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and expression exists in most Arab countries...Israel is the one state that disregards international legitimacy, ignores the rulings of the judiciary, engages in mass murder and tosses human rights to the wind."Unwilling as the U.S. administration, cobbling together its pretend-coalition of Muslim states, is to admit it, the World Trade Center bombing was the clashing cymbal announcing the war of civilizations had begun in earnest. As professor of European history Robert Wistrich writes in the Jerusalem Post of October 19, the message behind the slaughter was "one of all-out war against Western society, the modern Western way of life and Western values per se." The Islamists see Western democracy, freedom of thought, secularism, and capitalism as profoundly threatening to Muslim religious traditions and beliefs. However, Wistrich notes, it seems increasingly unlikely that September 11 will constitute a wake-up call to the West. "Unfortunately, despite President George W. Bush's initial declarations of a sustained and relentless war against international terrorism, America, too, is slowly sinking into the trap of believing that its war against terror might succeed if only the Israel/Palestine conflict were settled on terms favorable to the Arabs." The truth to which the U.S. blinds itself, notes Wistrich, is that "nothing would encourage Muslim terrorists, the mass murderers of Twin Towers' style operations and militant Islam, more in their jihad against the West than such an act of appeasement."
Wistrich concludes that either wiser heads will prevail in the Islamic world, and that world will come to terms with modernity, abandoning the anachronistic concept of "Holy War," or they "will doom us and themselves to war without end."
For the moment we have what Wistrich rightly describes as the current "theater of the absurd" with "the godfathers of terrorism...courted by the West to join the great coalition against terror!"
Herut Party chairman Michael Kleiner sometimes seems to be the only voice of sanity in Israel's Knesset. The following are excerpts from a press release he issued on October 14, explaining why he was renewing a no-confidence motion. "The national unity government that was established with scores of ministers and deputy ministers in order to gain broad public support for the government in its war against terror has turned into a goal instead of a means, and utterly failed." Moreover, says Kleiner, while it is true the army is the instrument for implementing government policy "When the government turns the army into a toy in Arafat's hands [for example, sending soldiers back and forth in the Hebron hills] it destroys the motivation of the IDF soldiers and denies them the feeling that they are serving a consistent policy guided by wisdom and not capriciousness."
Americans For a Safe Israel
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Outpost - 12 - November 2001