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June 2001 By Alan Caruba Events in Israel reveal a reality the headlines do not address. Islam is at war with the West. Islam has set its eyes upon the capture and control of Jerusalem, a city sacred to Jews and Christians alike. Its spiritual value to Islam is minimal. Its symbolic value is beyond price. Americans who think this is a war confined to the Middle East are deluding themselves, ignoring the murderous attacks upon the Twin Towers in New York, our embassies in Africa, our military barracks in Saudi Arabia, and our destroyer in Yemen. Europe, typically, is cravenly turning its back so as not to see the peril. "The last time a European government imposed trade sanctions on Jewish goods, it was Nazi Germany in 1938. Sixty-three years later it is the European Union which plans to ban the entry of duty-free products made by Jews living and working in the disputed territories in the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan. Even goods from East Jerusalem are to be blacklisted," says Zalman Shaval, the Israeli ambassador. The Bush administration has shown a prudent reluctance to get too involved, but it is involved, despite its outward appearance of sanguine patience. Diplomacy has not worked. While much is made of aid to Israel over the years, most Americans are unaware that, since 1993, the US has poured $900 million into the PLO’s coffers in a futile effort to bring about some semblance of peace based on the Oslo agreement. Funding the PLO has proved to be a very bad investment. In my lifetime, one Holocaust is enough! Israel is a nation born out of the blood of six million murdered Jews. Prior to the Holocaust, the idea of a Jewish state attracted only a few settlers to Palestine, which was then under the control of Great Britain. It discouraged immigration there. Following the Holocaust, many of the survivors headed for Palestine. They did so because their home nations had abandoned them. In 1948, the Jews established the State of Israel. Thousands of Arabs fled. They have, for the most part, remained a stateless people, unassimilated and generally unwelcome in their host nations. In 1967, the Israelis launched a pre-emptive attack on Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, occupying the Golan Heights, taking control of the Sinai and the West Bank. Suing for peace, Egypt eventually got the Sinai returned. The Golan and West Bank remain under Israeli control. Whatever else can be said, Israel was and is a nation surrounded by enemies. It has conquered territory in war. So did the US, but Israel is always expected to live by different rules than the rest of the world. In December 1987, the Intifada, the Palestinian uprising began and continues to this day, fifteen years later. No amount of land, promised by Israel in return for peace, has been deemed sufficient to bring about a cessation of these hostilities. The Arab obsession is to drive the Jews, i.e., the Europeans, the Westerners, from Israel. The Mitchell Report and other voices recommend a freeze on all settlement activity. Why the West thinks it can dictate to Israel where its people may live is beyond understanding, but one thing is clear, eight months ago, Israel offered to not only freeze its settlements, but to dismantle most of them and pull out of 98 percent of the territories. Former Prime Minister Ehud Barak made this offer to Chairman Arafat whose response was to walk away from a deal that would have given the PLO control of Gaza and the West Bank, along with power-sharing in Jerusalem. The Jerusalem offer got Barak replaced with Ariel Sharon. The Israelis have no choice except to fight for their lives and their land. To do this, they must destroy the leadership of the PLO, eviscerating its infrastructure, seizing its cache of arms, and driving as many Palestinians as possible from their nation. For this they will be denounced in the West as well as the rest of the world. It doesn’t matter, they must fight or they must flee. There are 5,842,454 people living in Israel, minus now the dead killed by terrorists. Eighty percent are Jewish. It is a republic in the midst of nations run by despots. Israel is just the tip of the sword of terrorism aimed at the West. From a purely historical point of view, Israel is most certainly the ancient homeland of the Jews, a people and a faith that preceded Christianity and Islam by more than a millennium. Jews walked the streets of Jerusalem a thousand years before the birth of Jesus and fifteen hundred years before the prophet Mohammed. The irony is that Jews have survived because they were forced out of Israel centuries ago, living in a Diaspora that, depending on the time and place, varied between levels of tolerance and persecution. Those who "returned" following WWII did so because they no longer had a homeland in Europe. Many did not even have a family. The effort to destroy Israel carries with it the message of a resurgent and militant Islam, intent on a mission to replace Christianity and other faiths because today’s Muslims believe theirs is the one, true faith. What tolerance Islam displayed in past eras has been replaced with a zeal few in the West comprehend. The recent trial in New York that found four defendants guilty of plotting the terrorist bombing of US embassies in Africa also provided tens of thousands of pages of information regarding the worldwide organization headed by Osama bin Laden, the Al-Qaeda group. A Wall Street Journal commentary by Daniel Pipes and Steven Emerson noted that "They demonstrate that Al-Qaeda sees the West in general and the US in particular, as the ultimate enemy of Islam." Here in the US, Al-Qaeda has terrorist cells in cities that include Brooklyn, NY, Orlando, FL, Dallas, TX, Santa Clara, CA, Columbia, MO, and Herndon, VA. We ignore this at our peril. The US is already under attack by Islamists. If we yield Israel to Arafat’s demands we will have failed to have learned the lesson of World War II when Hitler made similar demands to Germany’s neighbor states. The failure of the Mitchell Report lies in the fact it ignores clear evidence that the Palestinians are the aggressors. The nations supporting their war include Iran and most, if not all, of the nations of the Middle East. The survival of Israel depends now on its strategic value to the United States from both a national political and geopolitical point of view. It has a spiritual value that must also be measured and affirmed.
There are 1,974,181,000 Christians worldwide. There are 1,155,109,000 Muslims worldwide. There are 14,313,000 Jews worldwide. If peace for Israel must be imposed by war than it is a war the Israelis have struggled to avoid. It is a war, however, the Islamists have declared "holy."
©
2002 Alan Caruba. |
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