|
Date - September 12, 2001
The Jihad against Civilization
Today is Wednesday, the fourth day of the week. On Wednesday the Levites in
the Temple of Old would recite the 94th song and its verses,
At the first Pearl Harbor, the caualty rate was 2,403 Americans killed,
1,178 wounded and 640 never accounted for. It seems inevitable that the
current Pearl Harbor will have a far higher toll.
In trying to get some perspective on things, I think there is one
important lesson from the FIRST Pearl Harbor. In a sense, the events at
the first Pearl Harbor – in a strange way – saved the world. The US was
still in the grasp of its isolationist delusions. It is not clear that
Rossevelt would have been able to bring the country into the war against
Hitler. But after Pearl Harbor, everything changed. US will and
determination are hard to arouse, but once aroused they are devastating.
And Pearl Harbor aroused that will and that determination.
Indeed, because of Pearl Harbor causing the US to enter the war and save
the world, it has long been subject of infantile conspiracy theories by
those upset over its role. As just two examples of the “conspiracy
theories” about the original Pearl Harbor, see
http://www.reformed-theology.org/html/issue04/deceiver.htm. or
http://www.biblebelievers.org.au/wall_st.htm
(One can only imagine what the likes of Barry Chamish will do with this.)
My point is that there may be something positive to come out of the
attacks on New York and Washington by Arab or Islamist nazis. That is an
awakening of the United States. Suddenly Americans understand what Jews
have dealt with and put up with for 100 years, albeit the scope of the
attacks on the US was far worse than any single incident involving Israelis.
(Indeed it looks like the worst terrorist incident in history in terms of
the number of Israelis killed was in fact the attack on the World Trade
Center.) Suddenly they realize that the enemy of civilization is Islamist
nazism.
Suddenly it should be clear to all that terrorism cannot be dealt with
through an endless series of calls for restraint and moderation, which has
been the line taken by the US state department and White House for decades.
At long last Colin Powell refrained from explaining why restraint in the
face of terrorism is all that is needed. At long last, American can
understand why it was mindlessly insane to demand that Israel deal with
terrorists through concessions and goodwill gestures, in the belief that
terrorists will accept high-tech services, tourist hotels, and web sites in
lieu of their other demands. In other words, the public relations message
that Israeli politicians have never been able to get across has now been
presented to the world with devestating clarity. Now the world understands
what Israel has lived with; now it understands why “occupation” was and is
necessary; now it understands why Israel must not turn the Golan over to
Syrian terrorists; now it understands why Israel must terrorize the
Palestinian nazis.
And even the media is adjusting. The same CNN and sister media outfits
that have long listed the dead Arab suicide bombers as counted among the
“tragic death toll” after every incident in the Middle East may have had
their eyes opened at last. I doubt any will count the suicide terrorists
this time as part of the total tragic death toll.
Two weeks ago Israel fired a missile that killed the terrorist head of
the so-called Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, or PFLP. The
PFLP is the group long led by George Habash that specialized in plane
hijackings back in the 1970s, and so its involvement in the attacks on the
US should not be ruled out. It has ALREADY hijacked US planes and attacked
the US. The US State Department, the Euro-appeasers, the UN, EVERYONE
denounced that Israeli missile “assassination” of the terrorist from the
PFLP two weeks ago with the Israeli Left howling its Amens. How hollow
their denunciations sound now.
Bring on the Starbucks, for America has been awakened from its
delusions. It no longer believes that the solution to terrorism is
coddling of and pandering to terrorists, nor sympathizing with their
demands and their claims of having been victimized, nor seeking to redress
the “underlying causes” of terror.
Terror does not have underlying causes.
And now, even down in Peoria, this is at last understood.
Other matters at the margins of these events:
Steve Emerson on the Jihad against America
http://www.frontpagemag.com/guestcolumnists/emerson09-12-01.htm
The Israeli Dimension (http://www.stratfor.com/home/0109111800.htm)
and http://www.frontpagemag.com/guestcolumnists/plaut09-11-01.htm
Interesting question: will Israel’s social security administration, the
National Insurance Institute, which agreed to pay a pension to the family of
the terrorist suicide bomber who blew up Nahariya last week, also agree to
pay pensions to the families of the kamikazis who attacked the US if it
should turn out that they were Arabs with Israeli passports?
Wall Street Journal Editorial:
A Terrorist Pearl Harbor
The world is a different place after the massive terrorist attacks on the
United States yesterday, much as it was after the bombing of Pearl Harbor
nearly 60 years ago; a new kind of war has been declared on the world’s
democracies. Just as Munich led to World War II, so attempts to buy peace in
the Middle East are surely behind this attack.
The scope of the terror assault would have been unimaginable before
yesterday. Multiple suicide squads conducting multiple airline hijackings,
taking control of planes and diving them and their passengers into high
profile targets in New York and Washington. The nation’s airports closed
down, movement in and out of Manhattan impossible. Uncounted number of
innocent civilians killed, grief for many American families, anxiety for
even more and almost universal inconvenience.
For the dead we can only grieve, and repairing the physical damage will take
many years. But even within sight of the World Trade Center, life went on,
albeit fitfully, yesterday. The airlines will fly again, albeit not quite as
before, and new buildings will be built. Modern industrial society, for all
the talk of its vulnerabilities, has a certain resilience. Returning to our
normal way of life as quickly and as completely as possible is one part of
the answer to the monsters who plan and perpetrate such ghastly events.
President Bush rightly promises to pursue and punish those responsible. The
pursuit of those directly implicated in the attacks is a high calling, as
recent convictions of African embassy bombers demonstrate. But we delude
ourselves if we believe we are threatened by some band of mavericks, no
matter how well organized and financed. Acts of this magnitude can only be
done by, or at least with the connivance of, states. The key sentence in Mr.
Bush’s speech last night was therefore his promise to "make no distinction
between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them."
We are entitled to assume that this is the work of the usual suspects --
Saddam Hussein, the Taliban, the Iranian mullahs and other dictators who
invoke Muslim fundamentalism to justify their fundamentally illegitimate
power. The first victims of this are their own populations, cemented into
backwardness and cut off from modernity. Another is the Muslim faith itself,
richer and more humane than the reputation won by the fanatics who serve the
cynical despots.
The immediate focus of the terrorist drive is of course Israel. But as
yesterday’s events again show, Israel serves as a proxy for much deeper
grievances against the United States and the civilization it represents. An
undercurrent (or more) of resentment at Western civilization runs through
the chanceries and bazaars of the Arab world, as well as a fear of what
democracy might mean for the power of local rulers.
We were glad to see that some Arab leaders denounced the attacks yesterday.
Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak called it "horrible and unimaginable.’’ Even Yasser
Arafat sent his condolences. But these leaders need to understand that their
societies carefully nurture and inculate resentments and hatreds against
America and the non-Arab world.
In its current issue, Commentary magazine carries an article "How Suicide
Bombers Are Made," by the Italian journalist Fiamma Nirenstein. Items: Al
Ahram, the leading government-sponsored newspaper in Egypt, carries a series
about how Jews use the blood of Gentiles in matzah. In Gaza and the West
Bank, school texts praise a young man who becomes a shahid, a martyr for
Palestine and Islam. A hit song in Palestine and Egypt is entitled "I hate
Israel." These popular attitudes and these state policies, not some isolated
madman, are the threat we saw come to fruition yesterday. In Gaza, the
crowds rejoiced.
The American approach to this, and even more so the European one, has been
to be "even-handed" between the terrorists and their victims, between our
friends and our enemies. Faced with a new intifada, George W. Bush reneged
on his promise to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. President
Clinton begged Yasser Arafat to continue a photo-op "peace process" and
allowed our defense capabilities to decline. George H.W. Bush stopped
American tanks in the desert, leaving Saddam to pursue his evil designs in
Baghdad. Little wonder that the fanatics conclude that America can be
intimidated by a terrorist spectacle.
In this they have certainly miscalculated, just as Tojo’s war planners
miscalculated in believing Pearl Harbor would leave America with no taste
for war. The upshot of this is likely to be a serious turn on a number of
fronts. Intelligence, for example; how could the CIA and FBI have no advance
indication of so large an event? Homeland defense, for another; can anyone
now continue to doubt that someday people like those who conducted
yesterday’s events will have missiles that can threaten U.S. cities at 30
minutes warnings?
What most needs to be recognized, though, is that the terrorism has a
political purpose. It is intended to intimidate America into standing aside
humiliated while the Arab despots and fanatics destroy Israel and thereby
prove that freedom and democracy are not after all the wave of the future.
We can honor yesterday’s dead by rallying our diplomatic, moral, financial
and as necessary military resources to insure that that purpose is
convincingly defeated.
Eli Pollak is one of Israel’s most distinguised scientists:
In the wake of the terror attack on the United States, the Palestinian
Authority continues to employ terror tactics against journalists who dare
report on the joyous reaction of Palestinians to the tragedy unfolding in
the United States. The following has been reported this afternoon by Kol
Yisrael’s reporter Danny Zaken. Israels’ Media Watch has taken steps to
demand of national Israeli press organizations and international
organizations such as UNESCO to take appropriate actions against any form
of terror, and especially the attempts to stifle journalists from reporting
the truth.
Communicated by Prof. Eli Pollak, Chairman, Israel’s Media Watch
The Israel Broadcasting Authority has reported the following item:
The Palestinian Authority has threatened the lives of photographers and has
announced that it will prevent journalists from operating from within the
PA.
The subject is photographs from Nablus and Ramallah, where PA policemen
participated in ’shootings of joy’. IBA reported Danny Zaken reported that
senior PA officials have demanded from most news agencies to tone down their
reports on the joy in the PA territories. This morning the BBC broadcast
that only a handful of Palestinians took part in the ’festivities’ even
though yesterday, other pictures were broadcast which indicated a different
version of the events.
And this letter has been sent:
Alain Modoux
Dear Mr. Modoux,
It has been reported here in Israel that as a result of
threats exerted by officials of the Palestinian Authority, journalists
have ceased broadcasting the scenes of Palestinians displaying joy
and jubilation, as well as distributing candy, in the aftermath of the
terror attack on the United States (see in the Hebrew -
http://bet.iba.org.il/9828.htm). They have also stopped filming such
scenes.
This is an intolerable attack on the sacred principle of
Freedom of the Press. This behavior should not be condoned.
We call upon you and other international media organizations
to condemn this phenomenon and to make public your call to halt this
interference. The peoples of the world have the right to know what
occurs and this blatant attempt to censor the news is to be rejected.
In addition, disappointment must be expressed to those news agencies
and broadcasting networks which have surrendered to such threats.
I hope to hear from you soon as to the active steps you have
taken.
Sincerely,
Professor Eli Pollak
About Steven Plaut. Copyright © 2001 by Steven Plaut. -Published with permission © 1999-2001 by OpinioNet(tm), All Rights Reserved |