Apocalypse Now?
Herbert Zweibon

From the Editor
Rael Jean Isaac

Danse Macabre
Rael Jean Isaac

The Case For Limiting Muslim Immigration
Joseph Farah

The Gift That Keeps On Giving
Jack Engelhard

The Fighting French
Peter Metzger

Future of US-Europe Relations
Fjordman

How do you solve a problem like Sharia?
Mar Sheppard

The War Within The War
Ruth King

OUTPOST
Editor: Rael Jean Isaac
Editorial Board: Herbert Zweibon, Ruth King

AMERICANS FOR A SAFE ISRAEL
1623 Third Ave. (at 92nd St.) - Suite 205
New York, NY 10128
tel (212) 828-2424 / fax (212) 828-1717
E-mail: afsi @rcn.com web site: http://www.afsi.org

Herbert Zweibon

Israel and the United States lost the first round in the war against Iran as its proxy Hezbollah humbled Israel and strengthened its grip on the weak government of Lebanon.

Now Iran presses ahead to become a nuclear power, toying with irresolute Western powers in a pattern of on-again, off-again negotiations. The very enormity of the stakes turns off Western politicians and opinion-makers alike: the thinking of the mullahs is so foreign to them that they cannot believe in the reality of an apocalyptic danger. Yet Hebrew University Professor of Islamic History Moshe Sharon lays it out succinctly: “What moves the Iranian government and leadership today is first and foremost the wish to bring about the twelfth Imam.” Nuclear weapons, in their view, provide the way to do so, for the twelfth Imam (the Mahdi), says Sharon, “needs a war. He cannot come into the world without an Armageddon. He wants an Armageddon.”

Only the Bush administration and Israel have any sense of urgency. But while Israel recognizes her existential danger, it is hard to imagine the feckless and incompetent Kadima government undertaking the militarily difficult and diplomatically even more hazardous task of taking out Iran’s nuclear facilities.

That leaves the United States. Thus far President Bush has relied on the UN, which is as likely meaningfully to confront Iran as Moveon.Org is to endorse the president’s policies on Iraq. The President has said that turning to the UN is important because the American people must “see the president try to solve problems diplomatically before resorting to military force.” But there are costs. While pursuing a diplomatic track, the Bush administration cannot alienate the existing leadership by engaging in a serious effort to bring down the regime by, for example, giving all-out support to dissidents within Iran.

At the end of the day, a military option may be the only one left. Charles Krauthammer has outlined the high costs of that option – and the even worse costs of submission to a nuclear Iran. An attack on Iran is likely to send oil prices sky-high, possibly inaugurating a world-wide recession; Iran would activate its proxies around the world, most dangerously al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army in Iraq; the diplomatic fall-out would be large, even if much of it hypocritical. Yet the alternative to doing nothing as Krauthammer notes is that “every city in the civilized world will live under the specter of instant annihilation delivered either by missile or by terrorist. This from a country that has an official Death to America Day and has declared since Ayatollah Khomeini’s ascension that Israel must be wiped off the map.” And a jihadist Iran would overnight become the region’s hegemonic power.

The implications of that hegemony are enormous: the weak states of the Persian Gulf will be the first to fall in line. Already Qatar’s Emir Shaikh Hamad Bin Khalifa (supposedly our biggest ally in the region) has run to Lebanon to fawn over Iran’s proxy, Hezbollah. Iran will control the Middle East oil spigot. There is much talk of a Middle Eastern “Shiite crescent” under Iran’s influence. But with Iran a nuclear power, Sunni states like Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan–even Turkey-- will also be forced to look to Teheran.

Recognizing the extent of the danger, the President wants to prevent nuclear bombs from falling into the hands of Iran’s death-glorifying mullahs. Whether he acts will depend in part on how free he is to do so. That makes the coming Congressional elections especially important. A House of Representatives controlled by the Democrats will not only tie the President’s hands on further foreign policy initiatives but is likely to pursue impeachment efforts that at the very least will absorb and deflect the President’s energies from the crucial issue of Iran.

The perils are overwhelming, the prospects bleak.

Rael Jean Isaac

TRADING ISRAEL- FOR NOTHING

In a shocking move, the Bush administration is reported (New York Sun, Sept. 18) to be offering “progress on the Israel-Palestinian front” (aid to the Hamas government, an “international peace conference”) as an inducement for European and Arab countries to hold firm against Iran’s nuclear program and support “the war on terror.” Philip Zelikow, a senior adviser to Secretary of State Rice, explained the “thinking” (if one can use that word for something so addlebrained) behind the policy: “For the Arab moderates and the Europeans, some sense of progress and momentum on the Arab-Israeli dispute is the sine qua non for them to cooperate actively with the United States on the things that we care about.” (This strongly suggests that Israel is not numbered in “the things that we care about.”) If this goes forward, U.S. policy could be summed up as “Feed Israel to the Terrorists to Win the War on Terror.”
It hardly need be said that such a policy would do absolutely nothing to halt Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Its only effect would be further to enhance Iran’s standing in the Islamic world — proving the mere prospect of its bomb shifts U.S. policy on Israel.

SUING KHATAMI

All right, in the end it probably won’t work, but it was nonetheless exhilarating to hear that seven Jewish-Iranian families had spoiled Mohammad Khatami’s evening, serving him with papers as he preened in the midst of CAIR acolytes at a reception in Arlington, Virginia. The suit, filed in federal court under the Alien Torts Act and the Torture Victims Protection Act, contends former Iranian President Khatami is responsible for the kidnapping and torture of their family members between 1994 and 1997, that he instituted a policy of imprisoning them without trial and refused to supply any information about their whereabouts, which are unknown to this day.

THE POPE SPEAKS

On one level the attacks on the Pope’s speech are absurd, yet another violent collective paroxysm by Moslems whenever some slight to their sensibilities, real or, as in this case, far-fetched, ignites the Islamic rabble round the world. (Never mind that these same Moslems insist on the inalienable right of their own religious leaders to describe Jews as “sons of apes and pigs” and Christians as little better.) The offending words were a quotation the Pope used in the preface to the body of a speech he gave to scientists at the University of Regensburg, a disquisition on faith and reason (the latter wholly foreign to much of the Moslem world). It was a quotation from a 14th century Byzantine emperor who had sharp words for Mohammed. The Pope probably selected the quote because he hoped it would take the place of a joke at the beginning of a talk and wake up his audience. He was illustrating the candor of a long-gone ruler, not offering his own assessment of Mohammed or Islam.
But on another level, the speech was indeed a truly fundamental challenge to the Moslem world. For the Pope’s theme was that that faith must be divorced from violence. The Pope argued that anyone who engages in violence ceases to be a believer: anyone who goes along with violence opposes Reason and God who is the source of Reason. What could be a greater indictment of a Moslem world drunk with jihad?

A VOTE OF CONFIDENCE

While the Israeli public debates the merits of its Prime Minister in the wake of his faint-hearted pursuit of the war against Hezbollah, Olmert has won endorsement from none other than Hezbollah chief Nasrallah: “If we have to choose between a foolish Prime Minister and another who is strong and capable, we prefer that the fool remain.”

SHIMON SAYS

Cabinet fixture (now vice premier) Shimon Peres laments (alas, we fear, too soon) that the “one sided realignment plan has disappeared because of what happened in Gaza and what happened in Lebanon.” Says Shimon: “We evacuated Gaza and Lebanon and they continued to fire from there like fools.”

The fool, of course, is Peres who expected a different outcome. Amazingly, in Haaretz, far-left winger Yossi Sarid has written a scathing portrait of Peres as a hot air balloon. Sample: “As the reality of life declines, Peres’ vision rises, and as the vision is more ridiculous and more divorced from the reality, its owner increases in stature as the prophet of the generation.”

BLAIR'S FOLLY

Tony Blair (NY Post, May 27) declared the international community would be “hugely empowered” in the Arab world by creation of a Palestinian state“This is a dispute,” he said, “which casts a shadow over all attempts at reconciliation. Under its cover, global terrorism recruits.”

This shows how little Blair understands the Arab jihadis he claims to oppose. What will be empowered by the triumph of this first stage in the Islamic war against the West are precisely the Islamist zealots. Fired by their milestone victory, global terrorism will win vastly more recruits.

“Behold, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed,” 17th century Swedish minister Axel Oxenstierna declared.

ELLISON TO CONGRESS

With his victory in the Democratic primary, black convert to Islam Keith Ellison is assured of becoming the first Moslem in Congress. He is not a reassuring pioneer. In 1989 and 1990, under the pseudonym Keith Hakim, Ellison called for reparations for blacks and for a new black country made up of Arkansas, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi. At a rally on behalf of defendants on trial for murdering a Minneapolis police officer he declared: “We don’t get no justice, you don’t get no peace.”

Ellison told reporters he was never a member of the Nation of Islam but was “affiliated” with the group (whatever that means) for about 18 months. In fact there is evidence Ellison was involved with the Farrakhan outfit for nearly a decade. In addition Ellison has failed to pay his taxes, had his driver’s license suspended and filed incomplete campaign finance reports. Predictably none of this was uncovered by the mainstream media; but by blogs, notably MinnesotaDemocrats-Exposed.com and the national blog Power Line.

What is especially unsettling is that Ellison was endorsed by American Jewish World, the Jewish paper of Minneapolis. Three Democrats were running in the primary against Ellison. Why did the Jewish newspaper endorse the worst candidate?

RADICAL VERSUS PEACEFUL ISLAM

Professor of Islamic History Moshe Sharon mocks those who differentiate between radical and peaceful Islam. “All of a sudden we see that the greatest interpreters of Islam are politicians in the Western world. They know better than all the speakers in the mosques, all those who deliver terrible sermons against anything that is either Christian or Jewish. These Western politicians know that there is good Islam and bad Islam. They even know how to differentiate between the two, except that none of them know how to read a word of Arabic.”

SUICIDE BY OSLO

Thanks to Boris Shustoff for drawing our attention to an interview of Fatah leader Ziyad Abu Ein on Al-Alam TV on July 4 (translated by the indispensable MEMRI).

“There would have been no resistance in Palestine if not for Oslo….Throughout the occupied territories, we could not move a single pistol from one place to another. If not for Oslo, the weapons we got through Oslo, and if not for the ‘A’ areas of the Palestinian Authority, if not for the training, the camps, the protection provided by Oslo, and if not for the release of thousands of Palestinian prisoners through Oslo – this Palestinian resistance could not have carried out this great Palestinian Intifada, with which we confronted the Israeli occupation.”

Rael Jean Isaac

How do we account for the strange embrace between Israel and the United Nations now in progress? For the Israeli government’s welcoming UN forces on the frontier with Lebanon (many from Moslem countries that do not even recognize Israel)?

Clearly it is not Israel’s experience with the UN that explains why Israel should look upon the world organization as helpful to Israel’s vital interests. Anne Bayefsky (New York Sun, Sep. 12) points out the irony that the UN’s founding charter “took root in the calamity of a genocide that brought civilization to the brink of annihilation” and yet the UN has focused for decades on libeling and vilifying the Jewish state as the chief enemy of mankind. Tellingly, the UN’s Commission on Human Rights has devoted 30% of its resolutions to condemning Israel—with nary a word on the likes of China, Syria or Zimbabwe. It is because the world body is unwilling to condemn the murder of Jews that it has been unable to this day to come up with a definition of terrorism.

As for securing the border with Lebanon, Israel already has experience with the 2,000 man UNIFIL (United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon – note the revealing word “interim” for a force that took up the job 28 years ago). In September 2004 the UN passed Resolution 1559, primarily directed against the Syrian occupation of Lebanon, which also mandated the disarming of Hezbollah. In practice, UNIFIL paid no attention whatever as Hezbollah continued to amass thousands of missiles literally under its nose.

UNIFIL has vacillated between doing nothing and actively supporting Hezbollah. Lori Lowenthal Marcus (Weekly Standard, September 4) notes that in October 2000, when Hezbollah kidnapped three Israeli soldiers just yards from a UNIFIL post and dragged them across the border, the UN contented itself with videotaping the incident -- and then stonewalled Israel’s efforts to obtain this evidence. When it finally acceded, UN officials said the original decision (to deny the existence of the tapes) was based on their peacekeeping mandate requiring “full impartiality and objectivity,” which meant ensuring “that military and other sensitive information remains in their domain and is not passed to parties to a conflict.”

For the UN that means “except when the information aids Hezbollah.” Marcus points out that in the last war the UN’s “peacekeeping forces” openly published real-time intelligence of obvious usefulness to Hezbollah on the location, equipment and force structure of Israeli troops in Lebanon – while offering not a single item of intelligence regarding Hezbollah forces.

Yet Israel’s infatuation with the UN is such that during the war Olmert announced that Israel was fighting to implement Security Council Resolution 1559. As Caroline Glick points out (Jerusalem Post, September 7), this was not only false–Israel was fighting to secure the release of its hostages and to dismantle Hezbollah, not on behalf of the UN-- but in saying this was its aim Israel gave undeserved legitimacy and power to the UN in adjudicating the war, helping to pave the way for Resolution 1701, which vastly upgraded the UN’s position while securing none of Israel’s real goals.

So what accounts for the current “danse macabre” between the UN and the Israeli government? Two things. The first is the desperate need of the Kadima government to make it appear that something positive emerged from the war’s debacle. The UN and the Israeli government cooperate to bamboozle the Israeli public, eager to believe in any “roadmaps” to peace, however empty. And the UN is a willing partner in the dance, including language in Resolution 1701 that permits Israeli leaders to claim they have attained important aims. (Never mind that it should be obvious to anyone save a Shimon Peres– who occupies an alternative universe--that no provisions serving Israel’s interests will actually be implemented). The second reason, more threatening to Israel’s survival, is that many in the Olmert government, like Olmert himself “tired of fighting,” (now that they’ve lost they no longer have to be “tired of winning”) are prepared to “internationalize” the conflict, i.e. to interject UN forces between Israel and its neighbors in the delusory hope this will provide security.

Thus, pointing to the text of Resolution 1701 (which stipulates that the area between Israel’s border and the Litani River be “free of any armed personnel, assets and weapons other than those of the Government of Lebanon and of UNIFIL”) Olmert claims great achievements. In the New York Sun of August 28 Benny Avni reports Olmert boasted to the cabinet that “if someone had said before the war that Lebanon’s army could be deployed on the border and that Mr. Annan could say a multinational force would disarm Hezbollah; and that a weapons embargo would be imposed on Hezbollah – he would have told him he was ‘fantasizing.’”

In fact it is Olmert who is “fantasizing.” Turkey promptly announced that its force in Lebanon would not disarm “the resistance.” France announced that the international naval force designated to patrol Lebanon’s territorial waters would not be authorized to employ force. (Israel lifted its sea blockade anyway, against the recommendation of the IDF command, which saw the blockade as the only way to keep pressure on Lebanon to enforce an arms ban on Hezbollah and to prevent the hostage Israeli soldiers from being transferred to Iran.) Syria announced it would not countenance patrolling of its borders (in other words arms would continue to flow unimpeded to Hezbollah). Kofi Annan declared in Brussels “The disarmament of Hezbollah cannot be done by force. It has to be a political agreement.” Lebanese defense Minister Elias al-Murr declared the Lebanese army would not disarm Hezbollah guerillas. And Hezbollah itself announced that it had no intention of giving up its arms.

Most threatening of all, the UN, and many of the Israeli proponents of territorial retreat, see this as a first step. Italy’s Communist Foreign Minister Massino D’Alema says that if all goes well in Lebanon a “similar positive process could also begin in the Gaza Strip.” Olmert, who at the start of the war openly said it was primarily of importance because Israel’s victory would foster his “convergence” plan was forced to back off after the war. In his inimitable fashion, Shimon Peres said the plan to pull out of parts of the West Bank had “disappeared.”

But it is foolish to think “realignment” is dead. Now that pure unilateral action can no longer be sold to the Israeli public, its proponents see UN forces as the figleaf with which to revive it. Some months of quiet on the Lebanese border (while Hezbollah quietly restocks its arsenal) and there will be Israeli politicians to assure the Israeli public that here is a working formula that should be applied elsewhere. In other words, Resolution 1701 provides the precedent to put UN forces, including those of Moslem countries pledged to eliminate the “Zionist entity,” on the rest of Israel’s borders: Gaza, Judea and Samaria, then perhaps the Golan.

And then? We turn once again to the prophecy made in 1970 by Jochanan Bloch, philosopher and professor in the Department of the History of the Jewish People at Ben Gurion University (AFSI most recently reprinted his essay in the December 2005 Outpost). It is interesting that Bloch’s foreshadowing of disaster came when Israel was at the height of her power, following the Six Day War of 1967, in reaction to what he considered the government’s foolish policy of “territories for peace.”

In “The Trap” Bloch wrote: “The worse our position becomes, the more we will be dependent upon the help of the United States. Yet the more our situation deteriorates, the more the United States will hesitate to come to our assistance, for fear of confrontation with our enemies, and she will demand with greater sternness our retreat, a retreat we have in any case agreed to and signed…What the government does not realize at this point is that we will essentially have to retreat to the borders of 1949. A peace treaty we won’t get; we’ll get guarantees. Here there will be demilitarization; there will sit a UN force; here will be a corridor; there a mixed police force; here shared administration; there an enclave….Our defensive capability will be desperately handicapped in the choking collar of the ‘peace border,’ and the international guard forces…The process of blackmail will begin. If immigration has not yet ceased by itself, they’ll demand that we stop it. And the guaranteeing powers will explain to us that it is evil for us to exist on this outdated Zionist principle that can drag us to war…in two or three years they will say …that the ‘experiment of the Jewish state’ has failed, and that it is necessary to find a reasonable solution for the problem of Israel.”

Bloch believed the proposed “solution” would be liquidation of Israel for “a Palestinian state in which one will ‘guarantee’ the lives of the Jews.” But nine years before Bloch wrote his essay, in 1961, Nahum Goldmann, President of the World Jewish Congress, called for a “solution” in which Israel would be demilitarized and the Arab states themselves (along with the Western and Soviet bloc) would guarantee Israel’s borders. At the time all Israeli political leaders heaped scorn on the maverick Goldmann but today can anyone doubt that sooner or later a political descendant of the Shimon Pereses, Yossi Beilins and Yossi Sarids (if not these gentlemen themselves) will come up with such a ludicrous “solution” – resting Israel’s survival on the “goodwill” of neighboring jihadists?

Given current trends, this is the path down which Israel treads. Only a radical change in Israel’s political, intellectual and moral leadership can prevent such scenarios, unduly gloomy as they may seem now, from becoming reality. What was once self-understood in Israel now requires an intellectual revolution to be recognized once again: The “world community” (a meaningless term in any case) will not save Israel. The EU or even the United States will not save Israel. The Arab states will certainly not safeguard Israel’s citizens. Israel must rely on Israel to ensure Israel’s security.

Joseph Farah

Thousands of Saudi Arabian students are enrolling in U.S. colleges and universities this year in a new educational exchange program brokered by President Bush and Saudi King Abdullah. The program will quintuple the number of Saudi students and "scholars" in America by the end of the academic year.
Muslim immigration into the U.S. is way up, with 96,000 coming from Islamic countries in 2005, more than any other year in the previous two decades.

Untold thousands of illegal aliens entering the USA over the porous Mexican border each year are known as OTMs – "other than Mexicans" – many of whom originate from Muslim countries associated with jihadi terrorism.

It may not seem politically correct to say this. It may not seem like the "multicultural" thing to do. It may seem a bit "intolerant."

But five years after 9-11, maybe somebody needs to say it.

Not only does it make no sense to leave our borders open to illicit and undocumented immigration for national security reasons, it also makes no sense to open our borders legally to massive numbers of foreigners who do not share America's values and its Judeo-Christian heritage.

Let's take this "exchange" program for starters. Silly me. I always thought "exchange" programs involved "exchanges" of some kind. When I was in school, we actually "exchanged" students – sending American students abroad while accepting students from those host countries.

That's not the way the Bush-Abdullah exchange works. This is a one-way exchange. Saudis come here, but no American students are welcomed there – especially no Bible-carrying Christian students or, Allah forbid, kippa-wearing Jewish students.

The only thing being exchanged for the welcoming of these Saudi students and "scholars" are Saudi dollars that find their way into the coffers of the corrupt American academy – no doubt making life in our own universities just a little bit more unpleasant for those Christian and Jewish students who are unwelcome in Dar al-Islam.

Of even more concern to me are the permanent residents – the new wave of Muslim immigration into America. Why? Are we trying to prove something to the world? Are we just trying to demonstrate how open-minded and unbiased we are? Is that what immigration policy is supposed to be about?

I wouldn't mind seeing an increase in immigration from countries dominated by Islam. But the only immigrants we should accept are those who are persecuted for their religious beliefs – that is to say, in most cases, non-Muslims.

The Muslim world is responsible for most of the human rights horrors around the globe. So there is no shortage of people wanting to leave. However, we need to be sure we're not accepting people who will try to turn the U.S. into part of the Caliphate.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly in the near term, is the concern about inviting the enemy inside our gates. We heard it over and over a few days ago as we solemnly commemorated the five-year anniversary of the worst terrorist attack perpetrated anywhere in the world – "we are at war." We remain at war. Shouldn't our government act like it?

During World War II, did America open our country up to immigration from Germany, Italy and Japan? No. Because we didn't just acknowledge we were at war; we actually acted like it and did our best to protect America from attack and subversion.

Why do we continue absurd policies of treating every American traveling domestically like a terrorism suspect while we invite into our country with little scrutiny those who fit the profile of terrorism suspects? While we hunt down terrorists around the globe, why do we offer the enemy an opportunity to build a fifth column inside our country?

As a Christian American, I am deeply concerned about these policies. But I would be even more outraged if I were a member of the relatively small American Jewish community of about six million.

With the high birth rate of the Muslim American community, coupled with the explosion in immigration, it won't be long before Muslim Americans represent a bigger voting bloc than America's Jews. And given that more Jews live in the U.S. than any other country, including Israel, that is saying something.

Joseph Farah is editor of WorldNetDaily.com in which this article appeared on September 14.

Jack Engelhard

Some time ago, speaking at a university in New Jersey, I asked an Egyptian if he'd be willing to give up land for peace.

"Never!" he said. "Land is holy." I put the same question to an Israeli and, though he did not say land is holy, he also said, "Never."

But he was kind enough to offer up even Jerusalem "under the right circumstances." He continued: "We must keep Jerusalem as a bargaining chip."

There it is. To the Arab, land is holy. To the Israeli, land is a bargaining chip.

Is it any wonder that Israel did so badly in this war with Hezbollah? How can you fight, how can you win, when you're fighting for bargaining chips?

I'm reading where an Israeli named Otniel Shneller told The New York Sun that -- as a member of Ehud Olmert's cabinet — he is no longer willing to gift-wrap Judea and Samaria for the Palestinian Arabs "until the government can guarantee long-term safety in the north." Shneller is described as a settler, a religious Jew, and also as one of the architects of "Convergence," which to the rest of us means, "Hey, invite a terrorist into your home."

Shneller is now against "Convergence". Absolutely. Well, not quite.

"We have to wait," he says. Wait for what? "We need to be sure first that Hezbollah will never fire a rocket against our citizens again."

As for me, I am still playing the lottery and waiting to win the million-dollar jackpot.

Anyway, strong words from this man Shneller, until we realize that, to this Israeli (most Israelis?) Judea and Samaria is not land, not holy, but bargaining chips.

As Shneller is prepared to give away the West Bank (when the chicken crosses the road), Avi Dichter is in a hurry to give away the Golan. (Is this something in our genes?) Dichter is a high-ranking member of Kadima — the ruling party that sent out soldiers to fight a war sometimes without food and sometimes even without guns, but never mind such small details.

Dichter is minister of internal security and this is what he says: "Israel can withdraw from the Golan for true peace with Syria."

Yes, the Golan Heights -- another bargaining chip. ("Peace" and "Syria" -- isn't there an oxymoron some place in this mix?)

We all remember Prime Minister Olmert himself saying that winning the war against Hezbollah will make it easier for Israel to forfeit Judea and Samaria. Please don't ask me to explain why a prime minister would speak of capitulation in the middle of a war -- which Israel did not win anyway.

Why not? Why did Israel not win this war, and why (God forbid) is Israel at risk of losing future wars?

Because it is not fighting for land, it is not fighting for holiness; it is fighting for bargaining chips.

Jack Engelhard's latest novel The Bathsheba Deadline is being serialized by Amazon.com.

Peter Metzger

We all know that the French hardly fought the Germans at all, and what fighting they did was without resolve. What is generally not known is that the French "resistance" was nothing at all until the end of the war, Hollywood movies notwithstanding. But the main thing people don't know about the French is how eagerly they killed their own defenseless citizens.

The German occupiers ordered the French of Paris to give up some of their Jews for transport to the death camps in the East. But as long as some French Jews were to be rounded up, a four-times Prime Minister of France reasoned, why not round them all up? So this led to what became an enthusiastic movement in France to round up all their Jews, and it was this that shocked even the Nazis. While the German order only wanted the men and older boys rounded up, the Paris cops rounded up Jews of all ages and conditions, to a degree that repelled even the Nazis.

You see, the German occupier of Paris was the Wehrmacht and not the SS. Accordingly, those Germans were not such a bad lot, as Germans go. Remember how the German commander disobeyed the Hitler Befehl to burn Paris? Remember the repeated Hitler telegrams of two words "Brennt Paris"? So whereas the occupiers didn't have their hearts in it, they gave the order to round up some Jews anyway. But when they saw how the French rounded up every Jew, and how brutally they did it, even the Germans were appalled. But what came next shocked them even more.

In 1942, the Paris cops crammed 7,000 Parisian Jews into an enclosed sports stadium known as the Velodrome. They were left there for five days without food, water, toilets or any needed facility whatsoever. Many very young children died there under terrible circumstances.

So in summary, the French fight all right, but only when they can ambush their friends and kill their own unarmed civilians.

In 1995, French President Jacques Chirac apologized for these events.

This is excerpted from a longer essay by Peter Metzger, a scientist-journalist who in 1978 first coined the term Coercive Utopians for the “liberals” opposed to economic growth.

Fjordman

I still have a belief, or at least a hope, that most of Europe can be saved from Islam, although it will be a difficult fight. However, Europe is now so weak and the Islamic infiltration proceeding so quickly that it would be foolhardy to dismiss out of hand the possibility that Europe could indeed succumb to this threat.

How will it affect the New West, the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, if the Old West in Europe goes Islamic? Will Western civilization survive in the New World, or will these countries, too, follow Europe's demise? After all, Western civilization in Europe has the advantage of being native to the soil, where it has grown organically for centuries, whereas it has been transplanted to Australia, Canada and the USA..

One important factor in this regard is how big the flow of European refugees from Eurabia will be, and whether they have learned their lesson regarding Islam or whether they will bring their failed ideologies with them to their new homelands.
If Eurabia indeed becomes the end result, Europe will slowly be reduced from industrialized countries to just another overpopulated Islamic failure. However, this process took centuries in most of what is now the Islamic world, and will take decades or generations in Europe. In the meantime, Eurabia would constitute an existential threat to the rest of the West, and indeed to much of the non-Muslim world. Westerners would be cut off from their civilizational roots, and some of their prized cultural treasures would simply be physically destroyed.

This would be a tremendous blow to the West, and an equally tremendous boost to morale in the Islamic world. Islam has tried, and failed to conquer the European heartland of its Western rival for more than 1300 years. It is difficult to overstate what an enormous religious victory it would represent for Muslims if they were to finally succeed in this. In addition to the psychological effect on the global Islamic community, the umma would also get its hands on the accumulated financial and technological resources of Europe. This would reinvigorate Jihad worldwide, from Thailand to Armenia. We can already now, with the European Union appeasement of the Arab world, see the dangerous potential of such a constellation.

I'm also not fully convinced that Americans, despite frequent claims to the contrary, will prove that much more resistant to Jihad than Europeans are right now. I will be thrilled if they are, but there are some disturbing signs to the contrary. A video of Osama bin Laden meeting with two 9/11 hijackers revealed that the mass murderers were motivated by a desire to avenge Muslims ... in Bosnia, where the US went to war to protect Muslims..

Westerners are told to find ways to win the hearts and minds of Muslims. Very few care to ask whether or not this feat is possible at all. What if the hearts and minds of Muslims are already occupied by Allah and Muhammad, and there is little room left for infidels? If that is the case, it means that projects aimed at giving financial assistance to Muslims are at best a waste of money, at worst outright counterproductive.

Jizya is a punishment tax that non-Muslim dhimmis according to the Koran 9,29 are supposed to pay for "protection", "in willing submission", as a sign of their inferior status to their Islamic rulers. Muslims will thus see payments from non-Muslims as a sign that you accept having been defeated and being subjugated to Islam's might. As a result, they may in fact become more aggressive and demanding, not less.

Westerners who believe that providing financial assistance to Muslims, or even bombing non-Muslims on their behalf as NATO did in the Balkans, will somehow buy them gratitude from Muslims reveal a fundamental lack of understanding of how the Muslim mind works. Muslims are fatalists. For them, everything that happens, good or bad, is the will of Allah. If something bad takes place, this is a punishment for being lax Muslims. If something good happens, for instance a bombing of Christian Serbs that paves the way for ethnic cleansing of non-Muslims in Kosovo, this is a reward for being good Muslims. Muslims will feel gratitude, but to Allah who caused this, not to the infidels who actually carried out the bombing.

If anything, Western involvement in the Balkans signaled to Muslims that the West was now weak and ripe for conquest, since we sacrificed the Christian Serbs in favor of Muslims. As a consequence, instead of a Westernization of the Balkans, we may end up with a Balkanization of the West.

Bat Ye'or has talked about a conflict between Europeans and Eurabians, with the latter holding sway for now because they dominate the media and the political establishment. This conflict is most severe in Europe because of the European Union and the number of Muslims there, but I see similar conflicts in Canada, Australia and the United States.

I sometimes wonder whether the West at the beginning of the 21st century is mired in an ideological civil war, which in Western Europe in particular is getting so serious that it could well lead to physical civil wars. I will call the contestants Westerners and post-Westerners. This makes more sense than right-wingers vs. left-wingers because although left-wingers tend to be more aggressive and open in their denunciation of the West, and although the strongest opposition is usually found among conservatives, post-Westerners have penetrated deep into the political right-wing, too.

Both Leftists and quite a few right-wingers ironically agree on the fact that only economic factors matter, and that culture does not have any significant impact. Leftists talk about economic exploitation and are frequently critical of, if not hostile to, Western culture, hence their allegiance to Multiculturalism. Some right-wingers see immigration only as cheap labor and more consumers. A country is thus one giant job-producing corporation, no different from Coca-Cola or Toyota. Not a nation with a soul, a shared history or a common culture. In opposition to these post-Westerners we have traditional Westerners, whose primary loyalty still lies with their nation state, their culture and their civilization.

It is significant that most Western nations face common challenges in upholding their national borders, and that it is considered "racist" to prefer certain groups of immigrants over others. This is becoming more and more apparent in the illegal immigration debate. The open borders activists are basically arguing that it's a "human right" to be allowed to settle in the West, not that Westerners should be allowed to preserve their own culture and decide who should settle in their lands.

Our unwillingness to uphold our physical boundaries is closely related to our unwillingness to define our cultural boundaries. In a strange way, it is the shared denial of our own historical roots or even the fact that we have a culture, the notion that we have somehow moved "beyond history" and the idea that it is "racist" to uphold your national borders that reveal the fact that Europe, North America and Australia still belong to the same civilization, despite everything.

Serge Trifkovic, author of Sword of the Prophet and the new book Defeating Jihad, points this out, too: "It is in the inability and unwillingness of the elite class to confront jihad that Western Europe and North America most tellingly certify that they share the same chromosomes, that they belong to one culture and constitute one civilization." Writes Trifkovic: "This war is being fought, on the Islamic side, with the deep conviction that the West is on its last legs. The success of its demographic onslaught on Europe enhances the image of ‘a candy store with the busted lock,’ and that view is reinforced by the evidence from history that a civilization that loses the urge for self-perpetuation is indeed in peril."

Europeans, after several devastating wars during the 20th century, seem to believe that we have moved beyond war into an age of international law and dialogue, and that war for whatever reason is evil. That is one idea that Americans most definitely do not share, and they are right. But Americans have other Utopian dreams of their own. I have warned against the dangers of "celebrating diversity" in a country that is already so diverse as the USA. Americans should celebrate their sameness and what binds them together, or they could wake up one day and find out that they are united neither by culture, religion, race nor political beliefs — perhaps not even by language due to the growth of Spanish as a semi-official second language. This could create serious internal frictions, maybe even cause the country to fall apart.

The idea that "history is bunk," that all cultures can be assimilated equally into the USA and that the United States is a universal nation that has somehow magically moved beyond all conflicts known to mankind elsewhere is wrong and dangerous. It also has implications for foreign policy.

If Americans had remembered that their cherished political system was steeped in a Western and European cultural tradition, and may not work just as well in all other cultures, they might not have embarked on the project of exporting democracy to a deeply Islamic country such as Iraq, at the cost of hundreds of billions of dollars. This happened because Americans believed theirs was a universal nation without any core culture of its own. If this was the case, its political system could be exported everywhere.

Five years after 9/11, Muslim immigration to the United States is higher than ever, there is still great reluctance to name the enemy among members of the political establishment and President Bush sticks to his failed strategy of exporting democracy to the Arab world while the Islamization of the West continues apace.

I hope Americans are right, that the USA will prove more resistant to Islamization than Europe, and that Western civilization will prevail in the New World even if it should die in the Old World. But I confess to having some lingering doubt.

This is excerpted from an article by Nordic blogger Fjordman that appeared in Jihadwatch on Sept. 13.

Marc Sheppard

Steal a loaf of bread and one or both of your upper extremities will be hacked off at the wrist. Are you a married woman who’s just suffered the brutality of gang-rape? Well, you’ll either find four males your attackers were stupid enough to allow to bear witness to the crime, or find yourself guilty of adultery—a fate far worse than anything you suffered during the actual assault. Adulterers are wrapped head-to-toe mummy style, buried in sand up to their chests, and slowly and brutally stoned to death by their neighbors.

Welcome to the merciless world of Islamic Sharia Law, where religious “scholars” sit as judges and juries. This medieval system of “justice” oversees countless stonings, beheadings, crucifixions, and often-fatal floggings in Islamic theocracies each year. But the system is not confined to those lands only.

A growing number of countries with Muslim majorities are, while maintaining secular constitutions and penal codes, imposing religious law for family and civil matters. Less harsh than complete Sharia, indeed; yet this bifurcation creates what amounts to an Unequal Rights Amendment to the law. Women are treated as property, existing under the total command of, and fear of legal beatings from, their typically polygamous husbands or fathers.

To be sure, the greatest direct threat to western civilization emanates from the fanatical Muslims we currently face in the war on terror. Yet, of equal or, perhaps, greater menace are growing attempts by so-called “moderate” Muslim leaders to create dichotomous legal systems within non-Muslim countries.

Nowhere is this more rampant than Europe. According to a very disturbing February 2006 ICM opinion poll, 40% of British Muslims want Sharia law introduced into parts of the country. The dread of “home-grown” terrorism originating from their own soil last month provided Muslim leaders a unique blackmail opportunity to further those wishes.

Following the recently defused airline bomb terror plot, Dr. Syed Aziz Pasha, the Secretary General of the Union of Muslim Organizations in the UK and Ireland met with British government officials. During the talks, the Muslim leader had the gall to suggest that the introduction of Sharia Law, together with special bank holidays for Muslim religious festivals, would help to “combat terror” in Britain. The Daily Mail reported his extortive reasoning on August 15, 2006: “If you give us religious rights, we will be in a better position to convince young people that they are being treated equally along with other citizens.”

Thankfully, a week later, according to BBC News, Communities Secretary Ruth Kelly stated that “the government was opposed to any form of law contrary to British civil law, such as Sharia law.”

Earlier this year, Australia was faced with similar demands from radical Islamic clerics. During a February national television interview, Treasurer Peter Costello responded: “if you want a country which has Sharia law or a theocratic state, then Australia is not for you.”

Score one for our Anglosphere allies in the British Commonwealth. But this was merely a single battle in the global war. How are other countries responding when put to similar tests? To the leaders of those nations, here are but a few recent reminders of what Sharia has meant to civilized society:

• In Bangladesh, seven Islamic members of the Jamaatul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) were sentenced to death last year for the murder of two judges. One of the militants, Abdur Rahman, the head of this banned Islamic group, whose goal is the introduction of Sharia law into the country, stated that the murders were carried out “on the instructions of God.”

• The imposition of Sharia Law in 1983 in Sudan, where 70% of the population is Muslim, is regarded as a catalyst for the 20 year-long civil war which is at the heart of the current genocide in Darfur.

• In Mogadishu, fighters loyal to Somalia’s Islamic Courts will soon be uniformed to enforce strict Sharia law upon the entire land. Earlier this year these same militiamen killed two people at the screening of a World Cup soccer broadcast banned because it violated their strict interpretation of Islamic law.

• At the Amsterdam trial of Mohammed Bouyeri, the killer of filmmaker Theo van Gogh, the defendant told the court that Sharia law commanded that he “cut off the head of anyone who insults Allah and his prophet.”

Recently, in Canada, there has been intense public sparring over proposals to permit Sharia religious arbitration in civil disputes.

And, although Muslim immigrants to the U.S are perhaps better assimilated than anywhere else on the planet, one can’t ignore the words attributed to Council on American–Islamic Relations (CAIR) founder Omar M. Ahmad by the San Ramon Valley Herald on July 4, 1988, “Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Koran, the Muslim book of scripture, should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on Earth.”

Portentous declarations, indeed, particularly when coming from the chairman of one of the nation’s most influential Islamic civic organizations. Nevertheless, while we do battle with “radical” Muslim “extremists” abroad, and prepare to do the same at home, we continue to completely ignore the tangential threat imposed by their “moderate” confidantes.

This is excerpted from an article in The American Thinker of September 15.

Ruth King

Author Rita Kramer once wrote that anti-Semitism is the bedrock culture of Europe, always stirring within the great wars that have shaken the continent. The alarming escalation of anti-Semitism on the continent today would certainly bear this out.

In the aftermath of World War II, anti-Semitism was subdued in most Western nations, whose citizens were appalled by the genocide that killed one third of world Jewry. This was the case even in England which was involved in a confrontation with Jewish fighters determined to liberate Palestine.

The Russians and the satellite communist nations showed no such inhibitions. Jews who survived the Holocaust to return to Hungary and Poland were met with pogroms. Stalin set into motion fake trials, purges, “disappearances,” deportations and executions of Jews, including members of his inner circle and staunch supporters of the Communist party. Only his providential death in 1953 aborted his planned deportation of all Jews to Siberia, a likely death sentence for most. Even so, the oppression of Jews continued. Secret police hounded Jews, restricting their movements, their right to worship and congregate, fining and imprisoning them.

In 1967, Israel’s lightening success in the Six Day War invigorated Zionism and inspired pioneering Soviet Jews to become refuseniks. Their numbers and determination grew with Israel’s (more difficult) victory in 1973 and they demanded the right to emigrate. American Jews, also more confident and secure after 1967, lobbied their legislators to support Soviet Jewry. The result was the Jackson-Vanik amendment to the Trade Act of 1974 which denied normal trade with states that imprisoned their populations. The rest is history.

Subsequently, free of the yoke of Russia and dazzled by Israel's success, Eastern European countries made some efforts to restore Jewish communities and examine their own sordid history.

But now that the Western democracies are forced to confront Islamic terror, their Jewish citizens face an alarming surge of anti-Semitism. While most of it is fomented by Europe's large Moslem populations, the indifference and complicity of many non-Moslem citizens is startling.

The blame for this state of affairs is usually directed at Israel for its purported “occupation” of Arab lands. This is to reverse reality. In truth anti-Semitism escalated after the Oslo agreements, the Clinton/Rabin brokered swindle that made terrorism another form of statecraft. It grew exponentially with the continued pattern of surrender to terror culminating in the retreat from Gaza and Olmert’s offer of a “convergence” plan which would ineluctably thrust Israel back to the 1949 armistice line.

For a while anti-Semitism was cloaked in anti-Israel rhetoric. Dozens of leftist and “anti-war” political and communal organizations, academics, notably in the Middle East departments, the international media and, of course, the United Nations, all practiced this mode.

The Moslem world never bothered to cloak its anti-Semitism and is now full of hysterical hatred. We hear primitive anti-Jewish ranting from Iran’s president and the imams and mullahs whose vicious fulminations are so well documented by MEMRI, Daniel Pipes and the contributors to Jihad Watch. They embolden suicide bombers and Moslems worldwide, along with their cheerleaders in every corner of the world.

Even in Malaysia -- with no Jewish population -- the former Prime Minister Mahthir Mohamad called Jews an arrogant world power who gets others to fight its wars and issued a call to arms: “ It cannot be that there is no other way. 1.3 billion Muslims cannot be defeated by a few million Jews. There must be a way.” The “way” is mass murder and his view clearly resonates far beyond Malaysia.

In South Africa, once home to a large and successful Jewish population, editorials set the climate, describing Hezbollah and Hamas as “Islamic Liberation Groups” -- while studiously ignoring suicide attacks against innocent Israelis.

The Jewish Times of Australia (August 16) reports: “The Parramatta Synagogue has been attacked for the second time in the space of two weeks with blocks of cement hurled at it in the attack overnight….In another incident two weeks ago, an attempt was made to set alight a Jewish youth movement centre at Bondi.”

From Corsica, September 1, 2006: “A small explosive device was found Friday morning outside the synagogue of Bastia on the French island of Corsica, police said. The synagogue, the sole on the island, was vandalised in 1998 by unknown people with prayer books torn up, silk scarves shredded and religious images defaced, windows broken and silver candlestick holders stolen…”

Argentina is infamous for two terrorist attacks, the first against Israel’s embassy in 1992, which killed two dozen people, and the second in 1994, against the Jewish Community Center, which killed 85 and injured more than two hundred. Recently hundreds participated in an anti-Israel rally carrying placards denouncing the Jewish state as “genocidal” and pledging support to Hezbollah. The rally, initiated by Moslems, attracted large groups of non-Moslems including students, members of the Workers’ Party and a sizable group of middle class housewives and professionals.

In Venezuela, the Jewish communal organizations are harassed by Hugo Chavez whose pro-Jihadist sentiments were highlighted during his visits to Teheran. Hezbollah is given support and training grounds while Jews are increasingly frightened, their institutions unprotected.

In France, Belgium, and throughout the European Union, anti-Semitic incidents are on an alarming rise, including beating, stalking, desecration of synagogues and murder. The Jewish communities in EU nations are urged to keep a “low profile.” The president of Spain dons a keffya in solidarity with the intifadists and Italy joins England, Portugal, Spain and Germany in refusing to allow El Al cargo planes carrying IDF equipment from US military bases to Israel to land and refuel.

In England the rise in anti-Semitic incidents is so high that a commission has been established to investigate what Melanie Phillips calls “the hate fest against the Jewish people.” Early reports of the commission state that Moslems are eightfold more likely to hate Jews. But they find like-minded folks among rank and file Britons, in the media, in government where the mayor of London and assorted parliamentarians indulge in outrageous anti-Semitic rants, and in the universities where attacking Israel is part of the core curriculum.

In Oslo, a synagogue was bombed on September 17th. The home of Nobel peace prizes has a large Moslem population, but the non-Moslems are only too eager to join in bashing Jews. Jostein Gaarder, prominent author of Sophie's World, wrote in Aftenposten, Norway's leading newspaper "We do no longer recognize the state of Israel....May spirit and word sweep away the apartheid walls of Israel. The state of Israel does not exist. It is now without defense, without skin."

A sign of the times: IDF officers have been given a memorandum warning that they may face arrest and charges of war crimes in Europe. Organizations in Europe have begun to compile cases against government officials as well, and they too are warned against visiting Europe.

And here in the United States, our sunny corner of the Diaspora, there are more and more anti-Israel demonstrations. In Salt Lake City, Utah, the mayor permitted defense attorney Robert Breeze to hold a "Death to Israel" demonstration on September 6, despite protests from the Jewish community. On August 12, 2006 in Washington D.C., San Francisco, San Diego, Los Angeles and Seattle, anti-war rallies attracted thousands from Moslem communities and the socialist left. From their podiums one could hear a cacophony of anti-Jewish taunts, demanding an end to American support for “the Jewish Nazis and Kikes.” Similar hate fests are repeated on many campuses..

Even the political arena is different. Democratic candidates usually made the requisite bow to America’s “special relationship” with Israel. The landscape has changed. Connecticut’s Senator Joseph Lieberman, an orthodox Jew who was a vice presidential candidate in 2000, where his nomination at the Democratic Convention elicited cheering chants of “Joe and Hadassah,” is now called “Jew Lieberman” on a website promoting the Democrats.

And, last, mainline Protestant churches routinely promote boycotts of Israel and disinvestment from companies that do business with Israel. In fact, the major strong defenders of Israel are in the Evangelical community which represents forty percent of Republican voters in America.

Had enough? This is only the tip of the iceberg, but I’ll stop. And what is the reaction of the world’s Jews? Predictably, some Jewish organizations blame Israel. Recently the World Jewish Congress sent a mission to Israel to warn Olmert that Israel’s hard line policies in Lebanon had spurred the malignant recrudescence of Jew hatred. Other groups, like the English “Engage,” voice opposition to boycotts and violence against Jews, but keep the drum beating about the “occupation” and the suffering inflicted on Arabs, which only fuels the sentiments of their enemies. Jews continue to gravitate to the anti-war left and demonstrate a dangerous unwillingness to acknowledge the necessity for tough measures to find and control would-be terrorists on our soil.

What Jews fail so signally to recognize is that the most important cause of this resurgence of anti-Semitism is the perception of Israel in retreat. It is undeniable that a powerful and victorious Israel elevated the international prestige and confidence of the Jewish people everywhere. By contrast, an Israel which has lost its way and forfeited its claim to its legitimate and historic rights is viewed with contempt, encouraging and emboldening anti-Semites. Jew hatred is an opportunistic virus that attacks weakened organisms. Like those nations of Eastern Europe which hated Jews even after there were none left, the Arabs will hate Israel and the Jews even if they were all to leave or die. Only Israel’s determination to succeed, to prevail, to prosper and to win will sedate them and anti-Semites all over the world.

There is a war within the war on terror. It is a war against the Jewish people. The consequence of ignoring the link between a strong and secure Israel and the safety of all Jews will be a dark and cold winter for Jews throughout the Diaspora.