Category Archives: Israel

Lay Off Pat Robertson

Pat Robertson, â€œa life long supporter of Israel,” is being attacked for saying that God “has enmity against those who divide [His] land,’ suggesting He does not look kindly on Sharon. But as Ariel Sharon lies gravely ill , felled by a massive stroke, the seething cesspool known as the Palestinian Street has been rejoicing. Smiling children hold up placards with the words, “Sharon Die.” (Look at them; aren’t they precious?)

The Palestinians’ official leadership has been slightly more somber; the Arab world, after all, is and has always been more radical and militant than its leaders. As Arab-American scholar Fouad Ajami once noted, “It is a peculiarity of the Arab political order that many of the rulers and the dynasties are more moderate than the populace.” Hamas, the Palestinians’ unofficial representative—it is expected to win the upcoming democratic parliamentary elections—has been leading these terrifying tykes in celebration.

Every bit as bent and brutal are the offerings on assorted hard-Left websites. The Counterpunch cranks, for example, set a similar tone with articles entitled: “Stroke of Luck? Political Hemorrhage in Israel.” Written by an Arab, the piece was no match in its pixelated glee for “Sharon Meets His Maker,” by an expatriate Israeli.

Far and away the most hateful anti-Israel-cum-anti-Semitic tracts are penned by Jews. For instance, the revisionist, pseudo-scholarly campaign to delegitimize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state is the handiwork of Jews: “the New Historians.”

I have no doubt that were he alive today, Karl Marx would be a “New Historian.” Marx was one of the most notorious anti-Jewish thinkers. “Money is the jealous God of Israel, besides which no god may exist,” he wrote. In A History of the Jews, Paul Johnson presents an overview of Marx’s prolific anti-Semitism. Johnson has concluded that the archetype Jew in Marx’s thinking was replaced by the archetype capitalist.

Another marginal expatriate Israeli accused Bibi Netanyahu of dancing on Sharon’s grave. No links or quotes were offered in support of this inflammatory assertion. The commentator simply superimposed his twisted tantrum on innocent position statements made by the Netanyahu camp. The golem in question garnished his anti-Sharon prolixity with left-liberal root-causes rot: he contends a lone Jew—Rabin’s murderer—is to blame for the anarcho-terrorist society under construction, adjacent to Israel.

Sharon is old, overweight, and overburdened. I happen to think those realities caught up with him! Robertson disagrees. Like them or not, his theological beliefs include the idea that one will reap God’s wrath if one defies His wishes, as Robertson construes them. Big deal! Those who’ve been protesting Robertson with the greatest indignity are also the squawkers who were mum when Iran’s Majnun-in-Chief vowed to annihilate Israel. Let a Muslim cleric with a bucket of lopped off clitorises in the shed (I didn’t say that; Kathy Griffin did) make some or other ridiculous statement and it’s face to Mecca and keister up in the air for these bootlickers.

Robertson may be tactless, but his attackers are hypocrites. If they care so much about Sharon, let them turn the arrows in their quiver on the Palestinian Street, or on the hard-Left, or on other chronic loathers of Israel—and of civilization and liberty.

Death By The West

Islam, Israel, Media, Middle East, The West

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).

Putin And Sharon: Bred-In-The-Bone Patriots

Israel, Politics

Vladimir Putin and Ariel Sharon should have made more of their recent meeting. It was Sharon’s chance to get Putin on his side. Unlike George Bush the internationalist, Putin and Sharon are fierce nationalists who care first and foremost about their respective countries. Both, paradoxically, are under pressure from the U.S. for their treatment of terrorists —the two leaders are expected to make concessions to murderers who kill their civilians, while Bush and the international community make no such allowances for al-Qaida. The Murder Inc. of the Middle East (Hamas) and that of Russia (Chechen terrorists) have pan-Islamic aspirations and ties to al-Qaida. That the Left sympathizes with violent societies like Chechnya and the Palestinian Authority (their July-17 election is predicted to be a shoo-in for Hamas) is to be expected. From the Right one expects better, although it’s certainly a pleasant surprise to read an article in a libertarian publication which, for a change, rejects the root-causes rubbish: “[A] high-violence society does not get that way because of any particular cause or condition,” writes James L. Payne in The Prospects for Democracy in High-Violence Societies. “It is better understood as a society mired in the past, a society that has failed to make the transition away from primitive, counterproductive modes of interaction.”
In any case, a better understanding between Russia and Israel might take the pressure off Sharon to keep making concessions to “Hamastan,” and, perhaps, inject a new dynamic into the current imbalance of power in the world.