the global population or economy, but in real terms as functioning societies.

 

That being said, although all Western countries without exception are sinking under the weight of Third World mass immigration and in the process becoming a part of the Third World, they are not sinking equally fast. With the exception of France, Belgium and possibly the Netherlands and Sweden, the English-speaking world is leading the disintegration of the West, ideologically and demographically. The entire West is sick, but the Anglosphere is sicker than most. The English-speaking countries still have the most dynamic military traditions of the West, but that counts for little as long as they are used for promoting global Multiculturalism rather than for protecting the home country.

I cannot see that the Anglosphere has more freedom of speech than Continental European countries, either. The USA with its First Amendment does, which is great (we'll see what their new President does about that), but al-Canada is plain nuts and Britain is a Multicultural banana republic. Australia and New Zealand could be a part of Greater China by mid-century. Maybe they will be more prosperous than France will be as a part of Greater Algeria or the United States as a part of Greater Mexico, but by then they will be Asians, not Westerners.

 

I'm not sure why the Anglosphere is so bad. In the case of Britain, I strongly suspect it's partly caused by a Post-Imperial Stress Syndrome for a nation that once ruled much of the world and now cannot even rule its own suburbs. Empire was their identity. Much of the same can be said about the French. Indeed I suspect that one of their motivations for supporting the awful EU project is for them to resurrect some of their past imperial glory in another form.

 

Yet this cannot explain the actions of the United States, which is still the world's greatest power although that may not last forever. There is some form of universal proposition nation idea with roots dating back to the Enlightenment at work here. It's the concept that a country is not a nation based on a shared heritage, but an abstract entity which can be joined by absolutely anybody, a bit like an enlarged video club. If you claim that the United States is a "universal" nation and that Hamas-supporting Muslims, with which Westerners have absolutely nothing in common, can and should be imported to the USA, then you are a supporter of the concept of a proposition nation. This idea will eventually kill the United States as we once knew it.
 

Western elites are committed Post-National Globalists.

 The EU oligarchs want to import 50 million Africans, in addition to expanding the open borders of the EU to include Muslim North Africa and the Middle East. As I've documented in my essays, this is a planned destruction of all European and indeed Western nation states through transnational organizations such as the EU and the UN, in cooperation with local Multiculturalists. There is nothing accidental about this. We need to support, as a matter of principle, all European patriots who fight for their country and their dignity, provided that they do not champion totalitarian ideologies. We're all in the same boat.

 

Suppose the natives in some Western European countries actually start to seriously resist the organized destruction of their countries, halt mass immigration and reverse Multiculturalism. How will American authorities and media react to this? Frankly, I wouldn't be too surprised if they turn out to be actively hostile to the European natives. Europeans should reach out to American individuals. They are victims of the same Multicultural war against European civilization as we are. But we should expect no sympathy from the American elites. They are a hostile entity just as much as the EU elites are.

 

As we know, a "Nazi" these days is not one of the Muslims and their Leftist cheerleaders who shout "Death to Jews!" in the streets of Europe; it's any white person who doesn't lie down and die on command. If we don't lie down, we must be Nazis. We are after all Europeans.

 

Europeans have learned the wrong lessons from Nazism. For instance, the European Union is now actively and deliberately promoting Islamic immigration to Europe by the tens of millions, knowing fully well that they will gradually displace the original inhabitants of the continent. They also know that the people who move in have a culture of extreme anti-Semitism and despise Christianity, just as the Nazis did. Eurabianism has disturbing similarities with Nazism in some ways and with Communism in others. The EU is promoting Lebensraum for a new master race in Europe, just like the Nazis did. They only disagree on which master race to promote. The resurgence of violent anti-Semitism is directly caused by the policies of the EU and the national political elites. To hear them denounce others as "Fascists" is the ultimate fraud.

 

The EU is currently the planet's most evil organization, an institutionalized attack on the very existence of the native peoples of an entire continent, the most influential and creative civilization in human history. The EU is an organized crime against humanity and we should support absolutely everything that can undermine it as well as Globalism and Multiculturalism throughout the Western world.

 

That being said, the English-speaking world, and the United States in particular, is responsible for championing one of the most dangerous ideas of our time: the proposition nation. Everybody from Saudi Arabia to Somalia can supposedly be imported to the USA and the American political system should be exported to other cultures, by force if necessary. The USA is supposed to be a "universal nation," but there is no such thing.

 

Under Obama, I fear that the USA will no longer be the land of the free, home of the brave, but rather a global enforcer of non-discrimination and Diversity, the Multicultural Empire. Some would argue that this was the case already under Clinton and Bush, but it certainly will be the case now.
 

The European Union is a different kind of Multicultural Empire, although it, too, champions a form of proposition nation. I suspect that the idea ultimately dates back to some of the worse strands of Enlightenment thought. The French, who to a great extent have created the ideological and bureaucratic basis of the EU, have their own ideas about assimilating people from all around the world. Those of us who live in Western Europe thus have the misfortune of being exposed to the influence of no less than two Multicultural Empires at the same time.

 

The "conservative" French President Sarkozy, who praised Arabic as the language of science and high civilization after millions of Frenchmen voted for him in the hope that he would defend France and French culture, has stated that it is a duty for the French to become less French, culturally and genetically, and that the state should aggressively promote this agenda. The goal of Multiculturalism is to destroy a once-great European nation and turn it into an Islamic-dominated Third World entity. Make no mistake about it: This is what Multiculturalists have in store for all of us, if we do not stop them.
 

Fjordman is a Norway-based writer. He contributes in Brussels Journal, Gates of Vienna, Faith Freedom International and Jihad Watch amongst other websites. He is the author of Defeating Eurabia.

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

 

“Moderate Islam, Radical Islam”, and in Between.

 

by Raphael Israeli

 

A year ago, when the first case of "bulldozer terrorism" unfolded in Jerusalem, as a young Palestinian Muslim of East Jerusalem, who worked in Israel, lived comfortably with his family, and had no apparent quarrel with the authorities,  could have been considered a classic manifestation of "moderate Islam". And then, when he suddenly went on a rampage with his bulldozer, overturning buses hitting cars and passers-by, and was subsequently gunned down by policemen and alert civilians, the media rushed to dub him a case of "radical Islam". The same use of bulldozer as a weapon of terror was repeated twice more over the past year, with observers wondering what has turned Muslim quietism into Muslim terrorism. After all three events, their families set up large sheds outside their houses, sporting Hamas and Hizbullah banners, to welcome the large Muslim crowds which came to "congratulate" them for the "martyrdom" of their son, not to present "condolences". Manifestations of popular jubilation in the Palestinian street, for those carnages, also attested to the general mood which had triggered them in the first place.

 

It is often claimed that strict interpretation of Islam with its abuses, is only the lot of "fanatic", "radical", "fundamentalist", or "Islamist" Muslims, usually quantified as some 15% of the 1.5 billion world Muslims, as if that were a different faith embracing different  principles than those followed by the rank-and-file Muslims. In fact, we are talking about the same one creed which upholds Shari'a law to various degrees, but those who do not follow it to the letter, as in any other religion, are not adepts of an alternative "moderate Islam", the one that is sometimes dubbed "religion of peace", to distinguish it from the faith of the aggressive "extremists". The truth of the matter is that no such Islam exists, though there are certainly many truly moderate Muslims who have broken away from the bloody road of Islamic Shari'a, especially when they conveniently moved to the West, and can from a safe distance criticize the  phenomenon of the Islamikaze"  bombers against Westerners and Israelis, or the culture of death that is cultivated in many Islamic lands,  or indeed the unbridled anti-Semitic calumnies that are rife in their own culture. But they have yet to produce an alternative doctrine and worldview that could rival official Islam and posit a creed and a set of rules which can attract Muslims to relinquish the Shari'a and embrace another way. If they did, they would no longer be Muslims in the eyes of established Islam.

 

Moderate Muslims often accuse the radicals, who are, in fact, the common Muslims that behave in accordance with the accepted rules championed by the Shari'a, of having "hijacked" Islam or "distorted its "real" meaning, or misinterpreted it.  But the standards of the radicals, like the Jihad war or the strict implementation of the shar'ia, are those that prevail in the Islamic world. There are no accepted yardsticks of "moderate" Islam. One can simply watch the mass demonstrations in the streets of Gaza, Quetta, Casablanca, Durban and Jakarta, or in the Muslim neighborhoods in Paris, London, Marseille, Amsterdam, Sydney,   and Toronto, to realize how much alive,

universal and popular are the Muslim slogans and rampages, which are performed daily

 

 

by Muslim masses of men, women, children of all walks of life, and including their lay leaders and clerics, of all ages. Are they all "Islamists"? No, they are simply Muslims, and the common denominator which links them together in their hatred of the West and the Jews  is Islam, standard Islam,  under the  justification of the Shari'a, which is promoted by their Imams. While some moderate and courageous Muslim individuals will fortunately always be there to save the honor of Islam, when they raise their lone voices against the abuses perpetrated in the name of their faith,  the mainstream in the world of Islam, including westernized and modern professionals and intellectuals, will always be there to glorify, in mirth, the killings of westerners and Jews, to write or broadcast, in exhilaration, in favor of the Islamikaze, and distribute in jubilation sweets in the streets to "celebrate" the death of Americans or Israelis.

 

The champions of the spurious distinction between the so-called "islamist"  minority and the "peaceful" Muslim  majority, who  become entrapped in their reluctance  for a carpet condemnation of Islam lest they be accused of Islamophobia or racism (as if Islam were a race), if they are non-Muslim; and treason if they are, are also enslaved by  another distinction of their own making which has equally no leg to stand on. That is "Judeophobia", a parallel to Islamophobia, versus anti-Semitism, which is universally condemned in those circles, as it is no longer in vogue, at least not in public. They explain to us, that Islam has never been anti-Semitic, proof of their ignorance of Islamic sources, while the current dislike of Jews is no more than Judeophobia, which has no historical roots and has been a modern,  circumstantial and fleeting phenomenon which does not warrant uncalled for anxiety. If anti-Semitism is reduced to Judeophobia, it would merely become a junior counterpart of Islamophobia , and a lesser evil than anti-Semitism, and therefore less objectionable and more "acceptable", in par with "Islamophobia", as a modern phenomenon in Western society. Generally speaking, they would simplistically argue: "how can Muslims, or at least Arabs, themselves Semites, be Anti-Semitic?"

 

It is exactly this war of words, which has been engineered to obfuscate substance and increase the currency of Muslim terminology, while at the same time depriving the Jews and their supporters from their traditional arsenal in the battle against anti-Semitism. Can anyone explain  in what way the Qur'anic condemnation of Jews as "descendants of pigs and monkeys", which is routinely and universally preached to Muslims (not Islamists) by their clerics in both the Islamic world and Europe, is "Judeophobic" and not "anti-Semitic"? Is this hallowed Qur'anic reference, eternal as the Word of Allah, a circumstantial and fleeting pronouncement? To say so would be a blasphemy. It is used by Muslim clerics, as a matter of course, in such "moderate" and "pro-Western" countries as Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, as a continuation of the traditional way of demonizing and de-humanizing the Jews in order to facilitate their annihilation. What more would it take to call this blatant anti-Semitism?

 

Words were created to transmit conventionally agreed upon meanings. If each actor chose to lend to his words a different significance or accuse the others of "distorting" their meaning, then we would no longer be able to call a spade a spade or communicate with others. Anti-Semitism is the millennial irrational hatred of the Jews, and it has been called so since the onset of modern research on this sinister issue in the 19th Century. No amount of masking, manipulations with words and creation of parallels to dilute that terminology, can succeed, exactly as no coupling of the unique term  "Holocaust" with Armenians or Darfurians (Incidentally both perpetrated by Muslims), can blunt the poignancy of the Jewish Holocaust or rob it of its uniqueness. No wonder, then, that the most frequent manifestation of anti-Semitism these days, both among Muslims everywhere and their anti-Semitic allies in Europe, has been Holocaust denial, meaning that that devalued term in the eyes of the deniers has acquired a generic usage for all sorts of massacres, but the hated Jews cannot even claim to have acceded to the "honor" of having been one of its victims who, thereby, gained their uniqueness.

           

Raphael Israeli

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

           

           

           

 

 

Appeasing child killers.

 

by Caroline B. Glick

We were not supposed to see Shlomo Nativ's name in the newspapers. At least, we weren't supposed to know who he was for several years. He was just a 13-year-old boy. He was loved by his family and friends. He had brothers and sisters, parents and grandparents. His life was not our business. And, to a certain extent, now that it is over, it still shouldn't concern us.

What should concern us is his death. Nativ was murdered last Thursday at the hands of a Palestinian ax murderer just a few meters from his home in Bat Ayin. And his death should interest us for what it teaches us, first of all about the nature of the Middle East and Israel's place in it.

The mainstream media in Europe and the US and even here maintain that Nativ's death tells us little we didn't already "know" if we are right-thinking people. By this view of things, the cold-blooded terrorist murder of civilians - even of children - is to be expected when the victims in question are Israeli Jews who live beyond the 1949 armistice lines. It isn't nice. It isn't pleasant to say. But as far as the right-thinking people of the Western media are concerned, Israeli Jews like Nativ, who live in Gush Etzion in Judea, are simply asking to be murdered.

Today, the media's view is shared by both European governments and the Obama administration. For years now the Europeans have accepted the legally unsupportable Arab claim that all Jewish presence in areas beyond the 1949 armistice lines is illegal. Since 1993, supported by the Israeli Left, the US government has gradually moved toward adopting this view. And today this view stands at the center of President Barack Obama's emerging policy toward Israel and the Palestinians.

At base, this view assumes two things. First, it assumes that the root of the Arab-Israeli conflict is the absence of Palestinian statehood, and therefore the solution is the establishment of a Palestinian state. The second thing it assumes is that the Palestinian demand that any territory that Israel transfers to Palestinian control must first be ethnically cleansed of all Jewish presence is completely innocent and acceptable.

 

OBAMA MADE clear that this is the view of his administration on two occasions in the past week. First, at a news conference before he departed for his European tour, he announced that as far as his administration is concerned, the only way of contending with the Arab conflict with Israel is by establishing a Palestinian state. In his words, "It is critical for us to advance a two-state solution."

And second, last Thursday in London, Obama made clear that he supports the mass expulsion of Jews from Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria (as well as the Golan Heights), when he announced his support for the so-called Saudi peace plan.

The Saudi plan, issued as a propaganda stunt by Saudi King Abdullah during a meeting with New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman in 2002, calls for Israel to commit national suicide by removing itself to within the indefensible 1949 lines and accepting millions of hostile foreign Arabs as citizens in its rump state in exchange for "regular" relations with the Arab world.

Shlomo Nativ's murder shows clearly that Obama and his supporters are viewing the Arab conflict with Israel through a distorted lens. Their interpretation of both the nature of the conflict and its likely resolution are wrong.

 

IT TAKES A CERTAIN type of person to hack a child to death with an ax. In the case at hand, Nativ's murderer actually tried to kill seven-year-old Yair Gamliel as well. But unlike Nativ, the first grader managed to escape with a fractured skull.

Nativ of course was not the first child to be brutally murdered by Palestinian terrorists. Kobi Mandell and Yosef Ish-Ran were also 13 when they were stoned to death by a mob as they gathered wood for a bonfire in 2001. In 2003 five-month-old Shaked Avraham was shot in her crib by a Palestinian terrorist who pushed his way into her home. In 2002 five-year-old Matan Ohayon, four-year-old Noam Ohayon and their mother Revital Ohayon were murdered in their home in Kibbutz Metzer. And the list goes on and on and on.

It takes a special type of person to murder a child. And it takes a special type of society to support such behavior. Palestinian society is a special society. It has become routine, indeed it has become expected that in the aftermath of successful murders of Israelis - including children - Palestinians distribute candy in public celebrations.

In 2002 for instance, when word got out about the terrorist who barged into Nina Kardashov's bat mitzva party in Hadera and massacred six people, the masses took to the streets in neighboring Tulkarm to celebrate. That particular attack was carried out by a Fatah terrorist employed by the US-trained Palestinian Authority security forces. The Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) and the IDF now reportedly believe that Nativ was also murdered by a Fatah terrorist.

 

TO CELEBRATE the terrorist murder of children and to glorify child murderers as heroes is to celebrate and glorify the nullification of life - or at least the life of the target society. This is the case because at the most basic philosophical level, children represent the notion that life is intrinsically valuable. Since children haven't yet had the chance to accomplish great and lasting things for humanity, all they can give us is the promise of a future.

The fact that Palestinian terrorists target children specifically - both inside and outside the 1949 lines - and that Palestinian society celebrates their murder tells us that the two foundational assumptions upon which Obama and his supporters base their policies toward Israel and the Middle East are false. It is not the absence of a Palestinian state that stands at the root of the conflict, and it is not the presence of Israeli communities, or "settlements," beyond the 1949 armistice lines that renders the conflict intractable.

Instead, the root of the conflict is the Arab world's rejection of Israel's right to exist - regardless of its size. And the reason the conflict is intractable is because hatred of Israel and Jews is so deep and endemic in both Palestinian society and the wider Arab world that they view the very existence of Jews - including Jewish children - in Israel as an unacceptable affront to their sensibilities. Indeed, the Jewish presence both within and beyond the 1949 armistice lines is so unacceptable that murdering Jews at every opportunity is perceived as an acceptable and indeed heroic undertaking.

 

THIS BEING the case, the question necessarily arises, why are these basic facts so assiduously ignored by people like Obama who should know better? Why did Sen. John Kerry, who chairs the US Senate's Foreign Relations Committee, say in late February, "Nothing will do more to make clear our seriousness about turning the page [in US relations with the Arab world] than demonstrating - with actions rather than words - that we are serious about Israel's freezing settlement activity in the West Bank?"

Why did Secretary of State Hillary Clinton attack Israel during her visit last month for lawfully destroying illegal Arab houses in Jerusalem?

Why are Obama's supporters from Peace Now to the Arab League to The Washington Post and Haaretz editorial boards urging him to coerce the Netanyahu government to accept a complete halt to all building activities for Jews in Judea and Samaria?

The answer unfortunately is that in their actions, Obama, his colleagues and supporters are not motivated by facts. Instead they are motivated by a desire to ignore the facts. They wish to believe that the existence of Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria is a primary obstacle to peace because doing so allows them to ignore the fact that the reason there is no peace is because Palestinians and their Arab and Iranian brethren refuse to peacefully coexist with Israel regardless of its size. Accepting such bitter realities would make it impossible for them to move forward with their agenda of appeasing the Arab world because it would force them to acknowledge that the Arab world is unappeasable.

And that's the thing of it. At base, the so-called settlements are nothing but an excuse for appeasers to curry favor with the Arabs by blaming Israel for the absence of peace while ignoring the Arabs' bigotry, hatred and aggression. What these Israeli communities represent is nothing more than an assertion of Israeli rights to land - whether that land is within or beyond the 1949 armistice lines. If these communities didn't exist - as they no longer exist in Gaza - then a surrogate, such as the IDF which protects other Israeli land, would be found to replace them.

And if the IDF weren't around - as it isn't in Gaza or in southern Lebanon - then the appeasers would blame another surrogate, such as the Israeli naval quarantine of Gaza, or Israel's control over the town of Ghajar along the Lebanese border for the Arabs' bigotry, hatred and aggression against it.

Here it should be noted that there is no difference in principle between the way the likes of the Obama administration and its supporters treat Israel and the way they treat the US and its non-Israeli allies. When on Sunday Obama responded to North Korea's launch of a long-range ballistic missile by announcing that he wishes to all but disarm the US of its nuclear arsenal, he was effectively arguing that US strength is to blame for North Korea's aggression. He did what amounts to the same thing when he apologized to the Iranian regime for supposed US arrogance. By Obama's lights, now that the US is humble, the Iranians may one day stop calling for its destruction, waging war against it in Iraq and Afghanistan and building a nuclear arsenal.

Then too, when Denmark's Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen reportedly agreed to apologize to the Islamic world for Denmark's independent * Jyllands-Postens* 2005 publication of cartoons of Muhammad in exchange for Turkish support for his candidacy for NATO secretary-general, he was accepting that it is Western civilization - with its freedom of speech - that is to blame for Islamic aggression and intolerance.

In the end then, the truth exposed by Shlomo Nativ's brutal murder on Thursday in Bat Ayin is twofold. First, it demonstrated that the so-called settlements have no relevance whatsoever to the intractability of the Arab-Israeli conflict. When your enemy hates you so much that he hacks your children to pieces, there is nothing you can do, short of committing suicide, that will appease him.

Second, it reminded us of what appeasement places at risk. By attempting to appease the unappeasable, all that successive Israeli, American and European governments have done is strengthen our enemies at the expense of our security and freedom.

 

Caroline B. Glick is the senior Middle East Fellow at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, DC and the deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post.

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.