Zion. An island of sanity in an ocean of savagery.
Wednesday, September 08, 2004
Foreign Jews
I've commented many times on the attitude of many Jews towards the many problems that besiege the Israel, and the Jews in general. Most important in my view are Jews with what I call the Judenrat mentality. Part of this mentality is also the root cause for many American Jews to keep voting for the Democratic party, no matter what its current leadership intends to do once they are in power.
As I've stated before, the US is no friend of Israel (though the average American in the street most definitely IS). It usually makes little difference wether the president is a Democrat or a Republican. But this years election is different, and here's why: American Jews and the Iranian threat.
This year, though, there’s a difference. The stakes for Israel are rather high, and involve not just its security or its borders, its diplomatic standing or its economy, but its physical existence. As the Iranian threat looms, the debates concern only when—not whether—it will go nuclear. Some say next year, some say 2006, some say it already has a few bombs. As for Iran’s intentions toward Israel, one need only consult (among many other statements) the placards in last year’s military parade for the Shahab-3 missile declaring that “Israel must be wiped off the map.”
John Kerry has already stated (more than once, in fact) how he plans to deal with the Persian: The same way they did with N-Korea. Well, we all know how that worked out.
No doubt, we’re not soothsayers and can’t say for sure what Bush or Kerry would do in the future. We can say for sure, though—whatever the wisdom of the specific steps he’s taken—that Bush has solidly established his hawkishness at least since September 11, 2001; and we can say for sure that in twenty years in the Senate Kerry racked up an extreme-dovish voting record and has been equivocal and inconsistent about how he’d handle the world’s current terror problem.
Yet most American Jewish voters are set to follow the same blind path as always. The same path they followed when they voted Carter in 1980, despite Carter’s having created the Iranian problem in the first place with his weakness and waffling toward the ayatollahs; the same path they followed in 2000 when they voted Gore despite Clinton’s having helped plunge Israel into a terror war with his constant coddling of Arafat—and so on. Clearly, the typical American Jewish Democratic voter is not preoccupied with Israel and has a predominantly American agenda. Fair enough. One might think, though, that a danger of Israel’s actual obliteration and the deaths of hundreds of thousands or millions of its citizens would perk their interest in the Israeli dimension of this vote. Well, don’t think it.
Indeed, don't think that. It seems the jews are not done learning the hard lessons. Bush is not a friend of Israel. But Kerry is (intentionally or otherwise) the worst thing that could happen to Israel since Carter. And that is saying a lot.
Who knows where this might lead? To actual comprehension?
David Brooks comments on "the fringes" of Islam", whereas it is those fringes that protest can be heard from. Mainstream Islam is silent about the depraved atrocities that took place in Beslan, Southern Russia recently.
But otherwise, this op-ed by David Brooks is good reading.
We've been forced to endure the massacre of children. Whether it's teenagers outside an Israeli disco or students in Beslan, Russia, we've seen kids singled out as special targets.
We should by now have become used to the death cult that is thriving at the fringes of the Muslim world. This is the cult of people who are proud to declare, "You love life, but we love death." This is the cult that sent waves of defenseless children to be mowed down on the battlefields of the Iran-Iraq war, that trains kindergartners to become bombs, that fetishizes death, that sends people off joyfully to commit mass murder.
This cult attaches itself to a political cause but parasitically strangles it. The death cult has strangled the dream of a Palestinian state. The suicide bombers have not brought peace to Palestine; they've brought reprisals. The car bombers are not pushing the U.S. out of Iraq; they're forcing us to stay longer. The death cult is now strangling the Chechen cause, and will bring not independence but blood.
But that's the idea. Because the death cult is not really about the cause it purports to serve. It's about the sheer pleasure of killing and dying.
This last part is essential. There are many people in the world that lead unenviable lives, to use an understatement. Most of these people do not become terrorists. Certainly, none target children, for whatever cause. On the other hand, many Muslim terrorists are not from empoverished backgrounds at all. Quite a few are from rich Arab families, or born, raised and educated in the West.
Somehow, Islam (probably combined with some other lethal factors) enables them to perform such sick acts.
It's about massacring people while in a state of spiritual loftiness. It's about experiencing the total freedom of barbarism - freedom even from human nature, which says, Love children, and Love life. It's about the joy of sadism and suicide.
We should be used to this pathological mass movement by now. We should be able to talk about such things. Yet when you look at the Western reaction to the Beslan massacres, you see people quick to divert their attention away from the core horror of this act, as if to say: We don't want to stare into this abyss. We don't want to acknowledge those parts of human nature that were on display in Beslan. Something here, if thought about too deeply, undermines the categories we use to live our lives, undermines our faith in the essential goodness of human beings.
This is key. As long as we as a (comparatively) civilizes society REFUSE to accept what we are dealing with, this horror will not go away. It will instead strengthen and grow.
The Dutch foreign minister, Bernard Bot, speaking on behalf of the European Union, declared: "All countries in the world need to work together to prevent tragedies like this. But we also would like to know from the Russian authorities how this tragedy could have happened."
It wasn't a tragedy. It was a carefully planned mass murder operation. And it wasn't Russian authorities who stuffed basketball nets with explosives and shot children in the back as they tried to run away.
Bot is an unbelievable idiot, a prat of the worst kind. The sheer stupidity of this man is equalled only by his lack of humanity and empathy. In fact, until someone shows me his beating heart, I refuse to believe he has one. He is as morally and humanly dead as they come. Brooks ends on this note:
This death cult has no reason and is beyond negotiation.
He calls this frightening. Perhaps in a sense it is. Practically speaking, there are many ways in which we are more likely to die or be injured than by terrorism. But the straight knowledge that there IS such a cult, adhered to (in different degrees) by millions of people should be sufficient to make us confront it head-on.
Dennis Ross knows Arafat. He knows him better than most. He was the lead negotiator between Israel and the Arab Palestinians under both Bush and Clinton. After having kept his mouth shut for what must have seen like ages, he has this to say about the worlds oldest terrorist:
Throughout the Oslo peace process, everyone involved—Palestinians, Israelis, Americans, Egyptians, Saudis, and other Arab leaders—shared the belief that Arafat wanted peace with Israel. It seemed logical. After all, Arafat had crossed the threshold and recognized Israel, incurring the wrath of secular and religious rejectionists. And he had authorized five limited or interim agreements with the Israelis. Although Arafat held out until the last possible minute and strived for the best deal, he eventually made the compromises necessary to reach those interim agreements.
Unfortunately, such short-term progress masked some disquieting signals about the Palestinian leader’s intentions. Every agreement he made was limited and contained nothing he regarded as irrevocable. He was not, in his eyes, required to surrender any claims. Worse, notwithstanding his commitment to renounce violence, he has never relinquished the terror card. Moreover, he is always quick to exaggerate his achievements, even while maintaining an ongoing sense of grievance. During the Oslo peace process, he never prepared his public for compromise. Instead, he led the Palestinians to believe the peace process would produce everything they ever wanted—and he implicitly suggested a return to armed struggle if negotiations fell short of those unattainable goals. Even in good times, Arafat spoke to Palestinian groups about how the struggle, the jihad, would lead them to Jerusalem. Too often his partners in the peace process dismissed this behavior as Arafat being caught up in rhetorical flourishes in front of his “party” faithful. I myself pressed him when his language went too far or provoked an angry Israeli response, but his stock answer was that he was just talking about the importance of struggling for rights through the negotiation process.
But from the start of the Oslo negotiations in 1993, Arafat focused only on what he was going to receive, not what he had to give. He found it difficult to live without a cause, a struggle, a grievance, and a conflict to define him. Arafat never faced up to what he would have to do—even though we tried repeatedly to condition him. As a result, when he was finally put to the test with former President Bill Clinton’s proposal in December 2000, Arafat failed miserably.
Is there any sign that Arafat has changed and is ready to make historic decisions for peace? I see no indication of it.
Keep in mind this man is a politician. His statements amount to hammerblows when translated into the language of real humans.
On the subject of who directs or controls the Arab violence:
Arafat has demonstrated in the past that he can prevent violence—most notably in the spring of 1996 when he cracked down on Hamas and also in the first year of former Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s administration, when Israel, for the only time in its history, had a year in which it did not suffer a single fatality from terror.
Yet from the beginning of the peace process, Arafat made clear he prefers to co-opt, not confront, extremist groups. This approach reflects his leadership style: He never closes doors. He never forecloses options. He never knows when he might want to have a particular group, no matter what its ideology or purpose, on his side. This strategy has certainly been true of his dealings with Hamas and Islamic Jihad. In 1996, he suppressed extremists because they were threatening his power, not because they carried out four suicide bombings in Israel in nine days. Even then, the crackdown, while real, was limited. Arafat did not completely shut the door on either group.
In the past, whenever Arafat cracked down or threatened to do so, the militants backed down. But that stopped in September 2000 with the eruption of the Al-Aqsa Intifada. Those who say Arafat cannot carry out his security responsibilities because Israeli military incursions have devastated his capabilities fail to recognize that Arafat didn’t act even before Israelis destroyed his infrastructure. In the 20 months leading up to May 2002, he never gave unequivocal orders to arrest, much less stop, those who were planning, organizing, recruiting, financing, or implementing terror attacks against Israelis. Whether one thinks—as the Israelis believe recently captured documents demonstrate—Arafat directs the violence or that he simply acquiesces to it, the unmistakable fact is that he has made no serious or sustained effort to stop the violence.
And then some 30 odd years old news: Arafat ordered the murder of American diplomats (No, I'm not referring to the bomb attack that was perpetrated about a year ago, and also has had NO consequences for the Arch-terrorist). No, I'm talking about this:
FBI agents are now gathering evidence about Arafat's culpability in a March 1, 1973, operation in which eight members of the Black September terrorist organization, part of Arafat's Fatah faction of the PLO, stormed the Saudi embassy in Khartoum, reportedly on Arafat's orders, taking U.S. Ambassador Cleo Noel, diplomat Charge d'Affaires George Curtis Moore and others hostage, and one day later, killing Noel, Moore and Belgian diplomat Guy Eid.
Of course, this is not news at all. It is in fact common knowledge, as is the fact that the US State department has been blandly ignoring all evidence of the murder handed over to them by Israel. In addition, their own evidence has gone missing.
But the one critical piece of evidence needed to warrant an indictment – the tape recordings – was not produced by the NSA, the Central Intelligence Agency or the State Department.
Everyone who is even slightly interested in the matter has known about this for years, decades. It is only politically motivated that something seems to be moving now.
But just imagine for a second the kind of government these murdered diplomats worked for. It was quite happy to let the murder of its own people slide for some opportunistic motive.
FBI probes Arafat for American kills. Please read.
Mark Steyn handles his rage better than me, by writing thus: No other word for it but slaughter
PHOTOGRAPHED from above, the body bags look empty. They seem to lie flat on the ground, and it's only when you peer closer that you realise that that's because the bodies in them are too small to fill the length of the bags. They're children. Row upon row of dead children, more than a hundred of them, 150, more, many of them shot in the back as they tried to flee.
Reports of children being bayoneted after asking for water. Of girls being raped by the Psychopaths. There was never any intention of survival, certainly not of the hostages.
In the 1990s, while the world's leaders slept – or in Bill Clinton's case slept around – thousands of volunteers from across the globe passed through terrorist training camps in Afghanistan and were then dispatched to Indonesia, Kosovo, Sudan . . . and Chechnya. Wealthy Saudis – including members of the royal family – invested millions in setting up mosques and madrassas in what were traditionally spheres of a more accommodationist Islam, from the Balkans to South Asia, and successfully radicalised a generation of young Muslim men. It's the jihadist component – not the asymmetrical one, not the secessionist one – that accounts for the mound of undersized corpses, for the scale of the depravity.
There's hardly a better word for it: Depravity. Religion has nothing to do with it, except insofar as Islam preaches and encourages the dehumanization of non-Muslims. Murdering children is good. Inversely, not murdering is probably bad, by these standards. I like clear lines. It is not hard to see who is on which side.
Abdel Rahman al-Rashed is the general manager of Al Arabiya
Why is it scary? This man has a job not unlike Goebbels. Yet he makes awful sense in this op-ed.
It is a certain fact that not all Muslims are terrorists, but it is equally certain, and exceptionally painful, that almost all terrorists are Muslims.
The hostage-takers of children in Beslan, North Ossetia, were Muslims. The other hostage-takers and subsequent murderers of the Nepalese chefs and workers in Iraq were also Muslims. Those involved in rape and murder in Darfur, Sudan, are Muslims, with other Muslims chosen to be their victims.
Those responsible for the attacks on residential towers in Riyadh and Khobar were Muslims. The two women who crashed two airliners last week were also Muslims.
Bin Laden is a Muslim. The majority of those who manned the suicide bombings against buses, vehicles, schools, houses and buildings, all over the world, were Muslim.
What a pathetic record. What an abominable "achievement". Does all this tell us anything about ourselves, our societies and our culture?
What scares me the most is that he does not qualify his condemnation. He does not say "But they made us do it". Not anywhere. It is a very rare thing to witness, but I have to say, I love the sight of it. And long for more.
Let us listen to Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Sheikh - the Qatar-based radical Egyptian cleric - and hear him recite his "fatwa" about the religious permissibility of killing civilian Americans in Iraq. Let us contemplate the incident of this religious Sheikh allowing, nay even calling for, the murder of civilians.
This ailing Sheikh, in his last days, with two daughters studying in "infidel" Britain, soliciting children to kill innocent civilians.
How could this Sheikh face the mother of the youthful Nick Berg, who was slaughtered in Iraq because he wanted to build communication towers in that ravished country? How can we believe him when he tells us that Islam is the religion of mercy and peace while he is turning it into a religion of blood and slaughter?
Applause for this man. Bravo. So there is hope yet.
Arun Gandhi, grandson of the Mahatma visited Israel recently. India and Israel are on good terms lately, but Arun would have done better staying at home.
He saw the mandatory visit at Yad VaShem as an opportunity to lecture Israel on its attitudes towards security and selfdefense.
Mahatma Gandhi's philosophy of nonviolent resistance against an oppressor is surely one of the most admirable political phenomena of the 20th century. Yet ultimately his success lay in his choice of oppressor. Say what you will about the British, they regarded themselves as basically decent and, faced with Gandhi's challenge, they ultimately backed down.
The Nazi, Soviet, Khmer Rouge, and Hutu genocidists never allowed the passivity of their victims to slow them down, not for a minute. When Gandhi's grandson, Arun Gandhi, recently visited Yad Vashem, it would have been fair-minded of him to reflect upon this distinction. Instead he took the opportunity to lecture the Jews on their mistakes: "We got rid of Hitler but not the philosophy of hate that still threatens and strikes," he admonished.
This idiot really feels he has anything valid to say on the subject.Just because he has some of the blood of his legendary grandfather, doesn't mean he's not a retard.
It's hard to know where to begin when someone implies that Zionism resembles Nazism as an ideology of hate. When someone stands at Yad Vashem and says that the practice of Zionism is akin to the persecution Jews suffered in Europe, he has opened an unbridgeable chasm between his version of events and the historical truth.
When Arun Gandhi says that the barrier Israel is building in the West Bank is worse than Palestinian suicide bombings, his listener can only reflect morosely on the devastation of moral thinking that is so common in our generation.
And if only he were an exception. It has become so common to equate anything perceived as evil to Hitler, the Nazi's and the Holocaust, particularly when the "evil" is committed by Israel. Kind of like "now you're doing exactly what those bad people did to you. See, you are no better". But here's a gem from the Post article:
There has never been a chapter of human persecution more horrific than the Holocaust. It was preceded by many centuries of intermittent persecution of the Jews, some of it severe, much of it prolonged. And yet, in spite of endless provocation, the Jews were never "ground into dust," to use Gandhi's description of the Palestinians under Israeli rule; and although they must have felt intense frustration, they never preferred death with their tormentor's children, over life. No matter how much the Jews were persecuted, they never produced suicide murderers.
This is a key point. If anyone ever dares to attempt (again) that whatever Arabs ("Palestinians") do, its cause is their oppression by the Jews, point to this (apart from the fact that other Arabs and Mulsims behave as barbaric. Do they have generations of oppression by the Jews as an excuse?).
Morality is about decisions, not circumstances. Decisions made by adults, who could have decided otherwise had they so chosen. The Nazis launched the murder of the Jews at the moment of their greatest triumph, not in their dark years after World War I. While we do not equate the Palestinians with the Nazis, the Palestinian campaign of suicide murders began in the early years of the Oslo process as Yitzhak Rabin was leading the Israelis out of Palestinian territories, not during the preceding decades of Israeli control.
Conclusion: Arabs will regard compromise as weakness (which it is in this case), and you will get nothing but hatred from them. Bring them low, and they might actually listen to you. Israel has tried both approaches many times by now. It takes a Peres or someone equally moronic to ignore the lessons drawn.
Difference between an Arab and a Human Being part V
The Mensch and the Maniac
Sanity vs. lunacy; compassion vs. contempt.
Dueling words between a Jew and an Arab generated by the Beersheba genocide bombings distinguish one mindset from the other.
Nissim Vaknin found himself on a guilt trip because another human being died in his place. An Arab woman was elated that her husband sacrificed himself to commit mass murder against Jews.
Vaknin is a mensch who cherishes life. The widow, who was not identified and lives in the West Bank town of Hebron, is a maniac who revels in death.
In 1979 Sadat came to Israel and made the first step towards peace with the Jews. Jimmy Carter (then US president) promised Egypt 2 BILLION dollars annually for that peace. Also, Egypt was given back Sinai, which they had lost again in their war against Israel in 1973. Giving back Sinai was costly to Israel, in a number of ways. Firstly, more than 7000 families had settled there.
Secondly, Israel had invested heavily into Sinai, it is the only place where oil can be found in the local region.
But Israel wanted peace, heavy pressure was put on Menachem Begin (Israeli PM) by Carter (coercion is a more appropriate term), and eventually, Israel gave back Sinai, in return for which Egypt officially recognized Israel, opened a diplomatic mission in Tel Aviv and formally ended the existing state of belligerency. No matter that the deal was totally lopsided: Egypt had attacked Israel three times since its birth; Israel got nothing substantive in return; and Israel was not compensated for the losses sufferend in the war, or the losses incurred upon by abandoning its Sinai investments to the Egyptians.
Sadat was murdered soon after. He was no saint, had he had his way in 1973 then Israel would have ceased to exist. But there was some hope that since then, his desire for peaceful coexistence was sincere.
But Sadat was assassinated for his brave initiative. And Mubarak - his successor - was not made of the same stuff. No war has been declared officially, but the very first opportunity he saw to recall his ambassador, he used with both hands.
And as this article shows, his covert support for Arab Palestinian terrorists is ever increasing:
"It's crystal clear that Egypt supports terrorism against Israel by enabling Hamas and others to transform Sinai into their logistical rear," Steinitz told The Jerusalem Post. "The real policy of Egypt is to get the Israelis and Palestinians to bleed together."
According to data provided by Shin Bet chief Avi Dichter, in the past 18 months Egypt has allowed arms smugglers in the Sinai to bring 5,000 rifles, 330 anti-tank rocket launchers, several hundred RPG rockets, many mortars, and millions of bullets and other kinds of munitions into the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
"You don't take 5,000 Kalashnikovs in a few suitcases. You take them with many, many trucks and jeeps. So it is not something that a country can ignore," Steinitz said.
Combine this with the fact that Egypt has received over 50 BILLION (yes, 50.000.000.000) US dollars from the US in general aid, supplemented by more billions in military hardware, and the conclusion that Egypt is in fact still on a war footing with Israel is inescapable. It is low-intensity, covert, but is a war nonetheless.
On a related note is this statement from Jordan present king Abdullah. "Jordan king slams PA over concessions" Another successor of an Arab who made peace with Israel, now in effect chastising Arab Palestinians for compromising on their positions (which were untenable to start with). Helpful to peace, I'm sure. Can't wait for peace with the Persians.
We search the purses of little old ladies so that recent immigrants from Saudi Arabia named "Mohammed" wearing massive backpacks don't get singled out.
