RUTHFULLY YOURS

When one contemplates the radical anti-Israel Left in Israeli academia, Bar-Ilan University (BIU) is not ordinarily the school that jumps to mind. Bar-Ilan is nominally an Orthodox religious school, although lots of secularists and non-Jews study and teach there. Bar-Ilan has fewer tenured anti-Israel leftists than do other institutions, but nevertheless it does have a few. Probably the worst is Menachem Klein from the BIU political science department.

Klein is one the leading Bash-Israel academics who has a special passion for the idea of dividing Jerusalem and removing Israel from its sacred shrines. The 64-year-old was the academic fig leaf for the anti-Israel “Geneva Initiative” of Yossi Beilin and the Far Left. When he was denied an academic promotion a while back, he publicly denounced Bar Ilan University as a thuggish institution.

A member of the board of B’tselem, Klein seems to have never met an anti-Semite he does not like. He favors Israeli leftists negotiating peace with Palestinians, by surrendering to their demands.

In recent years, Klein has devoted his energies to resuscitating the old Stalinist myth about Arab-Jewish euphoria before the rise of Zionism and especially the silly pseudo-history around the notion of the “Arab Jew.” Invented by a small group of Israeli Stalinists led by Tel Aviv University sociologist Yehouda Shenhav, these people claim that Oriental Jews are actually Arabs of the Mosaic persuasion. Never mind the proportion who would slap you silly if they hear you calling them Arabs of any sort. Shenhav has promoted his view that Asian Jews are Arabs in numerous articles and his book, The Arab Jews: Nationality, Religion and Ethnicity, won rave reviews from Arab extremists and from PLO front groups.

Congress has passed a $576 billion Defense Appropriations bill for 2016 with a wide and bipartisan majority: 282-138, according to Defense News. The Obama administration takes issue with various parts of the bill, including presenting a six-page memo specifically calling for the elimination of Congress’s allocation of $635 million for Israel.

The money for Israel includes $268.7 million in R&D for U.S.-Israel cooperative missile defense programs; $72 million for the procurement of Iron Dome; $150 million for the procurement of David’s Sling; $120 million for procurement of Arrow III; and $42.7 million for U.S.-Israel anti-tunnel cooperation.

State Department spokesman John Kirby said the administration opposed the funding increase for Israel because it “would consume a growing share of a shrinking U.S. Missile Defense Agency’s budget… Additional support for Israel means fewer resources that are available for critical U.S. programs at a time when the missile threat from North Korea, in particular, is increasing.”

Here’s a thought for Adm. Kirby and the administration: Man up.

Fund U.S. missile defense programs – and the rest of the U.S. defense budget — at levels appropriate to the threat America faces without shortchanging an ally facing broad, increasing and unremitting threats.

How did we get here?

Thirty years ago, Israel was invited to join President Reagan’s missile defense program by LTG James Abrahamson, the first director of the Strategic Defense Initiative Office (SDIO). It was a serious philosophical leap for the IDF, which had until that time understood the only response to rockets and missiles to be offensive — hence escalatory. If Hizb’allah fired one at Israel; Israel fired two in return until the “international community” sought a ceasefire. Uzi Rubin, former director of the Israel Missile Defense Organization (IMDO), explained in inFOCUS Quarterly:

The IDF high command was generally skeptical about the strategic value of active defense, and doubted Israel’s defense industries’ ability to master the required technologies. This skepticism was mirrored by the media and elaborated on by civilian military analysts. Only shock and dismay from missiles and rockets hitting Israel’s undefended population centers in 1991 (the Gulf War) and 2006 (the Second Lebanon War), coupled with Iron Dome’s successful defense on the Gaza front brought a change of heart…

“Unfortunately Obama is not alone. The European big three — Cameron, Hollande and Merkel — all parrot the ‘religion of peace’ hoax. Mind you, let’s put it in perspective, they don’t have the same aversion to referring to radical Islamic terrorism; and, so far as I know, have not gone so far as Obama in purging all references to the religion that dare not speak its name from the lexicon of their military and security agencies. The words Islam, sharia law, and jihad are verboten apparently. The words extremism and terrorism, and now presumably ‘thuggism’, are allowed provided they are devoid of any link to Islam. We are in serious trouble. Islamists are beheading infidels and the Commander-in-Chief is parsing his language to cloud the threat. In these circumstances, whether he offends tender sensibilities or not, Trump is what the Western world needs now. Love sweet love will have to wait for a different time.”

The only thing more certain than the next Islamist assault is the parade of world leaders who can be counted to mouth their kumbaya pieties, even as the blood is wiped off the walls. In this, if nothing else, President Obama is the undisputed world leader.
Though the roots of ISIS go back a fair way it did not begin coming to prominence until President Obama withdrew remaining US troops from Iraq in December, 2011, leaving behind, as he put it, “a sovereign, stable, and self-reliant Iraq.” And it was after that, in April, 2013, that al-Baghdadi announced its formation. Yet, wall-to-wall conservative commentators apparently believe that defeating ISIS is the key to preventing the recent atrocities in Orlando, in San Bernardino, in Brussels, and in Paris.

Talk about memory loss. The London, Madrid, Bali and Mumbai bombings and countless other Islamist attacks occurred before ISIS was a glint in al-Baghdadi’s eye. Thomas Jefferson was fighting Muslim Tripoli pirates at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It is the religion stupid! And if and when ISIS is defeated, whatever that looks like, the religion, and its integral supremacist ideology, will persist. The only permanent solution is to degrade and marginalize Islam itself so that its remaining fundamentalist adherents resemble a small group of whacko religious snake dancers.

The religion cannot be saved. It cannot be saved because its very scripture is immutable and corrupting. That’s it, full stop, no argument. Where it holds sway warped views bloom: e.g., support for sharia law, religious intolerance, the inferiority of women, death for apostasy, and for blasphemy, heresy, homosexuality and adultery. Does anyone think that is a coincidence?

Sure, external and home-grown terrorists have to be killed. But the creed of Islam has to be confronted. The made-up hateful words of Allah and the hateful sayings and doings of his earthly amanuensis Mohammed cannot be allowed to stand unchallenged and infect hundreds of millions of people, here now and still to be born. It is a plague on humanity and must be confronted as resolutely as Reagan confronted ‘the evil empire’ and all that it stood for.