The Religious War: Insidious to the Ignorant

As Netanyahu returned to Washington and met again with Barack Obama on Tuesday, it’s important to recall what neither man would mention: the specific reason for the war between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs. It’s a religious war, just as the impending world war is also a religious war. The “Arab-Israeli” conflict over this or that piece of land is an Islamic narrative: taqiyya (religiously-sanctioned deception), to inflame the world and incite hatred against the Jews.

In fact, the conflict is not an Arab-Israeli anything. If it were, Muslim countries like Iran and Indonesia wouldn’t be so enflamed against Israel. It is Islam’s 1,400-year-old and continuing war against the Jews. That is the objective reality. The Koran calls the Jews the Muslims’ worst enemies (5:82), and says they’re accursed of Allah (9:30), who transformed them into apes and pigs (5:59-60). You don’t make peace with the people your god has told you are your worst enemies forever.

And secondarily, the Arab-Israeli conflict is the front line of Islam’s larger war against all unbelievers. As the world’s leading scholar on Islamic anti-Semitism, Bat Ye’or, said in an interview with me: “the Palestinian war was not only against Israel. The Palestinians, you have to see them as a tool or as an instrument of the Arab world to destroy Israel, and also as a channel to penetrate into Europe and Islamize Europe. It is exactly what they have done.”

One man who has noticed this, and is standing up against it, is the former Prime Minister of Spain, José María Aznar, who recently wrote this in the Times of London:

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.

Aznar’s words are powerful, but I am sorry they had to be said at all. 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 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. 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.

Game over. In all the years since then, we still haven’t seen Muslims take decisive action against terrorists in their ranks. Bush squandered a huge opportunity to speak honestly about what we’re facing. The result was unchecked infiltration of our government and intelligence agencies by supposedly “moderate” Muslims.

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. 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 stand up for Israel, America, and Western values.

We must be as passionate in fighting the forces of evil as they are in destroying the good. But Obama and Netanyahu won’t be discussing the conflict in those terms. And that means that whatever deal they make is doomed to fail, as have all others before. The jihad doesn’t compromise. The jihad doesn’t make deals.