Ehud Olmert said this week to the people of Gaza: “Don’t let Hamas, which is acting against the values of Islam, put you in danger. Stop them. Stop your enemies and ours.” Olmert did not have to say that Islam explains the endless hostility toward Israel. That would be asking too much, and at this point it would not be an intelligent thing to say. But it would be intelligent to grasp that truth, and to fashion policies based on that truth. He could, and should, in any statement have left Islam out of it. But he did something still worse. Olment mentioned Islam, and claimed, on the basis of no detailed knowledge whatsoever, to exculpate Islam.
In this respect he was not different from some others, such as Bush and Rice, or Blair, who keep thinking that they must say nice things about Islam even if they don’t know what they are talking about, mainly because they know that Islam is a “religion,” even “one of the world’s great religions.” (Why not for the word “great” substitute the more accurate word “major” and for the word “religion” substitute the ungainly but more accurate “belief-system”?)
And if it is “one of the world’s major religions, with more than a billion adherents,” so their thinking goes, it must be okay. Surely what it inculcates must be fine, for “religions” are fine, and they all mean pretty much — don’t they? — the same thing, because, you see, People Are The Same The Whole World Over. Surely Islam cannot be the explanation for the intolerable aggression and violence and hostility and mendaciousness of so many Muslims, of which the main victims are the world’s Infidels, though other Muslims have also been known to suffer.
And Olmert, pathetic, confused, desperate, blind, stupid, Olmert, is…just Olmert. The schlemiel as head of state. Even his corruption was pathetic: those expensive cigars, those occasional trips with stays in fancy hotels. A comical figure, pitiful but not to be pitied. Too many people far better than he died in Lebanon, and perhaps will die in the future, because of Olmert and the likes of Olmert.
Olmert refuses to learn a thing about Islam. It is all around him, all around and within Israel, in the mosques, in the sermons of imams, in the videocassettes and the audiocassettes, on the broadcasts and in the newspapers in Arab lands. But Olmert will not study Islam. He doesn’t have the time. He’s too busy making peace, he’s too busy with the “peace process.” He hasn’t time to study the texts. He will not study the tenets. He will not understand that the war against Israel is a Jihad, a war to remove from the Arab and Muslim midst an Infidel nation-state. He does not understand this. He will not understand it. He does not understand that no tangible assets must be given up by Israel; he does not understand that no agreement by Muslims with Infidels will be kept, not because of the untrustworthiness of this or that leader, but because Islam itself offers the Example of the Perfect Man, Muhammad, al-insan al-kamil, who in his breaching of the treaty he made with the Meccans at Hudaibiyya in 628 A.D. gave his followers an example for treaties for all time.
That’s Olmert.
But Olmert thinks he is the “realist.” People who want to hold onto the “West Bank” are, he thinks, “delusional.”
Study Islam and then decide who here is being “delusional.”
Olmert takes pride in his abandonment of what he regards as the “foolish certainties” of his parents and grandparents. Yet this has led him to confusion, and far greater distancing from realism, from understanding the nature and sources of the Jihad being waged against Israel. He is dangerous to the wellbeing of the state. For though his parents and grandparents may have been innocent of Islam, they at least had a solid sense of the legal, moral, and historic claims of the Jews to the Land of Israel — at the very least, to all of Western Palestine. And, furthermore, they understood, even without having investigated Islam, that for some reason the Arabs would never accept a Jewish state, never accept Jews unless they continued in the role of permanently humiliated, degraded, and insecure dhimmis. And that the Zionist pioneers were certainly unwilling — unable — to do.
Olmert must go. But so must all those who presume to protect and instruct the people of Israel, but who simply cannot figure out, cannot comprehend, what is going on. And will go on.