Reality; A group of Hamas terrorist marauders dig a long underground tunnel from Gaza into Israel, ambush an Israeli border patrol in Israel, kill two Israeli soldiers and capture another wounded Israeli soldier and take him into Gaza and hold him for ransom. A group of Hezbollah terrorists cross from Lebanon into Israel, ambush an Israeli border patrol, kill eight Israeli soldiers, capture two and drag them into Lebanon; and demand that Israel release Islamic terrorists from their jails if they want to see the captured Jewish soldiers alive.
Hamas is a democratically elected political movement; the Palestinian people electing them to speak and act in their behalf.
Hamas doesn’t recognize Israel’s right to exist, and therefore the Palestinian people who elected them into office also deny the Jewish people the right to exist and to have a country of their own. When you elect people into office, who act, as you would wish them to act, the voters also become responsible for their actions.
Hezbollah is also a political movement that is part of the democratically elected Lebanese Parliament that also refuses to recognize Israel’s right to exist; and fervently waits for the day when their parent organization in Iran will obtain nuclear weapons so they can wipe Israel off from the face of the earth.
So far so good, and fully understandable: it is not the first time that political movements that were democratically elected into power turn into the most murderous dictatorships in history. Why should it surprise anyone if Hamas and Hezbollah also did?
Like it or not Hitler and his henchmen were elected by the German people.
The Nazis as their Islamic co-ideologist counterparts were not bothered at all by the slaughter of the hundreds of thousands and even millions of inferiors being massacred in the name of Arian superiority; yet they were thoroughly shocked to their souls when a much smaller group of Germans in the cites of Dresden and Hamburg were bombed back to the stone age by the “uncivilized Americans” and the “Barbaric Soviets”… those appellations spoken by Nazi butchers, now echoed by “victimized” Lebanese leaders under Israel’s defensive fire.
I marvel as I watch these Islamic fundamentalists busy killing innocent people all over the world. While at the same time bemoaning the plight of their children and the civilian population that they themselves put under the risk of death when using them as human shields as they target civilian populations all over the globe.
What is even sadder, and to me, far more grave to watch is the demonizing by the cowardly appeasers by the European nations of Israel, for daring to survive in face of the open threats of fundamental Islam to destroy the Jews, whether in their country Israel, or their people regardless where they are located.
Well actually the hate of Islam is not restricted to Jews only, they are an equal opportunity hate group. The blowing up of Christian churches and killing worshipers in the process, killing tourists in Luxor, Egypt, or massacring hundreds of school children in Russia, blowing up commuters by the hundreds, in Madrid, London, or India, is a mere routine and mundane exercise for the purpose of keeping in shape for the Islamic freedom fighters. The major undertaking of some earnest killings of course are reserved to the Islamic communities busy killing each other in a wholesale manner as in the past in Alger, Lebanon, and Iraq attacking Iran and Kuwait. Currently we have wholesale slaughtering taking place in Iraq, where Sunni’s murder Shiite’s by the hundreds of thousands; and of course Shiite’s slaughtering Sunni’s with equal dedication. And we didn’t even mention Afghanistan, or the Sudan where these genocidal murder-fests are ongoing for decades without respite. All these are taking place without shedding a single tear for the poor children who are falling victims to these vicious feuds that date back to time immemorial, nor is there a single tear shed for the female population of Islam that were deprived from schools, and even from the most simple human dignities.
The world of Islam sees nothing wrong with killing their own by the millions, so why would they see anything wrong with killing others? It is getting somewhat tiresome to watch the Islamic world complain if someone else lightens their burden and does a mere fraction of “their killing quota”. Why be upset by the most brutal excesses of some American prison guards, when their gravest crime pales in comparison to the public hacking of heads off the innocents who were never at war with Islam, and their greatest crime was wanting to report on the plight or promises the future may hold for the following generations of Islam.
Why is it that people refuse to accept realities for what they are?
Why look for a common ground between Islam and other religions, when it doesn’t exist. Islam is an uncompromising religion that is simply not designed to coexist, but designed to rule. All man-made religions are designed as such, except the others have long outgrown this self-deluding stage of their existence. Of course Christianity still would love to expand, and expand they do, except today because of the last few hundred years it was arduously courting the cultures of others to join their way of life, and they became so accommodating that they have fragmented beyond repair. Christians, Christianity, what does it mean today…Presbyterian, Baptist, Catholic, Protestant, Anglicans, and dozens of other fragments. What does it mean? What do they have all in common? The love of Jesus and the desire to love others, and be loved by others. Judaism…not searching for converts, just wants to be left alone to wallow in its self-fulfillment; and lay back and enjoy it slow miniaturization that is turning that religion from the world of reality, into realm of memory.
Islam on the other hand, may be best explained by what I did see on a French television station during the recent riots in France. A young man, looking as from Arab descent, was vigorously trying to explain to a journalist why they are upset. He was pointing to a French police unit while very agitated and vigorously explaining, “They came here to our territory to tell us what to do.” For him it was no longer a French police officer in France, but a foreigner trespassing on Islamic territory.
Why look for something that doesn’t exist: coexistence with Islam on equal terms.
Islam was, and is, an expansionist and imperialistic religion. Wherever Islam has come, it left no room for others. The glory of the Mesopotamian, Syrian and Egyptian cultures all gave way to the Arabs. Those conquered by Islam have lost their history, their language and their religions, all to the sword of Islam...the Arabs.
The world has a built in excuse for whatever the Islamic world does and they don’t like or can’t explain. Bush said after the World Trade Center attack that the “fundamentalists have hijacked Islam”. Of course it was all nonsense, but it wasn’t the first or the last time that western politicians were trampling over each other to exonerate Islam from it kidnappers.
Today when we talk about Lebanon it is fashionable to say that the Hezbollah overpowers the poor Lebanese as did the Palestinians in the good old days of Arafat. Of course that excuse no longer flies, since native Lebanese who are very active in the Lebanese political process, make up the Hezbollah.
So in spite of all the excuses people want to provide for the helplessness of the Lebanese political landscape, the final responsibility rests not with the Hezbollah or their sponsors Iran or Syria, but with the impotence or the lack of sufficient determination of the Lebanese political leadership.
Few remember that the Israelis in the very beginning of their existence had to make the same decision. David Ben Gurion made the choice easily: in a choice between great fighting forces at the cost of the constitutional right of a democratic government, it is a no-brainer. The choice has to be the state. It was at the time when Israel was in desperate need of weapons, and skilled fighters, and the Ship Altelena was loaded with both. The problem was that the ship did belong to the Irgun organization that was headed by Begin, while the government was represented by David Ben Gurion and Chaim Weiztman. Ben Gurion insisted that any country could have only one government, and only one army. The showdown between Ben Gurion and Begin ended with Begin the famed “radical activist” leader giving into the reason of the inevitable logic of either order, or civil war. The man who translated Ben Gurion ideals into action was a small fry army officer by the name of Yitzchak Rabin.
As it relates to the history of Israel, the Jewish state had to face choices time and again that would be the catalyst of the relationship between the Jewish state and its neighbors. Israel has always guarantied the political rights of their Arab population. Arabs, in addition to being able to participate in the mainstream political landscape, can also form their own political parties and elect representatives to the Israeli parliament. These Arab members of the Israeli parliament enjoy freedoms that are unknown to any of their counterparts in the Arab or Islamic countries.
How far the protection of the political rights of the Arab population of Israel extends cannot be better illustrated than the way the Israeli parliament dealt with Meir Kahana’s political party. Meir Kahana did not advocate the destruction of the Arab countries, nor did he advocate the driving of the Arabs who live in Israel into the sea. He did not believe that Arabs and Jews could live in peace, he was an ardent Jewish nationalist, who was worried that the Arab population would eventually dwarf the Jewish population into a minority status, knowing what a minority status of the Jews was under the rule of an Islamic majority.
What he did propose was the expulsion of the Arab population from Israel to some other country. He wasn’t proposing an inhumane forceful expulsion, without regard to humanistic values, but rather an orderly population exchange where the Arab population who were willing to go would get a generous financial compensation from the state of Israel. His reasoning was that the Jews who were forced out by the Arab countries have come to Israel without anything, having to leave all their belonging behind, and yet the newly formed Jewish state was able to absorb all these Jewish refugees that numbered way in excess of the Jewish population of early Israel. The Arab nations that had the land and financial means of taking in their own, especially when they came to them with ample compensation, would be an easy task to implement. This proposition was so abhorrent in the eyes of the Israeli Jewish political establishments, that they declared the Kahana movement racist and expelled them from the Israeli parliaments. It is not the intent to judge whether Kahana was a racist or a Jewish patriot. Instead, to focus on the fact that Israel made a choice in which they found it more important to provide the full protection of their Arab citizens from the agitation against them. The Israeli parliament acted to remove even the seeds of possible racism by removing the platform from under Meir Kahana that could have promoted even the thought of separation of an Israeli citizen from its rights. Compare that to the rhetoric of the Hamas or Hezbollah, or Iran and Syria who are bent on the destruction of the state of Israel, and the extermination of its people.
So what is the solution, or is there no solution to the Israeli and Arab conflict?
Yes, the solution is to get used to the fact that there are no short-term solutions to the problems between Judaism and Islam; there are no short solutions for the differences between Israel and the Palestinians; and there are no short-term solutions for the problems that exist between the Jews and the Arabs.
To get an idea how deep is the divide that separates the two people from understanding even the problem so they could ponder a solution, even the name “Palestinian” is a stolen identity. It was the Jews who were the Palestinians until 1948; the others were called the Arabs.
To find the solution for all these fundamental differences lies in time, endurance and fundamental change in human thinking.
Recently the King of Jordan deciding to share the wisdom of the Arab world with us uncomprehending westerners, when saying the only alternative to a Palestinian state is violence. Meaning, create a Palestinian state and voile…no more violence.
Well, then what can be simpler then that…all we have to do is create a Palestinian state and the problem is solved? It sounds right, except that it has already was done in 1922, end it not only didn’t solve the problem but instead made it into a much bigger problem. On the other hand, who am I to second-guess King Abdullah? He sure knows what he is talking about. How you think his great grand father got 78% of all of Palestine the territories the League of Nations set aside for the establishment for a Jewish Homeland? This is what was decided by the League of Nations after the First World War…after the British captured the land from the colonies of the Ottoman Empire. Yet no lesser man then the great Winston Churchill, a noteworthy British patriot with a keen sense of history fell as a child would, for these stupid demagogic words and set King Abdullah’s great grand father of Abdullah the current King of Jordan on the throne of the freshly manufactured kingdom of Trans Jordan.
So the theory that the only way to achieve peace is to establish a Palestinian state didn’t work then, and therefore we could surmise that it wouldn’t work today either. As a matter of fact it wouldn’t help regardless how many Palestinian states were established in the region as long as there was a single Jewish State among them…it doesn’t matter how big or how small, nor does it matter how powerful or how weak, because the issue is that a non-Islamic nation is simply unacceptable to them. Thank God Israel is a super powerful nation, otherwise regardless of the support or sympathy of other countries around the globe, there would be no more Israel. So the question becomes why the King, who has more to fear from Hamas then from Israel, expresses a wish for Israeli acquiescence to a Hamas-run Palestine armed to the teeth as her neighbor.
The most amusing part of the King’s advice, is that while he keeps telling to the world and especially the Jewish State how important it is to make Hamas happy, he leaves no stone unturned trying to eliminate the presence of Hamas from Jordan.
The most important component of the recent Hamas victory is not that the Palestinian authority was defeated, but that a party regardless how inept and insincere, wanted to have peace with Israel so they can establish yet another Palestinian state. Hamas on the other hand did not want peace with Israel and has no specific plan for statehood; instead they have a very specific and declared desire to eliminate Israel. It was with this political program that they have won a tremendous victory from the Arab population living on the territories of Palestine. It was a democratic election so no one can quarrel with the result, the people said, “we care nothing about an Independent Palestine…what’s important for us is to destroy the presence of a Jewish state from our midst.”
There are of course the multitudes of social engineers who are ready to explain that the Hamas victory was a vote for order to get out of the chaos and corruption that the PA left behind…and it was true. On the other hand wasn’t that also the reason for the emergence of the Nazi movement of Germany, and the rise of Fascism all over Europe? Thank God for the straight speaking President of Iran who doesn’t mince his words and simply calls for the destruction of Israel, so the Israelis at least will know and understand no peace pacts, and further giveaways from Israel will provide them with safety, but instead, their own arms and willingness to fight for their survival are the only means to ensure their continued existence.
Why can’t the rest of the world understand that these Islamic terror bands mean what they say, and say what they mean when they talk about the destruction of Israel, and the cowardly compromisers of this world once again ready to sacrifice six million Jewish lives for the sake of “peace.” May God give the Jewish people the moral strength not be corrupted in their resolve to fight for their right for their future existence and the right to have a homeland where their children’s children can live with pride and dignity!