Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald discusses the Palestinian election and some of its larger implications:
The election is between those who believe in the Lesser Jihad (Slow Version) and the Lesser Jihad (Fast Version). The Europeans contributed billions to Arafat, and were then joined by the Americans, who helped contribute a few billion more, with both promising more billions over the next three years (a promise that should be forgotten — let the rich Arabs send the money to fellow Arabs, and have a bit less for mosques in the capitals of the West). In doing so they have only damaged the “Palestinians” — if a Hamas victory is regarded as “damage” — by supplying the very money that allowed the corrupt Arafat and his corrupt followers (every single one of them, including Abbas at the top of the list) with the money with which to be corrupt. If no pot of gold had been supplied to the “Palestinians,” there would have been no corruption and stealing of greater or lesser shares of that pot.
It is amusing that among the unintended consequences of those disgusting jizyah-payments by the E.U. and the inveigled Americans is the strengthening of Hamas, which has thereby lessened, rather than increased, the plausibility and hence the appeal(for the outside world), of the camouflage of “Palestinian nationalism” provided to the Lesser Jihad. The dominance of Hamas, the flight of even those local islamochristians who thought that if only they parrotted, and deeply believed, the Muslim Arab hostlitiy toward Israel, that they would be safe (one more vain attempt by Christians within Dar al-Islam to protect themselves), helps to rip the pseudo-nationalist “legitimate-rights–of-the-Palestinian-people” veil right off the dead-to-the-world face of the Jihad beneath. That Jihad, the Lesser Jihad against tiny Israel, did not require much in the way of resources, and began long ago. It began, that is, before the three things happened that permitted the Arabs and Muslims to openly demonstrate their aggressive intent. Those three tihngs were: one, the trillions in unearned, unmerited oil revenues; 2) the foolishly permitted migration of millions of Muslims behind enemy lines (to the Western world, to Infidel lands, to the Bilad al-kufr); third, technological advances made in the West and exploited by Muslims (audiocassettes, videocassettes, satellite channels, the Internet) helped make a reality of the permanent dream of a Greater Jihad.
So is it to be the Good-Government boys, with their bombs (put back in the rucksacks for now, so they can get on asking for more Infidel jizyah), or will it be the Bad-Government boys, Abbas and his crooks, whose only saving grace is that they are a little cleverer? Their timetable for Israel’s destruction is somewhat less impatient, and their preferred means not the suicide-bomb, but everything and anything else. These means include demographic conquest, and steady pressure, diplomatic, economic, political, so that the Israelis will forget their own legal, historic, and moral claims, and forget — as much of the rest of the world has too-easily allowed itself to forget — that they are in the right, and the Muslim Arabs, with a thin veneer of islamochristians to present their case to the outside world — in the wrong, the wrong, the very wrong.
And one wonders, too: if in the end Israel is thrown to the wolves (Iranian bomb, yawn some in the chanceries, and newspaper columns, of the West — “we can learn to live with that.” What do you mean by “we”?), just how indifferent will the West prove to be to the loss? What will the West say about this second mass-murder, in full view of everyone, of the Jews, the most persecuted, and most unoffending tribe, in human history?
And one more little question. Jerusalem and the rest of what Christians used to call (and some still do) the Holy Land might be erased by Muslim (perhaps Iranian) bombs, or be seized through conventional conquest, which might merely limit access to these lands that are so important to Christians everywhere. These lands can only be preserved for unimpeded Christian visits if Israel remains in existence, and in possession of those territories. The Western world shows no signs of wishing to field an army to protect those areas from Muslim destruction or seizure itself; so it will have to rely on Israel. And if the Holy Land is again taken over by Muslims, now with the full ideology of Islam let loose upon the world and within the minds of Muslims all over the world, what would such a loss mean for Christian morale, wherever Christians exist? What will it do to black Christians, for example, in sub-Saharan Africa, who are under constant pressure from local Muslims? What would it do in China, where many are interested in Christianity, pondering what it is that they need or think they need as solace against the unchained rush for riches in a China where Cupidity has become the new Party Line?
After nearly 2000 years, Jews in-gathered from Europe and the Middle East itself and rebuilt, against fantastic odds, their tiny country. They made Hebrew a living language. They did all those things the books say they did. They made the desert bloom (see “Palestine: Land of Promise,” by Walter Clay Lowdermilk, agronomist from Liberty, North Carolina). They rescued Jews who were survivors of the Nazi death camps, and Jews from Baghdad and Yemen, Syria and Egypt, Ethiopia and Soviet Russia. That was the second Jewish state in the Land of Israel. If it is destroyed, there will be no third.
And what will this “Palestine” look like? It will look like Gaza. It will look like Ramallah. It will look like Yemen. It will look like Ramadi. It will look like what all the Arab oil states would look like if they didn’t have that oil. It will take a while, but whatever had been built up will be destroyed.
Or, in the alternative, Iranian bombs, made possible by American stupidity and cupidity and timidity and rigidity (the Esdrujula Explanation of Current World Affairs) will destroy the land utterly. Americans, however, persist in putting all their eggs in the silly Iraqi basket, but the Easter Bunny in question has turned out to be related to Bre’r Rabbit. The big American “boots on the ground” effort to bring peace and harmony in Iraq, to make Kurd lie down with Arab and Sunni lie down with Shi’a, rather than leave and exploit those very ethnic and sectarian fissures that could resonate everywhere in the Muslim world, serving to divide and demoralize our permanent enemies, and help lead at least some of them (especially among the non-Arab Muslims resentful of the Arab supremacist ideology within Islam) out of the jihad nexus — all this makes us, the mighty United States, into something of a Baby Huey figure, unwilling to figure out what is really going on, or what we should do. Or not Baby Huey, but — to continue with the Joel Chandler Harris theme — we have been transformed into Bre’r Bear himself.
And thanks to our monomaniacal and obstinate refusal to see how to pluck a kind of victory from the tarbaby of Iraq, and in sticking with this Light Unto the Muslim Nations Effort, we are missing the chance, missing the boat. You don’t really think that our man “Zal” — Zalmay Khalilzad — could promote an exit so as to weaken Islam through those fissures he is trying to prevent from widening, do you? Why should anyone who claims to be a Muslim, no matter how weak or etiolated his faith, possibly be able to think in terms of weakening, dividing, demoralizing Muslims in order to further Infidel aims and secure Infidel goals? It is sheer madness to have a Muslim-American involved right now in Iraq — oh yes, he’s doing a heck of a job, as someone once said, but that heck of a job just isn’t the job that should be done.
Result: Iraq dithers and so do the Americans, waiting to be told — by the Iraqis — when they “can leave.” And Iran builds, and builds, and builds. And if they were Western rational men, as the Soviet rulers were, then one could perhaps believe that they would, if faced with retaliatory destruction, not ever use the bombs they may acquire. But that would be crazy. The entire history of the Muslim world shows a willingness to spend huge amounts, hundreds of billions, to focus every effort on the Jihad. The assumption that such people are “just like us” in the end is disproven by every suicide bomber and by every statement of Ahmadinejad and his fellows. When someone says he doesn’t care about the casualties because the Islamic world can withstand a loss of a few millions or tens of millions, and it’s worth it to destroy Israel (or anyone else similarly thought to be an affront to Islam), believe him. He means it. Khomeini meant what he wrote before the Islamic Revolution, and did exactly what he said he would do. Stop assuming that it isn’t meant.
If Iran gets this bomb, think now of what Jerusalem and Bethlehem and Nazareth may look like in some not-distant future. Buildings in decay. Ruin and desolation, reminiscent of the kind universally reported on by Western travellers to the Holy Land in the early and mid-19th century. Possibly the lingering effects of radiation (half-life of Strontium 90 is 47.7 years, if memory serves) — so if an intrepid reporter chooses to visit what is left of Jerusalem, he should be sure to bring his geiger counter. What Jews survived have departed, in those ships that took them wherever they could go — oh, how embarrassed, how ashamed, were so many in the Western world. But — they didn’t know the Iranian government meant it. They couldn’t believe it. They had no idea.
But it’s not completely empty, that Holy Land. Around the ruins of the Temple Mount and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (the one built on the site of the one destroyed upon the order of the Caliph al-Hakim in 1009), and the Mount of Olives, and Bethlehem, and all the other important sites, Jewish and Christian, there may be heard voices in chorus reciting Qur’anic verses or pseudo-Qur’anic verses of triumph. And now here they are, line after line, passing along in ranks in some imaginary parade-ground of your mind, coming closer still, goose-stepping in their black balaclavas and smartly clutching their kalashnikovs, while the handful of Jews and Christians who remain somewhere on the sidelines mutely cower, permanently cowed.