GAZA, Aug. 21 (Xinhua) — Prime minister of the deposed Palestinian unity government Ismail Haneya said on Thursday that liberating Jerusalem and the holy al-Aqsa Mosque can only be achieved through Jihad (Holy War), instead of “absurd peace talks.” — from this news article
Such shining forthrightness should not be allowed to obscure the obverse of the medal: Hamas stands for Fast Jihad, but Fatah stands for Slow Jihad. They differ only on matters of tactics and timing. The terminally ill Olmert regime, like a patient suffering Alzheimer’s who is persuaded on his deathbed to sign a document leaving everything to a distant and indifferent and least worthy relative, is determined, it appears, to sign away to Mahmoud Abbas what it has no right to sign away — for the Olmert regime lacks legitimacy. And it not only has no right to do so, it also exhibits no sense in attempting to do so, for it has failed to recognize the new understanding that is dawning among Infidels.
This understanding is not being brought about by any great improvement in Israel’s efforts at explaining itself, nor by any great improvement in the largely atrocious and biased coverage of Israel’s attempts to defend itself, but rather by the behavior of Muslims toward Infidels around the world. Each bomb attack on a bus in London, each slitting of the throats of Christian schoolgirls in Indonesia, each murder or threat of murder in Amsterdam or Denmark, each example of Muslim outrage in turn forces people, nolens-volens, to realize how absurd is the presentation of Islam as merely a “religion,” and to listen more keenly to the articulate defectors from Islam, such as Wafa Sultan and Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Ali Sina and Ibn Warraq, and to those who, having grown up within the Muslim world as non-Muslims, have also managed to survive, get to the West, and to testify.
All of this, and even the greater heed paid to the texts (and thus the tenets) of Islam, has changed the situation for Israel, and will continue to do so. For much more of the outside world is willing to listen, and is beginning to comprehend, that what the Arabs have done since the Six-Day War is absurd. They have carefully created out of the Gazan Arabs and the “West Bank” Arabs a totally fictitious “Palestinian people” (with lots of clever backdating), in order to misrepresent the Jihad against Israel by repackaging it as a “war for the legitimate rights of the ‘Palestinian’ people.” They keep using phrases that juridically are simply false, such as that deadly word “occupied.” Israel is the intended beneficiary of, and sole successor state to, the Mandate for Palestine. Thus it has a prior and convincing claim, should it choose to exercise it, to both Gaza and what the Jordanians renamed as “the West Bank,” in addition to its claim to territory taken in a war of self-defense. It is absurd — but so many things about the coverage of the Arab Muslim war on Israel are absurd. It is absurd to keep talking about part of the territory allocated by the League of Nations as “occupied” by Israel, when the League was attempting to do justice after the breakdown of the Ottoman Empire to others among the many peoples of the Middle East, not just to the dominant and dominating Arabs. It would be far more accurate to describe those portions of Judea and Samaria (as they have been known since before the time of Jesus, who had no trouble with those toponyms either) that comprise the soi-disant “West Bank” as “Arab-occupied parts of Judea and Samaria.” How strange it sounds. But get it repeated ten thousand times, and it will not sound strange at all.
Those Muslim acts of aggression against non-Muslims, and acts of aggression of every kind — for are not Muslim demands for changes in the very institutions, legal and political and social, of the Infidel nation-states that have so generously and heedlessly allowed Muslims to settle deep within, not acts of aggression of the most disturbing and threatening kind? — serve to push more and more Infidels into a state of receptivity to the truth. And in the case of Israel the truth is this: a Jihad is and has always been waged against it, and there is no “solution” to this Jihad based on further Israeli surrenders of tangible assets and of Jewish claims that Israeli governments have muted, or refused to articulate at all. Those claims are based on appeals to law, history, and to a sense of distributive justice or fairness: the Arabs have 22 states, with 14 million square miles of land, and untold natural resources and riches as a result; Israel is less than 1/1,000th the size).
But the Olmert government consists of stolid, unimaginative, Yesterday’s Men. They do not sense what is in the air. They have no idea how to capitalize upon it. They should go, quickly, and any piece of paper that that government is tempted to sign with the Slow Jihaidsts of Fatah should be snatched from their grasp, whatever it takes.
And the long-suffering Israeli public should demand a government not of recycled politicians who still cannot grasp the central relevance of Islam, much less discuss it either openly, or even with Western leaders in camera. Israel needs statesmen who will explain why the whole farce of peace-processing and negotiations and treaties made-to-be-breached by the Muslim side, following the example of Muhammad with the Meccans at Hudaibiyya, is over, and the age of Deterrence, of forcing the Arabs not to attack by invoking the doctrine of Necessity, or Darura, is the only way to keep the peace — and from here on out, that is the way it is going to be.