You Can’t Talk Sense to a Shotgun
by Michael Devolin
“The fight would continue, as it had in the Crusades, until the injustice was completely removed. By imposing partition, the United Nations would virtually precipitate Palestine into a bloodbath.” –Jamal Husseini, 1947
The above statement was addressed to the UN General Assembly regarding the establishment of a Jewish sovereign state in the Middle East. I’m not even going to approach the debate between Arab and Jews and the indigenous right of Jews to their place in the Middle East. If the Jewish people, with all their brains and brawn, cannot convince the Arab Muslim to stop hating Jews simply because they’re Jewish and find enough common ground to live together in peace, then my sciolistic and miniscule contribution to that eternal debate will accomplish nothing. But I use the Arab Muslim example of intransigence, as inspired by a religious fidelity, as a means of pointing out that the conflict in North America (Europe is lost, in my opinion) between the opponents of Islamic jihad and those who either support Islamic jihad or whose political vilification of Western values and traditions serve no other purpose than to empower Islamic jihad, will never come to an end. Our only hope is to prevent the Islamic imperial dream from reaching fruition here. After all the apologia and political sophism employed to portray Islam proper as being somehow benign—regardless its entire history, from its violent beginnings to its violence present day—the one and only course of action left to those of us who have never been convinced of this benignity is to speak with the enemy at the gate, intimate to him that we are truly aware of his willful nature, that we are not naive, and prevent him from entering our city.
Raphael Israeli has written, “…one cannot help but notice that some of the international conflicts in which Muslim groups or countries are involved, such as in the Middle East, Kashmir, the Philippines or Xinjiang, have also been tinged by Islamic ideology. The implications are vast: if, thus far, conflicts have been mediated and settled by negotiation and compromise, namely by quantitative means, once they are pushed to the religious domain they become qualitative and not given to negotiation and compromise and become that much more difficult to resolve.” They are foolish, therefore, who believe this conflict between the West and the religion of Islam will soon be settled and a final denouement reached.
And it is, essentially, a conflict between the religion of Islam and the West, not merely between the fundamentalists of Islam and the West. For without Islam the religion, there would be no Islamist fundamentalism—there would be no jihad. If Islam is an absolute good, there can be no 9/11, or Beslan, or 7/7, and now ISIS. Or as Raphael Israeli also asks, “Why is it that Islam has given rise to so many groups of ‘suicide bombers’, and to so many ‘spiritual’ leaders who openly condone this practice and lend legitimacy to it…?” These are questions our media and political leaders and apologists not only refuse to answer but, far worse and far more imprudent, refuse even to ask.
Efraim Karsh gives examples of Islamic recalcitrance in Palestine Betrayed: “For all their drastically different personalities and political styles, Arafat and Abbas are warp and woof of the same fabric: dogmatic PLO veterans who have never eschewed their commitment to Israel’s destruction and who have viewed the ‘peace process’ as the continuation by other means of their lifelong war.” He recounts elsewhere that Saeb Erekat, who served for 12 years as editor of the Palestinian newspaper Al-Quds (a paper which purported in 1997 that the virulently antisemitic book The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is indeed factual), who in 2002 alleged that the IDF killed more than 500 civilians during their assault on the town of Jenin (when in fact there were no more than between 53 and 56 recorded casualties), said of Netanyahu’s request that the PA recognize Israel’s “Jewish nature”, that “he [Netanyahu] will have to wait 1,000 years before he finds one Palestinian who will go along with him…” In other words, the Palestinians, or to be more precise, the Palestinian leadership, would much rather the land of Israel remain a desert and barren to Muslims and their terrorist affiliates exclusively—forbidden to Jews—than become a land cultivated, fruitful, and made beneficent for all, both Muslim and Jew.
It should be obvious to all by now that the goals and visions of Islamic jihad, as it exists in the West Bank and Gaza, takes precedence over the lives and well-being of ordinary Palestinians: death to the Jews and the elimination of the State of Israel, in the minds of Hamas and PA leadership, is far more important than providing a means of livelihood and enduring infrastructure for ordinary Palestinians. Better to build concrete tunnels with the purpose of attacking Israeli Jews than to build homes and schools and hospitals for Palestinian families. Moreover, that the majority of ordinary Palestinians actually concur (after all, they elected Hamas) with these nefarious adventures, as defined by Arafat and Abbas, speaks volumes about this overwhelmingly anti-Jewish mindset an assortment of Israeli governments since 1948 have vainly attempted to conciliate. “World history is the history of large cultures” wrote Oswald Spengler in Decline of the West. Who can deny that Islamist culture, as it exists within the Islamic world, is on the rise? We witnessed this dangerous proliferation playing out in the so-called “Arab Spring” and today in the subsequent and populist ISIS movement. Religiously prescribed intransigence is the pivotal ingredient to this brutal ideology’s continuity.
Instead of becoming an open pasture for political pundits the world over, good and bad, the “peace process” between the State of Israel and the Arab Muslim world (not simply the Palestinians) should be by now a joke shared amongst those who can see clearly that the debate is going nowhere, has always gone nowhere, and was going nowhere as far back as 1933. Lt. Col. (ret) Jonathan D. Halevi, senior researcher of the Middle East and radical Islam at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, recounts: “Arafat reached the decision that the negotiations at the Camp David summit in July 2000 were going nowhere. He sent a security representative to Sheikh Salah Shehade, head of the Hamas military wing at the time, with the message: ‘I have no objection to Hamas taking action.’”—Even while feigning the role of a “peace partner” in the eyes of the Western world, Arafat was secretly preparing for the Second Intifada, coordinating with Hamas immediate terror attacks inside the State of Israel.
You can’t talk sense to a shotgun. And you can’t negotiate on a level plane with a religious prejudice that presupposes Muslims as superior to, and above, all others. How can the State of Israel ever hope to accommodate, or exist contiguously with, a people whose religion is innately and traditionally anti-Jewish and whose tenets boast that Islam and the Muslim have obsolesced Judaism and the Jew? Neil J. Kressel posits that, according to studies, “…in non-democratic countries, high self-esteem may actually increase support for authoritarian institutions.” He points out further that psychologist Roy F. Baumeister’s research in this area of human behaviour suggests that “…empirical evidence supports the counterintuitive proposition that bullies, domestic abusers, and other perpetrators of violence frequently have high self-esteem…many evil-doers throughout history have possessed inflated self-images. When these images become tarnished or damaged, the result may be a powerful drive for revenge.” Islamist jihadists, those who commit “honour killings”, and those of Yasser Arafat’s ilk fit the above criterion perfectly. And the common denominator of them all is their religiously taught, hateful intransigency.
The same anti-Western and anti-Jewish sentiment that has for many decades permeated the Muslim Middle East is the same anti-Western and anti-Jewish sentiment now permeating North American universities, media, and political discourse. The portentous and existential imbroglio the tiny State of Israel shares with its Arab Muslim neighbors is the prime symbolic example of the much larger and precisely similar portentous existential imbroglio Western democracies now share with our Muslim citizens and/or immigrants. To insist that this imbroglio does not exist, to rely on the vain strategy of placating those whose religious tenets demand implacability is also intransigence.
Michael Devolin has been a member of JDL Canada since the 1980s, and has served as the personal bodyguard to Meir Weinstein, National Director of JDL Canada, at several high-profile trials, including the Jim Keegstra hate crimes trial and the Imra Finta war crimes trial.