Salam Fayad, with his suit and his tie and his reputation for being an apolitical “technocrat,” and with his American experience, is useful for the “Palestinian” Arabs as they downplay their never-ending ferocity. They do this purely for Western audiences of those whose goodwill they need, that is, those whom they most need to inveigle through personal charm and the plausible delivery of plausible lies that depend on the intended audience’s ignorance both of Islam and of the nature of the war being waged (a tous azimuths) against Israel.
Salam Fayad is the perfect front man for this. He’s the Very Type and Original of the Nobody-Here-But-Us-Accountants School of “Palestinian” Arab representatives. The same could be said of the henchman for many decades of Yassir Arafat, during some of his bloodiest years, Mahmoud Abbas. Didn’t Obama say, anent Ahmadinejad, that Holocaust-denial was intolerable? Yet Obama just the other day met and exchanged smiles and handshakes with Abbas, whose MGU doctoral thesis was a long-winded discussion of the “exaggerations” of the Holocaust, which is merely a form of Holocaust denial. Why has his involvement in the worst acts by Arafat, why has his Holocaust-denial, why has everything that Abbas said at that recent “Palestinian” gathering in Ramallah been so willfully ignored in the calculation of American policymakers, beginning at the Islam-ignorant and naive top?
How many more times must what someone smilingly maintains or plausibly assures, for the most obvious reasons, be taken at face value by powerful people in Washington or New York? All that fake sweet-reasonableness, all that display of hollow indignation, and feelings-of-being-deeply-wronged, is abetted by, on the part of Infidels, all that careful inattention to the nature of Islam and so to the nature of the war being made on Israel. The nature of that war has been what it is not just this year, not just this decade, but for the last century. There has been the attempt to throttle the existence, and then before that the coming-into-existence, of a Jewish nation-state, even though the Jews did nothing more than buy land from the 10% that was held by private parties. Remember, or learn if you never knew, that 90% of the land ruled by the Turks and that the League of Nations assigned to the Mandate for Palestine for the creation of a “Jewish National Home” was “state and waste land,” first in the possession of the Ottoman government, and then in that of the Mandatory authority, and finally, in the possession of the intended beneficiary and successor state to Mandatory Palestine, Israel.
Why is history, recent and ancient, continually ignored? Why are the texts and tenets of Islam ignored? When did a factitious and phony “peace” — that is, a Rose-Garden Peace Treaty, which should never be confused with a durable peace, become the goal? A durable peace requires Arab Muslims to refrain from attack based not on the impossible abandonment of Islamic doctrine, but on the forced invocation of Darura, that is, “necessity” — which can only happen if the Infidel enemy remains not only overwhelmingly stronger, but is clearly perceived as such.
But who has been the model, who has been the camouflage, who has inspired Mahmoud Abbas to take on the coloration that he does, chameleontically, whenever he meets with Western leaders? Abbas, this Slow Jihadist, differs not in ultimate goals, but only in matters of timing and tactics, with the Fast Jihadists of Hamas. He needs that Western aid to keep on flowing, and flowing, and flowing, to the “Palestinians” so that they can continue to make war, in every way, on the Infidel nation-state of Israel.
Why, that Perfect Model of Deportment, that speaker of American English, that man who is known for being merely a technocrat with a slide rule (oops, that dates me — strike that, and put in here the name of any economic-planning software you wish), that man whom Mahmoud Abbas would have you think he is, is none other than Salam Fayad.
Fayad, however, is merely the useful front man, and probably not, himself, a bad guy. But he is useful to the bad guys, and that is the problem, because practically everyone else — Mahmoud Abbas (nom de guerre: Abu Mazen), and the mythomaniacal “negotiator” Saeb Erekat, and Mohammad Dahlan, tutti quanti, are all engaged in an effort to use the West, to use America in particular, to push Israel back and back and back, stripping it of its last remaining, comically-tiny, “strategic depth,” taking away control of the water resources it needs, and always and everywhere making the very demands it knows Israel will never succumb to: to give up the Old City of Jerusalem, and to allow back millions of Arabs who have taken to being called “Palestinian refugees.” Close inspection of both the adjective and the noun in that glib formulation would show just how phony are the claims of almost all. And certainly what remains of those claims are far outstripped in numbers, and misery, and losses of all kinds, by the 900,000 Jews who fled pogroms in the Arab countries, beginning in 1948, with many arriving penniless in Israel.
It’s really long past time to see beyond the Fayad-facade (or all the other caryatides of that shaky edifice, the “Palestinian Authority”). Without American and Israeli financial and military assistance of extraordinary size (causing the great, but artificial, economic boom on the “West Bank”), it would collapse in a New York minute. And it is important to stop making an Arab-Israeli or, still more tendentious and phony, an “Israeli-Palestinian” “peace,” the ballyhooed goal of every new President, who devotes so much time and effort to that quixotic end. The antisemitic Carter was aided and abetted in that by the equally sinister, now out-of-the-closet Zbigniew Brzezinski, who the other day suggested that the Americans should shoot down Israeli planes sent to bomb the nuclear project of the Islamic Republic of Iran. But the “peace” that is ballyhooed is not peace but something quite different, a “peace treaty.” And for Muslims, any peace treaty signed with Infidels has no lasting validity. It is only to be observed while the Muslims are not yet ready to take on the Infidels with whom they have signed such a treaty. The model — see all the commentators, including Majid Khadduri in his authoritative “War and Peace in the Law of Islam” — for Muslim treaty-making remains that agreement made by Muhammad with the still-resistant Meccans at Hudaibiyyah, in 628 A.D. This treaty was to last ten years (which is why the Muslims always talk of a “hudna” or treaty lasting ten years — a point our policy-makers, and the press, seem determined not to note, much less explain to the confused public).
There is peace now between Israel and the Muslims who would, if they could, destroy it. That peace is one based on deterrence — the deterring effect of the IDF, the Israeli Defense Forces. That, and that alone, keeps Israel’s neighbors in line. But what, someone protests, what about Egypt? Doesn’t Egypt honor its peace treaty with Israel? The answer is No. Egypt has abandoned every single one of the solemn commitments it made to Israel, commitments to end hostile propaganda, to encourage tourism and trade, to change the atmosphere.
That was all, really, that the Israelis asked for, but it meant a great deal to them. And in exchange they were willing to hand over to Egypt the entire Sinai, for the second time. They had done so in 1956, only to see Nasser subsequently break every promise he made to the Western powers, not directly to Israel, for that hand-over. And they handed over not merely the entire Sinai (which was never historically part of Egypt, and became administratively part of it only in the 1920s, though this fact may come as yet one more surprise — there are so many — to those who make policy concerning Arabs and Israelis, in the chanceries of the West), but a Sinai in which oilfields had been found and developed, a resort started at Sharm el Sheikh, and all kinds of roads and other infrastructure built by the Israelis, some $16 billion worth in 1979 dollars.
But Egypt discourages, even punishes, those who visit Israel. Mubarak has not visited Israel at all, save once, to attend the funeral of Rabin. The government-controlled Egyptian media is full of such things as a television series based on the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” and Egypt is in fact a world center of antisemitic propaganda, and not only in Arabic. And what about that “peace” that Egypt observes? Egypt does not attack Israel for the same reason that Syria, or Saudi Arabia, or Libya, or Iran, does not attack Israel. Because it has calculated the consequences, and realizes that if it should attack, and should Israel yet again re-take the Sinai, Egypt will never ever get it back. Though the Israelis have shown themselves to be amazingly gullible and trusting over the last half-century, they are finally coming to their senses about Islam and about the nature and value of treaties signed, and promises made, by Muslim Arabs in order to obtain the kind of tangible concessions in land by Israel, that cannot easily be taken back.
No one here but us accountants, Mahmoud Abbas would have you believe, pushing Fayad forward and, when necessary, doing a passable imitation himself. But beyond Fayad, and under the coat of Abbas, is a dagger, the dagger of endless Jihad. He’s the figure described by Chaucer when he englished Boccaccio’s description in the “Teseida” of Treachery: “I con i occulti ferri i Tradimenti.” And Treachery, with hidden weapons….
It’s time to take out, all over the Western world, Khadduri’s book, and that of Antoine Fattal, and those of a dozen or five dozen other real scholars (beware the espositos and armstrongs and the apologists of MESA Nostra) of Islam, and find out exactly what Muslims are taught about treaties with non-Muslims.
And it’s time simply to put away childish things, things that in the past have been pursued by those who haven’t learned a thing, haven’t even recognized that they had a responsibility, a duty, to learn a thing, about Islam. The situation of endless Jihad should be regarded intelligently as a situation to be handled, not as a problem to be “solved.” Among the Childish Things that should be put away is the idea of Peace, a real peace in the sense that we non-Muslims endow that word, not the “peace” that Muslims talk about, which means the “peace” that comes when the entire world has surrendered to Islam, and there will be no more war or strife, because there will then be no need for war. For Islam will everywhere dominate, and Muslims will rule, everywhere.
Stop worrying, all over the Western, world, stop fretting and stop pontificating, and stop the endless negotiations or negotiations about negotiations, stop the whole farce of the “peace process” and understand that there will be no peace, in the Western sense. Israel should not be pressured to further surrender tangible assets that give it tiny, but indispensable, strategic depth. Israel should hold onto the aquifers, and make clear — as it should have done, through immediate annexation, in June 1967 — that it will allow the local Arabs as much autonomy as is consonant with Israel’s security, and the limits of such autonomy, will depend on Arab behavior. Their support for terrorism, and enthusiasm for it, will determine just how much autonomy those Arabs will have — a lot more, one can be certain, than the amount of autonomy that Arabs have allowed to any non-Muslims or non-Arab Muslims (Berbers, Kurds, blacks in Darfur) anywhere in the vast lands, the twenty-two members of the Arab League, where Arabs rule and their will is done.
Nobody here but us accountants — a meek, mild-mannered accountant, but a smyler with the knyf under the cloke.