PrintJune 20, 2010
Why Israel and the U.S. Are in Crisis
Israel is a fundamental part of the West. The West is what it is thanks to its Judeo-Christian roots. If the Jewish element of those roots is upturned and Israel is lost, then we are lost too. Whether we like it or not, our fate is inextricably intertwined.
Former Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar wrote that in the Times of London. It is powerful, magnificent. And I wish him great success with his "Friends of Israel Initiative," but I am deeply disturbed by the direction the narrative is taking -- such that friends of Israel such as Aznar now feel as if they must once again make the case for the legitimacy of Israel.
Why debate "Israel's right to exist" or "Israel's right to defend itself"? Why not debate France's right to exist, or Iran's, or Germany's?
How did it come to this?
There are definite points in history when things are on the cusp of real change. More specifically, there are defining moments when the direction of history can go either way.
When José María Aznar was Prime Minister of Spain, the world was a wholly different place, as recently as 2004. He served at a time when men -- not appeasers, shills, and tools for jihad -- were driving the bus. There was Bush, the inestimable John Howard (Australia), Blair (no great shakes, but light-years ahead of brick-brain Brown) -- and one of the best of the group was Aznar.
Yet this group did not seize the moment. They thought they had time and reason on their side. They did not. They blew it. "The greatest threat to mankind and civilization is the spread of the totalitarian philosophy," Ayn Rand wrote. "Its best ally is not the devotion of its followers but the confusion of its enemies." To fight it, we must understand it.
Yet Bush described Islam as "a religion of peace" in the wake of the Islamic jihadi attack on America. It wasn't that Bush was a shill for jihad; it was just that he was uninformed, and worse, not curious. He had whispering in his ear the stealth jihadist Grover Norquist and his band of Muslim Brotherhood brothers propagandizing the nonsensical meme that it was "just a few fringe extremists" who "hijacked" the religion" -- as well as the planes. Ten years and 15,511 Islamic attacks catastrophically demonstrate what a turning point that window of opportunity really was.
Grover Norquist is a powerhouse with deep pockets. Many Republicans are in his pockets and in his debt. Norquist's ties to Islamic supremacists and jihadists have been known for years. Just six weeks after 9/11, The New Republic ran an exposé explaining how Norquist arranged for George W. Bush to meet with fifteen Islamic supremacists at the White House on September 26, 2001 -- to show how Muslims rejected terrorism.
On the afternoon of September 26, George W. Bush gathered 15 prominent Muslim- and Arab-Americans at the White House. With cameras rolling, the president proclaimed that "the teachings of Islam are teachings of peace and good." It was a critically important moment, a statement to the world that America's Muslim leaders unambiguously reject the terror committed in Islam's name. (Read more here.)
Game over.
A second historic crossroads came in the summer of 2006, when the jihadist terror group Hezb'allah (Party of God) attacked Israel. For the first time in recent history, Israel had the tacit support of the U.S. and two Arab countries to rout the barbaric Islamic jihadist group in Lebanon. Apart from their aim of promised Jewish genocide, Hezb'allah followed in Arafat's bloody footsteps in Lebanon and destroyed what once was a prospering, thriving Christian nation.
In the summer of 2006, they attacked Israel, kidnapped and killed Jewish soldiers (torturing them in ways unimaginable), and went to war.
The U.N. and the international community did nothing and said nothing when the bodies of those kidnapped soldiers were returned two years later:
Rabbi Yisrael Weiss, former Chief Rabbi of the IDF, who was present during the transfer of the fallen soldiers, said that "the verification process yesterday was very slow, because, if we thought the enemy was cruel to the living and the dead, we were surprised, when we opened the caskets, to discover just how cruel. And I'll leave it at that."
Israel should have destroyed them. Instead, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert went to the United Nations, which was then and is now largely controlled by the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), and sought a resolution, the conditions of which have never been met by the soldiers of Allah. This was another historic turning point. Bush and Co. expected Israel to hold up her end in the strategic alliance in the war on the global jihad. The U.S. was in Iraq and Afghanistan doing just that. A defeat of the Iranian proxy Hezb'allah would have been a crushing blow to the mullahcracy in Iran. What a Sun Tzu move.
But Olmert hesitated, and the coalition of the willing suffered a grave loss. It was a TKO in the bout between the two camps duking it out in the Bush White House: the struggle between Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Bolton, etc. vs. Colin Powell, Armitage, Nick Burns, and Steve Hadley, etc. had been finally decided, and things would never be the same again. Individualism lost to collectivism. Reason lost to irrationality. American sovereignty lost to international law.
What followed was inevitable: the relentless anti-American six-year Bush-bashing campaign in the media succeeded. Bush lost Congress, Rumsfeld resigned, Bolton did the same, and Cheney went on mute.
The lights dimmed in the west as Atlas shrugged.
And now we come to this, as Aznar expresses it: "For Western countries to side with those who question Israel's legitimacy, for them to play games in international bodies with Israel's vital security issues, for them to appease those who oppose Western values rather than robustly to stand up in defence of those values, is not only a grave moral mistake, but a strategic error of the first magnitude."
And so we must now robustly stand up in defense of Israel, America, and Western values.
We must be as passionate in fighting the forces of evil as they are in destroying the good.
