Barry Rubin, Ruth R. Wisse, Mark Steyn 16/01/2009 Benvenuti nel nuovo Medio Oriente-Bush e Clinton-L'odio antico
WELCOME TO THE NEW MIDDLE EAST Barry Rubin Globe and Mail, January 15, 2009
In
, elements from within the regime are reportedly offering a $1-million reward for the assassination of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak because of his opposition to Hamas in the Gaza Strip. In , the leader of Hezbollah, which is backed by and
, merely calls for the Egyptian government’s overthrow.
In response to this, Tariq Alhomayed, a Saudi who is editor-in-chief of the newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat, describes Hamas as ’s tool, and argues that “
is a real threat to Arab security.” Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit, agrees, and he is not alone. When Arab states met to discuss the Gaza crisis,
vetoed any action. Even the Palestinian Authority blames Hamas for the fighting. Activists in Fatah, which runs the Palestinian Authority and is Hamas’s nationalist rival, make no secret of their hope that Hamas loses the war.
Welcome to the new
Middle East
, characterized no longer by the Arab-Israeli conflict but by an Arab nationalist-Islamist conflict. Recognizing this reality, virtually all Arab states—other than ’s ally, —and the Palestinian Authority want to see Hamas defeated in
Gaza
. Given their strong self-interest in thwarting Islamist revolutionary groups, especially those aligned with Iran, they are not inclined to listen to the “Arab street”—which is far quieter than it was during previous conflicts, such as the 1991 war in Kuwait, the 2000-2004 Palestinian uprising or the 2006 Israeli-Hezbollah war.
Today’s
Middle East
is very different from the old one. First, the internal politics of every Arab country revolves around a battle between Arab nationalist rulers and an Islamist opposition. In other words, Hamas’s allies are the regimes’ enemies. An Islamist state in Gaza would encourage those who seek to create similar entities in ,
and every other Arab country.
A tremendous price has already been paid for this conflict. The violence has included civil wars among Palestinians and Algerians, the bloodshed in and terrorist campaigns in and
. In the Palestinian case, after winning an election and making a deal with Fatah for a coalition government, Hamas turned on its rival and drove it out of Gaza by force. In return, the Palestinian Authority has been repressing Hamas in the
West Bank
. In
, Hezbollah has been trying to bully its more moderate Sunni Muslim, Christian and Druze rivals into submission.
Second, because Arab states confront an Iranian-Syrian alliance that includes Hamas and Hezbollah, in addition to internal conflicts, there is a regional battle between these two blocs. An aspect of this is that the largely Sunni Muslim-led states face a largely Shia Muslim-led competitor for regional hegemony.
These two problems pose far greater dangers to the existing states than does any (largely fabricated) Israeli threat, and the region’s rulers know it.
On the other side of the divide,
and its allies have put forward the banners of jihad and “resistance.” Their platform includes Islamist revolution in every country; Iran as the region’s dominant state, backed up by nuclear weapons; no peace with Israel and no Palestinian state until there can be an Islamist one encompassing all of Israel (as well as the West Bank and Gaza); and the expulsion of Western influence from the region.
This is a very ambitious program, probably impossible to achieve. Nevertheless, it is a prescription for endless terrorism and war: Both pro- and anti-Iranian revolutionary Islamists believe they will win because God is on their side and their enemies are cowardly, and they are quite prepared to spend the next half-century trying to prove it.
While this seems to be a very pessimistic assessment of the regional situation, the radical Islamist side has many weaknesses. Launching losing wars may make Islamists feel good, but being defeated is a costly proposition, for their arrogance and belligerence antagonize many who might otherwise be won over to their cause.
The situation also provides a good opportunity for Western policy-makers. The emphasis should be on building coalitions among the relatively moderate states that are threatened by radical Islamist forces, and on working hard to prevent from obtaining nuclear weapons—a goal that is in the interests of many in the region.
The worst mistake would be to follow the opposite policy—an inevitably futile effort to appease the extremists or seek to moderate them. Such a campaign actually disheartens the relative moderates who, feeling sold out, will try to cut their own deal with
Tehran
.
The crisis in
Gaza
is only one aspect of the much wider battle shaking the region. Helping Hamas would empower radical Islamism and Iranian ambitions, while undercutting the Palestinian Authority and everyone else, not just
. Arab states don’t want to help their worst enemy. Why should anyone else?
(Barry Rubin is director of the Israeli-based Global Research in
InternationalAffairsCenter
.)
BUSH DESTROYED A DICTATOR.
CLINTON
INSTALLED ONE. Ruth R. Wisse Wall Street Journal, January 15, 2009
As President George W. Bush prepares to leave office amid a media chorus of reproach and derision, there is at least one comparison with his predecessor that speaks greatly in his favor. Mr. Bush removed the most ruthless dictator of his day, Saddam Hussein, thereby offering Iraqi citizens the possibility of self-rule. Bill Clinton’s analogous achievement in the
Middle East
was to help install Yasser Arafat, the greatest terrorist of his day, as head of a proto-Palestinian state.
This is not how these events are generally perceived. The image that still looms in the public mind is that of President Clinton, peacemaker, standing between Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin in the Rose Garden on Sept. 13, 1993. With the best intentions, Mr. Clinton had worked hard for this peace agreement and would continue to strive for its success, hosting the head of the Palestine Liberation Organization at the White House more than any other foreign leader.
But the “peace process” almost immediately reversed its stated expectations. Emboldened by his diplomatic victory, Arafat adopted Islamist terminology and openly preached jihad. The casualties suffered by Israel in the years following the Oslo Accords exceeded those of previous decades, and dangers to Israel and the world have increased exponentially ever since. This so-called peace agreement rewarded terrorist methods as fail-safe instruments of modern warfare, and accelerated terrorist attacks on other democratic countries. Though Mr. Clinton did not foresee these consequences, his speech at the signing ceremony betrayed the self-deception on which the agreement was based.
Throughout the speech, Mr. Clinton invoked the significance of the “sliver of land between the river and the
Mediterranean Sea
” to “Jews, Christians, and Muslims throughout the world.” He repeatedly linked the “descendants of Isaac and Ishmael,” and the “shared future shaped by the values of the Torah, the Koran, and the Bible,” as though their “memories and dreams” were all equivalent. But Judaism is quite unlike Islam. The Jews claim solely that “sliver of land” and accept their minority status among the nations. By contrast, Islam seeks religious and territorial hegemony, most especially in the
Middle East
.
Hence 21 countries descendant from Ishmael have denied the descendants of Isaac their ancestral home. This difference of political visions is precisely what propels the Arab war against
.
To be sure, the signing ceremony at the White House may not have been the best time to recall Arafat’s complete record as the “father of modern terrorism,” a title accorded him by the press for masterminding such acts as the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, the murder of a schoolroom of children in northern Israel, and the establishment of a PLO missile base in Lebanon. But some mention of his profession was surely in order.
The PLO was founded, and funded, by Arab leaders as a terrorist proxy before 1967—that is, before gained the disputed territory of the
West Bank
that retroactively served as a Palestinian casus belli. Arafat had never been anything other than a terrorist. He had threatened Arab rulers in and
no less than the Jews of Israel. Mr. Clinton’s speech contained no hint of these facts, concealing the realities it purported to be changing.
To be fair,
’s role in this self-deception was, if anything, even greater. The Oslo Accords made
the first country in history ever to arm its enemy with the expectation of gaining security. The burden of soldiering in a defensive war for the “right to exist”—which ought to have been theirs from the outset—understandably saps the morale of Israelis. In this case, it also undermined their common sense.
The
Oslo
“peace accord” made the world more dangerous and subjected Palestinian Arabs to a rule of violence, corruption and intimidation. Arafat’s dictatorship has since been outmatched by an even more brutal Hamas regime that serves as the terrorist outpost of
. President Bush’s military intervention, by contrast, destroyed a terrorist state and made the world safer for its citizens.
(Ruth Wisse, a professor of Yiddish and comparative literature at Harvard.)
THE ‘OLDEST HATRED’ Mark Steyn National Review Online, January 10, 2009In
Toronto
, anti-Israel demonstrators yell “You are the brothers of pigs!”, and a protester complains to his interviewer that “Hitler didn’t do a good job.” In
Fort Lauderdale
, Palestinian supporters sneer at Jews, “You need a big oven, that’s what you need!” In
Amsterdam
, the crowd shouts, “Hamas, Hamas! Jews to the gas!”
In
Paris
, the state-owned TV network France-2 broadcasts film of dozens of dead Palestinians killed in an Israeli air raid on New Year’s Day. The channel subsequently admits that, in fact, the footage is not from January 1st 2009 but from 2005, and, while the corpses are certainly Palestinian, they were killed when a truck loaded with Hamas explosives detonated prematurely while leaving the Jabaliya refugee camp in another of those unfortunate work-related accidents to which
Gaza
is sadly prone. Conceding that the Palestinians supposedly killed by
were, alas, killed by Hamas, France-2 says the footage was broadcast “accidentally.”
In Toulouse, a synagogue is firebombed; in Bordeaux, two kosher butchers are attacked; at the Auber RER train station, a Jewish man is savagely assaulted by 20 youths taunting, “Palestine will kill the Jews;” in Villiers-le-Bel, a Jewish schoolgirl is brutally beaten by a gang jeering, “Jews must die.”
In Helsingborg, the congregation at a Swedish synagogue takes shelter as a window is broken and burning cloths thrown in; in Odense, principal Olav Nielsen announces that he will no longer admit Jewish children to the local school after a Dane of Lebanese extraction goes to the shopping mall and shoots two men working at the Dead Sea Products store; in Brussels, a Molotov cocktail is hurled at a Belgian synagogue; in Antwerp, lit rags are pushed through the mail flap of a Jewish home; and, across the Channel, “youths” attempt to burn the Brondesbury Park Synagogue.
In
London
, the police advise British Jews to review their security procedures because of potential revenge attacks. The Sun reports “fears” that “Islamic extremists” are drawing up a “hit list” of prominent Jews, including the Foreign Secretary, Amy Winehouse’s record producer, and the late Princess of Wales’s divorce lawyer. Meanwhile, The Guardian reports that Islamic non-extremists from the British Muslim Forum, the Islamic Foundation and other impeccably respectable “moderate” groups have warned the government that the Israelis’ “disproportionate force” in Gaza risks inflaming British Muslims, “reviving extremist groups,” and provoking “UK terrorist attacks”—not against Amy Winehouse’s record producer and other sinister members of the International Jewish Conspiracy but against targets of, ah, more general interest.
Forget, for the moment,
Gaza
. Forget that the Palestinian people are the most comprehensively wrecked people on the face of the earth. For the past sixty years they have been entrusted to the care of the United Nations, the Arab League, the PLO, Hamas and the “global community”—and the results are pretty much what you’d expect. You would have to be very hardhearted not to weep at the sight of dead Palestinian children, but you would also have to accord a measure of blame to the Hamas officials who choose to use grade schools as launch pads for Israeli-bound rockets, and to the UN refugee agency that turns a blind eye to it. And, even if you don’t deplore Fatah and Hamas for marinating their infants in a sick death cult in which martyrdom in the course of Jew-killing is the greatest goal to which a citizen can aspire, any fair-minded visitor to the West Bank or Gaza in the decade and a half in which the “Palestinian Authority” has exercised sovereign powers roughly equivalent to those of the nascent Irish Free State in 1922 would have to concede that the Palestinian “nationalist movement” has a profound shortage of nationalists interested in running a nation, or indeed capable of doing so. There is fault on both sides, of course, and
has few good long-term options. But, if this was a conventional ethno-nationalist dispute, it would have been over long ago.
So, as I said, forget
Gaza
. And instead ponder the reaction to Gaza in Scandinavia, , the , , and golly, even
Florida
. As the delegitimization of
has metastasized, we are assured that criticism of the Jewish state is not the same as anti-Semitism. We are further assured that anti-Zionism is not the same as anti-Semitism, which is a wee bit more of a stretch. Only
attracts an intellectually respectable movement querying its very existence. For the purposes of comparison, let’s take a state that came into existence at the exact same time as the Zionist Entity, and involved far bloodier population displacements. I happen to think the creation of
was the greatest failure of post-war British imperial policy. But the fact is that
exists, and if I were to launch a movement of anti-Pakism it would get pretty short shrift.
But, even allowing for that, what has a schoolgirl in Villiers-le-Bel to do with Israeli government policy? Just last month terrorists attacked
Bombay
, seized hostages, tortured them, killed them, and mutilated their bodies. The police intercepts of the phone conversations between the terrorists and their controllers make for lively reading:
“
caller 1: ‘Kill all hostages, except the two Muslims. Keep your phone switched on so that we can hear the gunfire.’
“Mumbai terrorist 2: ‘We have three foreigners, including women. From and
.’
“
caller 1: ‘Kill them.’
“(Voices of gunmen can be heard directing hostages to stand in a line, and telling two Muslims to stand aside. Sound of gunfire. Sound of cheering voices.)”
“Kill all hostages, except the two Muslims.” Tough for those Singaporean women. Yet no mosques in
have been attacked. The large Hindu populations in London, Toronto, and
Fort Lauderdale
have not shouted “Muslims must die!” or firebombed Halal butchers or attacked hijab-clad schoolgirls. CAIR and other Muslim lobby groups’ eternal bleating about “Islamophobia” is in inverse proportion to any examples of it. Meanwhile, “moderate Muslims” in
London
warn the government: “I’m a peaceful fellow myself, but I can’t speak for my excitable friends. Nice little G7 advanced western democracy you got here. Shame if anything were to happen to it.”
But why worry about European Muslims? The European political and media class essentially shares the same view of the situation—to the point where state TV stations are broadcasting fake Israeli “war crimes.” As I always say, the “oldest hatred” didn’t get that way without an ability to adapt: Once upon a time on the Continent, Jews were hated as rootless cosmopolitan figures who owed no national allegiance. So they became a conventional nation state, and now they’re hated for that. And, if Hamas get their way and destroy the Jewish state, the few who survive will be hated for something else. So it goes.
But Jew-hating has consequences for the Jew-hater, too. A few years ago the poet Nizar Qabbani wrote an ode to the intifada:
O mad people of
Gaza
,
a thousand greetings to the mad
The age of political reason
has long departed
so teach us madness
You can just about understand why living in
Gaza
would teach you madness. The enthusiastic adoption of the same pathologies by mainstream
Europe
is even more deranged—and in the end will prove just as self-destructive.
