Olmert: Hamas? Pah!

Hamas is not a strategic threat. The IDF could take it out and gain sovereign control of all of Gaza and the West Bank in the next thirty minutes if it so desired.

"We're not afraid of the Hamas in any way. They do not threaten our existence," he told The Associated Press.

Someone needs to hand this idiot his ass. I can't think of anything he could say that would be more like a red flag to hamass.

truth.....would you mind not pasting any more of the hate mail? EIGHT freaking pages of the crap. I print the various topics out to read and I'm not happy. All you needed to do was post the link and those of us who wanted to read the letters could do so.

A stupid man. And note please that successive stupid Israeli governments have not only been completely incapable of defending themselves over the last 30 years, and presenting their overwhelming case, but that their own incapacity has also harmed the larger Western world.

Had they refused to accept, and mocked, and quoted against it the very statements of the Arabs themselves, that political fiction "the Palestinian people" which began to be used in the late 1960s, and then gradually adopted, had they similarly managed to mock the invented topoynm "West Bank" and noted that the placenames "Judea" and "Samaria" were not, pace The Economist and others, merely "the Biblical terms used by those extreme Jewish settlers" but were in fact in continuous use from before the time of Jesus (and of course he used the words "Judea" and "Samaria" all the time), but for 2000 years, on all the maps in all the countries of the entire Western world, and only ceased to be used when the Jordanians came up with their highly implausible "West Bank" in order to avoid, just like the Romans some 2000 years before, placenames that were too obviously connected to the Jews.

Had they not sent Begin, sentimental grossly un-mediagenic Begin, to deal with the likes of Saint Sadat (whom the Israelis had beatified and then sanctified all at one go, when he arrived on the tarmac at Ben Gurion Airport that late November day, and the entire nation of Israel stood in grateful, and ridiculous, rapture), and with hideous holier-than-thou evil Jimmy Carter, with his evident physical and every other kind of revulsion at Begin ("I'm sick and tired of hearing about the Holocaust"), and his later-revealed (by his biographer Douglas Brinkley) deep admiration for Yassir Arafat, to whom he volunteered public-relations advice, and of course that "strategic" thinker (the one who let the Shah fell, with a little help from Gary Sick) the ludicrous Zbigniew Brzezinsky (my, aren't his children doing well on television these days? Think they started on a level playing field, the way we all do in the United States?)

Not a single Israeli in recent decades has done anything but prate about peace and peace and negotiations and a peace process and the Israeli desire for peace. Not one has described the relentless Arab assault, that began before the exsistence of the state of Israel, that exploded at the declaration of Israel's independence on May 15, 1948, and that has continued ever since, in direct proportion to how strong the Arabs felt themselves to be, as a Jihad. Not one has chosen to discuss the contents of Islam. After all, how many of those Israelis had bothered to study Islam? They were as ignorant, with far less justification, as were the leaders in other Western countries.

One can excuse some of it. For the first few decades, they were completely invovled in the resettlement and absorption of people who came with nothing. There were the hundreds of thousands who arrived, some of them permanently crazed with grief, others in states of shock -- imagine -- the survivors of every sort of torment in the death-camps except death itself, in many cases the only survivors of large families. How many orphans arrived in Israel? How many arrived penniless -- almost all, for the Nazis and their collaborators of course took everything (and even today, things are being sold off in Germany that were taken long ago). And then there were the hundreds of thousands of Yemeni Jews who were rescued in Operation Magic Carpet, who arrived with nothing, from lives of chattel slavery, where if a Jew who belonged to Arab Tribe A was killed by an Arab from Arab Tribe B, then an Arab from Tribe A could seek revenge by killing a Jew belonging to Arab Tribe B (this is evenly described, in a 1970s paper on Yemen, by the remarkably unsympathetic British student of the Yemen R. S. Serjeant). And then there were successive waves -- from Eastern Europe, from Russia, from Ethiopia.

And then there was the denial, or avoidance of Islam, based on hope, hope that somehow alliances could be forged with Iran and possibly Turkey, based on shared mistrust of the Arabs. It seemed, for a while, to work, but the Shah's fall, in which Arafat and his men played an important role (Arafat was Khomeini's first foreign guest after he came to power) ended that, and now, what with "Mein Kampf" in the Turksih bookstores, and the anti-American antisemitic movie "Travelling With Wolves" beating box-office records in Turkey, as the Erdogan supporters systematically assault both Kemalism and push Turkey ever further into the Arab -- i.e. Muslim -- orbit, and do so even as they keep demanding admission to the E.U. (for they see E.U. admisssion as not merely of economic value, but as a way to promote more quickly the islamization of Europe).

In not being able to speak truthfully about Islam, the Israelis were also exhibiting the same will to avoid the painful that the larger Western world exhibits. They did not want to conclude that the war with the "Palestinians" was prompted by Islam and could not be extinguished, no matter what territory Isrrael kept conceding, no matter what examples of desire to compromise, to make concesssions, to give up rights to that which Israel had, in any world except that formed by Islam, an undeniable legal, historic, and moral claim that far outweighed the claims, based on fictional history, fictional demography, fictional everything, of the recently invented "Palestinian" people. This desire to deny made sense. To face up to the nature of the enemy, to realize that the Jihad is relentless and endless, is not something Israelis want to believe. It is painful. But it is not the end of the world. The Soviet Union seemed to be a power that would never collapse, that would always threaten. It seemed such a solid police-state. Yet finally, from within, it did collapse, and not because of Western conquest, but rather because the West, remaining firm, helped to create the conditions within Soviet Russia that forced people at the highest levels (in some cases influenced by their children who had become dissidents at such educational institutions as that devoted to "Eastern Languages") to realize that, on its own terms, Soviet Communism had failed.

This is all far beyond the likes of Ehud Olmert.
One hopes he does not last too long, long enough to continue to inflict damage -- on Israel, and on the West that also has a stake, not only in Israel's survival, but in Israel's retaining possession of Jerusalem and other sites important to Christianity and hence to Western civilization. The facade presented by the islamochristians -- Naim Ateek, Michel Sabbag, Hanan Ashrawi -- has been ripped down, and the Islamic nature of the "Palestinian" cause, which was never a nationalist one, had nothing to do with this phony "two-tiny-peoples" business that was useful only in getting Westerners to avoid seeing the real nature of the conflict and sympathizing with what appeared to be the weaker of the two parties -- the "poor Palestinians" who, on the spot, did not appear to have the planes and guns of the Israelis, but of course were really only the local shock troops of a much greater force -- 300 million determined Arabs, a total of a billion Muslims with gigantic revenues from oil, prepared to use every weapon, military, economic, demographic, to wipe out the Infidel state of Israel.

And still are.

Olmert is a careerist, and has nothing to recommend him. Netanyahu has his moments. Lnndau has more than his moments. The Israeli media does not know where to put its feet and hands.

One hopes.

I think he called it right, they are not a strategic threat. They might be on the level of a pack of wild dogs, dangerous but unable to terrorize everyone. The hamas see themselves as mighty warriors but thier track record speaks for itself. True they managed to cause trouble and cause the costs of security to climb but they couldn't beat Israel in a real fight nor would they be brave enough to try. I think he was tring to tell them "you're nothing". I also think he was right, why give them credit?

No its not Hamas.Its just every thing else thats linin up against you Israel.Id hope the Isrealie state can reccongnize this.Its Jacobs Trouble.

ronin -> "I think he was tring to tell them "you're nothing"

i agree too. Olmert is just saying that ,in polite terms, that the IDF would wipe them out in about 30 minutes, and be home in time for tea.

its about time an Israeli politician pinpricked the over-inflated bravado nihilism of Hamas. They ARE nothing. He said the right thing at the right time.

Meanwhile in France:

"Ilan’s murder: minister speaks of “anti-Semitism by confusion” "

http://www.ejpress.org/article/news/france/6136

Islamist documentation discovered

"Sarkozy, who met with Ilan Halimi’s brother-in-law and a delegation of CRIF, the umbrella group of French Jewish secular organization, provided lawmakers with additional information about the occurring investigation.

Nicolas Sarkozy, France's interior minister
He said that pro-Palestinian and Islamist documents were found during searched conducted at the suspects’ homes in the city of Bagneux, south of Paris, where Ilan Halimi was detained during three weeks.

Sarkozy, who didn’t establish a link between the documents and the murder, warned against blaming the Muslim community. "What we don’t need now, in addition to this barbarity, is misunderstanding, intolerance and racism," he said.

According to the minister, these documents were published by the CBSP, the Palestinian Charity Committee (“Comite de bienfaisance et de secours aux Palestiniens”), with Salafist or Islamist texts."

This is window dressing. The IDF is going to fold up shop and dissolve, they will continue to act as neccesary.

uhhh..."ISNT going to fold up shot".

Big difference. My bad.

"SHOP"

Ok, Im going home now.

Hugh, perhaps you meant that there have been no Israeli leaders willing to talk about Islam? Because there are plenty of ordinary people who are and have always been willing to discuss this. Talk to anyone living in Chevron. I'd give R. Meir Kahane a'h" as another example, but he was murdered in the U.S. by a Muslim who was found 'not guilty' in a mockery of a trial. However, Kahane, for all his faults, was more than ready to call it as he saw it.

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there have been no Israeli leaders willing to talk about Islam

Which is one of history's great mysteries. It think it's because of the threat to personal safety plain talk would present to Israelo Jews.

There's one solution to that problem: mass expulsion. But attaining the ideal of mass expulsion of Moslems would first require plain talk about Islam. Catch-22.

Whatever you say, General Custer.

I sense dangerous hubris in Israel (among other places). They've won many conflicts, but their enemies learn from every defeat.

After all, how many of those Israelis had bothered to study Islam? They were as ignorant, with far less justification, as were the leaders in other Western countries.

Hugh mentioned further down that Netanyahu has his moments. The evidence seems to indicate that Netanyahu does recognize what the Islamic threat is, given his statements about how Islam is more dangerous than Communism, given their penchant for suicide bombings. On his web site netanyahu.org, there is a pipeline of hatred, that comes to as close as one can regarding the truth about Islam

http://www.conceptwizard.com/pipeline_of_hatred.html

Given that very few world politicians speak out openly about Islam, expecting anything more from Netanyahu would be unrealistic. As it is, his eloquent case about why the Palestinians shouldn't have a state has by & large fallen on deaf ears.

Landau does have more than his moments, indeed. Yes, I wish he would be more forthright speaking about islam and the nature of the jihad instead of "palestinian" intransigence, iranian hatred, and terrorism. (For some bizarre reason, and I cannot imagine it is related to personal safety, since any muslim would happily and with impunity assassinate any Isreali leader any time, the topic of islam still seems to be a taboo for Israeli politicians, even the best ones. Maybe too much lecturing from Rice and her miserable predecesors?) Still, Landau is far more cognizant and realistic than the others.

Does it seem that top Israeli leaders act against the interests of Israel? Does anyone but me suspect that some Israeli leaders are traitors?
I think the goal is to have the UN come in and "keep the peace" (take over). [Arafat actually asked for this a few years back. And Arafat was well connected.]

"Does it seem that top Israeli leaders act against the interests of Israel? Does anyone but me suspect that some Israeli leaders are traitors?"
..from post above

I think the notion of top Israeli leaders deliberately betraying their country, a country that has faced existential threat since its incipience, is preposterous. These are simply civilized men and women who lack the capacity, the imagination, to borrow Hugh's phrasing, to fully appreciate the hatred and barbarity if islam. Consequently, they cling to unachievable hopes.