Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald explores some of the implications of the recent meeting between an Israeli diplomat and one from Pakistan: implications which so far continue to be largely ignored by the intelligentsia, leaving us all that much more vulnerable.
The meeting between a single Pakistani diplomat, and a single Israeli diplomat — both pushed to it, no doubt, by the American government (which allows itself to believe that this act “means something”) should be seen as what it was — nothing at all. The meeting was not “the start of something”; the Pakistanis feel they have earned a point from the Americans, and have no intention of recognizing Israel, ever, even if they now state that they will think about doing so but only once “the West Bank, Jerusalem, etc.” are surrendered to the “Palestinian” Arabs — i.e. to the shock troops of the Arab and Muslim jihad against Israel.
As for the Israelis, they have never wished to, and have never been able to, recognize the nature of the opposition to them. This was true even of the clear-headed Jabotinsky, who recognized that only an “Iron Wall” of resistance would cause the Arabs, implacably opposed to a Jewish state, not to cease to oppose it but to cease to make violent war upon it.
But Jabotsinky wrote of “Arabs” and “Jews,” not of “Muslims” opposed for perfectly comprehensible Muslim reasons, to an Infidel nation-state. And the European-born elite that ran Israel had no experience of, and failed to inquire into, the nature of Islam and the treatment of non-Muslims under Muslim rule. So many Israelis were busy fighting, or busy creating a state, or busy rescuing and integrating a gigantic in-gathering of completely wretched, dispossessed people from such Arab countries as Yemen — quite primitive and illiterate refugees — that they did not stop to study Islam.
And during the 1960s and 1970s, there were alliances of mutual interest and shared antipathies (to the Arabs) with Iran and then, a bit later, with Turkey. The Shah of Iran was willing to ignore the Shari’a stipulations on the treatment of non-Muslims. He was hardly influenced by Islam, being little more than a “Muslim-for-identification-purposes-only” Muslim, which helped to explain both his virtues, from our point of view, and his inability to recognize that in the villages, Khomeini’s appeal was great. It was good that the Shah was secular, but unfortunate that he was also vain and weak. In the end, the monstrous Khomeini and his monstrous regime replaced him; while this was mainly an internal disaster, it also had its effects in foreign policy. The nascent alliance with Israel came to an abrupt end; an alliance with the PLO replaced it. (Arafat had been instrumental in putting Khomeini on the throne, and he was the first visitor to Khomeini welcomed in Teheran).
The “alliance” with Turkey, which was such a fixed idea just a few years ago, has also suffered as Islam itself reconquers Turkey — reconquers because the army has been prevented from stepping in to smash it, and because Erdogan and his Justice Party have been clever in how they have gone about reversing or limiting the Kemalist measures undertaken to constrain Islam as a political and social force. And here too, while the main victims have been within Turkey, that “alliance” with Israel has been damaged, even ended — by the new attitude of the Turkish government and, more surprisingly, the attitudes expressed all over the Turkish press: not only about Israel, but about the United States and Europe. Those who expected something better from secular Turks may be as shocked as was the Pentagon (which had no excuse, unlike the rest of us who are mere citizens) when the Turkish government refused to allow a fourth American division to enter Iraq from bases in Turkey.
Thus, in its desire for alliances that came to naught, and out of the ignorance of its ruling elites, and out of the desperate desire to believe that the conflict with the “Palestinians” really is not about the religiously-inspired requirement that no Infidel sovereign state be permitted anywhere within dar al-Islam (or, ultimately, anywhere in the world), Israel has failed, and continues to fail, to analyze its own (permanent, but manageable) problem and the ill-considered policies that recognition of this Jihad, which might be called the Lesser Jihad (the Greater Jihad being that against the entire Infidel world), might have avoided.
And what is more, had the Israelis from the beginning, from the late 1940s and early 1950s, understood and articulated the reasons for Arab opposition to their country — long before the “Palestinian” people were invented after 1967 — they would have received far more sympathy. They would have been the permanent underdog facing an implacable enemy. Instead, the pressure on them to give up territory in an impossible attempt to placate their enemies has steadily increased to the current boiling point in Gaza. Yet the Qur’an, the Hadith, and the Sira do NOT say “accept the Infidels and their states when they are willing to give up some territory,” or anything like that.
And what is more, had the European elites and their press and television not forgotten that Israel was in the right, and had they not ignored the terms and purpose of the Mandate for Palestine, and had they not remained completely unaware of the mistreatment of all non-Muslims and especially the Jews (nearly a million of whom fled Arab lands from 1948-1960, with more coming from Iran after Khomeini’s resistible rise), they might not only have refused to succumb so easily to the anti-Israel propaganda which is both supported by, and in turn helps to promote, antisemitism. Antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiments are mutually reinforcing — each helps promote the other. Just as important is the fact that had they not ignored all that, they would have been sufficiently alerted to the nature of Islam itself that they might have been careful not to permit (as they have for the last three decades) a virtually unopposed, undiscussed, uncontroversial migration to Western Europe of millions of Muslims. Now these Muslims, in their abundantly documented attitudes (which arise naturally out of the teachings of Islam), represent a clear, and permanent threat to the wellbeing of all Infidels in their own lands.
That could have been stopped. But the failure of the Israelis to grasp the nature of their enemy, and hence to articulate positions and policies based on a realistic assessment of Islam, has had terrible consequences for Israel, and for the rest of the Infidel world. Had the Lesser Jihad been properly identified as such, and the Western media become educated as to the nature of Islam in time, then the Greater Jihad, which is now funded by OPEC trillions, would not be advancing as quickly and confidently as it is: with millions of Muslims permitted to settle behind what they regard, and treat, as enemy lines, and with new technologies aiding the diffusion of Muslim tenets everywhere — while the Infidel remains largely, and blissfully, ignorant of all this.