Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald discusses what might happen to Christian holy sites and other monuments in Israel if the Jewish State disappeared:
Israel’s disappearance would have several consequences:
1) The Old City, all of Jerusalem, and all of the sites in the Holy Land that matter to the world’s Christians (of course all Jewish sites, which should matter to the world’s Christians) would be firmly in Muslim control. There might at first be noises about “allowing under the right conditions” some Christians to visit. But the islamization of the city would proceed. All synagogues and many churches would be razed, as they were in Muslim-ruled times past. The Western Wall would no doubt be fully incorporated into some grand new mosque. The remaining Christians and Jews would not at first be massacred — those who had dared to stay. They might at first be treated simply the way, say, Copts are treated in Egypt. Tolerated, but under constant threat. Or as Maronites have come to be treated in their own country, Lebanon, where for more than a thousand years they withstood, in the mountains, the Muslim invaders. Or like Hindus in Pakistan and Bangladesh, under constant threat, fleeing when they can, enduring when they can.
2) The moral consequences to the Western psyche would be grave. All thinking people would realize, would come to realize, that after the entire history of the persecution and mass-murder of the Jews, that in the full light of history, a horrible injustice had been done. After two thousand years, the Jews had finally managed, after acts of fabulous, story-book heroism, to recreate their tiny state, their commonwealth, and managed to in-gather so many survivors of both European antisemitism at its murderous worst, and of Muslim anti-Infidel persecution at its cruelest — and now this.
Yet, despite these obvious facts, Europeans (and others as well) have permitted the growth of an entirely false narrative of the Arab Muslim Jihad (aided by Arab “islamochristians”) against the inoffensive Jewish state. This narrative has been filled out with the steady daily drip of falsehoods in the press, the radio, and on television, by Arabs and Muslims, and by those who, out of diseased third-worldism or old-fashioned antisemitism — further aided by the widespread ignorance of the most elementary facts of history — hope to benefit from it. Israel has become the permanent whipping-boy, and because the menace of Islam could not be faced, it was so much more comforting to believe that there was only the matter of Israel to set Muslim against Christian. So Israel was not recognized merely as one part of a Greater Jihad, but instead as the entire cause of whatever hostility Muslims felt toward Christians. And for obvious psychological reasons, for the mental stability of those who were engaged in this cruel abandonment, it made things easier for them if they could first convince themselves that the Israelis were the aggressors, the ones who were in the wrong. And, looking backward, it also allowed a new generation of Europeans to overcome any feelings of guilt that they might have experienced if they looked, steadily and whole, at the entire history of the Jews in Europe. Lacking the mental and emotional stamina, eager to flee from the truth, of course intent on accepting the Arab and Muslim presentation of events, they have never done so.
Israel is under no obligation to recognize any U.N. Resolution, given the farce of the Arab-Muslim bloc that forms, as it has for the past thirty years, the only solid bloc at the U.N. But it does. It chooses to recognize Resolution 242. Resolution 242, analyzed at great length by all sorts of people. One was Raymond Aron, who in his French pamphlet on the wording discussed in detail the differences, in English and French, of the phrase “withdrawal from territories” and “withdrawal from the territories” and in French, how both phrases became “des territoires.” Another was the great Australian jurist (whom Roscoe Pound, Dean of Harvard Law School, regarded as one of the greatest writers on jurisprudence of the past century) Professor Julius Stone, whose unanswerable and exhaustive discussion of Israel’s right to hold onto the West Bank (and Gaza — a right it has now, for shallow calculations of raison d’etat, forfeited) — needs to be consulted.
The important thing in that resolution is that Israel is required, or not required but asked, to withdraw to “secure and defensible borders.” It is up to Israel, now understanding or being forced to understand, the nature of the relentless and endless Jihad and of the instruments of that Jihad, to calculate precisely what those “secure and defensible borders” are. And it is up to the sensible non-Israelis, as they themselves pass judgment on what that phrase “secure and defensible borders” might mean, to keep in mind the asymmetries of wealth and population between the Jews of Israel and the Arabs, and even the Muslims — not only in the immediate vicinity, but all over. They should also consider carefully what, if they were Israelis, if they lived in Israel, if their children and grandchildren would have to be worried about, what they would consider to be “secure and defensible borders.”
Sharon is a military man. He is a politician. He has not distinguished himself as a student of Islam, a student of Muslim psychology, or a thoughtful man. He is an abrupt man, who likes dramatic gestures. He is a stubborn man, and an autocratic one, who feels free to decide what he thinks best, even if he in doing so betrays completely the solemn commitments he made to those who elected him. I think he is a fool, and I think he is a dangerous fool. And in not finding him impressive, any more than one finds that Fool of Chelm Peres impressive, or Rabin, or that sentimentalist (as he proved to be, so eager to be loved: “Sadat and Carter like me. They really like me”) Begin, they all show that from 1920 on, Jews in what became Israel had only a handful of clear-sighted leaders, and even they had not factored in Islam. How could they? They just did not know enough; for them it was enough that “the Arabs” (including Christian Arabs, or islamochristians) were against them, and that, for decades, the main worry had to be the threat of the Nazis. Few in the Western world until recently bothered to investigate Islam, and Muslims themselves, until they acquired the OPEC wealth, and what power it gave them to aggressively push Da’wa, and until they found themselves allowed to settle, amazingly, behind what they consider to be enemy, because Infidel, lines, knew about Islam. Why should the Israelis have been any more attentive than people in France or England or Belgium or Spain?
The bitter fruit of all this ignorance could be the fall of Israel. And the fall of Israel will lead, not to that Kantian eternal peace, but to triumphalism all over the Muslim world. And the Muslim world, now, because of all the dithering especially about such matters as Israel, is now — all over.
Global warming, and global swarming. Both require, in part, the same remedies — doing everything possible to limit OPEC revenues, and the use of fossil fuels.
It will be difficult to undo what has been done. More, more, more — that’s the cry from Beijing and Bombay to Baltimore, Birmingham, and Bordeaux. More, more, more stuff, stuff, stuff. Radix malorum cupiditas est.