HUGH FITZGERALD REPLIES: READITALL
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Meanwhile, the Islamic Republic of Iran races ahead, with Ahmadinejad repeatedly caling for the erasure, the elimination, the end, of Israel. And meanwhile, too, we have Joseph Biden apparently tells the Israelis that their failure to do the bidding of the Obama Administration, their failure to simply surrender their rights, by being required never to exercise them (in Jerusalem and in the tiny patch of land which was always intended by the League of Nations’ Mandates Commission to be part of the territory assigned to the Mandate for Palestine for the exclusive purpose of the establishment of the Jewish National Home), Israel’s failure to promise it won’t try to destroy or severely damage the Islamic Republic of Iran’s nuclear project is “dangerous for us.” “For us” — but apparently the people of Israel are supposed to live with such a mortal threat, because two American administrations, like some previous ones that allowed Pakistan, using American money, to acquire nuclear weapons, have been so ineffective and feckless and now downright pusillanimous in dealing with the Islamic Republic of Iran, and all its works and days.
If Israel is beginning to feel more and more like Czechoslovakia in the late summer and fall of 1938, with that Runciman Mission, and then the final capitulation at Munich, with Neville Chamberlain, well-satisfied with himself, returning in triumph to London, believing deeply he had achieved “peace in our time,” it has every right to.
The Obama Administration still does not want to begin to try to understand Islam, because to do so would simply require too much concentration and too much effort. And if it were understood, the folly of this “peace-processing” — the favorite activity of so many Islam-ignorant American administrations– would be clear, and the recognition that there is no end to, and therefore no “solution” to, the endless Jihad against Israel (just as there is no end to, and therefore no “solution,” to, all the other local Jihads whose sum is the world-wide Jihad that many governments and “those taking a leadersip role” simply do not want to hear about, do not want to have to think about it, want only to dismiss it and put it out of their mind, want to refuse to believe the evidence, of Musliim texts and Muslim behavior toward non-Muslims, over the past 1350 years, from Spain to the East Indies — because they are Podsnaps all, and that’s the way they deal, like their great original Mr. Podsnap, with things that don’t quite fit their limited world-view, things that might upset their mental applecarts.
Israel is not building “settlements” in Saudi Arabia, or in Jordan. In the immediate case, it is giving permission for apartments to be built in its capital, Jerusalem, a city where all religions enjoy full religious freedom only because Israel is in control, and such religious freedom would disappear just as soon as the only other claimant — the Muslims — took power, if they ever did.
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Furthermore, the Mandate for Palestine was abolutely clear: the Middle East did not belong to the Arab Muslims alone. There were other peoples, too, who deserved their own states, even though they may have been scattered. No one doubted that the independent Kurdistan would of course have some non-Kurds within it, and not all Kurds would be included in it. No one doubted that the contemplated independent Armenia would have some Kurds and Turks in it, but so what? And while the Mandate for Lebanon was, early on, tacitly and correctly understood as a refuge for Chrisetians in the Middle East, unfortunately the French as historic protectors of the Maronites weakened, and durinig the last fifty years the position of the Maronites, and other Christians too, has weakeneed. The Mandates system of the League of Nations did not go far enough, for Great Britain, in particular, was not thinking when it created out of three Ottoman vilayets (Mosul, Baghdad, Basra) the country of Iraq, about the future of the Assyrians and Chaldeans, and it ought to have provided for them, somewhere in the north, possibly under a joint arrangement with the independent Kurdistan that might have been created, but was not.
Now, as to the Jewish National Home, or Israel, and its borders. As you surely know, the only reason the Arabs have any claim to the “West Bank” is that the Arab Leagion of Jordan (under Glubb Pasha and Alec Kirkbride) managed to seize it. The claim of the Arabs is only that of military occupier. But when Israel took the “West Bank” in the Six-Day War, its claim was not that of a military occupier, but based on the provisions of the League of Nations’ Mandate for Palestine. And this legal claim was strengthened by a moral claim: the claim that allows countries that fend off those bent on destroying them (and there was considerable evidence of this, right from May 15, 1948 and the declaration of Azzam Pasha that there would be a massacre [of the Jews of Israel] such as had not been seen since the days of the Mongols.
Furthermore, Resolution 242 did not, and could not, have effaced the original League of Nations’ Mandate, and its terms. The United Nations took over, assumed, that mandatory system, and did not change it and by its own charter could not change it. And Resolution 242 is all about “defensible borders” and security, and as a military matter, it is simply impossible, given the permanent imbalance of forces – with the Arabs having nearly fifty times the population, more than one-thousand times the land area, and with vast sums spent on arms, far more than Israel ever could manage, because of the trillions of unstoppable dollars that the oil and gas deposits provide.
That is why it is so infuriating to see representatives of an Administration that cannot begin to recognize that the real theatre of war is not Iraq, not Afghanistan, not Pakistan, but imperilled Western Europe, refuses still to recognize the central role of the ideology of Islam. For if it were to realize it, it would see the Arab Muslim war on Israal as what it is, and recognize that only deterrence, not “peace processes” leading to utterly worthless “peace treaties” that would of course be based on further surrenders of territory indispensable for the survival of Israel, will keep the peace. The best peace Israel can hope for is the present one, or one made somewhat better by a shared recongition, among the advanced countries, that Islam is a threat to all of them, and that none of them ought to lecture or threaten the others as to what they do, or do not do, in their own attempts to rescue themselves from the menace posed to each by those adherents of Islam — they are so many — who take the texts and tenets of Islam to heart. And one never knows when an outward “moderate” will become something different, for all kinds of reasons, some of which may have nothing to do with politics but with a more personal desarroi.
It is maddening to have those who presume to tell others what to do show that they have no understanding of the nature of Islam. Maddening, and for those who live in the West, frightening as well. One hopes for a dozen Geert Wilders, and little by little, there are signs that such will be appearing. Not becuase the “Islamophobes” have been so utterly convincing, but because Muslims themselves, in their attacks on non-Muslims (Assyrians and Chaldeans in Iraq, Copts, in Egypt, black African Christians in the Sudan, where the slaughter is about to begin again, Hindus and Sikhs and Christians in the subcontinent, and Buddhists too, in the Chittagong Hills of Bangladesh, as well as in southern Thailand, and then there’s the killing of Christians and burning fo thousands of churches in Indonesia, and the attacks in the southern Philippins, and the massacres of Christians by Muslims in Nigeria, which may remind people of why Christians in 1967 tried to fight for their existence against what Colonel Ojukwu called the “Jihad” against them. And so on.
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The evidence mounts and mounts, too much for the usual suave deflections and deliberate confusions. One hopes that among those coming to their senses, all over the Western world, will be those in Israel who for several decades have refused — so unpleasant is it for them to contmeplate — that the war being waged against them is prompted by Islam, has no end, and any concessions will whet, not sate, Arab appetites. Such things as the Biden-Clinton tongue-lashings delivered to Israel are so outrageous, so disgusting, that one hopes that it will push more and more Israelis, and those who wish Israel will, in the direction of common sense about Islam. That’s all one asks: a little common sense. All over the Western world.
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“But Israel has gradually been building Jewish settlement closer and closer to the al-Aqsa mosque, such that now Jewish apartments are just a few metres away. It is no wonder Fatah officials feel threatened by this.” — from a poster above
A poster above would like you to believe that Al-Aksa Mosque is somehow threatened by the building of apartments for Israelis — physically threatened,.
Let’s take a look at that claim. First, let’s take a little look at Al-Aksa Mosque itself, which takes its name from a phrase in the Qur’an, about “the farthest mosque” (al-masjid al-aksa), a phrase the meaning of which was the subject of great discussion and dispute in the period of earliest post-Muhammad Islam — it was not even clear if it should be given a literal and physical meaning and therefore location, or endowed perhaps more impressively with a meaning that was not of this world, but figurative and spiritual. In the end, an early Umayyad caliph sitting in Damascus decided that, why, tiens, the “farthest mosque” — from which Muhammad supposedly flew up to the Seventh Heaven and back on his fabulous steed al-Buraq — must surely be right smack on top of the holiest site to Jews, the Temple Mount, right in the center of a city holy to both Jews and Christians. What better way to establish, and even flaunt, the power and supremacy of Islam, than to plant, as it were, the Flag of Islam, with the Al-Aksa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock (which, by the way, has the clear shape of a Byzantine martyrium, and inscriptions in Arabic that are not Qur’anic, and — if you believe the philological and other evidence adduced by that brilliant scholar Christoph Luxenberg — is not Islamic at all but, rather, Christian, in what the writing expresses).
Now what is it we know, if we know only one thing, about Al-Aksa Mosque? We know that it is built not at ground level, but on top of the Temple Mount, that is many tens of meters (or “metres” as the English or English-educated Muslim apologist for Islam known as “Simon” writes it) above the ground. So it makes no sense to claim that the Israeli apartments “threaten” to “creep up” on the Al-Aksa Mosque. If they are in the vicinity — are they? — they are perhaps “creeping up” on the ground-level Western Wall, but the last thing in the world they could be “creeping up” on is Al-Aksa Mosque.
And of course the same poster would I think prefer you to ignore many things in the history of Jerusalem. For example, to forget the destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre by the Caliph Hakim, ruling in Cairo, in 1009. Or if we move forward to just the last six decades since Israel declared its independence, the treatment, by the Jordanians, of the synagoguges in the Old City — 37 of 38 of them were blown up, and of the ancient Jewish tombstones on the Mount of Olives, that were pulled up and then used to line Jordanian army latrines. And he knows perfectly well that during that period of Arab Muslim rule Jews could not get to the Western Wall to pray. And he further knows — or does he? — that not a single Arab leader of note, not a single Muslim religious leader of note, save for King Abdullah himself (after all, the eastern part of Jerusalem was declared to be, with Amman, joint capital of Jordan, but that was merely a pro forma declaratoin), not a single Arab “intellectual” of note, appears to have visited Jerusalem, that is the Old City, when the Arabs controlled it until Jordan’s King Hussein, having listened to the siren song (well, the recorded telephone calls) of Gamal Abdel Nasser) of Nasser, foolishly joined in the gang-up on Israel and for his pains, lost that part of Judea and Samaria, 9which the Jordanians had carefully renamed the “West Bank” in the same spirit as the Romans who renamed their pesky because rebellious province of “Judea” as “Syria palaestinorum” or “Syria of the Philistines,” and ultimately the shortened adjectival form, “Palestine,” gained acceptance in Western Christendom as the toponym of choice.
There’s much more one could say, and perhaps if prompted, I will. But the poster above needs to study history, or perhaps he knows that history all too well, and wishes that you not know it, indeeed counts on your not knowing it.
Well, this isn’t the website of the BBC or “The Guardian.”
Too many people at this website are well-informed, largely by dint of their own efforts, about the history of the war being made on Israel, and more important, on the history of Islam itself, and the war being made, over the past 1350 years, on every conceivable kind of Infidel.
He’s come to the wrong website. He’s peddling the wrong wares.
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