Rael Jean Isaac

Halkin on the Golan

Has Hillel Halkin finally found an Israeli retreat he did not like? On superficial reading, his column in the New York Sun of May 27 makes it appear so. He starts by saying “I can’t remember how many columns I have written in The New York Sun and other places, against the idea of returning the entire Golan Heights to Syria in exchange for a largely worthless peace treaty.” (The reference to many columns suggests Halkin has become sensitive to the charge—richly deserved—that he is a champion of the flip-flop.) Yet the key to the next flip-flop is right there in the phrase “the entire Golan Heights.” And it is reinforced near the end of the article where Halkin says that the Olmert government policy will mean “keeping the Golan or hoping eventually to settle with the Syrians for part of it, will be made that much more difficult.”

So Halkin leaves a door open wide enough for a camel to walk through for what will surely (if past is prologue) be his next position—that if Israel gets a statement saying this or that from the United States, then giving up the Golan (and you can bet the farm Syria won’t be content with part of it) is a wonderful move in the interest of Israel’s security and international standing. And yes, once the Golan is gone (shades of Halkin’s Gaza somersaults), we can expect more columns on what a bad idea it was after all. We repeat again, how can it be that this baffled and baffling pundit is the best both the New York Sun and Commentary can offer?

Christians in Iraq

As Robin Harris notes in National Review Online, the surge is working “but at the same time the Iraqi Christian community is dying…In former times, the violent persecution of Christians in a country effectively under the rule of a Western, Christian power would have been unthinkable. But not, it seems, in the enlightened 21st century.”

It is even worse than what Harris describes. In the enlightened 21st century, the Christian community of Iraq has been forced to finance its own destruction. For years Mosul Archbishop Paulos Faraj Raho (as reported in The New York Times of June 26) was forced to pay protection money (gathered from alms at Sunday mass and from funds donated by Christians abroad to help Iraqi fellow Christians) to the terrorist insurgency. When security improved in 2007 he stopped paying. But security had not improved enough —the Archbishop was kidnapped and his body found in a shallow grave outside Mosul.

The Archbishop’s payments were only the tip of the iceberg. The Times reports that Christian households in Mosul, the seat of Iraqi Christianity, were forced to pay hundreds of dollars a month for each male member of the household (the insurgents brazenly called this protection money jizya, the name for the tax on Christians and Jews under Islamic law). The terrorists collected further funds from Christians by kidnapping priests and forcing congregations to pay ransoms as high as $150,000. Author Rosie Malek-Yonan, at a Congressional hearing in 2006, accused the U.S. army of failing to protect Christians out of concern that special attention to their plight would play into the hands of insurgent propagandists.

U.S. catering to Moslem “sensitivities” has turned craven. A U.S. marine in Fallujah handed out what The Washington Post described as “only a few coins” inscribed in Arabic with two lines from the New Testament. As Diana West points out, it is the army’s reaction that is shocking. The Army suspended the Marine and the U.S. military spokesman in the area declared “This incident doesn’t represent the morals of the Marines.” Writes West: “Freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, freedom of religion doesn’t represent the morals of the Marines?”

The numbers tell the story. The Christian population is half what it was when the U.S. forces took over Iraq and of the remaining 400,000, 100,000 have been internally displaced. Soon the Christian community of Iraq may become like the once proud Jewish community of Iraq – a tiny remnant.

Loony Livni

Tzipi Livni is emerging as contender for the role of Israel’s chief fool. For could even Simple Shimon top this? “The demand of the Palestinians for a home of their own is the very thing which causes our demand for a Jewish homeland to be legitimate.” (quoted in The Jerusalem Post, June 23)

Three thousand five hundred years of Jewish history don’t exist for Livni. As Shmuel Katz wrote in Battleground: “The Jews were never a people without a homeland. Having been robbed of their land, Jews never ceased to give expression to their anguish at their deprivation and to pray for and demand its return. Throughout the nearly two millennia of dispersion, Palestine remained the focus of the national culture. Every single day in all those seventy generations, devout Jews gave voice to their attachment to Zion.”

As for the Arabs of Palestine, they never saw themselves as a nation. The “Palestinians” as we pointed out in a thirty year old pamphlet by that name constitute “a political masquerade,” an “’anti-nation,’ one that derives its entire meaning and purpose from the desire to destroy another nation.” Theirs is a “nationalism which has developed through, lives in, and depends on opposition to Zionism and Israel.”

And it is in fulfilling this perverted nationalism that Tzipi Livni sees the source of Israel’s legitimacy? Heaven help us, this ignoramus is bruited as a possible future Prime Minister.

Blood on Their Hands

When the pattern of wildly imbalanced prisoner “exchanges” began in 1983 (Israel exchanged 4,700 Arabs for six captured Israeli soldiers), Israeli government leaders promised that there would be no release of those “with blood on their hands.” Like most promises of Israeli governments, that fizzled and the most recent “exchange” releases a Lebanese terrorist with the most bloody hands imaginable, Samir Kuntar, who invaded an apartment in Nahariya in 1979.

Here is a description of what happened by the woman who lost her husband and two small children at his hands: “Outside we could hear the men storming about. Desperately, we sought to hide. Danny helped our neighbor climb into a crawl space above our bedroom; I went in behind her with Yael in my arms. Then Danny grabbed Einat and was dashing out the front door to take refuge in an underground shelter when the terrorists came crashing into our flat. They held Danny and Einat while they searched for me and Yael, knowing there were more people in the apartment. I will never forget the joy and the hatred in their voices as they swaggered about hunting for us, firing their guns and throwing grenades. I knew that if Yael cried out, the terrorists would toss a grenade into the crawl space and we would be killed. So I kept my hand over her mouth, hoping she could breathe. As I lay there, I remembered my mother telling me how she had hidden from the Nazis during the Holocaust. ‘This is just like what happened to my mother,’ I thought.

“As police began to arrive, the terrorists took Danny and Einat down to the beach. There, according to eyewitnesses, one of them shot Danny in front of Einat so that his death would be the last sight she would ever see. Then he smashed my little girl’s skull in against a rock with his rifle butt. That terrorist was Samir Kuntar. By the time we were rescued from the crawl space, hours later, Yael, too, was dead. In trying to save all our lives, I had smothered her…”

Now in his early 40s, an unrepentant Kuntar promises to return to murdering Israelis on his release. And for what is the Israeli government releasing Kuntar as well as other terrorists into the jubilant arms of Hezbollah? In the craziest (and most dishonorable) “exchange” yet, it is for the dead bodies of two Israeli soldiers, so the families will have “closure.”

As Steven Plaut points out, Netanyahu and the Likud as well as the National Union party have been silent about this disgraceful “exchange.”

Outpost has frequently pointed out that a state is not a family, and cannot act as a family might, sacrificing everything to bring home a loved one. In this case, even a family should find the price for visiting a tombstone too high.