A TIME TO SPEAK
Vol. IV:5 (No. 41)
May 2004 - Iyar-Sivan 5764
WILL-O'-THE-WISPS
Will-O'-The-Wisp -- also
called ignis fatuus [Latin for "silly fire"]:
a
mysterious light that moves away as one approaches it,
luring one who follows it toward peril or destruction
At times a person of
good intentions can be subject to hazardous delusions that permit them to
believe nice and comforting things and evade or deny harsh and discomforting
ones.
A
simple man believes anything
A
clever man ponders his course.
-- Proverbs
14:15
"No man is exempt from saying silly things.
The mischief is to say them deliberately."
-- Michel de Montaigne, 1588
"Any response
to the latest Palestinian atrocity that involves 'ending the cycle of violence'
and 'getting the piece process back on track' is also worthy of derision."
-- Mark Steyn, December
2003
A particularly pernicious
will-o'-the-wisp lures the gullible into the morass of an Israeli-Palestinian
Peace Process. Left to itself, this "silly light" would flicker out were it
not refueled with suppositions that there is something Israel or anyone else
can do to make the Arabs willing to live in peace with it. If only Israel
will concede this or yield that . . . give more . . . and when that does not
work give more still . . . All that is needed to keep
rushing after this will-o'-the-wisp is the resolve to ignore the amply demonstrated
truth that to the Arab it is permanently insufferable that Israel should
exist in even the tiniest space or most degraded condition.
The Peace Process Delusion
inspires demands that "both sides exercise utmost restraint". Obviously, terrorists
and their sponsors will not thereby be induced to restraint, so these are
really demands that Israel should not respond when its citizens are murdered
or threatened. The correct response is to admonish the murderers that the
slaughter will not advance their "rightful aspirations" or their "just cause"
-- as though that were the prime defect of the slaughters.
But the "aspiration"
and the "cause" are simply to kill Jews along the way to killing Israel. Official
spokesmen for the Arabs and Iranians not only admit but proclaim it, stridently
and ferociously. Those dancing after the will-o'-the-wisp ignore that inconvenient
detail or frivolously dismiss it as mere rhetoric, while they go on rewinding
tapes of roadmaps and touching up visions of Two-State-Solutions. Some are
genuinely if unthinkingly beguiled. Others know well enough that this "silly
light" can only lead Israel to the No-State-Dissolution.
*
* * * * * *
Another will-o'-the-wisp
is a naïve sanguinity that hatred of Israel and anti-Israel programs might
be ameliorated "if only they understood . . . ", if only Israel presents its
case more effectively it will be less vilified. It is indeed true, especially
in recent years, that individuals representing Israel before the world are
conspicuously unqualified for the role and give a false impression of the
character and quality of the country and its people. It is also true that
public statements set the wrong tone; defensive when they should be self-confident,
apologetic when it should be self-confident, flustered when it should be poised.
If there are individuals
who believe Israel is evil because they believe the reporting of irresponsible
or even corrupt news media, then accurate information might enlighten some
of these. But accurate information is abhorrent to the bulk of the news media.
For example, in the current actions against terrorism and terrorist-smugglers
in Gaza, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) invited journalists to "embed" and
thereby witness what was happening. They declined, preferring to invent reports
untainted by accuracy, or indolently file PLO propaganda sheets in place of
news reports.
* * * * * *
*
Israel does indeed owe
it to itself, to its friends, and to the historical record to present itself
properly. Yet it is a vain expectation that upgrading information services
and public relations can win over policymakers, academics, international organizations
and others that have a vested interest in an anti-Israel agenda. That agenda
is not formed by anything that Israel does or refrains from doing, or anything
it says or how eloquently it is said. Rather, it is formed from political-economic-psychological
components that are neither based on nor influenced by facts or fairness.
Two plangent examples
are the European Union (EU) and the United Nations (UN).
I] The European Union
began as an economic affiliation of six states and now subsumes twenty-seven
states, with unelected commissioners dictating minutiae of national, domestic
and even private life. Reasons enough come to mind why Europe collectively
-- with some individual exceptions -- has a self-serving aversion to Israel
-- the land of the Jews who survived and escaped the European regime and now
outstrip Europe in most constructive accomplishments. .
The foreign policy of
the EU is collective and conformity is obligatory for all members. (A prime
minister of the Czech Republic made some remarks mildly sympathetic to Israel,
at a time when his country's membership in the EU was pending but not yet
in effect. He was officially taken to task for the indiscretion and warned
that such deviancy would not be tolerated.)
On the Middle East, the
mandatory policy is based exclusively on distaste for Israel. It is required
in the formal international agreements by which Europe merged itself into
Eurabia, and programmed into the hearts and minds of the populace with the
cooperation of clergy, educators and news media. Israel
is in no way responsible for the terms of those agreements or the design of
the programs, and can in no way change them.
The Egyptian-born historian
who uses the name Bat Ye'or [Hebrew for "Daughter of the Nile"] now lives
in Europe. She has traced the founding of Eurabia and its anti-Israel principles
in several recent studies. From "The Road to Munich", National Review, 9 October 2002 (emphasis added):
"[. . . .] After the Yom Kippur War and the Arab oil blackmail in
1973, the then-European Community (EC) created a structure of Cooperation
and Dialogue with the Arab League. The Euro-Arab Dialogue (EAD) began as a
French initiative composed of representatives from the EC and Arab League
countries. From the outset the EAD was considered as a vast transaction: The
EC agreed to support the Arab anti-Israeli policy in exchange for wide commercial
agreements. [. . . .]
"Over the years, Euro-Arab
collaboration developed at all levels: political, economic, religious and
in the transfer of technologies, education, universities, radio, television,
press, publishers, and writers unions. This structure became the
channel for Arab immigration into Europe, of anti-Americanism, and of Judeophobia,
which -- linked with a general hatred of the West and its denigration --
constituted a pseudo-culture imported from Arab countries. The interpenetration
of European and Arab policies determined Europe's relentless anti-Israel
policy and its anti-Americanism. This politico-economic edifice, with
minute details, is rooted in a multiform European symbiosis with the Arab
world. [. . . .]
"Europe's economic greed
was instrumentalized by Arab League policy in a long-term political strategy
targeting Israel, Europe, and America. Arab economical ascendancy over the
EC influenced the latter's policy toward Israel. The EAD was the vehicle for
legitimizing the propaganda of the PLO, procuring it international diplomatic
recognition, and conferring on Arafat's terrorist movement honor and international
stature by supporting Arafat's address to the General Assembly of the United
Nations on November 13, 1974 .
Through the labyrinth
of the EAD system, a policy of Israel's delegitimization was planned at both
the EC's national and international levels. Approved instructions
from the highest political, religious, and academic authorities functioned
within the EAD's multiple commissions, implicating the media, universities,
and diverse cultural activities. The EAD was the mouthpiece which diffused
and popularized throughout Europe the defamation of Israel. France, Belgium,
and Luxembourg were then the most active agents of the EAD.
"Strategically, the Euro-Arab
Cooperation was a political instrument for anti-Americanism in Europe, whose
aim was to separate and weaken the two continents by an incitement to hostility
and the permanent denigration of American policy in the Middle East . The
cultural infrastructure of the EAD allowed the traditional cultural baggage
of Arab societies, with its anti-Christian and anti-Jewish prejudices and
its hostility against Israel and the West, to be imported into Europe. The
discredit heaped on the infidel Judeo-Christian culture was expressed by
the claim of the superiority of the Islamic civilization, at which source
European scholars, over the centuries -- it was said -- had humbly slaked
their thirst for knowledge. Drowned in this wave of Arab cultural and religious
expansionism that was integrated into the cultural activities of the EAD,
Europeans adopted the Arab-Islamic conception of history.
"The obsequiousness of
certain academics, subjected to a political power dominated by economic materialism,
is reminiscent of the worst periods of the decline of civilizations. The
suppression of intellectual freedom imported from undemocratic Muslim countries,
attached to a culture of hate against Israel, has recently led to the exclusion
and boycott of Israeli academics by some of their European colleagues.
"The cogs created by
the EAD led the EC (later the European Union) to tolerate Palestinian terrorism
on its own territory, to justify it, and finally to finance Palestinian infrastructure
-- later to become the Palestinian Authority -- and
hate-mongering educational system. The ministers and intellectuals who have
created Eurabia deny the current wave of criminal attacks against European
Jews, which they, themselves, have inspired. They deny the antisemitism, as
they have neglected the attacks against the fundamental rights of their own
citizens by delinquency and the terrorist threats, which they have allowed
to develop with impunity in their countries, in exchange for financial profits.
The silence and the negligence of the public authorities faced with this wave
of antisemitic aggressions is but the tip of the emerged iceberg of a global
policy. The EAD, which had tied Arab strategic policies for the destruction
of Israel to the European economy was the Trojan horse for Europe's inclusion
into the orbit of Arab-Muslim influence.
"With the support of
parliaments and ministries, the EAD concealed behind the Arab-Israel conflict
the global jihad being perpetrated on all continents. Europe's subservience
to Arab policy led the EU to give an artificial and absolute priority to the
Arab-Israel conflict in international affairs. [. . . .] Europe's pathological
obsession with the Arab-Palestinian conflict, has obscured the criminal
ongoing persecution of Christians and other minorities in Muslim lands worldwide,
and the sufferings and slavery of millions from jihad wars in Africa and
Asia.
"[-. . . .] The recent
anti-Jewish hysteria in Europe was an advertisement to neutralize diaspora
Jews, and the Israeli self-defense mechanism against Palestinian terror, which
is why it was so superbly overlooked by the highest authorities. This complacent
attitude has scandalized many European friends of Israel, who are much more
numerous than the EAD censorship organs and the Euro-Arab terrorist networks
would have us believe. Yet the majority of Europeans, who are not antisemitic,
are totally unaware of most of the EAD's policy, since its key deliberations
are unrecorded. More research and publications are needed in this field.
"The cracks between Europe
and America reveal the divergences between the choice of liberty and the
road back to Munich on which the European Union continues to caper to new
Arab-Islamic tunes, now called 'occupation,' 'peace and justice,' and 'immigrants'
rights' -- themes which were composed for Israel's burial. And for Europe's
demise."
Comment: So obedient
is the EU vassal of Arabia that it does shrink from making itself absurd:
On EU funds to the PLO: Israel has provided
stacks of authentic documentation that this money is used to finance terrorism.
The EU professes it does not prove anything.
On violent assaults on
the persons of Jews and their institutions in Europe: The EU ordered a study,
and then suppressed the report because it concluded that the perpetrators
are primarily Muslims. Instead, it made and adopted a second hasty report
to show that the perpetrators are primarily European hoodlums.
II] The United Nations
was founded to supervise peace and
international co-existence and has turned itself into the planet's Front Office
for the war against Israel and the Jews. If one were to evaluate the condition
of the world according to UN resolutions, it would appear that the country
that is No. 100 in size with .0008 percent of the population is the source
of all mischief. In its struggle against this pernicious entity, the UN invests
billions of dollars that might have been put to use for health care, famine
relief, education, or even cleaning up some of its own massive internal corruption.
Israel has been a member
for more than half-a-century. In all that time the UN has never given elementary
protection to its rights. It has condoned and even encouraged a bloc of member
states in their permanent campaign of aggression, terrorism and intent-to-destroy.
Recently, the UN almost
simultaneously decided (a) not to address the genocidal horrors the government
of the Sudan is committing against its own citizen and (b) elected the government
of the Sudan to membership on the Commission on Human Rights. That being done,
the UN was free to turn its full focus and force on Israel's war crimes against
tunnels used to smuggle weapons and long-range missiles to terrorists in
Gaza.
Its agency UNRWA turned
its 56-year-old refugee camps into bases for recruitment and training of terrorists,
and allows the use of UN facilities and equipment in terrorist enterprises.
The UN peacekeepers in Lebanon abet incursions into Israel to abduct and
murder Israeli soldiers, and Secretary-General Kofi Annan conceals the evidence
as long as he can.
Israel continues to waste
its rhetoric, its reputation and its dues on this global epicenter of corruption
and Judeophobia. In other democracies, there is still a tendency to ignore
the scandals, the predominance of brutal dictatorships, the corruption of
the secretariat and its employees, the gross misconduct of UN peacekeepers.
It is even argued that nations dare not defend themselves or their vital interests
without the permission of the UN or, even worse, that
they should delegate the defense to the UN itself.
Where Israel and the
Jews are concerned, the EU and the UN have established records of unmistakable
hostility and malevolent intent. They are members of the Quartet that drew
the roadmap appointing themselves arbiters of Israel's fate.
Any government of Israel
that follows that "silly light" is following a roadmap into the quicksand.
[See Issues 28 & 29]
* * * * * *
*
"We are not fighting so you will offer us something.
We are fighting to eliminate you."
-- Hassan Massawi, Hezbollah
A snare perhaps unique
to present-day democracies -- especially Israel and the United States -- is
being so fastidious about one's own moral purity that one is inhibited about
recognizing much less confronting evil. The corollary is a self-defeating
self-absorption that detracts attention from the nature and threats of the
enemy.
This tendency is addressed in "Stop Navel-Gazing,"
by Caroline Glick, The Jerusalem Post, 14 May 2004
"We are in a world war
and yet we do not notice it.
"[Islamist jihadi attacks
on Christians in Africa] should be taken into account when we look at the
bloody toll of the Palestinian offensive in Gaza and when we observe American
confusion in Iraq today. It should be taken into account because we must realize
that our enemies are engaged in a world war against the non-Muslim world.
When we consider our daily battles on our limited terrain we must not allow
our perceptions to be distorted by that directly before us.
"Yet undermine our perceptive
powers we have. Although the Palestinians, like their Iranian and Hizbullah
overlords have consistently stated that their aim is to destroy Israel in
stages, we Israelis refuse to see the overall picture of their strategy. They
execute Tali Hatuel and her daughters on the day of the Likud poll and we
fail to understand the message. It is not, 'Get out of Gaza, or else.' It
is, 'Regardless of what you desire, we will push you out of Gaza as we pushed
you out of Lebanon and as we will push you out of the rest of Palestine that
you refer to as Israel.'
"But we don't see it
that way. Our press, like our beleaguered and vain politicians, pushes a different
story. In their story, there is no enemy, only Israel. [. . . . ] We do not
see news analyses of Palestinian societal derangement that manifests itself
in cannibalism. We do not see debates of what an Israeli defeat in Gaza means
to a society bred from the cradle to the grave on global jihad and its requisite
genocide of the Jewish people in the Land of Israel and beyond. [. . . .]
"When we pay attention
to our enemies and see the scope of their ambitions and depth of their hatred
we must come to a revolutionary conclusion. We, Israelis, Americans, and indeed
all non-fascistic Muslims constitute the frontline in the war wherever we
are. It was not US military deployment in Saudi Arabia that precipitated the
September 11 attacks anymore than it was the Israeli presence in Lebanon or
in Gaza or Judea and Samaria or Jerusalem that precipitated the Palestinian-led
jihad against Israel. It is our existence that provokes our enemy.
"Our enemies, the forces
of global jihad, be they Palestinian or Jordanian, Saudi, Egyptian, Syrian,
Lebanese, Iranian or Iraqi use all the means at their disposal to wage their
war against us. From their television and radio stations and newspapers they
incite for our destruction and feed us fictions of our own culpability to
both strengthen their forces' will to fight us and weaken our will to defend
ourselves.
"In the UN, the Arab
League, the Organization of the Islamic Conference and on countless other
international stages they seek to criminalize us for our crime of defending
our existence. In this they find accomplices among our own self-absorbed elites
who are only too happy to blame the war being waged against us on ourselves.
"When we limit our gaze
to ourselves not only do we fail to take notice of the nature of the war,
we craft national policies that harm both ourselves and our allies. In Israel,
our self-obsession has brought about plan after plan all of which have weakened
us and our allies in the global struggle. From the Oslo initiative to the
retreat from Lebanon to Sharon's pullout plan from Gaza and parts of Samaria
we have hurt ourselves and our allies.
"We have hurt ourselves
by weakening our ability to recognize our enemies as such seeing them rather
as erstwhile peace partners. We have hurt ourselves by discrediting our own
right to live unmolested as large swathes of our elites have preferred our
enemies the Palestinians to our own citizens in Judea, Samaria and Gaza.
"In behaving as though
the Palestinian branch of the global jihad is engaging in a war over a few
kilometers in Gaza, Judea and Samaria rather than playing a central role in
the global jihad against non-Muslims, we are making it harder for our allies,
first and foremost the Americans, to see the true nature of the war they
too are fighting. If it is only Israeli settlers who are preventing peace
by living in mobile homes in Judea and Samaria then perhaps it is only America
in its 'arrogance' that is preventing the jihadis from coming to a meeting
of the minds with the West.
"As the jihad spreads
throughout the world, we must stop finally with our self-destructive self-absorption.
The butchers in Zeitoun who kicked the remains of our soldiers like footballs
on Tuesday, like the butchers in Baghdad, Karachi, Riyadh and beyond who kill
with barbaric ecstasy and primordial hatred do so not because of anything
we have done. They do so because they are barbarians. And if we do not wish
to be destroyed, we must do everything to destroy them and nothing to give
them hope for victory against us."
* * * * * *
*
Even the aspiration to high moral standards
can be a will-o'-the-wisp when it morphs into the singularly immoral tactic
of putting Israel's own citizen-soldiers into needless danger out of humanitarian
concern for "the other".
When the IDF went into action against terrorist
bases and nests in Jenin, this doctrine produced the order not to shell or
bomb the bases, but to clear them room by room. The intent was to avoid casualties
among non-combatants in those bases, but the effect was to enable a juvenile
terrorist-in-training was able to lure the soldiers into a trap where 23 of
them were killed. (That was the real Jenin Massacre, not the fictional one
made-up by UN officials and British reporters.) This kind of sacrifice is
not required by traditional Jewish ethics, common sense, or the "international
humanitarian law" blithely invoked against Israel.
It is standard practice for Arab terrorists
and even soldiers of Arab states to ring themselves with civilians, preferably
old women and young children, in part to protect themselves and in part to
incur pathetic casualties to exploit for propaganda. The ruling in many quarters
that this endows the combatants with immunity is itself contrary to the widely
misconstrued Geneva Convention. It also contravenes the clear statement
in Article 28: "The presence of a protected person [non-combatant] may not
be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations."
Israel's young men in
military service and older men called up for reserve duty do not inflict harm
on non-combatants when it can possibly be avoided. But they are not obligated
by any moral law to risk or waste their own lives to accommodate that enemy
trick, and the country they are defending has not the right to impose that
sacrifice upon them.
From
Issue No. 36:
Avihu
Keinan, z"l, a young soldier from the community re-established at biblical
Shilo, lost his life when the military doctrine of humane restraint put him
in unnecessary peril. His father, Moshe Keinan, speaks out in "A True Jewish
Morality Not A False One," Reported by IMRA (Independent Review and Analysis)
11 October 2003:
"Moshe Keinan, father of Givati Brigade reconnaissance
unit soldier, Avihu Keinan, who was killed in action the day before Rosh Hashanah
while searching for a terrorist commander, will be marching to Jerusalem from
his home in Shiloh. He will depart from his son's grave in the Shiloh Cemetery
on Sunday morning, October 12.
"He is demanding that the Israeli armed forces
be instructed to fight the war against terror in a manner consistent with
true Jewish morality, and not the false morality which endangers our soldiers
and citizens.
"He is demanding that the army act in a truly
moral way; it should not care more for the enemy and the enemy's supporters
than it does for Israeli soldiers.
"He is demanding a morality that is not perverted
by unnecessary feelings of guilt, a morality that does not irresponsibly endanger
our soldiers to the benefit of our enemy. [. . . .] Even the Geneva Convention
acknowledges that civilians cannot be used as shields. The lives of these
civilians are their own responsibility of those who place them in danger.
"Those who support this false morality are themselves
immoral; they are endangering and damaging the lives of Israeli civilians
and soldiers. [. . . .]"
* * * * * *
*
When Israeli soldiers on duty in the Gaza strip
were killed in the explosion of a mine, local Arabs seized their body parts
to make sport with them, display them in parades, and try to extract ransom
for them.
While their comrades painstakingly searched
for and recovered the remains (including those hidden in a UN ambulance),
local residents were placed under curfew, and the IDF delivered food and water
to their houses.
Staff Sergeants Alexei Hayat, age 20, of Beersheba,
and Rotem Adam, age 21, of Rishon Letzion were on guard duty when one of them
helped an old Arab woman to carry her food supply into her house. In the
performance of that act, he was fatally shot by a sniper. When his comrade
rushed to his aid, he too was killed by the sniper.
END