Posted on 05/02/2002 11:52:52 PM PDT by JohnHuang2
I can't sleep tonight. It is a rainy, gloomy night in Basel, Switzerland. I have just seen heart-breaking photos on the news of the funeral of the 18-year-old niece of Israel's soft-spoken U.N. Ambassador Yehuda Lancry, victim of the most recent suicide bombing in Haifa. She was a pretty girl. She was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Now she is one of 466 victims of Arab terror murdered in cold blood since former Prime Minister Barak offered Arafat a deal for a Palestinian State.
I step out to take a deep breath. I am standing on the balcony of the 970-year-old Drei Konige hotel, on the exact same spot where Theodor Herzl once stood back in 1896. He was a journalist at the time covering the infamous Dreyfus trial and was so revolted by the rabid anti-Semitism of 19th-century Europe that he wrote "Der Judenstadt" ("The Jewish State"), the book that became the blueprint for the creation of the modern state of Israel. Who would have thought that in 2002 Jews living in the former Soviet Union and Poland are safer than those living in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Haifa?
I am looking at the murky waters of the Rhine, thinking of how little the world has changed. Behind me, in my hotel room a strange Arabic-language music video is blaring on my television set.
I return to the room to watch how Egypt's Nile TV (one of at least eight Arabic language channels offered via satellite in Switzerland) is repeatedly running that strange video clip that boils my blood – backed by a hundred-piece orchestra, a singer in wailing voices extols the struggle of Palestinian "freedom fighters." In a masterfully edited video montage, Israeli soldiers are firing at innocent Palestinian children as if they were target-practicing. A Palestinian child is hit by a hail of bullets, and in appropriate, grainy, documentary-like slow motion, falls to the ground to the wailing sounds of the orchestra in the background. The lead singer weeps and a "martyr" is born.
I flip the channel. There is an Arabic language documentary, showing a Palestinian suicide-kindergarten, where the curriculum focuses mainly on marching to patriotic war songs and preparing children for "martyrdom operations" against the Jewish enemy. The classroom walls are wallpapered with posters of young Palestinian youngsters who blew themselves up as human bombs. In one shot, there is a placard next to the blackboard, depicting a swastika and the Star of David dripping in blood side by side.
On the next channel, Saeb Erakat, chief Palestinian negotiator, is shouting at the camera with a wall-size poster of Jerusalem behind him, declaring Yasser Arafat the "democratically elected leader of his people."
The keffiyeh-clad commentator on the Kuwaiti channel is shedding crocodile tears for his suffering Palestinian brothers, conveniently forgetting the fact that his country promptly cleansed itself of most Palestinians in the wake of the Gulf War, in which Yasser Arafat took the side of Saddam Hussein.
The next news item is more cheerful however – it speaks of the upcoming opening of Villa Moda, the most opulent super-luxury shopping mall in the Middle East. It is owned by Majed al Sabah, the nephew of the Emir of Kuwait – a place where believers who no longer want to travel to increasingly "dangerous places" like London, Paris and New York to spend their U.S. petrol-dollars, can buy their latest Chanel bags. Then there is a commentary on why the Kuwaitis and their Saudi brothers should not allow the American "infidels" to use Arab soil to attack their Iraqi brethren. It would upset the peace of their populations.
On the next channel, Saddam Hussein's recently increased premium payments to the families of suicide bombers are praised.
I can't fall asleep, so I keep changing the channels. The European stations are showing news footage of a number of French synagogues being burned at the hands of unseen perpetrators. And there is an item on German television of a young Hassidic man beaten savagely by "persons unknown." British commentators on the BBC are giving lessons in morality to Israeli Jews who "militarily conquered other peoples' land." I am wondering: "What a blatant double standard. What was Great Britain doing two decades ago sending its fleet half a world away to fight a war in defense of their claims of conquest on the Falklands?"
I turn off the TV set and try to make sense of it all. How little has changed in the years since the days of Herzl and Dreyfus. Synagogues are burning, Jews are beaten, the German and British governments are imposing a quiet boycott of Israel, the Swiss are talking of putting punitive tariffs on Israeli goods in public and Arafat and Kofi Anan are speaking of moral equivalency. And while 21 Arab states sit on their hands and their petrol billions instead of trying to better the conditions of their Palestinian brethren, Yasser Arafat is negotiating with U.S. Secretary of State Powell.
President Bush called for an all-out war on terrorism. His secretary of state just paid a visit to the arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat in Ramallah. Along with many, Arafat regards Zionism as a way of making Palestinians pay for the Holocaust. The "leader of the Palestinian people" stated the purpose of his life, just a decade after he established Al Fatah, the predecessor of the PLO (and incidentally, this was many years before Israel conquered Arab lands): "The end of Israel is the goal of our struggle, and it allows for neither compromise nor mediation," he explained to the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci in 1972. "We don't want peace. We want war, victory. Peace for us means the destruction of Israel and nothing else."
It is dawn in Basel. A young couple are walking their dog by the Rhine. The young lady holding the leash appears to be in her eighth month of pregnancy. I look at her from my hotel window and suddenly I am filled with envy. That child who is about to be born into the world of this tiny nation will never see war. After all, there has been no war in this part of the world for centuries. There is no Sept. 11 lurking in their future and their baby carriage will not likely be blown up by anyone.
I think of the hundreds of Jews who were murdered by Arab terror since the deal that the Palestinians demanded was offered to them. I think of the Six Million. The world never learned.
The sooner we acknowledge that we- and Israel- are in a Holy War with about a billion Muslims, the better off we'll be.
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