THINK-ISRAEL features essays and commentaries that provide context for current events in Israel. The war Islam is waging against Israel and the West is top priority. We report on global anti-Semitism, Islamism and creeping Sharia.We aim to make sense of what's going on.
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What we are talking about in the July-August 2011 Issue
1. In Islam, the behavior of the pious Muslim in all aspects of his life is modeled on the words and actions of a 7th century prophet. Marrying a child is sanctioned because Mohammed married the child Aisha. This is very different from Judaism, where customs and life styles flow from the Law. King David was reprimanded for sending Uriah to his death so that David could marry his widow. If Mohammed had behaved as had David, I suspect that today a Moslem's desire for a woman would be considered an acceptable reason for destroying her husband. Basing Islamic law on specific behavior rather than on general laws makes change almost impossible. A law will generally encompass different modes of behavioral expression. Mimicking the behavior of an individual is more specific and thus more resistant to change.
2. the outrageous bias of the U.N and the E.U. in lending their prestige and power to the attempt to destroy Israel has some unwelcome repercussions. The massacre by Anders Breivik may be an early harbinger of a new trend: disgruntled ethnic and national groups may be deciding that terrorizing people as the Palestinian Arabs do is more effective than writing letters. Also, allowing Iran to develop a nuclear bomb might set off a chain reaction of political readjustments in the area which can only contribute to its instability.
3. The U.N. is legally bound by the way the League of Nations divided the Ottoman Empire. The League created many of the current Arab states. With the same authority, it assigned a tiny portion of the Middle East -- what is now Israel, Samaria, Judea, Gaza and the Golan -- irrevocably to the Jewish people. The trust was transferred to the U.N., the successor to the League. Were the U.N. to decide to wipe out Israel by planting another Arab state in Biblical Israel, what does that do to the legality of the present-day Arab states? Such a move might finally shake Israel out of its passivity. A determined Israel would immediately annex Samaria and Judea. A long-term solution for separating Palestinian Arabs and Jews would be to create a homeland for the Arabs somewhere in the vast land holdings the Arabs own.
Read on!
In this section, we discuss the lock-and-key relationship of Islam and particular conditions that it needs in order to thrive. We start with Islam's insistence on treating women (and homosexuals, slaves and members of all other religions) as inferiors. As much as we Westerners would like to assume that Islam will outgrow its archaic ideas and come to adopt more tolerant attitudes, unfortunately, this can not happen. The core of Islam is Muhammad, that most perfect of men. His actions are to be emulated; his commands are irrevocable.
So there is no way to modify attitudes and behavior yet stay within the tenets of the religion. Every other ethnic and religious group more or less modifies its behavior to conform to the laws and acceptable life styles of the host country. Muslims can not do that; they can not redefine concepts, attenuate some practices, abandon other practices, yet retain the essence of their religion.
When Muslims move to non-Islamic countries, pious Muslims, bolstered by their mullahs and head men, will seek to modify their environment according to their religious requirements and the customs and practices that are the outgrowth of Islam. They will not stop their demands until they can live fully under sharia law. It is important we recognize this, because the environment under which Islam will thrive doesn't just inconvenience us; it means that we would need to surrender our way of life to it. We would then be living our lives to suit Islam, not ourselves.
This essay discusses a subject ignored when Islam is declared a peaceful religion: the appalling way the ordinary Muslim -- even a Muslim living in modern countries -- is conditioned to treat women by the tenets of Islam. Declaring the man as the supreme arbiter of his household with unquestioned power to compel obedience may sound something between quaint and ludicrous, but it isn't funny when we finally understand this is how the Koran constructed and authorized fundamental relationships in the Muslim home. Muslim clerics continue to reinforce the idea that in a well-regulated household men are all-powerful and women totally subservient. Given that it is an integral part of Islam, "the position of women is fixed, and rulings, such as the beating of a wife, must remain in place as specified by the Quran", without hope of change within the confines of the religion.
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Thanks to Mohammad's example, child marriages to older, even elderly, men is not unusual in Moslem countries. More than half the girls in Afghanistan are married by 16, many of them as young as 9 or 10 and their husbands are old enough to be their grandfathers. In Nepal, 40% are married by age 15. Raymond Ibrahim provides us with an excellent example of how to try to turn a lemon into lemonade Muslim-style: rationalizing Muhammad's rape of a 9-year old child. The story still leaves a heavily sour taste. As Ibrahim writes, "... here we have a cleric straining to finding a positive aspect to Muhammad's pedophilia — that he was patient and indulgent of his child-bride — while ignoring the heart of it: that the man Islam is built around desired to have sex with a child in the first place." The more we learn, the less do we understand why modern-day Muslim clerics -- and we aren't talking fringe but respected authoritative mullahs and politicians -- would insist Muhammad was a perfect man and should be emulated in all respects.
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What's in a name? This essay by Amil Imani makes it clear that in this
war that Islam is waging globally, words count very much and we need to
know their meaning precisely. To start with, Islam does NOT mean
peace; it means surrender. "When radical Muslims behave in
violent barbaric ways, they are only doing so in obedience to the
dictates of their creed. They are surrendering and sacrificing anything
and everything in service to the will and pleasure of Allah..."
Most are imperfect in their dedication most of the time, but the ideology is that
"[i]f only the masses of Muslims arise and carry out the orders of
Allah, then we would have the promised paradise of Islam on earth as
exemplified by such rules as that of the Taliban, Saudi Arabia, the
Sudan, and of course the Shiite nirvana of the Islamic Republic of
Iran."
It's not a mission the rest of us should want to encourage.
Andrew McCarthy reminds us that the Islamic takeover of Europe has usually not been dramatic -- it has come on little cat feet, slowly but steadily. And when it has dug itself into a place, in what then seems but an instant it announces that the place is a Muslim enclave, even though it is in the middle of a European city. As we saw in Israel where Palestinian Arabs took pot shots at electrical workers come to fix the grid so they could have electricity, in Europe, police, fire and ambulance workers who come to rescue people aren't allowed into Muslim-controlled areas. McCarthy tracks for us the psychotic reasoning engaged in by European politicos and media that allows them to ignore what is happening to their countries by conjuring up a fantasy woven around the notion that Islam is peaceful, therefore the Muslim violence that they are actually seeing must be unreal. And so the Muslims continue to seal off areas that are, as Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi put it, "enclaves that will grow and spread and connect," cancerous enclaves that ignore the law of the land and live by sharia.
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Lest you think the previous article by Andrew McCarthy applies only to Europe and a dominating Islam can't possibly skip across the Atlantic, read this essay by Mark Steyn on what goes on in a public school in Toronto Canada, a public school where Muslims hold prayer services during the school day and menstruating girls are segregated from the other students. The write-up could just as easily come from a scattering of public schools across the country in the U.S.A. More to the point, the article is a snapshot at a time after Muslims became a majority at a school and before they start dictating the curriculum without interference.
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Over the years several studies have correlated the growth of the number of Muslims in a foreign country and "the transition from conciliatory Islam to fascist Islam." See e.g. "Crossroads" in the January-February issue of Think-Israel; and it is a major theme of R.K. Ohri's book "The Long March of Islam" that we serialized from September-October 2009 to March-April 2011. This essay by Richard Butrick describes the changes in the behavior of Muslims as their numbers increase relative to the rest of the population in a non-Muslim country. While varying in some details, the general picture is the same: the Muslims don't want to 'fit in' or assimilate or just live quietly in their own way. They want to run the show and won't stop until they do.
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The previous articles in this set chronicled how Muslims restructure alien environments to conform to a life style imposed on them by Islam. This article asks if the reaction of the host culture helps the process, and, if so, how. This is a fascinating article. I have often wondered why immigrant groups who are polite and conforming and benefit their new country find acceptance difficult while immigrant Muslims who are demanding and unreasonable and tarnished by the brutal terrorism practiced by their co-religionists have no trouble gaining a foothold. They may encounter some mumbling resentment but they soon acquire a multitude of friends in various places who help them gain control of their environment. Babs Barron suggests the Westerner no longer has a strong anchor in religion to guide him in making rational judgments. Moreover, the Westerner is conflicted because his conditioned belief that all life styles are good forces him to ignore the actuality of the Muslim's blatantly bad behavior. Extremist Muslim spokesmen are shamelessly insistent, repeating over and over again that Islam is a peaceful religion -- and this is said with an intimidating undercurrent: people must concede this point, or else... the Westerner feel guilty that he can't fully agree, yet his political philosophy won't let him disagree. Many deal with the conflict by disabling their knowledge of what is actually happening and like the members of any cult end up unconditionally accepting Muslim's dominant voice -- and values.
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It seems almost as if there's a race between the UN and Iran on which one can clobber Israel first. Iran is working industriously at developing a nuclear WID -- Weapon of Israeli Destruction. We have done little to counter Iran's promise of nuclear destruction effectively. We have imposed sanctions -- as Jerrold Sobel sarcastically wrote, "Persian rugs and teas can no longer be exported to the United States and word has it opium will soon be on this list." -- and we have debated among ourselves, quibbling about whether Iran can possibly be serious, even though she is spending her wealth and time and resources and proclaiming her evil intent at every opportunity. Letting Iran proceed has larger ramifications in that it encourages other medieval states to attempt to acquire nuclear weapons either because of fear of Iran or as a sign they too have reached technological puberty.
Meantime, calling it a peace plan, the U.N. plans to carve out an instant State, giving most of Biblical Israel to the hostile terrorist-controlled group of Arabs who became the Palestinian people in an instant some 50 years ago. Or as Daniel Greenfield writes: "a Palestinian state should be created the same way the Palestinian people were. By simply pretending it exists and then doing nothing to prove it. If it worked for manufacturing a Palestinian nationality, why not a state. Why not a planet or a galaxy. No one is using Mars are they?"
Ill-reasoned, inappropriate and unseemly hostility to Israel has characterized the U.N. -- controlled by a large bloc of Muslim states -- for decades. As Abba Eban put it years ago, "If Algeria introduced a UN resolution declaring that the Earth was flat and that Israel had flattened it, it would pass by a vote of 164-13 with 26 abstentions." No matter how they prettify their plan, rewarding the Arabs for their refusal to allow a Jewish state in what they regard as their territory won't lead to peace -- it will only make it easier to kill Jews.
Return to Feature IndexClare Lopez provides us with a clear-eyed understanding of the medieval theological underpinnings of Iran's view of its mission in this world. Its objective is nothing less than "the establishment of an Islamic state worldwide and subjugation of all people on earth to Sharia, or Islamic law." She points out that Iran's alliances, her short-term goals and her foreign policy are derived from and guided by this mission, making Iran "a serious adversary that poses a grave threat to the democratic way of life everywhere." In consequence, "U.S. policy decisions about how to deal with this Iranian regime will be among the most crucial American leadership must make in the coming months." Unfortunately, the present Administration shows little appreciation of what's at stake.
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Observing that the Intelligence Community has never corrected its 2007 estimate that Iran had no nuclear program, Fred Fleitz writes, "One can't underestimate the dangers posed to our country by a U.S. intelligence community that is unable to provide timely and objective analysis of such major threats to U.S. national security — or to make appropriate adjustments when it is proven wrong." Two images come to mind. One, the original Manchurian Candidate movie, which posited that a man likely to become President of the United States could be a Communist mole. As daring as this was, it was beyond imagining that the FBI would have an outreach program to the enemy or that the CIA would buy the enemy time to develop a deadly weapon. The second image is the Iraqi foreign minister, nicknamed Baghdad Bob, denying that Saddam Hussein was in trouble, even though the American troops were at the palace gate.
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The need to deal with Iran's working on a nuclear bomb has been enmeshed in denials by USA intelligence agencies, assertions that just another sanction will do the trick, trivialization, beating down straw men and blasting non-arguments. Amil Imani warns us that it is a "deadly miscalculation" to ignore what Iran continues to do in a steady and dedicated manner. As he says, "What sane person would want to take a chance to wait and see if the mad Mullahs, once they have the bomb, would use it or not?" In fact, can we be sure that only Israel is in danger? The rulers of Iran aren't exactly fond of the USA, either.
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When some daft situation arose, people would say, "The loonies are running the insane asylum." Today, things are much worse as the undisciplined and corrupt U.N., aided and abetted by the European Union and the Obama administration, is moving to run the world. Last year, when Eye on the UN reported the new members of various humanitarian and human rights U.N. committees (click here), it sounded like a bad joke. Now, as Caroline Glick informs us, "... UN members elected Qatar President of the General Assembly and Iran one of the body's vice presidents," and Iran hosted its first "World Without Terrorism Conference."
Dan Friedman who sent in this article notes that "no amount of 'reason' can excise the cancer of Jew-hatred from the body politic once it is allowed to spread. Jew-haters, too, always have powerful 'reasons' of their own. Today, with a big boost from Obama, we have passed the point of no return. The onslaught against the Jews will continue and intensify. That's why it's a privilege to be the first generation in history to live when the Jewish Nation has the military prowess to make the insanity of anti-Semitism an unproductive enterprise. We need to thank our Creator for that. But the drama in the coming years will be about whether or not Israel has the will to unleash its deterrence without obtaining anyone else's permission, save G-d's."
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Barbara Lerner summarizes the outrageous demands made of Israel in the name of peace and in full knowledge that should Israel consent to them, she would not long survive as a state. Anyone who knows the history and geography of the region understands that the projected "peace" borders would be impossible to defend; that allowing others to share control of Judaism's holy city of Jerusalem is as absurd as demanding that other religions have partial control of Islam's holy city of Mecca; and that allowing the putative descendants of the 1948 Arab refugees into Israel would make the Jews a minority in their own country overnight. In similar fashion, amputating parts of Israel to create a Palestinian state would not lead to peace but to a weakened Israel, while her "peace partners" would -- as they have in Gaza -- acquire more space and less supervision so that they can more easily train terrorists and manufacture missiles and explosives.
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THE PEACE PROCESS may be encouraging the spread of Palestinian Arab terrorism because the world "understands" the need for the Po' Palestinians to resort to terror. People flock to help them. The U.N. wants to give them a State with no strings attached and no effort on their part. They don't even have to give up their obsession of destroying Israel. Other groups with a grievance take note that these terrorists are not punished but rewarded and so terror tactics become attractive. Not every would-be terrorist realizes that Europeans who approve of terror when it is directed at Israel may be less understanding when they are the target.
There's a history of course of Irish Catholic bombings. But playing hide-the-bomb has gone down considerably since the IRA gave up all/many/some of their weapons, so the politicians can claim the peace treaty is still in effect. The Basque continue to explode very small bombs and haven't killed anyone -- that's too boring to make a splash in the newspapers. The ones making news the past few years are Muslim -- a Muslim bomber with bad timing in Stockholm last Christmas, rape terror in Sweden, tire burning and arson in France, as well as kidnapping, torturing and massacring a young Jewish man, Ilan Halimi. British Muslims have been active at home bombing the subway and figuratively raising the flag of Islam over what previously were ordinary English communities, as well as traveling to Israel, Pakistan and Mumbai pour le sport. Muslims are also implicated in major disturbances fronted by people with various (virtuous) causes. As Nidra Poller wrote in the August 28, 2011 American Thinker
"Forces working behind specious liberation movements to forge a united Muslim front against the West are weakening us from within by fostering specious protest movements. Citizens of our democracies are led to identify with enraged mobs -- anarchists, altermondialistes, ecologists, striking students and workers, pro-Hamas anti-Zionists, indignados in Athens and Madrid...the list is endless. Palestinian shahid-murderers of Israeli civilians, stampeding Muslims damning 'Mohammed cartoons,' and middle-class students protesting tuition hikes are linked by a chain of sympathy in this danse macabre. People-gathered-in-a-public-square has become the emblem of virtue, and never mind what motivates them or where they are headed. "
Recently in Norway a white European created enough carnage to hit the papers. Of course, given that he was native stock European and could be described as right-wing and a Christian -- which he disclaimed -- he might have gotten publicity even if he'd only nicked a couple of kids.
Muslims who commit mayhem are never called Christianphobes or Westernphobes or Foreignerphobes. Breivik was immediately called an Islamophobe although his discursive manuscript immortalizing his thoughts include text proclaiming his admiration for Al-Qaeda because of their concern for cultural purity, their ability to acquire weaponry and their dedication to their cause. He studied their training manual and acted on the realization that Arabs don't have an exclusive on using terror as a weapon of demoralization and political change. He despised the takeover of his country by Muslims and on the morning of July 22 he put a bomb outside the Prime Minister's office in a Norwegian government administration building complex, because, he asserted, Norwegian politicians have encouraged Muslim immigration. In the afternoon, he used a gun on the some young Norwegians likely to become the next generation of advocates of multiculturalism and unrestricted Muslim immigration.
Among the participants were Crown Prince Haakon, Minister of Foreign Affairs Jonas Gahr Store, Equality Minister Audun Lysbakken (SV), Oslo mayor Fabian Stang (H), American ambassador Barry White and the Bishop of Oslo Ole Christian Kvarme. They were welcomed by Imam Najeeb Naz.
Muslims are usually said to have become terrorists because they are frustrated or poor or picked upon. But the media immediately decided the Norwegian mass murderer had no environmental or personal reasons for what he did. It was all the fault of the anti-Muslim writers that he read. As Nidra Poller wrote:
"While the similarity among mobs in Clapham, Benghazi, Tahrir Square, Strasbourg, etc. goes unnoticed, a churlish campaign has been launched against authors whose writings were cut and pasted into the manifesto of mass murderer Anders Breivik. (But the same censors go berserk if you say that the words of the Koran, the hadith, and the Sunna, no less than sermons in everyone's corner mosque, promote and provoke violence!) ... Conscientious thinkers who warn against the dangers of jihad conquest are assaulted because the white jihadi Anders Breivik was just smart enough to appreciate their works...like millions of other readers...none of them murderers... and too evil to share their humanity."
Time will tell whether Anders Breivik was an aberration like Timothy McVeigh, a white Lone Wolf terrorist who chalked up a body count sufficient to compete with a lot of more or less competent Muslim terrorists and would-be terrorists. Or was Breivik the start of a new phenomenon: other ethnic and national groups acting like a bunch of Arabs, carrying out grotesque acts of violence, seeking to maximize damage, preferring easy targets like children to facing a soldier with a gun.
While we're on the subject, pro-Palestinian
defenders using FBI data cleverly added apples and cockroaches and came out with the startling news that
Muslims only committed 6% of the terror attacks in the USA from
1980-2005. Latinos, Jews, Communists, "Extreme Left Wing Groups" and
"others" did all the rest. This is probably accurate. After all, burning
the flag by Latinos counts as one incident.
Destruction of the World Trade Center by suicide-murderers, all Muslims, counts as one incident.
The FBI Terrorism 1980-2005 Terrorism by Event Report actually compared the 318 incidents by type of terror -- 209 bombings, 43 arsons, 20 malicious destructions, 16 shootings, 10 hostile takeovers, 8 robberies, 4 assaults, 2 hijackings, 2 kidnappings, 2 rocket attacks, 1 assassination and 1 WMD. It understood that the fight against terrorists of the sort that destroyed the World Trade Center was a tad more significant than catching those who release animals from a research laboratory.
The propaganda that the Arabs own the Middle East because they invaded much of it in the 7th Century and controlled it for a time can even affect those Jews whose primary allegiance is to Liberalism, politically-correct free speech, and Underdoggery. They will dedicate themselves to any cause that claims to be Liberal and isn't Jewish or whines it is the underdog and needs protection. The last essay in this section talks about one such Jew.
Return to Feature IndexNidra Poller asks why Norwegians seem to have been mentally unprepared for a terrorist attack. The terrorist, Anders Breivik, managed to stalk and shoot victims for well over an hour before the police finally came. True, police were busy with the aftermath of his morning attack in the heart of Oslo. But distraction and confusion is what the terrorists we know most about -- Arab terrorists -- do. Shouldn't those responsible for public safety know that? None of the victims, engrossed in play acting that Israelis are terrorists and the Palestinian Arabs are innocent lambs, took the initiative in stopping him. Nor did they have security guards, who need to be prepared for a terrorist attack. Even though the Norwegians are embroiled in Middle East politics and favor unfettered Muslim immigration domestically, they acted as if they themselves were immune to attack from those unhappy with their policies. In this case, the irritant was Norway's policy of catering to Muslim immigrants, allowing them to take over neighborhoods and increasingly demanding their convenience be given consideration over the needs of Norway's native population. Breivek used the tools and techniques most used by Muslim terrorists. Will Norway be shocked into understanding they have been reassigned their role in a world-wide drama -- they have gone from the serene role of high level decision maker to that of ordinary victim -- and they can't opt out.
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With the aid of European admirers, Arab terrorism had the best of all possible worlds. At the small cost of a few of their children, they inflicted monstrous and long-lasting physical and psychological damage on Israelis while their Western admirers rationalized their acts with the query, "How else can these defenseless people defend themselves? It's Israel that has the strong military. It's Israel that's in a position to do the right thing and make concessions." And best of all, the intellectual "neutrals" such as Norwegian politicos would sprout legalese, asserting that Israel's response must be proportional, thus neutralizing Israel's military strengths, while secure in the knowledge that Israel would never fight Arab-style - slitting throating and targeting Arab babies isn't their way. What they didn't forsee was that terrorism was made to seem a most attractive weapon, a weapon whose use was not restricted to Arabs. As Barry Rubin in this essay points out that "... terrorism is not an ideology or a movement but merely a strategy: to murder noncombatants systematically and deliberately for political ends in order to get your enemy to give up and your own side to cheer and join up." Monkey see, monkey do. The Norwegians are now in the unenviable position of seeing one of their own turn the terror weapon inward.
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The Norwegians seem to have no concept of the world-class proxy war taking place in the Middle East: the Palestinian Arabs, both those controlled by the Fatah Terror Group and those in Gaza under the thumb of the less polished Hamas, are the foot soldiers of resurgent Islam. The terrorist activities they practice in Israel are eventually emulated and exported. On the other side, Israel, not by its own choice, has been thrown into the front lines and given the role of defending Western values of fair play and 'live and let live.' Ironically, some of those who should be most grateful haven't a clue. One such is Norway's Ambassador to Israel, Svein Sevje, who condemns Norwegian terrorism against Norwegians but condones Arab terrorism against Jews. This is based, he claims, on Israel's occupation of Arab land. Wallace Brand responds in this essay with the actual facts about the so-called Israeli occupation.
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Philip Getz responds to an article called "The Romance of Birthright Israel", in which a young participant trashes the Birthright Israel program, suggesting all sorts of sinister motivations. Getz gets the response just right. He provides us with insight into the narrowed perspectives of pro-palestinian Jews and the preposterous conclusions their adopted ideology can impose. As Getz says, "the only interesting aspect of Feldman's article is how keenly it encapsulates, at its extreme, the syndrome that Birthright was created to combat." One can only hope that someday she will come out of her trance and start using her "Yiddishe kopf."
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This set of articles suggest how Israel should handle the current crisis, where the U.N. plans soon to sanction the illegitimate birth of another Arab state. The terrorists who govern the Arabs in Gaza and in Samaria and Judea (what the media insists on calling the West Bank) have announced they will request the U.N. to grant them a state, carving it out of most of Biblical Israel. Inside Israel, Israeli Arabs and Jewish Marxists who would dismember their own State to satisfy a spurious Arab claim are also in favor of a Palestinian state.
An immediate solution to being besieged to give up land would be to annex Samaria and Judea. Israel has international law on its side, as well as Biblical promise, and an extraordinary history of devotion to the homeland: there were always Jews living in Israel despite having to endure dreadful hardships and Jews kept its memory alive for 2000 years when living in the Diaspora. In recent times, Israel created a modern state out of a malaria-infested, rock-strewn wasteland, a state that in a few short years has benefitted the entire world with innovative electronics and medical techniques. It has served as an instructive example of how to live civilized when barbarians want to reduce you to their level. Even demographic trends are in its favor. It also has the reality underlying the creation of most countries -- it conquered the land fair and square, regaining more of its own land each time the Arab countries invaded Israel to demolish it.
The problem is that Israel is still groggy from years of believing that it must cater to world opinion. Unfortunately, it doesn't have the luxury of deferring action. It must rid itself of Fifth-Column Arabs in Israel and curtail the growth of the Arab population so that it doesn't reach the "take-over" stage of Muslim control of a foreign host. (See Richard Butrick article )
Annexation is a short-term solution. A better solution and one that gives the Arabs that call themselves Palestinians their own land is to give them their own place within the vast land area the Arabs own. See e.g., Section 1 of the September-October 2010 Issue. This will require regional support -- but, after all, the Arab states were responsible for the local Arabs becoming refugees. In fact they created two sets of refugees: Arab and Jewish.
Israel solved the problem of the Jewish refugees from Arab lands -- it made them citizens and helped them reconstruct their lives as Israelis while keeping what they wanted of their old customs and traditions. They did this with no help from the U.N. The wealth and real property the Jews left behind when they were forced to flee is still in the hands of the Arab states.
The Arab countries have resources to solve the other refugee problem -- they are in position to give the Arabs who now call themselves Palestinians room to construct a state somewhere within the 99.99% of the Middle East the Arab own. It could be much larger than Israel and the Territories and still be a tiny portion of the land the Arabs have.
At this point, someone is sure to say: but don't you understand, the Arab refugees want to return to their homeland, just as the Jews did over 2000 years of the Diaspora. The answer is that it is a publicist's dream but a complete lie to say that Israel belongs to the Palestinian people. There is no Palestinian People. There never was a Country or State that was called Palestine. There is no claim by the Palestinian Arabs to land that most of them came to after the Jewish Aliyah made the area economically attractive. The land was owned by the Ottomans for hundreds of years before the Europeans conquered it in WW1, not by Arabs.
It is ludicrous that so many local Arabs have kept their benefits-rich refugee status while living under Arab governance in Gaza, Samaria and Judea. It is pathetic that their pretending that their environment and culture is alien to what they had before their (great) grandparents left Israel -- a few miles down the road -- is accepted by their logic-deficient and history-ignorant sympathizers.
Admittedly, giving the "Palestinians" a state is allowing them to win the "I'm a nuisance" exploitation game, but there are practical reasons to do so. It would wipe out the UNRWA-run ponds where the malaria of terrorism is bred; it would save the ever-growing expense of keeping a large group on perpetual welfare; it would quarantine a group that is a menace not just to Israel but to any of the Arab states that have taken them in. It would eliminate a wild card in an already unstable area of the world. It would remove a distraction so Israel could deal with the very real threat coming from Iran.
For Israel, this is not the time to expel a sizable portion of the half million Jews living in the towns and villages of Samaria and Judea from their homes and businesses, forcing them to flee as refugees to what's left of Israel. It will be impossible to do so without bankrupting the country -- recall that most of the 10,000 Jews of Gaza who were expelled by the Sharon government in 2005 are not yet settled, even though it has already cost much more than even pessimistic projections estimated -- and the contributions the Gazan Jews made to the economy by the sale of their spectacular produce are no more. More to the point, we don't need demoralized Jews, refugees in their own country. Israel is in the forefront of those battling radical Islam. We should help her concentrate on that, not distract her while Iran develops a nuclear bomb.
This set of essays assumes it's o.k. that there be one Jewish state in the Middle East. The first essay is a logical projection of Israel's current conciliatory agreement to a 2-state solution. The other essays look at ways and means to avoiding death by accommodation. They look at two problems that Israel has: a growing Israeli Arabs population, many of whom are radicalized and starting to act as Muslims do in any host country as they become more numerous and see themselves soon reaching critical mass; and an appeasement mentality that is compromising Israel's ability to maintain its sovereignty. It has even infected the IDF.
Return to Feature IndexSteven Plaut brilliantly describes how Israel can be diplomatically hounded to its own death by the combined actions of UN diplomats, the U.S. State Department, and the tutored and continued riotous demands of the Arabs, whose ranks are enlarged by useful idiots volunteering to help the Palestinians gain their rights. Their clamor is backed by support from "world" leaders and meets little resistance from the appeasement mentality of Israeli politicians. The essay is called satire. In point of fact, it is so close to how the Arabs under Arafat and Abbas have bargained -- accepting a final agreement one day, using it as starting point the next -- that the only thing Steven Plaut may have gotten wrong -- should the Israelis let themselves be snookered into giving up land -- is the date. He places it in 2013. It could happen in 2012.
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Jerold Auerbach does what shouldn't be necessary -- he reminds the politicos of the U.N. that its creating a Palestinian State in what was Mandated Palestine would be illegal. It would violate the U.N.'s own role as guarantor that what was Mandated Palestine is held in an irrevocable trust for the Jewish people. Auerbach also explores why Israel has not made this information generally known. He writes, contrasting a secular government and more or less religious settlers: "At best ambivalent - and usually hostile - toward Jews in Judea and Samaria, government officials have resolutely maintained silence about the international guarantees for the 'close settlement' of Jews west of the Jordan River." But that doesn't do away with reality: Israeli settlements are legitimate because Samaria and Judea belong to Israel. They are legally Israel's by the same authority that gave the rest of the Ottoman Middle East to the Arabs. "The Palestinian claim, by contrast, is a contrived recent invention. ... Devised by Arabs who only recently identified themselves as 'Palestinians,' it is built on the foundation of perpetual victimization claims, the international determination to delegitimize Israel, and - perhaps most revealing - the pillaging of Jewish and Zionist history." Annexation by Israel of at least pieces of Samaria and Judea is a low-keyed but necessary solution.
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Steven Kruger puts into perspective the bizarre notion that Jewish land can and should accommodate another state. Of interest is the emphasis given in the article to God's promise to the Jewish people, and how it is ignored by Israel's secular government. "Instead of declaring and enforcing the rights of Jews, the government of Israel continues the touchy-feely policy toward Arabs put in place by left-wing Jews in Mandatory Palestine after World War I." Conversely, Kruger puts little faith in promises made by secular organizations or in the integrity or fairness of what is euphemistically called 'the international community'. He points out that "[i]f implemented, the two-state 'solution' would find a vulnerable Land of Israel, hemmed by an irrational border, and surrounded by a post-Mubarak Egypt, a Hamas-controlled Aza, a post-Abbas 'Palestine,' an Assad-controlled Syria, and a Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon." He rejects this suicidal solution in favor of a 22-state solution, one Jewish, the others Arab.
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If you visit Israel convinced that it keeps its Arabs fearful and oppressed, it will come as a shock to see Arabs walking with ease in all the parks and gardens and malls all over the country. The converse is not true. It is the Jews who are bullied. It is the Jews who are fearful of going into places they will be surrounded by an Arab crowd. Driving a car on a highway when 'prankish' Arab teenagers gather to pelt cars with rocks has become an unsolicited adventure. Jews have learned to stay out of Arab villages, where the inhabitants can suddenly become violent. Jews routinely have their cars stolen, their herds stolen, their orchards burned, their olive trees uprooted. When Israel reclaimed eastern Jerusalem in 1968 after Jordan and Egypt failed their second try at destroying Israel, Israel foolishly did not eject the Arabs who were squatting in the homes of Jews that Jordan had evicted in 1948. It now requires protracted legal battles to reclaim the Jewish houses one at a time, while the Arabs illegally take State land wholesale and built illegally without official protest. To add to the injury: the probability is that the police and the judiciary will ignore or minimize the damage that the Arabs do. Zvi November paints an accurate picture of Arabs in Israel, not forgetting to write about those -- number unknown -- who genuinely appreciate living in Israel. In general, however, the Arabs enjoy both the medical, educational and psychological benefits of living in Israel and the pleasure of playing victim to convince easily-gulled Westerners they are the suffering victims of Israeli inhumanity.
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For many years now, the IDF has not emphasized that its primary mission is to defend Israel. It has fought wars as if a major objective was to avoid raising the ire of hostile politicians and media. In Jenin when they hunted for terrorists, they were scrupulous about not injuring Arab women and children, at the cost of 23 soldiers dying, most of them lured into booby traps by the same children they were protecting from harm. In the Gaza campaign, they avoided wholesale shooting at groups that were shielding the terrorists. They have gone to absurd lengths, including announcing they were coming, so that the most that could be accomplished was the destruction of an empty building. Given the anti-Israel feeling the Arabs have successfully generated, their scruples have bought them nothing, not even a pat on the back from a hostile press. And isn't it immoral for the IDF to have valued the lives of an enemy that started the war and will not stop warring above the lives of its own people? Elliot Jager examines the question of morality when the enemy has no scruples. This is a thoughtful examination of the Jewish concepts of fighting a war. Jager cites the political philosopher Asa Kasher who "believes that Israel has a front-line role in helping the enlightened world develop the legal and moral tools to confront the scourge of terrorism."
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The previous essay described how well Israeli Arabs are treated in Israel and how they have responded. This essay looks at Arab behavior from the point of view of the Israeli, who sees the Arabs grabbing land and creating enclaves that keep out Jews. Josh Hasten's writes of an interview with Nadia Matar, a remarkable woman who heads Women in Green (WIG), a group that understands that if Israel is to be Jewish, Jews must be able to go anywheres in their own land, without fear and without restriction. Specifically, WIG works to keep a presence on land that is stealthily being taken over by Arabs (who of course instantly claim they've been in that place since ancient times). As a personal anecdote, on a trip to Samaria and Judea with the AFSI group, we drove to an army base that had been evacuated without notice and without concern that letting it be taken over by the local Arabs would put the surrounding Jewish villages in jeopardy. The army's advice to the Jews was: stay out of the way of the Arabs. Avoid trouble. WIG was there, saying by their actions: this is our country and we won't give up an inch. If Israel survives its current appeasement mentality, it will in large measure be due to patriots like Nadia and the Women in Green.
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In this essay, Yoram Ettinger first lays out the problem. The problem is that the problem has been misstated as one of Arab concern for the Palestinian Arab, when in point of fact the Arab states make use the Palestinian Arabs as supposed victims, but care nothing about them. Were Israel to disappear tomorrow and the Palestinian Arabs take all the land they claim as theirs, it wouldn't make a dent in the disarray and potential disasters in the Middle East. That being said, Ettinger suggests how Israel should be reacting, specifically with subduing Palestinian Arab terrorism, and, more generally, how to do the necessary and not be inhibited by fear of foreign repercussions.
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The Hadar-Israel Organization reminds us of the last time that Israel was divided. It happened just after Israel became a state in 1948. Her neighbors invaded the new-born state intent on destroying it. They didn't succeed but Jordan took over the eastern section of Jerusalem, kicked out or killed all the Jews, destroyed the synagogues and installed Arabs in the Jewish houses. It wasn't until 1967 that Israel reclaimed that part of Jerusalem the Arabs had started calling East Jerusalem and claiming they had lived there since time immemorial. The photographs speak for themselves.
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The previous article recorded that the Jews were forced out of their homes in the Eastern part of Jerusalem in 1948. This article by Omri Ceren follows up on a major consequence. As he writes: "But because they [the Jordanians] succeeded in doing that [occupying Jerusalem] for almost 20 whole years — in contrast to 1,000 years of continuous Jewish life — the Obama administration insists that the Jewish State needs to cede portions of East Jerusalem to a future Palestinian entity on demographic grounds. Very even-handed!"
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This is where our readers get a chance to write opinions and editorials and share articles they find informative. The Blog-Eds page for the month is updated every few days.
There is a separate file that is the index for the articles on the Blog-Ed page. You can access an article immediately from this index by clicking on the item in the index.
To access the Index, click the "Blog-Eds List" box in the Blue Strip on the top of the Blog-Ed page.
September 2011 BLOG-EDS
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October 2011 BLOG-EDS
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