Putting the
Muslim Genie Back in the Bottle
with a Clear-Cut Victory
Moshe Sharon
When, in July 2006, the Hizbullah showered
Israel with missiles for 33 days from Lebanon, targeting civilians and
civilian installations, the government of Israel did not declare war,
and announced that it would not conquer the enemy’s territory and it
prevented the IDF from retaliating by attacking civilian settlements,
even when the Hizbullah enemy used Lebanese civilians as human
shields, and turned schools, mosques and hospitals into missile
launching sites. Moreover, the government did not understand the
importance for Israel to achieve a clear-cut, unquestionable, major
victory in this war. It failed to perceive the unusual harm to Israel,
in the long run, if the Hizbullah could claim victory, as indeed it
actually did. The enemies of Israel, which comprise all the Arab
countries in the Middle East (including Egypt and Jordan) and beyond
it, and the rest of the Islamic world, are now convinced that Israel
is a temporary entity that can be defeated and destroyed, and its
Jewish population can be exterminated. The Western world, particularly
the United States, and Israel itself, have not yet come to grips with
the gravity of the global conflict, and keep on deceiving themselves
with seasonal “peace initiatives”. The Saudi-influenced American State
Department, backed by a deluded, uninformed and defeatist media, have
convinced themselves and the Israeli government that once the Arabs
sign an agreement they keep it. Meanwhile Israel has to pay for
useless pieces of paper with territory vital for its existence, in
spite of the bad experience of the “Oslo agreements”, which brought
havoc to the streets of Israel.
All the Arab countries, led by the Arab League,
Saudi Arabia and Egypt, concurrently while supporting and arming
terrorists that are fighting Israel, are also active in digging
Israel’s grave on the diplomatic front by publicizing “peace plans.”
It is high time to announce clearly that all these plans are part and
parcel of the Arab war against Israel. This, and nothing else, is the
aim of the clauses in these peace initiatives, which demand the
withdrawal of Israel to the pre-1967 armistice lines, and the “return
of the Arab refugees”.
The “peace” treaty between Israel and Egypt is
usually quoted as a successful agreement. There is no real peace
between Israel and Egypt. Egypt treats Israel as a dhimmi
state, subordinate to the Egyptians’ whims and compelled to accept the
Egyptian self-declared superiority. At the same time, Israel obliges
itself to ignore all the Egyptian violations of the treaty: The
horrific anti-Semitic publications in the Egyptian state-controlled
and state-directed media, and the intensive Egyptian anti Israeli
activity in all the international forums.
Meanwhile Egypt is preparing for war, preparing
a huge and modernized army. Is it not clear that Israel, its people,
its territory and its army, are the targets of these extensive,
intensive, and expensive Egyptian preparations?
Now, after Annapolis, in late November 2007, it
is clear that Israel succumbed to the Arab-Saudi ultimatum: Either
Israel accepts the Arab “peace” plan, which means putting it on the
straight route to disappearance within a few years or “bear the
consequences”. The Americans are elated: The Arabs are “talking
peace.” The President of the United States of America was so excited
that he decided to convene that “peace conference” where Israel was
the defendant facing its accusers: The Arab League, the Egyptians, the
Jordanians, the American Secretary of State, following the traditional
pro-Arab policies of the State Department, and the European Union to
top it all.
Islam
knows only one kind of relationship with the non-Moslems: War and
triumph. Negotiations with the infidel are sometimes needed; they are
a method to win time. Time is exactly what the Hamas and the other
dozen Palestinian terrorist groups need: They need time to arm
themselves with more deadly missiles for more effective attacks on
Israeli citizens. The same can be said about the Palestinians and
their Arab brethren who wish to turn Israel into a coastal strip, a
piece of indefensible land. If Israel and the West wish to live as
independent “non-believers” the victory and triumph which represent
the Islamic religious-political agenda can only be met with the same
weapon: Victory and triumph.
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Fundamentalist Islam – Violence and Terrorism
Raphael Israeli
In the last decade, Muslim fundamentalists have
authored the lion’s share of the most horrific acts of terror
throughout the world, including the attack on September 11 and those
in Bali, Ankara, Chechnya and other parts of Russia. To comprehend
what makes them tick, one must first acknowledge the fallacy inherent
in the artificial differentiation drawn between Islam, the supposed
“religion of peace”, and the fundamentalist “bad guys” who are blamed
for the horrors of terror, which ignores the overwhelming support that
they get from the Muslim mainstream.
Then, the key question of leadership has to be
invoked; as without it the tremendous appeal and success of the
anti-establishment fundamentalist Muslims cannot be explained. And
finally, the Muslim ideology that guides them, which is no different
from mainstream Islam, sheds light on how these terrorist movements
transcend ideology and enter the domain of violence and mass terror.
These developments, far from remaining within the boundaries of the
Islamic world, have penetrated the West and have engendered virulent
manifestations of anti-Semitism.
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How Will Iran Retaliate
to a Strike
on Its Nuclear Facilities?
Dany Shoham
During the recent decade, Iran became a major
sub-nuclear regional power, militarily and otherwise, persistently
aiming and considerably progressing towards shaping into a nuclear
one. Such a shift appears to be undesirable, in various senses, hence
a variety of countermeasures - including a strike on Iran’s nuclear
facilities - are being conducted and considered. Iran’s military
competence and readiness to react in response to such strike, namely
to launch a second strike are factors of paramount importance.
Particularly, that they seem to form an intriguing strategic equation,
one wing of which embodies the first-strike option serving to deprive
nuclear capability to Iran, while the other wing poses the adequacy -
or inadequacy - of Iran’s increasing non-nuclear WMD arsenal to deter
or hamper the implementation of that option. This demanding, scarcely
dealt with equation constitutes the essential axis of the present
analysis. It is thereby observed that Iran is currently in possession
of instant, full-scale chemical-biological-radiological-based
retaliatory abilities, which may foreseeably and effectively be
realized, unless severely curtailed.
The implications of this study pertain,
foremost, to Israel and the USA, and may be considered to be supreme
ones. The strategic vulnerability of Israel to non-nuclear WMD has
thoroughly been presented, in spite of the various, highly
contributive protective and defensive measures fostered and upgraded
by her. The threat to the USA is obviously restricted in comparison,
generally, yet its potential magnitude is still considerable.
Therefore, taking into account the sever menaces thereby posed to
Israel and the USA, together with the actual feasibility of an Iranian
CBR-based second strike, as pointed out in this paper, a preemptive
attack should indeed be conducted, in effect, aiming to incapacitate
the Iranian CBR potency, right prior to or in conjunction with the
destruction of nuclear facilities. This would mean, in practical
terms, hitting the Iranian storage and deployment facilities of CBR
warfare agents, munitions, warheads, and/or delivery systems. Treating
the threat of Iranian-induced CBR terrorism acts is another, highly
significant dimension, and not a less complicated one, in its way.
Not in
vain, connectedly, said Alexis Debat, director of terrorism and
national security at the Nixon Center, that the Pentagon had drawn up
plans for massive airstrikes against 1,200 targets in Iran, designed
to annihilate the Iranians’ military capability in three days.
“They’re about taking out the entire Iranian military,” he noted. “The
US military had concluded that whether you go for pinprick strikes or
all-out military action, the reaction from the Iranians will be the
same.” It was, he added, a “very legitimate strategic calculus”.
Although seemingly an extremely drastic, outstandingly complex
military operation, it has its own sound rationale; one inherent
component of which is, in all likelihood, the desirable elimination of
Iran’s CBR retaliatory capabilities before they materialize.
Inversely, that factor would cause the Iranians to carry out CBR-based
retaliatory moves as early as possible, and consume their CBR arsenal
as fast as possible, before injured. Naturally, this tentative
interplay is most challenging for the attacker and for the responder.
And the responder – the IRGC, actually – is quite able; it should be
handled very meticulously.
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Our
Inner Scourge:
The Catastrophe of Israel Academics
Shlomo Sharan
The opinions and claims of Israel academics
against Jews, Zionism and Israel are discussed and analyzed in this
study. It is estimated that some 20 to 25% of people who teach the
Humanities and Social Sciences in Israel’s universities and colleges
have expressed extreme anti-Zionist positions, largely, though not
exclusively, in regard to Israel’s policies and actions vis-à-vis the
Arab Palestinians. In addition to their expression of anti-Zionist,
and often outright anti-Semitic attitudes, they have engaged in public
demonstrations, prepared and signed petitions addressed to soldiers in
the IDF to disobey their commanders’ orders and not serve in Judea and
Samaria, and have been active in encouraging academic organizations
abroad (particularly in England) to boycott Israel universities and
academics. These academic personnel travel abroad and consistently
denounce Israel for a series of crimes against Arabs that are as
fictitious as are the claims made by the Arabs themselves. In fact,
the anti-Zionist academics have adopted the Arab view of Israel’s
history and of Arab accusations against Israel without regard for
their relation to reality. In particular, is the distressing use of
the analogy between Israel policy and practices of the Nazi regime in
WWII. A distinct percentage of the far-Left anti-Zionist outcries
espoused the extreme position that Israel should be either a
bi-national state or should be replaced in its entirety by an
Arab-Palestinian nation, precisely in the terms advocated by Hamas and
the PLO. In short, Jewish academic personnel who teach Israeli
students in our institutions of higher learning advocate that Israel
be dismantled as a Jewish state; the ingathering of the exiles should
be discontinued, and Israel should cease persecuting the Palestinians
by killing homicide bombers who infiltrate Israel or retaliate against
the firing of rockets at towns like Sderot. In short, we should
surrender to the Arabs for the sake of peace. Is this phenomenon
sanctioned under the guise of academic freedom, or is it actually
sanctioned by the incumbent powers that be who want peace now at all
costs, including the destruction of the third commonwealth?
Not a
few of the anti-Zionist academics were lifetime communists and adhere
to a Marxist ideology that opposes separate nationalism beyond the
international brotherhood of the proletariat. To dismantle Israel is a
first step in this direction, despite the fact that other nations
oddly enough refuse to follow suit.
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Otto Weininger Remains
Current
Not Only in Vienna Cafes
Yosef Barnea
Otto Weininger (1880-1903), the Jewish
philosopher, who became an apostate on the day that he received his
doctorate, remains an interesting research subject, as one can deduce
from the pamphlet edited by Yaakov Golomb: “Nietzsche in the Vienna
Cafes” (Rasling Publishers, 2006), based on an international symposium
that took place in Vienna in June 2002. Kurt Rudolf Fisher, of the
University of Vienna, notes in his article, “Experiences with
Nietzsche and Weininger”, that from his perspective, the discussion of
anti-Semitism is not merely theoretical, and after citing his personal
background, he focuses on Nietzsche’s influence on Weininger, who
considered him (Nietzsche) a philo-Semite and then Fisher goes back to
deal with his personal historical experience regarding the gap between
Weininger’s idealism, from the turn of the century, and the harsh
reality that developed more than a generation after his suicide. He
thereby contributes a critique of the mistaken perception that draws a
straight line between Weininger’s philosophy and Hitler’s thinking.
It is regarding that point that Alan Jelenik
disagrees with him, contending that it is not true that Hitler
worshipped Weininger in any significant manner, and if influence on
Hitler can be attributed to any author, it would seem to be Henry
Ford, whose book, “The International Jews”, was published in 34
editions before 1934! Jelenik devotes a significant chapter in his
article “Kant’s ‘Eunice’ Principle, or How Friedrich Nietzsche
Influenced Weininger”, to the ethics of man and woman. In his opinion,
Weininger was assisted by Ibsen in placing a mirror before the regnant
narcissistic society in contending that “only when a third gender that
is neither man nor woman will emerge from man, will humanity be
saved”. The central idea posited by Jelenik in his article is the
following contention: “The central contention raised in Sex and
Character (Weininger’s book – Y.B.) is that sex is morally
unjustified even in the context of marriage as it always involves
treating the personality within me or within the other as a means to
pleasure and not as an end in and of itself”
Alan
Jelenik .makes a substantial contribution to understanding the
dialectical relationship between Kant and Nietzsche thanks to
Weininger, as Weininger is willing to accept the Nietzschean (love of
fate) in the least likely place to find it – at the heart of Kantian
ethics. According to Weininger, the human position that should be
accepted is not burning passion, but rather its opposite – sexual
restraint. According to Jelenik, Weininger’s perception that sides
with logic and values with no alternative viable, was influenced by
the contemporary liberal movements that advocated social reforms in
the form of abstention (from drinking and patronizing prostitutes and
the like).
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The
Strategy of Defeat
Mark Silverberg
Based upon Israel’s geo-political situation, it
is only a matter of time before Israel will be forced to confront the
Islamic threat posed by Hamas, Fatah, Hizbullah, Syria and, by
extension, Iran. As that moment approaches, it is critical that the
Israeli military war doctrine be reevaluated with a view to redefining
the concept of “victory”. As military historian Victor Davis Hanson of
Stanford’s Hoover Institute wrote recently of the American experience
in Iraq:
Sixteen years ago (1991) on the cessation of
hostilities (after the first Gulf War), Saddam Hussein’s supposedly
“defeated” army used its gun ships to butcher Kurds and Shiites while
Americans looked on. And because we never achieved the war’s proper
aim – ensuring that Iraq would never again use its petro-wealth to
destroy the peace of the region – we have had to fight a second war of
no-fly zones, and then a third war to remove Saddam, and now a fourth
war of counterinsurgency to protect the fledgling Iraqi democracy.
...and the war still rages on.
An analysis of American military war doctrine
over the past century and a half suggests that in existential
conflicts “total (or general) war” (examples of which include the
American Civil War and World War II) as opposed to a “limited,
defensive war” (symbolized by Korea, Vietnam and the current conflict
in Iraq) is the only means by which absolute and total victory can be
achieved. Based on the American Civil War and the World War II
experience, “absolute victory” has come to mean vanquishing the enemy
– not merely defeating its army and effecting regime change, but
forcing its acceptance that the vision that led to its aggression and
the system that sustained it were at an end.
This
paper argues convincingly that Israel must restore its “aura of
invincibility” lost in the Second Lebanon War if there is to be any
semblance of hope for a better future. That will only be achieved when
Israel’s enemies come to realize that they have truly been defeated,
that they cannot continue the system that led to the war, and that
their dream of conquest is dead.
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The
Storks are Landing
Daniel Johnson
(The complete article can be read on the site of
The American Spectator:
http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=11624)
Europe is the birthplace of Western civilization
and until the 20th century, defended
the values of that civilization against all threats at home and abroad
on its own, courageously battled and succeeded to preserve its unique
character. In the 20th century, Europe needed the United
States in order to save Western civilization from the Nazi and
communist threats. The US took upon itself the role of warrior on
behalf of the values of freedom, humanism and democracy; sacrificed
the lives of its soldiers on European soil during two bloody World
Wars and in the Cold War that continued until the collapse of the
Soviet Union. The United States bears the burden of defending Europe
even today. Thus, Europe owes a debt of honor to America.
When America again went to war (in Afghanistan,
Iraq and perhaps, in the future, in Iran) against the new threat posed
by radical Islam against the Western world and its values in the early
21st centuries, one would have anticipated that Europe
would stand alongside America without hesitation. However, Europe not
only ignores repaying its debt, but also renounces its historic
heritage, displays weakness and appeasement vis-à-vis radical
Islam, which openly threatens to conquer it (and has even initiated
that process), and publicly voices reservations regarding America’s
willingness to combat international Islamic terrorism and the Islamic
countries that provide it with support and shelter.
In light
of the very real danger facing Western civilization in general and
Europe in particular, we call upon Europe’s leaders to come to their
senses and stand shoulder to shoulder with the United States in the
war that will bring salvation to the Western world from an
unprecedented dark era.
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