Posted on 04/01/2003 6:41:16 AM PST by Brian Allen
I get it now. The Palestinian Arabs don't really want a state of their own.
They're just yanking our chain.
This finally dawned on me after the latest suicide attack in Israel.
The United States and Great Britain have made it clear that once Saddam Hussein is deposed, our next order of business in the region is to help create a Palestinian state in parts of what was originally intended to be Israel (and not to include parts of Transjordan where it should be, but that's another story).
So naturally, another suicidal murderer decides this is the perfect time to blow itself up in an Israeli shopping mall killing itself and, it hoped, a bunch of innocent civilians. This was done, the responsible organization claimed, as "a gift to the heroic Iraqi people."
Nothin' says lovin' like charred body parts, I guess. Someone ought to let these maniacs know that most people give candies or a nice houseplant. But maybe there's a method to their madness. The Arabs believe the U.S. and Israel are, in some strange, esoteric way, the same entity ? that if you cut one, the other bleeds. And they're right in the sense that the U.S. and Israel both treasure freedom and truth, and value and honor human life --- something foreign to the suicide/murder crowd.
Also, since the last and only positive thing the Arabs produced for mankind was algebra or something, and there's some question that that wasn't stolen from some conquered people, they may feel they have no other gift to give, and decided to "say it with death."
Most "peoples" have something uniquely their own to give the world ? something they produce that represents their nature.
The Germans, for instance, make a fairly reliable car and can usually keep the trains running on time. The Swiss produce a descent watch and nice chocolate. The French do an acceptable wine and tasty cheese; the Jews produce scientists, doctors, entertainers and all sorts of Nobel Peace Prize winners in every conceivable field; and the Americans provide the world with nearly everything. The Arabs have given the world the suicide killer.
It occurs to me there won't be much call for those once a Palestinian state is created.
I mean, the Palestinians have no other obvious talents. They produce nothing else. They subsist entirely on donations. Yasser Arafat has grown extremely wealthy on the charity of others, and that would presumably stop once the Palestinians achieve their stated goal. But since Arafat and his minions know they have no clue how to run a successful country, they don't really want one. Even if they were to achieve their ultimate desire - to wipe Israel out entirely - they wouldn't be able to make effective use of what the Jews have created there, and they know it.
It's a scam.
Otherwise, this latest suicide attack in Natanya makes no sense. The Palestinians must know they have no hope of achieving statehood without support from the U.S. and England. Knowing that, why would they announce they have hundreds of suicide killers inside Iraq, ready to murder American and British troops? How do they expect us to respond to that? By redoubling our commitment to the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state where this kind of thing can go on totally unchecked? Does it make sense to antagonize the people you need to achieve what you say you want? Either these people are not the sharpest nails in the bomb belt, or they don't really want to get off the gravy train.
Palestinian statehood would kill the goose that lays the golden egg, and Arafat knows it. Maybe they're actually more clever than we give them credit for.
Article by John Derbyshire
National Review Online - September 14th, 2001
HESPEROPHOBIA
Back in 1982 there were some horrible massacres at two Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. Christian Lebanese Arabs actually did the killing; but the Israeli army was in the neighborhood, and was responsible, at some theoretical level, for keeping the peace in the zone that included the camps. Because of this, the Israelis took much of the brunt of the world’s outrage at the killings. Commenting on these events, the Israeli Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, remarked in disgust: “Goyim kill goyim, and they blame the Jews!”
I’ve been getting the same feeling from some of my email. The fundamental reason America is under attack by Arab terrorists, several dozen people want me to know, is that the U.S. supports Israel. And the only reason we do that, several of them have said, or hinted, is because of the political power of the Jewish lobby here in the U.S.A. A few of my correspondents have expressed themselves more ... bluntly than that. Put it this way: while I have not yet encountered the word “bloodsuckers” (perhaps my readership isn’t “diverse” enough), some of this stuff comes pretty close — though I should say in fairness, most is argued on cold national-interest grounds. At any rate, a lot of people feel that the mass killing of Americans by Arab terrorists is all the fault of Israel and those American politicians who, for low and disreputable motives, or from sheer blindness to America’s true ideals and interests, support her. Goyim kill goyim, and they blame the Jews.
Setting aside the statistical certainty that some of the dead Americans are Jewish (as, in high statistical probability, some were of Arab origins), and at the risk of yet more ill-tempered or abusive emails, I am going to declare that I don’t think these recent outrages can be blamed on the Jews, nor even on pro-Israel American politicians. The root phenomenon is not American involvement in Middle Eastern affairs: the root phenomenon is hesperophobia.
This word was coined by the political scientist Robert Conquest. Its roots are the Greek words ‘Ýóðåñïò (hesperos), which means “the west” and öüâïò (phobos), which means “fear,” but which when used as an English suffix can also carry the meaning “hate”. Hesperophobia is fear or hatred of the West. [While I’m in the classical stuff, by the way, I committed a breach of good manners in my last posting by inserting a Latin tag without translation. I am sorry. Oderint dum metuant means “Let them hate us, so long as they fear us.” Seneca rebuked Cicero for saying it, though it seems to have been current among educated late-republican Romans.]
Here is the news: a lot of people out there hate us. The name “Durban” mean anything? In China, in India, in Pakistan, in Indonesia and Malaysia, in Africa and in the Arab countries, European civilization — the West — is widely hated. Matter of fact, quite a lot of Europeans and Americans hate it, too, as you will know if you spend much time on college campuses.
I can’t see any strong reason for believing that if the state of Israel were to disappear from the face of the earth tomorrow, hesperophobia would disappear with it. Not even just Arab hesperophobia would decline. A common word for Europeans in the Arabic language is feringji, from “Frank”, i.e. crusader. Arabs don’t hate us because we support Israel. They hate us because we humiliated them, showed up the gross inferiority of their culture. To them, and similarly humiliated peoples, we are the other, detested and feared in a way we can barely understand. Things got really bad in the 19th century. When European society achieved industrial lift-off, Europeans were suddenly buzzing all over the world like a swarm of bees. They encountered these other cultures, that had been vegetating in a quiet conviction of their own superiority for centuries (or in the case of the Chinese, millennia). When these encounters occurred, the encountered culture collapsed in a cloud of dust. Some of them, like the Turks, managed to reconstitute themselves as more or less modern nations; others, like the Arabs and the Chinese, are still struggling with the trauma of that encounter. Neither the Arabs nor the Chinese, for example, have yet been able to attain rational, constitutional government. For a devastating look at the paleolithic condition of politics and society in the Arab world, I strongly recommend my colleague David Pryce-Jones’s book, The Closed Circle.
The 1991 Gulf War showed how little has changed since those first encounters. Here were the armies of the West: swift, deadly, efficient, equipped and organized, under the command of elected civilians at the head of a robust and elaborate constitutional structure. And here were the Arabs: a shambling, ill-nourished, shoeless rabble, led by a mad gangster-despot. (That was their Arabs. There were also, of course, our Arabs — the Kuwaitis and Saudis, cowering in their plush-lined air-conditioned bunkers being waited on by their Filipino servants while we did their fighting for them.) Final body counts: the West, 134 dead, the Arabs, 20,000 or more.
The superiority of one culture over another has not been so starkly demonstrated since a handful of British wooden ships, at the end of ten-thousand-mile lines of communications, brought the Celestial Empire to its knees a hundred and fifty years earlier. The Chinese are still mad about that: they are still making angry, bitter movies about the Opium Wars. A hundred and fifty years from now, the Arabs will not have forgotten [EITHER!] Gulf War.
If you haven’t spent some time in its company, the depth and bitterness of hesperophobia in these cultures is hard to imagine. As Thomas Friedman points out in today’s New York Times, Palestinian suicide bombers do not target yeshivas, synagogues or religious settlements. They go for shopping malls or Sbarro’s outlets. Sure, they hate the Jews, but they hate the West as much, or more.
Israel is not a cause of any of this, except to the degree that Israeli culture is essentially Western. If the present state of Israel were inhabited by Christian Lithuanians or Frenchmen, the hatred would be nearly as intense. Nearly, not completely: hatred of the Jews has been built into Arab-Moslem culture since the time of Mohammed. There is a tale you will hear from Arab apologists that the Jews were contented and well-treated in the old Arab-Moslem empires. This is nonsense: more often than not, they were treated like swine. For a true account, read Joan Peters’ From Time Immemorial, or Gil Carl Alroy Behind the Middle East Crisis. From the Arab point of view, Israel, or any Western state on “Arab land,” is an outrage, an illegitimate creation, a crusader state. The fact that the Jews had a wealthy and powerful nation on that land three thousand years ago counts for nothing. Israel is, from the point of view of most Arabs, an alien graft that must not be allowed to “take.” It is a reminder of what can barely be thought of without acute psychic pain: the squalid, hopeless, irredeemable inferiority of one’s own culture by comparison with another.
So, so, so, is this any of America’s business? What are we doing, meddling in the Middle East? Where is our interest? Well, U.S. politicians must speak for themselves, but if I had any position of authority in any Western nation, I would be urging full support for Israel, and I am not Jewish. (Following my Passover column, in fact, a lot of NRO readers, along with at least one ex-editor of The New Republic, believe I am an antisemite.) It’s a matter of cultural solidarity. We of the West must hang together, or else we shall hang separately. American isolationists simply do not understand how much we are hated in other places.
What, after all, does the Buchananite program offer us, if carried through? We have no troops in Israel to be withdrawn. If we withdraw our aid, the Israelis will be less able to defend themselves against the Arabs. Should we just let the free market take over, U.S. arms manufacturers selling weapons to them cash on the nail? Apparently not: several of my correspondents have explained to me that what so enrages the Arabs is the sight of their people being killed “by American weapons”. Oh. No weapons, then (and presumably we should try to repatriate the ones they already have — lots of luck with that, guys). But if we don’t arm the Israelis, who will? While other hesperophobic countries — China, for example — are gleefully arming the Arabs and other Israel-haters like Iran, and pocketing the profits?
And the end of it all will be ... what? Inevitably, without our support, it will be the destruction of Israel. They are so few, and the Arabs so many. The Arabs will overwhelm that tiny state, and there will be such an orgy of massacre as has not been seen since the Rape of Nanking. And we shall be doing ... what? Watching it on our TVs, with a six-pack and a bucket of Nacho chips to hand? That’s the Buchananite vision? If so, it is a vision of cowards and fools, and I want no part of it.
Israel’s culture is ours. The Israeli Nation is part of the West. If she goes down, we have suffered a defeat, and the howling, jeering forces of barbarism have won a victory. You don’t have to be Zionist, nor even Jewish, to support Israel. You don’t have to be in the pocket of the Israeli congressional lobbies, or a suck-up to “powerful pro-Zionist interests.” You don’t have to pretend not to notice the occasional follies and cruelties of Israeli policy. You don’t have to forget about the U.S.S. Liberty or Jonathan Pollard. You just have to think straight. You just have to understand that the war between civilization and barbarism is being fought today just as it was fought at Chalons and Tours, at the gates of Kiev and Vienna, by the hoplites at Marathon and the legions on the Rhine. It is, as you have heard a thousand times, this past few days, a war; and the thing about war is, you have to take sides, and close your eyes to your allies’ imperfections for the duration. There isn’t any choice. What happened this week was not, or not only, an act of anti-Americanism, anti-Israelism or anti-Semitism. It was in part all those things:
But more than anything else, it was an act of hesperophobia.
Arabs did not invent the suicide bomber. They copied it from the Japanese. Their only refinement was to do it in a cowardly manner in civilian clothes, instead of bravely in uniform.
Sacrificial suicide in warfare was not invented by the Japanese either: in almost all armies, at different times, there were soldiers who sacrificed themselves to kill many of the opposite army. The new dimension in the Japanese military (air force) is the institutionalization of sacrificial suicide.
What the author refers to is entirely different: Arabs have invented --- and I believe she is correct in saying so -- a sacrificial homicide of a civilian directed at the civilians of the people the bomber hates. This is not even an instrument of warfare; and, as you know, there were hardly any attacks against military installations in Israel. It is mostly killing children on a bus on their way to school; elderly people that just came from the former Soviet Union during their Passover selebration; housewives buying produce at an outdoor market; and teenagers at a discoteque.
So the Arab invention differs from similar previous actions in that it is: (i) not an act of warfare agaisnt an opposing army but of hatred towards a people of a certain ethnicity and/or religion, (ii) conducted by a civilian, and (iii) directed at civilians.
It does appear, therefore, that the Nobel for this invention goes to the Arabs.
Yeah, but then what? If the terrosim become acts of war, what could the then Israelis do differently because Palestine is a sovereign state--over-run the country and put in a military controlled government? Short of genocide or transfer, nothing would change.
How the world would react to that is predictable, but I think the Israelis would prefer to live with that, rather than the existing situation.
Of course, the palestinians would become someone else's problem. And then the problem starts again.
Hesperophobia.
As I said earlier to another post, arabs have a tradition of suicide attacks since at least the ashashins of the 10th or 11th century.
Funding for their program has been temporarily suspended due to their sponsor being dead.
Manipulating world wide and home grown opinion to launch wars of aggression to seize oil fields.
How is that neither they, nor the others that claim we're after the oil, ever reconcile those beliefs with the fact that once we freed Kuwait, we turned around and sailed away from all that oil?
Point out to them how completely backward this is, how successful countries are based on exactly the opposite
This problem is rooted in the far too prevalent notion that "might makes right." This silly sophistry has been bandied about so often it is now taken as axomatic. The truth, as you point out is that "right makes might." Whatever immediate advantage may be gained by flexing power capriciously is lost over time to the massed energy of the great majority who naturally revile tyrannts and tyranny and always have. That is why the whole of human history should be understood as a long, inexorable movement toward liberty.
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