“The mystery is not the way we die, it’s the way we live.” — Martin Cruz Smith, from Red Star
When Jews begin warning the world about apocalyptic possibilities, the world should listen. When we are told that Iran is a much too dangerous country to be interested in nuclear weapons capability, we should take them at their word. I mean, here is a people who has survived all their enemies—the most ruthless of enemies—and lived to tell of their unimaginable sufferings: We should take note of their survivor skills and the wisdom thereof that has, to date, shaped them into a powerful and resourceful nation (the State of Israel) of both soldiers and mavens alike. As their Tanach says, “Who is like Your people Israel, a unique nation on earth…?”
But we choose to ignore their premonitions, numerous portents notwithstanding. Gateway Pundit recently reported that “Gwen Ifill, a star news anchor on the taxpayer funded Public Broadcasting System’s Washington Week and PBS Newshour, took to Twitter on Wednesday to mock Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu” regarding his apprehensions about Iran. David Remnick of the New Yorker magazine recounts that David Grossman, “a liberal Israeli novelist published a liberal polemic in a liberal newspaper” regarding Benjamin Netanyahu’s dire admonitions about Iran’s nuclear initiatives and that the same article “inspired no protests” from the Israeli public. Remnick goes on to write a tediously protracted history of Meir Dagan, a former director of Mossad, as an introduction to the fact that Dagan disagrees with Netanyahu’s idea that Israel should bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities. Remnick fails to articulate, however, that Dagan never once has asserted that Iran is not a dangerous enemy of the State of Israel and the Western world—he simply disagrees with the suggested gambit of a military attack on Iran. Remnick wilfully paints a picture of the majority of Israeli citizens (read: Jews) as war-mongers and politically pugnacious, which is the ultimate slander, in my opinion, of a people who have too long and far too patiently endured rocket attacks and terrorist infiltration into their country while the Western world either turns a blind eye or excoriates the IDF/IAF for what they conjecture is a “disproportionate response.”
Anyone following events in the Middle East will have long ago read about Hamas and their boast to the Jews of Israel that, “We love death more than you love life.” This particular sentiment is commonplace and exclusive to many adherents of the “religion of peace,” not only the madmen of Hamas. Most of us will also remember Ayatollah Khomeini’s malefic statement (as quoted in Sir Martin Gilbert’s In Ishmael’s House) that “this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time” and the President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, threatening that Israel must be “wiped off the map.” And I tie these two parallel voices of Islamic fundamentalism together here in order to point out the fact that even with knowledge that Israel possesses the means to obliterate both Hamas and Iran, these two nocuous, virulently anti-Jewish entities plunge headlong, regardless, into no-win confrontations with the Middle East’s only democracy. Their religiously inspired foolhardiness affirms the prescience of Norman Podhoretz and his argument that “deterrence could not be relied upon with a regime [Iran] ruled by Islamofascist revolutionaries who not only were ready to die for their beliefs but cared less about protecting their people than about the spread of their ideology and their power.” The recklessness and hateful rhetoric of both Hamas and the Republic of Iran provide new meaning to the proverb, “The fool rages and is confident.”
But we who love life, who respect the living, live not so brashly. As Benjamin Franklin opined, our happiness is produced primarily by “the little advantages that occur every day.” The Left and their cohorts within the dark world of Islamic fundamentalism mistake Western democracy’s good graces as being what Henry Fielding referred to as an “amiable weakness,” or to be more precise, a lack of determination and resolve, on our part, to preserve the freedoms we are presently so vigorously holding on to. We know that our vision of life is much clearer and far more salubrious than the jihadist’s feverish anticipation of death. It’s the way we live that makes our enemies envious—and therefore hateful—of us. The Islamist may not be afraid to die, but the far stronger and wiser of this world are those who are not afraid to live.