| FrontPageMag.com | By Robert Spencer | By Hugh Fitzgerald | Books | Jihad Watch | Islam 101 | Qur'an Blog | Raymond Ibrahim | Robert Spencer |  |
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Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald does the work that the dhimmis in the State Department cannot or will not do:
A poster on this website recently asked, “Now how do we unload that $2 billion annual yoke to Egypt?"The same way we unstick ourselves from the Iraq tarbaby -- just do it. Decide to do it, tell Egypt that we have Ten Good Reasons to End the Jizyah, and that it is hereby over. The American people simply will not stand for shelling out $2 billion a year (my, what could that do for solar energy and wind energy projects?), amounting to some $60 billion and counting, to a country that is not part of the West, and that does not share our beliefs or our assumptions -- and that does share beliefs and assumptions that, if they were somehow to prevail, would make our lives as Infidels much more unpleasant, expensive, and physically dangerous. At the very least, and at the most, they might pose a mortal threat.
Here are those Ten Good Reasons:
1) Egypt has failed to fulfill every single one of those intangible commitments it made to Israel under the Camp David Accords, all that stuff about ending hostile propaganda and so on. Instead, it has prevented Egyptians from visiting Israel, prevented Israelis from participating in film and book festivals in Cairo, and done everything it can in the press and on television (all of which are controlled completely by the government -- just try making noises about Mubarak's plans for his son) to make Egypt a hotbed of antisemitism. A multi-part television series based on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion does not exactly correspond to what Egypt committed itself to do in order to receive, for the second time, the entire Sinai, together with oilfields and $16 billion (in 1979 dollars) in infrastructure put in by the Israelis.2) Egypt has failed to make the Egyptian population grateful for the nearly $60 billion it has so far received. In fact, we have come to understand that the American aid is a kind of slush fund for the Mubarak Family-and-Friends Plan, and so actually increases resentment by people in Egypt toward the Americans.
3) The discovery that many high officials in Egypt were receiving sums from Saddam Hussein cannot allow further sums to go to Egypt. There has been evidence of collaboration between the regime of Saddam Hussein and Egypt on certain kinds of weapons development. In other ways Egypt was meretricious in how it hid all these dealings from the American government.
4) The failure of the Egyptian government to stop all the weapons smuggling into Gaza, though it has been made well aware, for years, of the situation, is a further violation of Egypt's commitments and of what the American government has a right to expect of it. Arms sent to such terrorist groups as Hamas (or Hezbollah, or Islamic Jihad) through Egypt can only be sent with the knowledge of some Egyptian authorities. The government should have found them. It did not.
5) The endless and sustained anti-American campaign in the press and television have led Egyptians to be among the most thoroughly anti-American in their views, even among Muslims. The government should have been moving heaven and earth to change these attitudes if it expected American taxpayers to keep shelling out money to a regime, a country, and a people (or at least the Muslim component of that people) who do not wish us, as Infidels, well -- and whom we, in turn, have no obligation in the slightest to support, and many good reasons not to support.
6) The behavior of Egypt in protecting the Sudan, in preventing U.N. troops or any troops except the ineffective African Union contingent, shows that the government of Egypt has no moral objections to the Jihad being conducted against non-Arab (and therefore inferior in every respect) Muslims in Darfur. Egypt has in every way been defending that government and throwing up obstacle after obstacle to attempts to end the continued mass murders in Darfur, as have other Arab and Muslim governments. Over the past 20 years Egypt has more or less successfully prevented Western powers from stopping the genocide against Christian and animist black Africans in the southern Sudan. This is not surprising. During the Biafra War it was Egyptian pilots who gleefully strafed Ibo and other Christian villages, killing tens of thousands of helpless villagers (who had not a rifle among them). Egypt's role in suppressing the Christians during the Biafra War was promptly forgotten; it should not have been.
7) The stratokleptocracy (or rule by a thieving military caste) has led Egyptians to turn to Islam as the answer, as most Muslims inevitably will when assorted lords of misrule confront them. And they inevitably will be so confronted, because Islam itself encourages the habit of subservience to the ruler, and the habit of mental submission at every level, and the habit of discouraging free inquiry. All this leads to conspiracy theories, rumors, and sheer political craziness, preventing good government from being established.
Therefore the more money Americans and other Infidels supply those corrupt and odious Egyptian rulers, the more, not less, will be their obvious gain. That gain will be flaunted, leading to still more resentment by ordinary Egyptians not privy to the appropriation and divvying up of that aid. The more aid we give to Egypt, the more anti-Americanism will be encouraged.
8) The behavior of the Egyptian officials in reacting to the kidnapping and rape, or kidnapping and forced conversion of Coptic girls, and the attacks on Coptic schools and churches, and even murders of Coptic priests and villagers, has been intolerable. These have often been carried out with the full knowledge, and sometimes the participation, of local police. This will probably continue, but it should not continue with American aid money.
9) Egypt has made repeated threats, some official, and some unofficial, to the government of Ethiopia and to others involved in its agricultural development, warning that "the Nile belongs to Egypt" and that Ethiopia (a country which in recent decades has suffered from famine and drought) should not dare to divert some of the headwaters of the Nile without Egypt's explicit approval. It is clear that the Egyptian government backs the Sudanese Arabs in wiping out as many of the non-Arabs -- whether Muslim or non-Muslim -- as possible. Meanwhile, the Arab control of Sudan (which just a half-century ago had a black African majority) tightens. This, in turn, is part of a larger effort to extend Egyptian (i.e., Arab Muslim) control, so that Ethiopia, the old Christian kingdom that once was given a dispensation (because some of Muhammad's followers had been given temporary refuge in Ethiopia by the negus, thus earning a special exemption from the violent Jihad), will never dare to take decisions about the Nile waters or anything else without express permission of the Arab Muslim imperialists in Cairo.
10) Egypt is a corrupt country out of control. By permitting successive governments to count on American support, the viciousness and corruption are allowed to continue without any consequences. From 1882 to 1922, the British brought some semblance of efficiency and a reduction of corruption to the Egyptian Civil Service.) See Edward Cecil's classic "Memoirs of an Egyptian Official," with its famous epigraph: "Here lies one who tried to hustle the East." Even after that period, Egypt enjoyed a period of good government, of an expanding economy, and of semi-decency in public life. This was reflected in the vivacity of its European and Levantine populations. It came to an end when Nasser and the other colonels arrived on the scene. There was the famous rioting against Jews, Copts, and Europeans, in Alexandria. Almost overnight, Greeks, Italians, Jews, and many others who had lived there had their property stolen by the Egyptians, who called it "nationalization." The Egyptian Muslims who ran everything took billions of dollars in property, the fruit in some cases of family entrepreneurial activity that had gone on for a century or more. Following Nasser was Saint Sadat: the same Sadat imprisoned by the British for his pro-Nazi activities during World War II. Jimmy Carter, who incidentally has also managed to award himself the same title, of course, awarded him his sainthood. Carter was rewarding Saint Sadat for deigning to accept all of the Sinai -- territory that morally Egypt had no right to receive back yet again. Egypt, after all, had lost in a war of aggression started when Nasser demanded that U Thant pull out the U.N. peacekeepers, and then proceeded to block the Straits of Tiran in May 1967.
Yet Carter rewarded Sadat and Egypt with nearly $2 billion a year in American foreign aid -- which foreign aid became automatic, a tribute never to be interrupted, in other words, Jizyah. This Jizyah has bought us nothing, unless you think that the anti-Americanism in Egypt has been swell, that the threats to Ethiopia and the support for the Sudanese government are acceptable, that the complicity in arms-smuggling into Gaza is perfectly understandable, that the continued and even growing numbers of rapes and looting and murders of Copts is simply what one should expect of Muslims and that one should not get too upset about it.
I don't think any of those things. And I don't think other long-suffering American taxpayers, Infidels all, agree with The New Duranty Times, or those lazy officials or hangers-on in Washington who keep prating about the "need" to keep "our Egyptian ally" happy. Why? So they can torture, occasionally, the odd Al Qaeda suspect? But meanwhile, they can try to produce WMD, harass the Copts, plot diplomatically and with arms-smuggling against Israel, bully Ethiopia to endure further famine, and fill the press and television with the most disgusting and scandalous misrepresentations of the behavior of American soldiers, as they have done for decades in their misrepresentation of Israeli soldiers.
No, I have presented Ten Good Reasons For Stopping the Jizyah to Egypt.
I defy anyone in Washington to offer even One Good Reason for continuing the Jizyah to that meretricious and sinister regime, people, and country.
It took me precisely 22 minutes to compose this article at one go. Why cannot those thousands of bigshots in Washington, in their think-tanks or in their well-paid government jobs, or at their newspapers and magazines, come up with these Ten Reasons, and Ninety Reasons more? If they did, they would thereby save us money, and, when it comes to dealing with the menace of the Jihad everywhere, Start Making Sense.
Posted by Robert at April 17, 2006 9:56 AM
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Sounds like somebody in DC likes Arab-Muslim states that are decivilizing.
Posted by: Eliyahu![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/nav-commenters.gif)
at April 17, 2006 10:28 AM
I was just talking to my friend this morning about how these people in Washington are really educated and (how little ole me who is not) can't see what's going on and are doing nothing about this.
Common sense tells you that NOTHING, NOTHING, we as Americans do will make these people like us. If we give them money, they hate us. If we don't give them money, they hate us.
So, common sense says enough. Common sense has been replaced with stupidity.
Posted by: freewoman at April 17, 2006 10:37 AM
The problem with PC and the islamic threat is one of race. Because Islam is a culture of non-whites, and non-Christians especially, they are viewed as being ultimately non-threatening by the elite class. It is believed that only whites, technologically advanced whites, like the Nazis, can really pose a threat. Non-whites are viewed as being mere harmless protestors. When they fly planes into buildings it is viewed as a mere protest vandalism.
When they saw off heads, it is viewed as mere political statements. When they eventually nuke NYC, and they will, it will be viewed as an atomic protest strike. And the Left will find some rational for it. Because they are non-white. And as non-whites, they are protestors. This is also why that racially-motivated crimes by islamic youth and mobs against white citizens are never prosecuted as hate crimes even though those countries have hate crime laws.
So what it all comes down to is the fact that westerners underestimate the capacity for indigenous evil of any non-white race. They just don't believe in it. Thus the ever growing contorted, convoluted attempt to understand the Islamic threat in some political context rather than for what it is, namely the social gyrations of a race of people who, by and large, are fundamentally anti-social and inhumane and have been that way since the Dark Ages.
Posted by: thethinker at April 17, 2006 11:19 AM
Hugh says there are a lot more reasons to end the Jizya. Yes indeed. Here is an eleventh: The Al-Azhar Seminary in Cairo issued fatwas putting its blessing on suicide bombings in Israel, and encouraging Jihadists to go to Iraq, etc.
Posted by: markjames at April 17, 2006 11:58 AM
Thethinker:
Not only do Western PCers underestimate the capacity for indigneous evil, they underestimate ALL the capabilities of non-Western non-whites. And isn't that racism in its purest form?
And when these PCers tell us to be more tolerant when we "attack" Islam for--well, being intolerant, isn't that just as ironic?
Oh the hypocracy!
Posted by: Know Your Enemy at April 17, 2006 1:06 PM
thethinker ought to know that the Arabs traditionally considered themselves as white as you see yourself. Many of them are swarthy, but many of them are fairly pale-skinned. Look at that Syrian girl on CNN, Hala G, then there have been several other Arab women on CNN who were as pale as I am anyhow. There was a Rim or Reem and an Octavia Nasr, etc.
And many of their victims are dark-skinned, as in India, Israel, Egyptian Copts, etc.
at April 17, 2006 1:27 PM
Don’t you all think the reason we pour money down the Mid-East rat hole, specifically Egypt, is for our government to fulfill some ill-conceived policy of supporting the ”lesser of two evils”? The Hobson choice our government mistakenly finds itself in is:
1. Support the current stratokleptocracy, as Hugh puts it, as screwed up and as anti-American as Egypt is.
2. Or support some nihilistic Islamic extremist group AKA the Muslim Brotherhood.
The third and most obvious choice, except to the denizens of Washington, is to completely end all foreign aid to Egypt. There is no other country on the face of the earth that will step in to fill that $2 billion gap. The ensuing financial crisis just might bring real change. If not, we at least saved $2 billion bucks.
I read on line recently that the oil rich Arab kingdoms could easily pay the $2 billion but are too busy building grand palaces to further insulate their sheiks from the Arab street, and building grand mosques to placate their mullahs and clerics.
The only downside to cutting off aid is that the Copts and other religious minorities would be wiped out by the “religion of peace.”
at April 17, 2006 1:55 PM
As I recall, support to Egypt was used to woo it from the Soviet sphere of influence. I don't fault Jimmy Carter for attempting to get Israel and Egypt to talk. At that time, it made a lot of sense to broker a peace deal, bring stability to the region and look like a good guy in the process. And for a second or two, it appeared as if he had succeeded. But that was then, and only for a second or two, followed in quick succession by the Iranian hostage crisis in which Carter's leadership was thoroughly discredited. But he got off easy compared to Sadat, it would seem.
US foreign aid saved Abu Simbul, at least for a while. But there is no guarantee that this site won't be destroyed by Moslem fanatics as other world heritage sites have been. Cutting off aid would at least cost the ummah expense of buying their own dynamite.
Posted by: Chatillon at April 17, 2006 3:03 PM
Egypt's GDP is 339 billion, just under Saudi Arabia's, so I'm not sure how much stopping USAID expenditures will affect their economy.
Egyptian foreign aid from the US is among the highest in the world at 1.78 billion, of which $1.28 billion is military assistance. It is topped only by foreign aid to Israel, which receives $2.49 billion in aid, of which $2.25 billion is in military assistance.
US total foreign aid is about $20 billion.
Why do we give so much aid to countries that should be able to fend for themselves?
at April 17, 2006 3:43 PM
"I don't fault Jimmy Carter for attempting to get Israel and Egypt to talk. At that time, it made a lot of sense to broker a peace deal, bring stability to the region and look like a good guy in the process. And for a second or two, it appeared as if he had succeeded."
-- from a posting above
Jimmy Carter, the man who addressed Khomeini as a "fellow man of faith," and whose every statement since has further revealed him to be an unctuous, holier-than-thou fool, and a menace to this country (and certainly the worst president in our history) did not "attempt to get Israel and Egypt to talk." Sadat decided he wanted to get Israel to give up, for the second time, the entire Sinai, and so, having first assured himself discreetly that the Israelis would indeed not only give it to him (something that was not required of them under any known theory of international law, or any of the precedents long observed, most recently after World War II), but that the entire country of Israel would give him a hero's welcome as a Prince of Peace, which is exactly what those endlessly sentimental, desperate, and foolish Israelis, forgetting entirely their own self-respect and their own rights, proceeded to do.
What you refer to as his "brokering" of a "peace deal" was an atrocious several months of constant wearing down of Begin, so eager to be liked ("Sadat and Carter like me, they really like me") paid for in the coin of Israel's rights and Israel's security. For a handful of promises about ending hostile propaganda and similar attitudinal changes from Egypt, Israel handed over tangible assets in three tranches, all within a few years, and representing a gigantic buffer against possible Egyptian invasion (which could happen at a moment's notice), together with oilfields discovered and exploited by the Israelis, three major airfileds, roads, and much else.
Carter showed at every opportunity he understood nothing of Israel's plight, and he was, and remains, sickeningly unsympathetic to the Jewish state -- do not forget those remaraks to the effect that "I'm sick and tired of hearing about the Holocaust" which was his response to the admittedly not-very-photogenic, or very soothing, or very crowd-pleasing Begin (a man from a different time and space altogether). He pushed Israel again and again for concessions, while worshipping Saint Sadat, the man who had been pro-Nazi during World War II, had been a loyal aide to the megalomaniac Nasser and the whole Nasserite enterprise, who launched a surpirse attack on Yom Kippur against Israel, and who, internally, treated the Copts terribly (leading Pope Shenouda II to go into internal exile) and even resurrected the fortunes of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose members, far from grateful, later assassinated Sadat at one of those grandiose Aida-like military parades designed to celebrate the "victory" of what the Egyptians call "the October War" (a "victory" which led to a severe Egyptian defeat, once the Israelis recovered from being initially caught by surpirse, and would have led to a crushing loss had Kissinger and Nixon not insisted on preventing Sharon from destroying Egypt's Third Army).
There is no such thing as a "successful" peace deal to be brokered between Muslims and non-Msulims, whether those non-Muslims are in Israel, or India, or the southern Sudan, or anywhere else. There can be no permanent peace between Believers and Infidels. The model for all Muslim treaties is the agreement made by Muhammad with the Meccans, the so-called Treaty of Al-Hudaibiyya, which as Majid Khadduri notes in "War and Peace in Islam," was broken by Muhammad just as soon as he felt his forces had become strong enough to do so. To suggest that there could ever be a permanent peace, so that Infidel sovereign states could exist permanently, when it is the duty of Muslims to spread Islam until there are no barriers to its rule, its dominance, all over the globe, is simply to misunderstand Islam.
Carter knew nothing; Brzezinski knew nothing,about Islam. In their cases, so hostile were they, in so many ways, to Israel and its rights that one suspects had they understood the meaninglessness of any Muslim promises under such treaties, they would not have cared.
But what is the excuse for those who, today, have still not bothered to study the Islamic jurisprudence on treaties between Believers and Infidels, when the anssers may be unpleasant to realize, but are absolutely clear?
Posted by: Hugh at April 17, 2006 4:39 PM
A comment above seems to be aimed equally at the foreign aid given to Egypt, a Muslim country hostile to us and to the interests of Infidels everywhere, and to Israel. But it is absurd to equate the two kinds of aid. That to Egypt is to a corrupt country, its rulers hostile to us and its population even more so, and they must be, no matter the various smiling assurances they like to give that "it's just the American government we dislike, not the American people" because Egypt is a Muslim country, and its people are taught that between Believers and Infidels there must be permanent hostility. Why should they think or act otherwise?
Israel, on the other had, is a tiny, hard-to-locate-on-the-map country, that has taken in refugees, reclaimed the desert, been a model of how a country can succeed with no natural resources, and until after the Six-Day War received not a penny from the American government (or any other government) in aid, a fact which needs to be remembered. Yet it has been for many decades the lightning rod for Arab Muslim aggression, and the Lesser Jihad against Israel for a time prevented a Greater Jihad from developing. It was only when the OPEC oil revenues gave the Arabs and Muslims the wherewithal to dream bigger dreams, and to finance them through the buying of vast quantities of arms, of paying for mosques and madrasas and Da'wa around the world, and in doing much else to undercut Infidels both within Dar al-Islam and within Dar al-Harb (not least in collaboration with the millions of Muslims who had foolishly been allowed to settle within the Bilad al-Kufr, or Lands of the Infidels, which is to say -- deep behind what Muslims themselves are taught to regard as enemy lines).
As it happens, not only does Israel have legal, moral, and historic rights that the Western world ought to support to the hilt -- far more than many Israelis themselves support those rights -- but Israel is also protecting the Holy Land of the Christians from Muslim takeover. For no one else in the Western world shows an interest in sending hundreds of thousands of troops to defend that Holy Land, so it is up to Israel.
At the very least, the monstrous campaign that has encouraged historical amnesia as to the actual history, both demographic and cadatral and other, in the area, needs to be undone all over the Western world. The effect of that cunning invention, the "Palestinian people," needs to be reversed by undoing that transparent attempt to disguise a classic Jihad as merely a matter of "two tiny peoples, etc."
There is no connnection, none, between denying the Jizyah to Muslim countries, and denying aid to the most deserving of allies who, in fact,for a long time have borne the brunt of Muslim hostility, and who, if they were ever to succumb, not only would be massacred (and leave the Western world with a final blow to its civilizational morale, the first two being that of World War I, and then that of what was permitted, or even collaborated in, during World War II), but such a defeat would lead to Muslim triumphalism that all over the world would lead to horrific consequences for Infidels everywhere.
Posted by: Hugh at April 17, 2006 4:51 PM
Two billion dollars would sure pay a lot of border patrol salaries, and if Iran is going sic some of those 40,000 suicide bombers on us we're sure as heck going to need more bodies on the border sooner rather than later.
Posted by: krkrjak at April 17, 2006 5:03 PM
Re comment about protecting Copts by giving $$$ to Egyptian govt. Look, the Copts are being constantly attacked as it is. Maybe holding back the $$ might encourage Mubarak to take a fresh look at human rights in his own country. He doesn't want to be thrown to the dogs either.
Re Brzezinski. I read an interview with him in LeMonde after 9-11. He was asked if he regretted having fostered Muslim fanatics in Afghanistan in order to fight the USSR. He answered that it was wonderful that the Soviet empire had broken up, now everybody was free, but, as I recall, he had little to say about the suffering of his American countrymen on account of Bin Laden, his former protege in Afghanistan.
I don't recall him offering regrets over 9-11.
at April 17, 2006 6:36 PM
I do agree with these posts Islam plays the non white card well but the muslims are not only white they are white arab supremacists. Islamic arabs are the other white meat. Why cant the PC groups realize this and start hating them as much as they hate the rest of us.
Posted by: pissedoffcanadian at April 17, 2006 6:36 PM
Mr. Fitzgerald:
You're almost right on several points.
1) Jimmy Carter is actually the second-worst president in US history.
2) Menachim Begin was hardly the needy, approval-seeking personality that you paint. He was one tough customer and I don't think they make them any other way in Israel.
3) Anwar Sadat doesn't appear on my calendar of the saints for some reason. Nevertheless, I'm guessing that he knew that there might be some blowback in response to recognition of Israel. He was right.
4) I fully agree with you: the lessons of Carter's administration weren't taken to heart as the way not to proceed (see Item1) above).
Posted by: Chatillon at April 17, 2006 7:12 PM
Ancient country of Egypt was a flourishing center of learning,and is the land of the Bible,and the Paroras and the pyramids.Then the Arabs came, and vandalised it,killing most of its original inhabitants-the Goptic Christians,who were living peacefully. After the Islamic conquest,the fame,and intellectual standard of Egypt has vanished,and in its place Islamic fanatcism and ignorance ruled Egypt. The once rulers of egypt-the Goptic Christians became a third class inhabitants of their own country and their churches were burnt,daughters raped and were ill treated in every respect.
I fully support Dr.Fitzgerald's magnanimous suggestion of stopping that huge sum of money given as charity to these monsters. As some Posters suggested above,this money can be used for posting guards for patroling our borders.
Further,these gopts can be immigrated into western countries,instead of imporing trouble creating Islamists. THE WHOLE OF EUROPE ,AUSTRALIA, CANADA AND AMERICA SHOULD BRING IN THESE PERSECUTED CHRISTIANS FROM EGYPT,LABASESE CHRISTIANS,PAKISTANI CHRISTIANS,AND PEOPLE FROM EASTERN EUROPE,AS REFUGEES. These people will not only work hard in our countries,they will be ever greatful to you,assimilate with your country,and they will not indulge in bombing our subways,buildings,and killing our own people.
at April 17, 2006 8:27 PM
"the second-worst president..."
-- from a posting above
Who's on first?
Posted by: Hugh at April 17, 2006 9:46 PM
Millard Fillmore?
Posted by: Shinoliite at April 17, 2006 10:05 PM
"Menachim [sic] Begin was hardly the needy, approval-seeking personality that you paint. He was one tough customer and I don't think they make them any other way in Israel."
-- from the same posting abive
Begin hardly struck a hard bargain in anything. He did one important thing -- his decision to bomb Iraq's reactor. This whole business of "tough customers" in Israel, which is merely a variant on all that talk by those who support Israel in the abstract, and who, for their own mental stability, have convinced themselves that Israel's recent leaders are either " tough customers" (despite Begin yielding time after time to Sadat's absurd demands and getting nothing tangible in return, or now that other "tough" lieutenant to "tough old" Sharon, the impossible Ehud Olmert, even now announcing that he will, for absolutely nothing in return, give up territory in the "West Bank" (that is, Judea and Samaria) despite the absolute necessity of holding on to the entire West Bank, to control of the invasion routes from the east, to the Judean Heights, and to the aquifers on which Israel so defends, or, in that hoariest of cliches designed to explain away to supporters of Israel the maddening and repeated idicocy of its governments and their inability to state their case, and their rights, and instead to yield at every point, that phrase "tough old generals" who "wouldn't sell Israel out" but turn out, however "tough" they may have been as generals, schoolgirls or confused adolescents when it comes to negotiating with a relentless, determined, and completely meretricious enemy, as Rabin with Arafat, or as Sharon with -- well, with nobody, because Sharon was determined, in his demented obstinacy, to use his prestige as a warrior to get the Israeli public to accept his dangerous and stupid ideas on how to deal with Gaza -- by uprooting and demoralizing the Jews who lived there, in some cases having started villages before the state of Israel even existed, and handing it all over to people who wish to destroy, and say so, and act to do so, the state of Israel.
"Tough customers." "Tough old generals" who would "never make a decision that would harm Israel."
What comforting nonsense, shown up by a moment's study of what Israel has given up, again and again, to enemies that remain entirely implacable, in their ultimate goals -- they differ only on how rapidly to proceed, with Abbas in favor of Slow Jihad, and Hamas in favor of Fast Jihad -- as Islam tells them they must.
Posted by: Hugh at April 17, 2006 10:11 PM
As I recall, support to Egypt was used to woo it from the Soviet sphere of influence. Posted by: Chatillon
I agree with Hugh above on Carter, but even if one excuses all the Jiziya that was paid to Cairo in order to keep it off the Soviet bloc, the fact remains that the Soviet bloc is dead, Russia's antics in Iraq, Iran and Syria notwithstanding. As a result, it doesn't make any sense to keep paying it for any reason whatsoever.
If the geo-political alignment of the world has changed from Communism being the main threat to Islam being the main threat, why not recognize that the frontiers of liberty are no longer in Germany, Norway and Turkey, but in Israel, India, Phillipines, Thailand, Ethiopia and a myriad host of other places.
It's high time that the White House made a public statement not only denouncing Carter's foreign policy adventures as ex-Prez, but also warning all countries that no statements made by him will be supported by the State Department or the US foreign policy establishment (am I being redundant?)
Posted by: Infidel Pride at April 17, 2006 10:16 PM
"and leave the Western world with a final blow to its civilizational morale"
Hugh:
why do you weave such tragic tales about your heritage and civilization? all cultures must live and die in their own times, yet those ideas which are good and strong still find ways to live on.
Consider Phlebas.
Posted by: jehana at April 17, 2006 10:53 PM
Those of you still thinking 'how tough the Israelis are' should be studying what Jim Baker has to say on the subject.
When he was Reagans chief of staff, Baker once said he didn't need to have a vision "because the guy down the hall (Reagan) has one. I'm more interested in the game than in philosophy."
Manoevering the Israelis into ontoward positions, is for Baker, something of that game. He once likened it to turkey hunting. He was shooting gobblers together with a companion on his San Antonio ranch in 1988. "Coming here is the closest I get to therapy," he said.
As narrated by Michael Kramer in Time magazine, he was just discussing the mid-East with Jim Baker, as they were hunting.
"There, over there," says Baker. "That's a hen feather. It's easy to tell hens from gobblers. The gobblers are blacker and have beards. You need any toilet paper, let me know," he says, carefully producing about a dozen neatly folded sheets. "I never come out here without it.
Amazing, isn't it, a real challenge."
"Toilet paper.?"
"No. The Middle East. You think we'll ever be able to get a peace agreement over there?.
Patience, said Baker. That's how you get a leg up hunting turkeys." And that too, he likes to say, is how you become successful at anything, in or out of politics.
"You know how he kills turkeys?" Barney McHenry, one of Baker's oldest friends, said. "He pays good money to have someone load his feeders with, corn so he can lure them in. Then he shoots them while they're standing on the ground eating. Some sport."
"Wrong," says Baker. "The thing is getting them in. They're smart as hell. Their eyesight and hearing are incredible, about ten times better than a human's. The trick is in getting them where you want them, on your terms. Then you control the situation, not them. You have the options. Pull the trigger or don't. It doesn't matter once you've got them where you want them. The important thing is knowing that it's in your hands, that you can do whatever you determine is in your interest to do.
I don't know, though," he adds after a few seconds.
"You mean we might spook them or get to the feeders after they're gone?"
"No," says Baker, flashing a brief, fleeting smile. "I mean Israel."
Nowadays you find Jim "f**k the jews" Baker on the board of the Peres Peace Center foundation, that same Peres who's philosophy has entierely overtaken practically all the jewish parties in Israel from wall to wall.
Posted by: Hugo Schmidt-Fischer at April 17, 2006 11:04 PM
Jehana
Cultures dying of their own shortcomings, like the Roman Empire, is one thing. Cultures being destroyed by other cultures, like the Ancient Egyptians by the Romans, is another. What is unacceptable is civilization as a whole being destroyed, and barbarians taking over.
In the above scenario, we are talking about not allowing Egypt and the other Mohammedan supremacists not just to merely terminate Israel, but also to massacre the Jews. WWII was bad enough: the last thing we want is a re-run of that, appetizing as it might be to the likes of you. If we have to have another holocaust, I have some worthier targets in mind.
Targets that could use a major attutude adjustment, like the Japanese did after WWII.
Posted by: Infidel Pride at April 17, 2006 11:26 PM
"why do you weave such tragic tales about your heritage and civilization? all cultures must live and die in their own times, yet those ideas which are good and strong still find ways to live on."
-- from a posting above pooh-poohing talk about civilizational declines and falls
What fatalism, and how cruel, and misguided. What do you mean "all cultures must live and die in their own times"? Do you think European civilization, that of the West, deserves to "die" because of the cupidity and stupidity of many of its elites, who failed to investigate Islam before letting Muslim migrants by the millions into their midst? Do you want us to do nothing, to lament the loss of nothing, and simply to roll over and play dead?
As for Islam, it has been a complete political, economic, social, intellectual and moral failure, yet it continues to spread its mental poison, limiting severely the means of artistic expression, halting free and skeptical inquiry without which the enterprise of science (not mere technology, or weapons building, but science) is not possible, and in general stunts the mental and moral growth of Muslims everywhere.
Is Islam an example of "those ideas which are good and strong" and that "still find ways to live on"?
For some reason you assume that the best naturally survives. There is no evidence for this. Everywhere that Islam has replaced a pre-Islamic civilization, that land has been the poorer for it. You may not wish to do enough of what needs to be done to resist it and reverse its implacable and deadly spread, and to undo the great damage already done in Infidel lands by the large-scale presence of Muslims who make those indigneous Infidels lead lives that are far more unpleasant, expensive, and physically dangerous than they would other wise be.
Good does not inevitably triumph. The Nazis might have won, and in being defeated, they helped kill 60 million people, many of them entirely inoffensive. The Communists covered, with their idiotic nonsense and lies, much of the globe, for much of the past century, and their legacy still persists in China.
There have been periods, very long periods, when superior civilizations have succumbed to barbarians, inferior in every respect. Why one should attempt to soothe oneself with the notion that "good and strong" ideas merely "live on" -- who cares if they "live on" in this or that remote outpost, or merely as a velleity in the minds of some men? What consolation is that?
Your fatalism is curious. Fatalism does not console me. It simply makes me want to do more to spread the word about the menace of that belief-system that is so insidious in its hold on the minds of those so thoroughly, even so civilizationally, brainwashed, that they cannot undo its hold on them, even if they recognize so much of what is morally and intellectually unacceptable about it. Filial piety, including the smells of some pious grandmother's cooking -- say, in Afghanistan or a Muslim home in India -- can get in the way of looking steadily and whole at what Islam is, and what it has done in preventing Muslims, for at least a thousand years, of doing all kinds of things -- in art and science, or simply in living -- that hundreds of millions of people never had a chance to do. It has surely been the greatest brake, over the longest time, on human mental freedom in the history of the world. Incredible that some should stay loyal to it even when they begin to get a glimmer of what is wrong -- but filial piety and defensiveness go a long way. And the brainwashing starts so early, and is so complete, and is wrapped up in so much else, that it is hard to withstand or undo.
Those of us not born into Islam deserve no special credit for seeing right through it -- we did not have to endure it being dinned into us, and into previous generations, and into every mental crevice of our societies, as have most Believers. Only the usual, the most advanced -- Ibn Warraq or Ali Sina, Azam Kamguian or Ayaan Hirsi Ali, are able to fight their way out, and to jettison the entire belief-system. These are unusual people. Most people are usual.
Posted by: Hugh at April 17, 2006 11:27 PM
You can see how brainwashed a culture can become in Jordan's academic junk-science Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies (RIIFS) . They produce bizarre studies. Such as the book authored by former crown prince El-Hassan bin Talal, "Christianity in the Arab World".
It promises in the teaser, to provide "a concise account of the emegence and development of Christianity in the Arab world.". They have it totally wrong, it was the other way around actually. It were Arabs who suddenly emerged in the Christian world, through conquest, and later through asphyxation of the Christian communities they encroached upon.
Yes there had been Chrisitians in the Arab peninsula before the emergence of Islam. But substantially, predominately, many vast countries had been Christian, before any Arabs ever showed up. For example, Egypt was inhabited by Copts.
at April 17, 2006 11:46 PM
"former crown prince El-Hassan bin Talal, "Christianity in the Arab World".
-- from a posting above
Friend, host, patron of Bernard Lewis, who in the fall of 2003 co-signed (but claims he did not write) an article with James Woolsey, proposing a Hashemite monarch for Iraq. Without naming Prince Hassan, Lewis and Woolsey were clearly proposing him. He has his points. Mainly, a plummy voice so that he could always do those tapes for the Metropolitan whenever Philippe de Montebello comes down with laryngitis. Likes to talk about the "greatness" of the "Arab." Not much use for Islam. But "the Arab" -- ah, now you're talking. And plummily, to boot.
at April 18, 2006 12:00 AM
Hassan bin-Talal's little institute has spawned many absurd studies. Here's from their Website:
Established in 1994 in Amman, Jordan, under the patronage of former crown prince El-Hassan bin Talal, the Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies (RIIFS) provides a venue in the Arab world for the interdisciplinary study and rational discussion of religion and religious issues, with particular reference to Christianity in Arab and Islamic society. More recently, RIIFS has broadened its focus to include all issues pertaining to religious, cultural and civilizational diversity, regionally and globally. For this purpose, it maintains relations with similarly concerned academic institutions in different parts of the world.
Kamal Salibi, Emeritus Professor at the Department of History and Archaeology at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon, was the Royal Institute's founding director and has since been named its honorary president. Salibi is the author of two preposterous books advocating the "Israel in Yemen" theory. In this view, the placenames of the Bible actually allude to places in Arabia and were later reinterpreted to refer to places in so-called Palestine when the Jews moved there after the Exile; and the ancient Jews actually came from Yemen, on the Arabian peninsula. In his view, the epigraphic evidence for Jewish presence in Palestine comes from a later period, or is mere coincidence of names. "Palestinia Authority" propaganda historians, like Jarid al-Kidwa, agree, claiming that the pre-exilic Jews never lived in Israel.
A TV show broadcast on PLO Television in 1997 featured Arab historian Jarid al-Kidwa. He claimed that "all the events surrounding Kings Saul, David and Rehoboam occurred in Yemen, and no Hebrew remnants were found in Israel, for a very simple reason--because they were never here." Wow those PLO TV programs. Makes you happy doesn't it, that you are paying taxes in Europe or the US to finance that garbage.
"Palestinian" officials have often stated that sites of particular significance to the Palestinians such as the Old City of Jerusalem were never inhabited by Jews, or that sites of particular religious significance in fact were somewhere else... al Kidwa stated "The stories of the Torah and the Bible did not take place in the Land of Israel --they occurred in the Arabian peninsula, primarily in Yemen. The identity of our father Ibrahim [Abraham] who is mentioned in the Koran is clear. From the Koran's description of him it arises that he lived in the southern Hejaz [Saudi Arabia], near Mecca. "
Welcome to Cloud-Cuckoo Land...
at April 18, 2006 12:12 AM
Hugh, your hasty rhetorical puddings would not suffer from a pinch of positivity. Ever considered taking your own advice?
Posted by: jehana at April 18, 2006 1:18 AM
A state-controlled newspaper in Egypt has published an editorial that gloats over the latest suicide-bombing murders in Tel Aviv.
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=20143&only
That the US Government expects the American people to subsidise this kind of thing through their taxes is an obscenity.
Posted by: Yojimbo at April 18, 2006 4:37 AM
I support the end to aid to Muslim countries.
http://www.middleeast.org/launch/redirect.cgi?num=89&a=46
Below are the actual voting records of various Arabic/Islamic States which are recorded in both the US State Department and United Nations records:
-Kuwait votes against the United States 67% of the time
-Qatar votes against the United States 67% of the time
-Morocco votes against the United States 70% of the time
-United Arab Emirates votes against the U. S. 70% of the time.
-Jordan votes against the United States 71% of the time.
-Tunisia votes against the United States 71% of the time.
-Saudi Arabia votes against the United States 73% of the time.
-Yemen votes against the United States 74% of the time.
-Algeria votes against the United States 74% of the time.
-Oman votes against the United States 74% of the time.
-Sudan votes against the United States 75% of the time.
-Pakistan votes against the United States 75% of the time.
-Libya votes against the United States 76% of the time.
-Egypt votes against the United States 79% of the time.
-Lebanon votes against the United States 80% of the time.
-India votes against the United States 81% of the time.
-Syria votes against the United States 84% of the time.
-Mauritania votes against the United States 87% of the time.
U S Foreign Aid to those that oppose us:
-Egypt, for example, after voting 79% of the time against the United States, still receives $2 billion annually in US Foreign Aid.
-Jordan votes 71% against the United States and receives $192,814,000 annually in US Foreign Aid.
-Pakistan votes 75% against the United States receives $6,721,000 annually in US Foreign Aid.
-India votes 81% against the United States receives $143,699,000 annually.
*LBN-SPECIAL BONUS - 12 Sept 2005
at April 18, 2006 6:13 AM
What's a "pinch of positivity"? Is that like Eric Idle's song at the end of "Life of Brian" -"Look on the Bright Side of Life"? Or do you want me to look on the "Bright Side" of Islam?
Tell me all about that Bright Side. Starting 1350 years ago. Tell it to me from the viewpoint of the Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, Hindus, and Buddhists, so many tens of millions of whom were kindly given by their conquerors the chance to warmly embrace Islam, with all the wonderful things that meant for their own civilizations, for practice of art, the enterprise of science, the development of political and mental freedom. What is that Bright Side?
Posted by: Hugh at April 18, 2006 9:16 AM
Hugh-
The "Bright Side" is the light you see zooming down the tunnel of death.
Usually described as a very positive thing.
Islam's warriors merely release us from this vale of tears and permit us to Enter the Light.
(Often, your head getting there first... but, hey, look on the bright side... what do you need a body for in non-Muslim heaven?)
Then there's the cheerful side of Islamic iconoclasm.
No more clutter in Western museums.
Just lots and lots of of comfy rugs.
All the easier to convert them to prayer rooms.
(Just like the side streets of many French cities 5 times a day.)
Posted by: profitsbeard at April 18, 2006 10:09 AM
Mr. Fitzgerald:
What point do you wish to make? That Western leadership has been inept and/or perfidious? So it remains. History as a roadmap is an invaluable tool. However, driving down the road is a real time activity. Fulminations against Carter today are largely irrelevant, given the recklessness of the present adminstration and their total disregard for lessons (not) learned. The present administration persistently refuses to identify the problem, indeed persists in supporting the problem (anyone remember Dubai ports deal, boys and girsl?) and has thrown away money on a adventures in nation building in Iraq and Afghanistan. The results? More sharia! Woopee!
So "Who's on first?" You know W-ho.
Posted by: Chatillon at April 18, 2006 12:45 PM
"Chatillon" above appears to have overloooked approximately 500 of my approximately 5000 postings here that take the Bush Administration to task for its idiotic Light Unto the Muslim Nations project. Perhaps he should read all of those and then tell me if he thinks I have not identified the real culprit and am wasting time on Carter. Carter, and Brzezinski, represent a large part of the Democratic Party -- the wrong part, the part that wants us to either "remain in Iraq now because we broke it and now we have to fix it" or those who want us out, not in order to weaken Islam (as I do), but in order to have learned our lesson and never ever do anything bad to any Muslim state again.
There is no need to let anyone off. Carter is ignorant and hideous, Bush ignorant, sentimental, and obstinate. Both can be deplored, in different ways. Bush will be president for two more years, and can continue to waste men, materiel, money, and morale in Iraq. Carter, though no longer president, can appeal to the very worst in the Democratic Party.
Why should either 'scape whipping?
Posted by: Hugh at April 18, 2006 1:29 PM
"Why should either 'scape whipping?"
...Because one of them is a dead horse, which is exactly what we're flogging right now. Cut 'im loose and get on with guiding the one still alive in the harness.
BTW, you do the Democrats an unintended service by claiming that Carter represents a large number of them. They are not organized well enough to be represented by anybody, having trouble enough agreeing on the time of day let alone viable domestic and foreign policy...Hmmm come to think of it maybe Carter is a perfect representative after all.
Posted by: Chatillon at April 18, 2006 3:27 PM
Chatillon I agree with Hugh. I hate Bush too but when i bring this up all the liberals who hate him just love that i say this. But I have to emphasis that I hate him for almost the complete opposite reason the MSM does. I always hear how Clinton was the best President and Jimmy Carter was very good too. Just opposing Bush is not enough. Because most of the people who oppose him are doing it for the wrong reasons. And these people are looking at the policies of Carter and Clinton as inspiration. So no they are not a dead horse. Their poisonous ideals are alive and well.
Posted by: pissedoffcanadian at April 18, 2006 4:06 PM
"A comment above seems to be aimed equally at the foreign aid given to Egypt, a Muslim country hostile to us and to the interests of Infidels everywhere, and to Israel. But it is absurd to equate the two kinds of aid"
it may be absurd, but nevertheless the US government has chosen to give Egypt and Israel roughly equal amounts of aid, and this aid primarily military in both cases.
Why has this military aid been given continuously to Egypt and Israel directly after the two countries signed a peace treaty in 1979? in what way does it make sense to give countries war money as a reward for maintaining peace?
and if President Carter was wrong to do so, as has been proposed, why did President Regan not change this?
at April 19, 2006 2:10 PM
Military aid to Egypt made sense in the 80's after Sadat's assassination, when there was an axis composed of the Soviet Union, Syria and Libya. In Sudan, the pro-Cairo Nimeiry regime had been overthrown, and nothing could have been worse than Egypt too folding back into Soviet influence.
Since the Cold War ended, 15 years have lapsed, during which time the aid should have been decreased until it got to zero. However, given that it hasn't, and that Egypt is one of the major ideological centers of al Qaeda (apart from Saudi Arabia), it's high time to end it.
There was a rationale behind past policies. There hasn't been one for some 15 years, and it's high time it ended.
Posted by: Infidel Pride at April 19, 2006 7:36 PM
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