Posted on 10/06/2001 10:02:00 AM PDT by Masada
Disaster doesn't always bring out the best in us.
Sometimes, tragically, it brings out the worst. A case in point: the finger-pointing in the wake of the September 11 terror attacks, seeking to blame the atrocities on America's supposedly misguided support for Israel — and on Jewish Americans who supposedly manipulate the system to tilt our policy the wrong way.
No, it's not a national groundswell. You hear it mainly on the margins, and if past experience is a guide, it will stay there. Still, the variety and persistence of the finger-pointers is startling: left-wing professors in California, right-wing fanatics in Idaho, Arab-American activists in Michigan, smart-alec journalists in New York. There's enough of it to be worrying.
In reply, important voices are being raised from within the Jewish community, declaring that the attacks and the hatred behind them have nothing to do with America's support for Israel. Osama bin Laden and his ilk are motivated, we are reminded, by larger, more global issues: suspicion of modernity, secularism, democracy and the Western civilization that champions them. On the policy plane, his passion is driving American troops off the holy soil of Arabia. Israel isn't on his screen, except perhaps tangentially, as one more example of the West's corrupting influence.
The fact is, things are a bit more complicated than that. Bin Laden and his allies are driven, above all, by an extremist version of fundamentalist Islam. And Islam, as many of those same defenders of Israel have noted countless times, regards the mere existence of a Jewish state in the Middle East as a cardinal theological challenge. Indeed, pessimists in the pro-Israel community have been pointing for decades to the power of Islam's territorial imperative as a reason to dismiss Israel-Arab peacemaking as impossibly naïve. It's hard to see how that reading squares with the notion that the world's most dangerously fanatical Islamist just isn't interested in Israel.
But we needn't search the theology texts to divine bin Laden's motives. He's spelled them out repeatedly in various public statements. He's on a self-declared holy war against "Crusaders and Jews," with a three-fold goal: "liberating" Mecca and the rest of Arabia from American "occupation," "liberating" Al-Aqsa in Jerusalem from Jewish "occupation" and lifting the Western embargo on Iraq. They're always stated in that three-fold form, and usually in that order.
The fact is, Israel is one of the issues, though not the only one, driving bin Laden and his cohorts. It is foolish to deny it; that merely undermines the credibility of Israel's defenders at a time when Israel sorely needs defending. The best defense is always the truth.
And the truth is that America and Israel are allies, not because of some cabal of Jewish lobbyists, but because their two peoples demand it. America's support for Israel is not misguided, but profoundly moral. America and Israel share a deep community of values. They are partners in the democratic enterprise, cities on a hill devoted to something larger than themselves. Both are imperfect, at times painfully so. Both become impatient when their imperfections are pointed out. Still, both are societies striving to represent the better nature of humankind, and for that reason they deserve defending.
If America's defense of her values sometimes puts her on the firing line, then that's the right place to be. That's not a hard case to make. Most Americans, like most Israelis, understand it instinctively.
Right you are chump. Israel has 1,000,000 Arab citizens and 100,000 illegal alien Arabs living within it's borders. Contrast this with the Arab nations your love so much. They are now judenrein (free of Jews) just the way the Nazis liked to do it. The Arabs pushed out all their Jews post 1948.
And now you and the Pallies want a judenrein West Bank and Gaza.....Figures, eh?
No one's going to do that anywhere while noncombatants are going to be attacked, like they are every day by Israel.
If we start attacking Afghanistan and do to them what Israel is doing to the Palestinians, we aren't going to get any help from the local Afghan people either.
If Israel is serious about working with local people, it must first demonstrate to those people they will not be killed just for going about their daily existence.
You said "post 1948." Which means the Jews started the process, for which you blame the Arabs.
The "Palestinians" should quit acting like children and cleanse the terrorism out by themselves - unless of course they have no desire to do so.
And how are they going to do this? Do you want to give any of them weapons to do the job with? Any other form of logistical or moral support?
No you won't. "Terrorism" is just an excuse to keep the lid on. Even a few dead Jews here and there is seen as a necessary price to pay for a Greater Israel.
Jews wanted their own nation to defend themselves from Arab attacks. This is why the Mandate was split into two areas. Because Arabs and Jews could not live together. Any people without their own nation in the MidEast suffers. Just look how the Kurds are knocked about.
A Pallie nation is fine with me if Israel has rock solid guarantees it will not turn into an Afghanistan style staging area for Palestinian terrorism and aggression. The odds say it would be!
They were given weapons! The PA "police force" was armed and trained by Israel and the CIA under Oslo. Part of the PA police force duties included confiscating arms and disarming the militias (Annex I, Art. II, 1 and art. XI). The PA abrogated the Interim Agreement and expanded the police force beyond the permissible limits (now around 40,000 - 50,000). They were supposed to extradite terrorists, arrest them, etc. They had some show arrests shortly after Oslo but that was the extent of it. The militias are now stronger and better armed then ever. What a failure. Of course, it's obvious they had no desire to carry out any of these stipulations. Just another tactic of ruse and attrition by the PA leadership against Israel.
This is where you and the rest of the [non-Jewish] world start to diverge.
They do.
We do.
And even more important, we look to see whether one side or both sides are really interested in any constructive solutions.
The country of Israel presently has a Prime Minister who does not appear to. And the venomous and vitriolic way that Israeli supporters like yourself attacks anyone who does not back Israel 100% also leads to this conclusion.
Whose country is it, anyway?
If it's the Israeli's, then they've got to do the dirty work and at the same time abide by the rules of law regarding criminal justice the rest of the Western world adheres to.
If it's the Palestinians, give them their own state.
You can't have it both ways. If you want the Palestinians to get rid of the terrorists themselves, to benefit Israeli Jews, then the Palestinians are going to need some positive incentives to compensate them for this difficult task.
Barak tried and he was spit on by the "hapless" "Palestinians".
Got any other bright ideas? How about the Arab countries agree that the "Palestinians" can live and work in those vast Arab and Islamic lands. Israel can throw in the Gaza for good measure and the Arabs can get out of the West Bank. They can't live in peace with Israel anyway. The Arab "Palestinians" should have listened to this guy. It's not too late:
In 1939, Mojli Amin, a member of the Arab Defense Committee for Palestine, drew up a proposal, published in Damascus and distributed among Arab leaders, entitled "Exchange of Populations." Amin proposed that
"all the Arabs of Palestine shall leave and be divided up among the neigboring Arab countries. In exchange for this, all the Jews living in Arab countries will go to Palestine...The exchange of populations should be carried out in the same way that Turkey and Greece exchanged their populations. Special committees must be set up to deal with the liquidation of Jewish and Arab property....I fear, in truth, that the Arabs will not agree...But in spite of this, I take upon myself the task of convincing them..."(from the Central Zionist Archives-525/5630).
The U.N. Conference on Racism attempted to brand Zionism as Racist and Fascist. Is this your guideline for dealing with the Jewish Problem?
Says you. Say the Israelis. What do the Palestinians say? What's their side? Any time they try to put forth their issues, the Zionists call it "Arabprop" and big old bad nazism/fascism. And Isrel won't let any objective observers mediate on grounds of "national sovereignty"
Don't agree with this factual assertion. If the "moderates" exist and are suppressed by the PA leadership then they should seek asylum in those benevolent and freedom-loving Arab Islamic and Islamic lands where they can argue and write for moderation and co-existence. Sorry to bring it up again. But the historical answer to why there are no strong moderate voices among the "Palestinians" is explainable by this historical fact as stated by the good Islamic professor:
Concluding that anti-Zionism is the logical outgrowth of Islamic faith is wrong. This conclusion represents the false transformation of Islam from a religion into a secularized ideology.This factual assertion is supported by "reasonable" non-Zionist historians such as Benny Morris (New Historian but not blatantly phony guys like Finklestein) and Zionist historians as well. Basically it means the "Palestinian" people have been largely nazified.Such a false transformation of Islam was in fact made by the late Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el-Husseini. He is the one person most responsible, both morally and materially, for the repeated Arab defeats in their conflict with the Jews in Israel.
Husseni not only incited Arabs against Jews. He also encouraged the torture and murder of all Arabs who correctly understood that Arab cooperation with Jews was a precious opportunity for the development of the Land of Israel. Husseini ended his woeful life by putting his perverted religious teachings at the service of the evil and pagan Nazis.
After Husseini came Jamal al-Din 'Abd al-Nasser. Nasser based his policy on Pan-Arabism, hatred and contempt for Jews, and an alliance with the atheistic Soviet Union. Nasser's terrible choices were critical factors in maintaining Arab backwardness. Fortunately, most of Nasser's mistakes were afterward corrected by the martyr Anwar Sadat. (3)
After the defeat of Nasserianism, Islamic fundamentalist movements made anti-Zionism the primary feature of their propaganda. They presented the negation of any Jewish rights to the Land of Israel as rooted in authentic Islam and derived from authentic Islamic religious principles. (SHAYKH PROF. ABDUL HADI PALAZZI)
I repeat my argument:
Yeah, and I repeatedly disagree with it.
About the 1968 Allon Plan -- not every Israeli plan has to be negotiated. What precedes negotiation is a unilateral decision -- whether by Israel or its neighbors
Israel "unilaterally" (because ALL the other Arab Islamic States would not) met and negotiated with Anwar Sadat. Israel negotiated a land for peace agreement with Egypt hoping that the Arabs would follow the lead of Sadat. Instead, Sadat was hated by his Arab Islamic brethren and lay dead a few years later by assassins bullets in a reviewing stand, not by a lone sick gunman, but by assassins of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Afterwards, the Jihads and Intifadas continued against Israel.
Your solutions are no solutions. Time to pick up the mantle of exchange of population. Arabs out of West Bank into vast Arab and Islamic lands. Israel would likely throw the Gaza in for good measure and give billions of dollars to the "exchanged" Arabs. After all, we can't expect their Arab brethren to pony up can we?
This is the core issue, which no amount of historical histrionics can get away from.
You got your causation backwards. Oslo - Rabin, post-Oslo - Sharon. Why post Oslo? Because the PA and the terrorists which make up its leadership undermined Oslo from the inception. Moroever, Israel takes out stupid PA police stations because these acts are prefaced by Jews being killed. Moroever, the PA police force has been expressly involved in the terrorism themselves. Hence, they are a valid objects for destruction.
Israel also has no claim to argue that it is fighting "terrorists" when its own forces -- its hundreds of tanks with their flechette rounds (used by no other civilized army, to my knowledge), its helicopters and their anti-tank missiles, its thousands of rifemen, its macjhine gunners and its snipers -- mount raids on refugee camps and Palestinian villages that are really classic terror operations straight out of a German or Japanese or "Custer" playbook.
You talk as if Israel has unleased WWIII against the "Palestinians". Of course we know that you use hyperbole and exaggeration to make your points because if Israel did unleash this torrent of military action there would be just smoke where the "Palestinians" once lived. That is the problem though. Your exaggerations and hyperbole merely fuel the propaganda and falsehoods so prevalent amongst the "Palestinian" shills.
Why is this so? Because these IDF actions are "war crimes" by EVERY definition of the Geneva Conventions and the
International Laws of Warfare.
No they aren't. But let the UN try to claim such and try to hang Jews for the sake of the pan Islamic agenda and Israel will rightfully defend itself against the internationalists and globalists of the UN. You of course would cheer the UN invading Israel and arresting Jews.
Gee -- come to think of it -- why aren't the thuggish US "Christians" that cheer on the IDF and Sharon swooning over Putin's exterminators in Grozny?
They aren't? Of course you don't have to be a Christian to support Putin's war against the Jihadists in Chechnya. You, of course, support the Jihadists by this statement you made.
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