“The only solution ultimately is to re-launch the framework for a negotiated peace with a two-state solution at the heart of it…” — from a recent statement by Tony Blair
He’s well-spoken and incoherent, withal. He can’t figure out Islam, and doesn’t want to. It’s too disturbing. Too many problems are posed, if he were to begin to understand it. He knows there’s a problem with Islam — outside Great Britain, and deep inside Great Britain. But he allows himself to believe that it is “manageable.” He allows himself to be believe that there is a permanent “solution.” And when it comes to Israel, he assumes that the “solution” is based on Israel withdrawing still further from land to which it has legal, historic, and moral title. The clear intent and the specific provisions of the League of Nations’ Mandate for Palestine, which mandate, like those others of the League, was to have its precise terms respected in toto by the successor organization, the United Nations.
Blair, like so many others, ignores completely these legal, historic, and moral claims. Child of the century, or rather child of the last few decades, he chooses to believe that the sudden appearance of the phrase “Palestinian people” after the Six-Day War, and the careful and relentless promotion of this soi-disant “Palestinian people,” and the rewriting of history that took place to accompany it, and the absence of any context, have no significance. He ignores the context of what is wrongly called the “Arab world” but which has many, and once had even more, non-Arab and non-Muslim minorities. He also ignores the fact that the Jews managed on their own to return and to buy land. Not a single dunam of land was taken from Arabs before they made war in 1948, and very little after that. After all, nearly 90% of Israel, as the successor state to Mandatory Palestine, was state or waste land. It passed from the Ottoman government to the British Mandatory Authority to Israel — a fact that so many ignore, or never bothered to find out.
Blair would have us believe that the texts of Islam do not mean what they say. Or perhaps he does not know what they say. What they say is this: no Infidel state can be permitted, whatever its size, on any land that was once a part of Dar al-Islam. Once conquered by Islam, territory belongs forever to Muslims. In a sense, you might well ask, what does it matter? Doesn’t, in the Islamic view, the whole world belong ultimately to Islam? Isn’t Islam everywhere to dominate, aren’t Muslims everywhere, ultimately, to rule?
And you would be right. But there is a matter of priorities. The unprecedented has now occurred — millions and now tens of millions of Muslims have been allowed to settle deep within Infidel lands, behind what Muslims themselves are taught to regard as, essentially, enemy lines. Naturally, still weak because far less numerous behind those enemy lines, Muslims in the Infidel lands must prevent those Infidels from examining too closely the texts and tenets of Islam, and figuring out what they mean. They must prevent those Infidels from looking too closely at the history of Islamic Jihad-conquest, and especially at the history of the subsequent subjugation of non-Muslims from Spain to East Asia, over 1350 years. They must prevent Infidels from finding out about Muslim attitudes toward many kinds of artistic expression (sculpture, paintings of living creatures, music) and toward the free and skeptical inquiry that makes science possible, and is everywhere encouraged in the advanced West, and discouraged in Islam. They must keep up a patter of phony sweetness-and-light, and misrepresent Islam as “respecting” Christianity and Judaism.
And Infidels don’t generally know that major figures from both those religions have been appropriated by Islam and turned into Muslims — for we are all Muslims, right back to Abraham, in the Islamic view. They usually don’t bother to examine what the Islamic “Jesus” and the Islamic “Moses” are, in Islam. Muslim-Christian and Muslim-Jewish “dialogues” become occasions for special pleading and careful taqiyya-and-tu-quoque by Muslim spokesmen, delivered to self-selected groups of Infidels. Those Infidels, meanwhile, are in equal measures ignorant, naive, and self-preening: “We are willing to meet and listen and dialogue with our Muslim brothers — unlike all those others, the benighted and the bigoted. We are morally superior, and we will demonstrate that moral superiority by taking every occasion to defend ‘our Muslim brothers’ from those who would divide us.”
The beachhead is gained, and the Muslim troops fan out across the new land, ready to spread Islam. They spread it in the prisons among those looking for justification for their alienation from The System, Amerika, Kapitalism, and finding Islam as the perfect vehicle to justify their own past, and possibly future, criminal behavior, and in many cases, to dignify it, draping naked aggression in the cloak of a new faith. And since so many of the undisciplined long not merely for discipline, but for Total Discipline, Islam provides a ready-made Community of Believers, who will enforce, in every way, rules that cover every detail of life. Bush likes to prate about how everyone “wants freedom.” It’s nonsense. The spirit of wanting to march in serried ranks, of Belonging to the Group (Nuremberg! Hitlerjugend! Jawohl!), and of knowing what one is to do, for every occasion, at every step, is a strong one. There are many who cannot stand or do not know how to use “freedom” (which Bush himself hardly understands), and who long for Authority.
And that is what Islam provides: Authority, the Authority of Allah and the Example of Muhammad, whose life, whose words and deeds serve as a gloss on the will expressed by Allah in the Qur’an.
Blair, as a leading spokesman of the nattering classes (World Leader Division), goes on about a “manageable” problem to which there is a “solution.” He wishes tiny, permanently beleaguered Israel, the physical refuge and embodiment of the most persecuted tribe in human history, to pay the price for his inability, and that of others, to dare to come to grips with the menace of Islam. He wants to prolong for a while longer the illusion that the problem arises from something we, the Infidels have done. In this case, the Infidels are those stubborn Israelis, who keep insisting on staying alive, who keep insisting on being able to have a minimum level of defensible borders, who keep insisting — though not nearly as effectively as they should and could — that yes, they have legal, historic, and moral rights to this land, that they are the victims of an Arab siege. The Israelis still do not call it, as they should, a Jihad, albeit a Local or Lesser Jihad. The monstrous rewriting of history that has gone on virtually unopposed since the Six-Day War needs itself to be rewritten, and the truth, or much of it, brought back to the consciousness of those in the West who have no idea of it – such as Blair, Rice, and other “two-state” solutionists.
Darura. “Darura” in Arabic means “necessity.” The Arabs and Muslims understand this idea. “Necessity” can justify even violating explicit prohibitions. You may, if starving, eat pork, according to some. You may, if you need to protect the faith, lie to Infidels — lie about Islam itself, lie about your own belief in Islam. There is no further surrender of territory by Israel that will bring about “peace” with the Arab Muslims. The Arabs, and the shock troops of Arab Islam in the Lesser Jihad against Israel, are divided. But they are not divided the way that Blair and Rice and others seem to think. They are not divided, that is, between those who are ready to permanently accept Israel’s existence (and what’s more, its right to permanent existence) and those who are not.
No. They are divided, rather, between those who are the Slow Jihadists and those who are the Fast Jihadists. The Slow Jihadists are what the media like to repeatedly assure us are the “moderates.” How many times have you seen a reporter blandly begin by referring in his dispatch to “the moderate Mahmoud Abbas” or “the moderates of Fatah”? The Homeric epithets here are not singer-of-tales mnemonic devices, but rather part of mental bullying, a deliberate attempt to tell us what to make of facts, not to think for ourselves. Thinking for yourself is discouraged. You must repeat: Abbas “the moderate,” Fatah “the moderates.” You must further be told that what is called the “Two-State Solution” is indeed a “Solution.” If it weren’t, why would such impressive people as Condoleeza Rice or Tony Blair, or the “Quartet” (the Four Horsemen of Israel’s Apocalypse is more like it), call it a “Two-State Solution”?
Let’s get this straight. There is no difference in the ultimate goal of Fatah or of Hamas. Both want Israel as a Jewish state to disappear. They both know it is wrong, unjust, contra naturam, for Infidels, and especially the Jews, to possess land that was once ruled by Muslims. This is especially true of the Jews, who are so despised in the Islamic world for being weak, and are the special focus of hatred.
The difference is in tactics. Fatah’s Mahmoud Abbas, loyal collaborator for decades with Yassir Arafat, behind the mild-mannered generally-accepted-accounting-principles suit-and-tie demeanor, is a firm supporter of terrorism in the past and in the present too, if the targets are the right ones. He believes that it will take patience. It will take a longer effort to soften Israel up, by continuing to weaken Israel economically and diplomatically, and militarily by pushing it back to the 1949 Armistice Lines which — for god’s sake, just look at a map, and just imagine you are in the IDF and trying to plan to defend the population of Israel in this 1949 armistice lines, lines which the Arabs themselves always refused to make permanent.
Hamas, on the other hand, doesn’t want to wait. It wants not to chip away at Israel, not to slowly reduce it to conquerable proportions, but to subject it to military attack right now. It might consider a very temporary hudna or truce, but only so long as everyone is clear, including the Israelis, that it is temporary. And it is amusing to see how indignant Hamas becomes when Israel seems ill-disposed toward such an idea. Mahmoud Abbas himself can’t understand why, given how little is demanded of him by the outside world, and given how eager every Infidel government seems to be to ignore his real nature and the real goals of Fatah and of all the “Palestinians,” Hamas remains so stubbornly, shoot-yourself-in-the-foot pur et dur. But there it is.
In other words, the differences are only differences in means, not ends: in timing and in tactics. Why this should not be understood in the West, why assorted blairs and rices cannot or will not understood, is testimony to something. Fear of realizing the truth, for what it might mean. Embarrassment on the part of those who have spent their entire professional lives participating in, and pontificating about, “negotiations” and a “peace process” which they solemnly parse every few weeks — all those dennis-rosses, and martin-indyks, and richard-hasses, and aaron-millers, who if they had actually noticed the gorilla of Islam in the room and grasped its significance, would have realized how foolish and time-wasting and false-hope-raising, and doomed-to-fail, were not merely this or that portentous airplaning back and forth, but the whole dismal thing. Do you think Bill Clinton, who entertained Yassir Arafat more than he did any other foreign “leader,” will ever grasp Islam, and therefore grasp what a waste it all was, how pointless, how stupid?
When I write “pointless” and “stupid,” I mean, of course, “pointless” and “stupid” for those who wish Israel well, wish Israel to survive. I do not mean….the others. Those others harbor hostility toward Israel that is often connected not merely to ignorance or laziness, but to a deeper much more unpleasant mental pathology. The business of antisemitism and vicious anti-Israel activities gives rise, nowadays, to a version of the chicken-and-egg problem. Just as we used to say as children “which came first, the chicken or the egg?” a new version might be “which came first, antisemitism or anti-Israel sentiment based on ignorance” — for those two mutually reinforce, and prompt, one another.
If the goal is “peace” between Arabs and Israel, there is only one way to ensure that peace. It is not to give the Slow Jihadists what they want. It is not to call a “solution” that which will only further imperil Israel, and whet, not sate, Arab and Muslim appetites. It is to ensure that Israel is not only relieved of the constant pressuring by uncomprehending and cruel outsiders, who do not face the peril that Israel has and will always face, but is regarded by those who would destroy it as so obviously superior in military might that they will give up hope of destroying it and simply learn to live with their resentment, as they did, more or less, between 1948 and 1967.
Only this time Israel will have something like defensible borders, the borders which it was meant all along to include, and didn’t include in 1948 simply because Ben Gurion called a halt to the war. After all, the land that Israel currently possesses or controls is far less than the amount of land originally set aside for the Mandate for Palestine, a mandate whose express provisions show that it was created for the exclusive purpose of establishing the Jewish National Home. Israel, at the moment, save for Gaza, possesses Western Palestine, for the British decided that the provisions of the Mandate about the mandatory’s duty to “facilitate Jewish immigration” and “close Jewish settlement on the land” would not apply to the land east of the Jordan, which became, for realpolitik purposes, the Emirate of Transjordan. But that should be it. Israel gave, and gave, and gave. The giving has to stop.
And the largest and only sure keeper of the peace between Arabs and Israel is the IDF. Not the UN, not Javier Solana’s would-be EU ‘peacekeepers.” Only the IDF. The civilised world — that is, the civilized themselves — must support not “negotiations” and “peace processes” between Israel (or any Infidel state) and Muslim states or groups. For these will only lead to tangible concessions on the part of the Infidels, and no concessions, only temporary and false “truces,” on the part of those who, as Majid Khadduri and many others have pointed out, make “treaties” with Infidels only on the model of Al-Hudaibiyya. Treaties, that is, in the Muslim view are not subject to the Western idea, so natural that we assume it always existed, of Pacta sunt servanda. No, in Islam treaties are not to be obeyed. That is the rule: treaties, by the Muslim side, are not to be obeyed, but rather, breached at the first opportunity.
Darura.
Memorize that word. Understand its significance. And if you are a would-be diplomat going off to the Middle East, don’t you dare leave home without it.