PrintJanuary 25, 2010
Compare and contrast; Israel response to Haiti earthquake and the terrorists
While the world - led by the United States and Israel - rushes to the aid of the devastated nation of Haiti, Osama Bin Laden has chosen to take credit for the failed Christmas Day attack in the US and has vowed future attacks on the US and Israel:
On Sunday's tape, bin Laden cited Washington's support for Israel as a motivator for more attacks on the United States, and vowed to keep on as long as Palestinians cannot live in peace.
"Our attacks against you will continue as long as U.S. support for Israel continues," he said. "It is not fair that Americans should live in peace as long as our brothers in Gaza live in the worst conditions."
The response of Israel to a disaster in the Western Hemisphere has been nothing short of disproportionate in the best sense of the word. Perhaps the real reason for Bin Laden and radical Islam's consuming hatred of Israel actually has little to do with land ownership or religion at all? Carrol Quigley, former Dean of the Georgetown School of Foreign Service, writing in his landmark 1966 book "Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World In Our Time," had this to say on page 1063-64:
The Israeli were full of self-sacrifice, self-discipline, social solidarity, readiness to work, cooperation, and hopes for the future. Their ideology was largely Western, with a devotion to science, democracy, individual respect, technology, and the future which could match or exceed the best periods of the Western past. All these things made them anathema to the Arabs, whose hysterical hatred was not really aimed at the loss of Palestine as a land but at the presence of the Israeli, whose qualities were a refutation of generations of Arab self-deceptions and pretenses.
So how long will much of the world continue in "self-deceptions and pretenses" in its own appraisal of the Arab-Israeli conflict? As the last two weeks indicate, the evidence is mounting.
