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Reaping the Tempest

by Yashiko Sagamori
November 16th, 2005

Recent events have led me to the sad conclusion that I am not a compassionate person.

Thus, I found no compassion within myself when I heard of the triple bombing in Amman on 11/9. Amman is the capital of Jordan. According to the latest trends in geography, the Jordanian population consists mostly of “Palestinians”. They never say who the rest of the Jordanians are, which leads me to believe those must be members of the Hashemite family transplanted from the Arabian Peninsula by the British 8 or 9 decades ago, when the British decided to hand the peninsula to the House of Saud.

The “Palestinians” lead the Islamic world in suicide bombings. The responsibility for the bombings in Amman was claimed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Osama bin Laden's Gauleiter in Iraq. Mr. Zarqawi happens to be a Jordanian. Therefore, he is either a close relative of the king, or a “Palestinian”, or both.

Unlike most suicide bombings perpetrated by Arabs, this one claimed not a single Jewish or American life. All its victims — 57 killed and, roughly, twice as many wounded — were Arabs. Some of them happened to be high-level officials of the so-called “Palestinian”, so-called “Authority”, the leaders of a terrorist group that was on the forefront of jihad long before jihad became popular in Europe. They were caught in the middle of a wedding reception, just like so many Jews who have been killed or maimed by an Arab bomb in the middle of their own joyous occasions.

It doesn't make any difference to me whether those “Palestinian” VIP's just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time or were targeted deliberately. But I don't believe in sheer coincidences, and if I am right to be skeptical in this particular case, the bombing was a manifestation of the unfolding political process within the PA. In this case, I am bitterly disappointed they hadn't invited Jimmy Carter to observe Arab democracy in action.

Am I glad the three hotels in Amman were bombed? Of course, not. I might have been, had there been even a scintilla of hope that, in the aftermath of having been senselessly victimized by their own, Muslims might reconsider what they have been doing to the world. But there is no such hope. The “Arab street” promptly condemned the crime and announced that the people who had committed it could not have been Muslim.

At first, it was just a metaphor. A sales clerk at a haberdashery in Nazi Germany might have meant the same thing when he admonished a member of Hitlerjugend caught shoplifting, saying, “You are not a real Nazi!” Of course, the shoplifter was a perfectly real Nazi, and the bombers were perfectly real Muslims. But the “Arab street” continued brainstorming in the same promising direction and quickly deduced that Israel must have been the guilty party behind the bombing.

Why not? Arabs have blamed Israel for everything, from 9/11 to terrorist acts committed by Saudis in Saudi Arabia. Why not blame Israel for a mass murder of Jordanians committed by a Jordanian?

By the way, people who came to that paradoxical conclusion were not extremists. They were not members of Al Qaeda, or Hamas, or Islamic Jihad, or Islamic Brotherhood, or CAIR. They were normal — by Muslim standards — people whose lives are spent in a daily struggle for survival, the Arabic version of the rat race we all are too familiar with. They go to work in the morning and come home at night. They raise their kids hoping their lives will be easier. In their own way, they are truly honorable people, always ready to prove it by sacrificing the life of a misbehaving sister or daughter on the altar of their family honor. They are not extremists. They are as main stream as a person can be in his or her community.

But why Israel? Here is the explanation provided by the New York Times:

“People don't blame Israel out of a vacuum,” said Rami Khoury, a Jordanian political commentator and writer based in Lebanon. “There is a very strong historical reason, because Israel has caused a lot of grief for Arab people one way or another.”

One way or another. Israel has been the target of Arab aggression ever since 1947, when the UN did just about the only sensible thing in its entire history, having reluctantly restored Israel's rights to a small part of its historic homeland. If you asked an educated Arab for an example of an evil deed committed by Israel against Arabs, there is only one thing he would be able to tell you without resorting to the usual anti-Semitic lies: Israel exists. The mere fact of Israel's existence hurts Muslims, in general, and Arabs, in particular, more than anything Israel has done or could have done to them in the last 60 years, because nothing demonstrates the falsity of Islam as convincingly as the mere fact of Israel's existence.

What happened in Jordan is just one example of how evil unleashed by evil people inevitably comes back to hurt them. You don't think that the eternal backwardness of the Muslim world is correlated with its eternal hatred of Jews? Well, think again. Murderous hatred — towards the Jews, towards the “infidels”, towards each other — has defined the life of a Muslim since the very first days of Islam. Hatred is an extremely powerful thing, especially when it is shared by 1.2 billion people. But it provides a very poor foundation for building a future. This is why Islam has been stagnant for 14 centuries.

Jordanian authorities have made several arrests in connection with the bombing; all those arrested were Arabs, not a single Jew among them. The “Arab street” remains unconvinced. But do you think those arrests will prevent the next mass murder of Arabs by Arabs? If you are not sure, ask why none of the many successful targeted assassinations conducted by Israel has stopped the Arab aggression? Try to remember how many times you have heard that the IDF shot and killed a local terrorist leader in one of Arab settlements in Israel. Why hasn't the terror infrastructure collapsed after suffering so many casualties?

Simply because every successful elimination of a terrorist leader provides a career opportunity for his many followers. Islam, the ideology of jihad, remains intact. The “Arab street”, the community that produces terrorists, remains intact. Individuals willing to sacrifice their lives to the cause cannot be deterred by arrests or even executions. Is there a solution? You bet there is, but only in theory.

Why only in theory? Because it can come either from the Muslims or from the West, and I don't think we should expect the Muslims to end jihad unless overwhelming deadly force from the West leaves them no alternative at all. Will the West do that?

No, because the West made its choice decades ago, when it decided to support the Arabs against the Jews. The West decided that Islam was not the enemy long before President Bush announced it to the world. Islam was just another religion. Zionism was the enemy, the source of clear and present danger. And when Islam sent tens of millions of its followers to the European and American shores, there was no reason for the host countries to reject the invaders.

I couldn't describe this situation better than the Spanish journalist Sebastian Villar Rodriguez, whose short article I reproduce here, even though most of you read it recently, when it was making rounds on the Internet. Here it is:

Europe died in Auschwitz

I was walking along Raval (Barcelona) when all of a sudden I understood that Europe died with Auschwitz. We assassinated 6 million Jews in order to end up bringing in 20 million Muslims! We burnt in Auschwitz the culture, intelligence and power to create. We burnt the people of the world, the one who is proclaimed the chosen people of God. Because it is the people who gave to humanity the symbolic figures who were capable of changing history (Christ, Marx, Einstein, Freud...) and who is the origin of progress and wellbeing.

We must admit that Europe, by relaxing its borders and giving in under the pretext of tolerance to the values of a fallacious cultural relativism, opened it's doors to 20 million Muslims, often illiterates and fanatics that we could meet, at best, in places such as Raval, the poorest of the nations and of the ghettos, and who are preparing the worst, such as the 9/11 and the Madrid bombing and who are lodged in apartment blocs provided by the social welfare.

We also have exchanged culture with fanaticism, the capacity to create with the will to destroy, the wisdom with the superstition. We have exchanged the transcendental instinct of the Jews, who even under the worst possible conditions have always looked for a better peaceful world, for the suicide bomber. We have exchanged the pride of life for the fanatic obsession of death. Our death and that of our children.

What a grave mistake have we made!!!

Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss-born Islamic scholar and activist confidently declared Islam a European religion. He is right. Even if France deports every hostile non-citizen, there will be enough French Muslims left to continue destroying the country and there is absolutely nothing the real French can do short of defying President Bush and declaring Islam an enemy. But you aren't going to hold your breath waiting for the French — or even for us — to do something that takes courage. The same process of erosion, the same creeping jihad is going on all over Europe. Therefore, Europe no longer belongs to the Christians. Therefore, Europe is no longer a part of the Judeo-Christian civilization.

Can our civilization survive in the United States alone? It couldn't even under the best of circumstances, because the very essence of it demands constant exchange of trends and ideas. The culture of any single civilized country will inevitably stagnate in isolation.

Plus, our current circumstances are far from being the best. Our demise began long before 9/11. Do you remember yourselves spitting at wounded American soldiers coming home from Vietnam? Let me tell you: No country can survive that. No country can survive its betryal of its own soldiers. Of course, America is too big to turn belly up overnight. It took Europe six decades to notice that it is dead. The United States will also bask in its delusion of grandeur a while longer. But we all know that it has already stopped answering the ever multiplying challenges to its superpower status.

How did that happen? Simple. The malignant anti-establishment infantilism of the 60's became a foundation for an all-powerful anti-American political establishment. The healthy competition of political ideas was smothered by political correctness. The brave new interpretation of American laws by activist judges has turned this formerly great country upside down and inside out. Displays of the Ten Commandments and nativity scenes are outlawed like public nudity, while the White House celebrates Ramadan in a deliberately conspicuous manner. And the first thing the President of the United States proclaims in the wake of the worse defeat this country has ever suffered in any war is that Islam is not the enemy. I can't tell you how enormous my contempt for Bill Clinton is. But the damage Bill Clinton has done to this country doesn't really look so bad compared to the developing legacy of Bush-43.

As a result of their combined efforts, the United States, which can only exist as a Christian superpower, is neither.

When I think that anti-Semitism in one form or another has been the underlying cause of the death of our civilization, I can't help thinking about Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's Minister of Propaganda. At the beginning of his career he was a run-of-the-mill Jew hater. At the end of his career he murdered his six children, believing he was saving them from a fate worse than death. Consider this. Even a monster like Joseph Goebbels was a human being. The understanding of that simple, purely biological fact allows us to imagine ourselves in his shoes, to touch the shadow of the absolute horror he had to live through in the final hours of his horrible life. Do you think he deserves compassion? Forgiveness? Anything but the deepest depths of hell?

As I said, I am not a compassionate person. I believe that Arabs deserve the misery they have lived in for 14 centuries. I believe that our civilization should have kept multiplying their misery until Islam, like cannibalbsm, became a part of humanity's barbaric past. That simple task was well within our reach, and we are now paying for our failure to not even consider it, much less accomplish it. I believe we deserve what's coming to us, and I find very little compassion in my heart.

There is only one problem. Where will our children live?

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