The so-called occupied territories are really disputed territory, gained due to acts of aggression by the Arab states against Israel. There was no Palestinian State in 1967 when the territories were captured. What kind of morality is it, then, to return territory to the aggressor? And where’s the precedent? It rewards aggression—and guarantees it’ll reoccur. If anything, by returning land to the aggressors—the Sinai first—Israel violated Nullum crimen sine poena, the imperative in international law to punish the aggressor. Writer William Anderson pointed out to me that had the Arabs seized parts of Israel in one of their many failed campaigns, there would be no calls to return the land. Come to think of it, before the brutal Muslim conquest, the land was Christia—Egypt, Libya, North Africa, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, and Asia Minor were Christian, not so? In Israel the West has reclaimed a small spot of sanity in a sea of savagery, where enlightened Western law prevails, and where Christians and Jews and their holy places are safe. (By the way, not once is Jerusalem mentioned in the Qur’an. Muslim fondness for Jerusalem is almost as recent, and certainly as innovative, as the discovery of Palestinian nationhood.) Yet, what is the West feverishly fighting for? The utter emasculation of Israel. The Bully Bush administration is now talking about Israel’s return to the 1949 “Armistice lines.” Amazing—and all the more so when such “thinking” is applauded by paleoconservatives (and by many libertarians). Aren’t they forever decrying the Death of the West? Paleocons certainly stood firm behind the Christian side in Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Chechnya, Cyprus, Sudan, East Timor and Kashmir. And so they ought to have: Muslims have wiped out entire Christian communities in these places, not that the strongmen in power or the talking twits on television have noticed. Yet you’ll often hear paleoconservatives condemn Condi R. and Genghis B. for leaning on, say, Vladimir Putin; but celebrate when they sunder Israel’s sovereignty. It is becoming apparent that to some, bringing about the end of Israel is well worth the deadly price of reviving and consolidating a caliphate. There’s a word for that (besides insanity).
Category Archives: Islam
Neocon Tales Of The Arabian Nights
Curiously, those who advocate aggressive and futile wars against Muslims are equally devoted to promoting the Religion-of-Peace pie-in-the-sky, and the attendant misconceptions about Islam. Yes, neoconservatives, led by the Bush/Blair pair, have managed to anesthetize their subjects to a faith that defies sanitation. As you know, neoconservatives implicate “Radical Islam” in our woes, by which they mean a splinter of Islam. Indeed, an estimated 100 to 300 million Muslims are active adherents of Islamism: small potatoes, right? Yet to listen to our globalists, you’d think that Jihadists are as alien to Islam as edelweiss is to the Kalahari.
Ad nauseam we hear it chanted that the Religion-of-Peace was doing what it does best–inspire serenity and prosperity–when suddenly, ex nihilo, radicals materialized and derailed it. Of course, this nonsensical incantation is both ahistorical and illiterate–it’s easily corrected with the aid of a good history book and a Quran.
The first will show that the sword has always been integral to Islam, and that conversion has invariably meant conquest and untold carnage. The second will prove that, to be fair to Islam’s alleged hijackers, the’ve done no more than act on the dictates of their faith. Bin Laden is an obedient Muslim. He has obeyed the Quran. The Call to Jihad instructs Muslims that, “When you meet those who disbelieve smite at their necks till when you have killed and wounded many of them.” Holy war, which is demanded in Islamic law, is not defensive war as the Western students of Islam would like to tell us, warns Serge Trifkovic, foreign affairs editor of the paleoconservative magazine Chronicles, and author of The Sword of the Prophet.
Islam, moreover, has changed little over 1,400 years. Unlike the Jewish (and no doubt Christian) holy texts which have been reinterpreted by the sages over the centuries, the Quran has not; ”its decrees are not debatable and are to be taken literally.” Bin Laden may not be a perfect Muslim–he prefers bombing to beheading. But the times they have changed. Allowances must be made for technological advances and expediency.
A geopolitical blind spot tops the historical and textual deficiencies characteristic of the administration’s approach to terrorism and Islam. Agree or disagree with it, an aggressive war, launched against a sovereign Muslim nation–Iraq–was bound to serve as a catalyst for Jihadists. But the policy pinheads who extol Islam refuse to factor American foreign policy into the terrorism equation. Supporters of Bush’s foreign policy would do well to remember that, even if they believe, as Bush expects them to, that war in Iraq and terrorism in America are mutually exclusive conditions, they must at least concede that the president’s domestic positions on immigration, border security, and the imperative to be “minimally observant” about America’s enemies (comedian Dennis Miller’s term for racial profiling), amount to a reckless indifference to the sovereignty and safety of Americans.
But as I’ve previously observed, “Inviting an invasion by foreigners and instigating one against them are two sides of the same neoconservative coin.”
The Quran Defiled?
Newsweek’s Quran-down-the-crapper allegations, published after a suspicious sourcing process, now a media staple, sparked deadly riots from Jakarta to Jalalabad —17 dead so far, presumably Muslims killed by their co-religionists. Just for good measure, 200 Qurans were likely burned when a library was set on fire. How did the neoconservatives respond? As “committed cultural and religious relativists who firmly believe a good democratic heart throbs in every thorax,” they groveled obsequiously —”Any desecration of the Koran would not be tolerated,” kvetched Condi. And they pretended there was nothing deviant about the Islamic response —and its devastation. Can you imagine contemporary Christians reacting so savagely to the perennial disrespect their teachings elicit? (The ACLU would need to relocate to an undisclosed bunker.) A prominent Rabbi is beaten to a pulp in Moscow (currently a regular occurrence around the world). Do his followers go on a rampage? From Buddhists to Bahá’Ãs —such barbarism is almost unheard of in this day and age among peoples of other faiths. This reaction is yet another reminder why we have no place in those parts of the world (although, to be fair to the administration, the riots were a response to putative wrongdoing in Guanta¡namo). The storm alleged to have begun in a toilet bowel is also a testament to the impotence of American empire. If one wants to transform the Muslim world —something I’ve opposed on ethical, pragmatic, and historical grounds —one must have a core. Multiculturalism and majoritarianism are no match for fundamentalist fanaticism.