Gaza—Do It Right Or Not At All

Israel: Do It Right Or Don’t Do It At All
by Gerald A. Honigman

Figures...the one day I don’t read the paper or check my computer for news first thing in the morning...

Ugh!

Turns out the Jews finally overdosed and moved on Gaza while I was in the very midst of writing this article. So now, after having to plead my case with publishers I already drive crazy, please check it out anyway. Let’s see how good the Israelis do. And hopefully, I’ll be proven wrong...on at least some counts.

One of the so-called “Arab World’s” greatest scholars, Ibn Khaldun, singled out the Jews centuries ago when he wrote The Muqaddimah.


Writing of the rise and fall of civilizations, he stressed the overwhelming importance of ‘asabiyah--unique group consciousness--to the overall fate of any nation.


While Ibn Khaldun noted that the Jews had one of the most “noble houses” in history, he explained that, as a result of losing their ‘asabiyah, they had subsequently suffered constant humiliations as a result.


The Muqaddimah stressed that the Jews were forced to wander in the desert for forty years due to their “meekness.” Ibn Khaldun held that this was necessary so that a new generation would arise with a new, more powerful ‘asabiyah.

Prime Minister Olmert and his crew should pay close attention to this...Jews can’t afford yet another of such wanderings.


After putting up with countless mortar and rocket terror launched from Gaza since it unilaterally withdrew from there years ago, it looks like Israel, under Olmert and Livni, has gotten a green light from Washington to do what should have been done long ago. Unfortunately, these are not the leaders to do it right.


Too many of Olmert’s crew have much in common with the “post-Zionism” plaguing too much of Israel today.

Too many of Israel’s teachers, especially at the higher levels, lack that ‘asabiyah Ibn Khaldun stressed and have spread the disease to their students as well.


Israel’s war against Hizbullah in Lebanon was a result of such new leaders. An Israel under Menachem Begin, David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, or Arik Sharon would not have fought Hizbullah largely by the Arabs’ own game plan. Olmert’s crew did--with disastrous results.

And now this same crew is telegraphing its punch to do a virtual Lebanon II in Gaza.


More young Israelis will be sent on the ground into deadly booby traps set for human and tank alike.


Arabs like to joke about how Jews value life...

We’ll, for starters, they don’t believe that they’ll have seventy-two virgins awaiting them in Heaven as a reward for blowing up Arab babes and other innocents the way Arabs see this picture for themselves. So, the Arabs are correct--for this and many other reasons as well.


But, following up on this observation, Israel thus needs to play a very different game in Gaza.


Hamas and the Gazan Arabs who elected it to office know that Israel can’t lay low forever. It has deliberately been trying to bait Israel into fighting at this time. But I suspect that Hamas expects Israel to follow a game plan approved by Washington--especially the State Department--which will not allow it to do what really needs to be done here...actually win.

Israel will be allowed to punish Foggy Bottom’s bad cop terrorists for the sake of the alleged latter-day Arafatian good cop ones of its darling, Mahmud Abbas. In reality, both have the same long-term goal for the Jewish State. But there’s billions of dollars at stake for the winners. Recall Arafat’s legendary Swiss bank accounts and so forth.

Israel must indeed answer terror, but at minimum cost to itself. Every soldier Israel loses is like America losing about sixty.

No matter how “good” it tries to be here, it will be condemned anyway...So, do it as best as possible.

Those who deliberately set up terror shops amidst their own civilian human shields will be responsible for the deaths of innocents (and keep in mind that those “innocents” gladly elected the leaders they now have). The Geneva Conventions condemn such cowardice and further state that it will not prevent retribution. See the Perfidy Clause and so forth.

So, here’s the real plan...

Bombers, not helicopters, will take the lead here.

Israel has already telegraphed its punch loudly and clearly in the aftermath of all Gaza singing Hamas’s praises for hundreds of mortars and rockets fired at Israel in just the past few weeks. Newspaper articles all over the world have reported of Israel’s upcoming invasion.

Massive, quick retaliation, following America’s own Powell Doctrine for war, must be the guideline.  If having death and destruction fired non-stop at your towns by folks who don’t recognize your very right to exist is not war, then what is?

Bombers will need to seek out major groupings of armed fighters. So, the time for the strike should be set for when Hamas is having another of its major rallies or parades. Hopefully, Israeli intelligence can redeem itself here a bit. Hundreds must be sent to Paradise at one time--enough so that there will be a shortage of virgins.

Qassam rockets and such must be answered by artillery. Forget the tit-for-tat manure that Arabs only laugh at… Massive barrages must target sites from which terror is launched. Prospective mine fields and booby traps must be blasted as well.

Any suspected hideouts of Hamas leadership must be taken out. Israel had opportunities in earlier decades to do this and refused because of the human shield thing. Not this time...

Hide with them, die with them. President Bush almost said those exact words himself.

Many underground bunkers as well as tunnels have likely been constructed by Arabs in preparation for Gaza’s virtual Lebanon II. This is a good time to test those bunker-busters, assuming Israel has gotten some decent intelligence here before it uses those expensive bombs.

Israeli teens and others should not be sent in on the ground until everything has been done to reduce their casualties. To Hell with those “innocents” who’d slit Jews’s throats in an instant given the chance.

It’s time for Israel to fight to win...like any other country would. So...

I don’t recommend hitting Gaza now.

Conventional wisdom states that Israel should attack before President Obama takes office along with his list of anti-Israel advisers.

While this is a consideration, it is trumped by the make-up of Israel’s current leaders and the wisdom of Ibn Khaldun.

Israel has waited this long to strike. It must wait a bit longer...until new elections produce leaders for whom the Jews’s Zionist ‘asabiyah is once more calling both the political and military shots.

At that time, it will be able to fight to win--not merely play the game that others have in store for it.

[0] Trackbacks   [0] Pingbacks

Kurds, Jews, And Shi'a Shoes

Kurds, Jews, And Shi’a Shoes
by Gerald A. Honigman

As I’m sure you’ve heard by now, on a recent surprise visit to Iraq, President Bush had to duck when a Shi’a Arab journalist threw shoes at him in protest of American policies and presence in Iraq. During a news conference, Muntadhar al-Zaidi yelled out, “this is a gift from the Iraqis, a farewell kiss, you dog” and fired away. Thrown shoes and dogs are about as low as you go in the Arab world. Forget about “Marley and Me,” “Rin Tin Tin,” or “Old Yeller”.

I wish I could say that I was shocked by this disrespect usually reserved for such folks as the tolerant Arabs’ “kilab yahud"—Jew dogs. I wasn’t.

Polls show that most Arab Iraqis—especially Shi’a—supported al-Zaidi. While he was roughed up by those with a stake in the current regime, those later reports reveal the pulse of the nation. While the Sunni have no love for America either—they were Saddam’s folks—they now fear what’s in store for themselves later on.

While estimates of the dead vary (some hundreds of thousands), the 60% of Iraq who are Shi’a had their own aspirations suppressed only via the iron fist of the Sunni Arabs’ Saddam. He employed the same murderous tactics against them as he did with non-Arab Kurds in the north. Similar bloody actions against others in neighboring Iran by the majority non-Arab, Persian Shi’a are probably not a bad model for what to expect after America leaves a Shi’a-dominated Iraq as well …Payback time, so to speak. And don’t expect a President Obama to move back in.

Unfortunately, the Kurds will also be caught up in this murderous, age old Arab feud. The one thing both Shi’a and Sunni Arabs can agree on (just like with Israel, the black African Sudan, Berber North Africa, and elsewhere) is that Kurds should have no claims on alleged “purely Arab patrimony.”

Having supported America’s move against Saddam, decades of intense study, publication in academic journals and elsewhere, and involvement with the region still made me very wary.

While the Arabs owed Great Britain a huge debt for the very creation of a united, Arab-ruled Iraq out of the post-World War I Mandate of Mesopotamia, this didn’t stop them not long afterwards from rising up against what they only saw as British imperialism.

No giving the devil his due here…Use him then lose him.

I can understand that. Too bad Arabs can’t grant this same understanding to others though.

Imperialism is only nasty when it’s not Arabs dishing it out. How do you think the region became “purely Arab patrimony” in too many an Arab mind?

Without the Brits’ involvement, the Turkish phoenix rising under Ataturk from the ruins of the centuries’ old Ottoman Empire would have surely grabbed the oil-rich region around Mosul (which it formerly ruled) and probably would have extended its claim to the black gold of Kirkuk as well.

To make the new prospective Arab state viable (the British navy had recently switched from coal to oil and was the main arm of the British Empire), the Brits had to attach the oil of the Kurdish north to the Sunni Arab center and Shi’a Arab oil of the south.

In the process of siring the Middle East’s version of Yugoslavia, London thus shafted Kurds out of the best chance they ever had at regaining their own independence…something the Brits had promised them earlier as well.

After having their very country created and handed to them by the Brits (who also supplied aircraft and such to fight the Kurds), the Arabs soon revolted to try to drive the Brits out.

Granted, imperialism has its nasty side, and the Brits created an Arab Iraq for their own reasons, yet still…

So, the point here is that America should have known not to expect any gratitude from most Iraqi Arabs either. Hence the thrown shoes, the thrower now a national hero, and so forth.

There’s yet another angle to this…

Think of all the American blood, lives, money, and other aid which have been spent for the sake of Arabs in Iraq, giving them new freedoms which they have never had.

Trillions of American dollars will be spent before it’s over, billions each month. Visit a local VA hospital to see just some of the other tragic, lasting costs…That shoe-thrower who called President Bush a dog would have literally been fed to the dogs if he tried that trick with the man America freed him from. The innocents who died whom the shoe thrower complained about mostly died because of the same cowardly Arab trick Israel deals with daily. Arabs love to use their non-combatants as human shields…against the Geneva Conventions, and so forth. They shoot and then run behind the skirts of their women and toys of their kids.

Was/is America hoping to get something positive for itself as a result of its Iraq expenditures? Sure…But does that erase the above truisms?

Think about those anti-Israel voices quick to protest about two billion dollars in aid sent to Israel each year…an investment whose return comes back to us positively in many ways.

The current war in Iraq costs America more (for the sake of Arabs who mostly hate us as “infidels” in a context of a war for their Dar ul-Islam) in one week than Israel gets in foreign assistance in one year. And, in exchange for that assistance, the State Department feels it has the right to pressure Jews into suicidal concessions.

America has already spent about $500 billion dollars for Iraq, with much more set to come.

It would take Israel centuries to get this much aid from America. And Israel doesn’t ask for American blood to be shed on its behalf or to be bribed to display America’s own values and democratic inclinations. How long will the latter last among Arabs after America’s exit from Iraq?

Ironically, the one people in Iraq who better share our values--the Kurds--are the folks the Arabist James Baker types in the State Department are determined to shaft yet again on behalf of Arabs who want to be sure that oil in Kurdish lands remains part of the “purely Arab patrimony.”

Sound familiar?

Same shafting game you read above…just different shafters.

While I didn’t vote for the Obama-Biden ticket largely because of the long list of known anti-Semitic and anti-Israel friends and advisors Obama has aligned himself with (he’s already brought several into his future Administration), Senator Joe Biden has a better understanding of the Yugoslavian nature of Iraqi demographics than most politicians.

I’m hoping against the odds that he’ll pull more weight than the shaft the Jews and the Kurds Arabist types which are all-too-common in the State Department (and among Obama’s buddies) which Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton will soon be leading.

[0] Trackbacks   [0] Pingbacks

Of Mumbai And Beyond...

Of Mumbai And Beyond…

by Gerald A. Honigman

The recent atrocities committed in Mumbai, India in the name of the ongoing quest for the spread of the Arab and Arabizeds’ Dar ul-Islam is merely a continuation of a war waged by Muhammed’s followers for about fourteen centuries now against the Dar al-Harb…the realm of war, i.e. all peoples and lands not yet conquered either in the name of what Arab pipedreams proclaim to be “purely Arab patrimony” or the faith of the Arabs’ Seal of the Prophets.

As Arab armies burst out of the Arabian Peninsula around the mid-7th century C.E., lands native to other Semitic but non-Arab peoples (despite the wishful thinking of those who espouse the Winkler-Caetani Theory--Jews, Assyrians, Phoenicians/Lebanese, etc.), Copts, Berbers, Kurds, Persians and other Aryan peoples, Turks, black Africans, Indians, and others fell one after another to Arab and Arabized imperial conquests. Numerous millions of people were slaughtered in the process--continuing to this very day. Others willingly jumped on the Arab bandwagon to gain shares of the conquests.

Muhammad of Gaur first spread the Dar ul-Islam into India in the 12th century C.E., and the highlight of these conquests came with the Moghul Empire several centuries later.

The results were lasting, and the partition of the Indian subcontinent into a Muslim Pakistan and largely Hindu India in 1947 reflected this. During that same year, Arabs would reject a similar partition of what was left of the original 1920 Mandate of Palestine after Arab Jordan was created from nearly 80% of it in 1922. Had Arabs accepted this, they would have wound up with about 90% of the whole with the creation of their 2nd, not 1st, Arab state in “Palestine”--the name the Roman Emperor Hadrian gave to Judaea after the Jews’ second revolt for freedom in 133-135 C.E.

There are, indeed, similarities between what Israel faces in Judea and Samaria today--renamed, as a result of 20th century British imperialism and Jordanian Arab conquest, the “West Bank"--and what India faces in Kashmir and elsewhere. The one big difference, of course, is that there are about one billion Indians (who were never earlier subjected to a forced diaspora like the Jews were after taking on Rome) instead of some six million Jews facing similar threats from Arab and/or Arabized.

Over the years, more and more Indians themselves have begun to notice this. As they do, they see the linkage between Arabs blowing up Jews on buses and restaurants, and Arabized Pakistanis blowing up and massacring Hindus and others in Parliament and in hotels in Mumbai.

Before moving on, something else must be said about those partitions of the Mandate of Palestine and the Indian subcontinent mentioned earlier…

While working for the liberation of India from British imperial occupation, Mohandas Gandhi opposed the partition of the Indian subcontinent into a Hindu India and a Muslim Pakistan. He believed that people of all religious faiths should be able to get along in the same nation. He was assassinated by a Hindu nationalist.

So much for getting along…Some places it works, some places it’s laughable. The Mahatma didn’t understand the nature of the enemy he was facing…an enemy who sees justice only in terms of its own ilk.

Gandhi opposed Zionism--the national liberation movement of the Jews--to the very end; his major statement circulated as an editorial in the Harijan of November 11, 1938. Among other things, while first professing his supposed “sympathies” for perennially persecuted Jews, he next claimed that…

Palestine of the biblical conception is not a geographical tract.

Actually, he did get that one right. Palestine wasn’t...It represented a vague geographical area according to the ancient Greeks.

As mentioned above, the name itself was bestowed on Judaea--the defined land of the Jews--by Hadrian, after the Jews’ second major war (133-135 C.E.) for their independence against the Romans. To squash their hopes once and for all, he renamed the land itself after their historic enemies, the Philistines (Syria Palaestina), a non-Semitic Greek people from the area around the Aegean Sea.

But Israel and Judaea were well-known nations/kingdoms peopled by Hebrews/Jews. As just one of many examples, the Habiru/Apiru--Hebrews--were written about throughout the extensive correspondence of ancient Pharaohs, their vassals, and others as well. And these folks evolved into a separate people with their own unique culture, language, history--and, yes, religion too. Gandhi saw the religious claims of Jews as their main, if not only, leg to stand on in this conflict...which he rejected.

But the differences which separated Jews from Arabs were not simply theological. While Gandhi still has plenty of company here in his booboo (including academics), this doesn’t excuse it. What made matters worse, if you don’t really know, you shouldn’t really say...especially if you see yourself, or are seen by others, as a major voice for justice and morality in this world.

With all due respect to a man whom I otherwise greatly admire, Gandhi knew about as much about Jews and their history as most Jews know about the various Indian peoples. The difference, however, is that Jews would never have told the latter to remain forever victimized and at the potential receiving end of those with a long history of bloody conquest and persecution.

While it would be nice if we all just really “got along,” and there was no need for nationalism, national borders, and such, the reality is that this belief is too often fiction--and especially when it comes to the millennial Jewish experience...something Gandhi acknowledged himself when admitting “his sympathies.”

What else is new? In a post-Auschwitz age, people may grudgingly cry crocodile tears for dead Jews (a la the Holocaust and such), but have no room for empathy for live ones.

Listen to Gandhi again:

However...my sympathy does not blind me to the requirements of justice...why should they (Jews) not, like other peoples...make that country their home where they are born...?

I guess he hadn’t heard of the Dreyfus Affair in “enlightened” France, or had not seen pictures of Jews waving their medals from World War I in front of the Nazis, or had not heard of General Grant’s order of expulsion for the Jews of the South during America‘s Civil War, or of the Damascus Blood Libel in 19th century Arab Syria, etc., etc., and so forth…Again, what you don’t really know, you really shouldn’t comment on…

Imagine, for one moment, that India--as massive as it is--underwent the experiences that the Jews in their tiny state did in their fight for freedom and independence against an imperial power like Rome, culminating in much of the population massacred and most of the rest forcibly exiled in that great Diaspora already mentioned.

Next, imagine that those hypothetical Indians (like those real Jews) in almost everywhere that they eventually landed--the Muslim East as well as the Christian West--never knew what the morrow would bring...massacres, forced conversions, expulsions, ghettoization (the mellah in the Arab world), demonization, and such culminating in a holocaust which wiped out one third of all Indian people.

Would Jews insist that Indians remain forever at someone else’s mercy and give up on a resurrected national existence simply in order to survive?

I think not. Yet that’s what Gandhi expected of Jews. Einstein had a famous disagreement with Gandhi over this. So I’m in good company.

Unlike Indians, Jews were literally forced into those above positions and had earlier tried desperately to follow Gandhi’s advice to be “accepted”… but to no avail. As nasty as some aspects of the British Raj were, they do not compare to those millennial experiences of stateless Jews.

So, the real question that the Mahatma and others needed to ask is…

Is a victim any less a victim because his victimization has been the longest and most enduring?

Should Jews (those above victims) have not wanted something better for their children? Should they have continued to put their trust only in those who declared them to be G_d-killers, children of the Devil, killers of Prophets, sons of apes and pigs, dogs, and such with periodic and predictable consequences?

Sadly, the otherwise wise Gandhi thought so.

Take a look below at how the ancient historians saw this identity issue. Here’s a few of my favorite quotes from Vol. II, Book V The Works Of Tacitus, which discussed the Jews’ first major revolt in 66-73 C.E. for their freedom and independence against the Soviet Union (or British Empire, Mr. Gandhi)--of its day, Rome. There were others (Dio Cassius, Josephus, etc.) who wrote about such things as well:

It inflamed Vespasian’s resentment that the Jews were the only nation who had not yet submitted...Titus was appointed by his father to complete the subjugation of Judaea… he commanded three legions in Judaea itself… To these he added the twelfth from Syria and the third and twenty-second from Alexandria… amongst his allies were a band of Arabs, formidable in themselves and harboring towards the Jews the bitter animosity usually subsisting between neighboring nations…

No, Rome was not just referring to the Jews’ religious identity, which Gandhi spoke of, here, but to a distinct nation and people.


If Indians can have a homeland, and Arabs almost two dozen created mostly via conquest of non-Arab peoples’ lands, then why single out and deny Jews their miniscule, resurrected one?

Towards the end of the movie made about Gandhi starring Ben Kingsley, there’s a telling scene. Numerous people are seen walking in opposite directions, depicting the population exchange involving many millions of people going on after the Indian subcontinent’s first partition.

The same thing happened after the Arabs’ attack on a reborn Israel in 1948.

For every Arab refugee created as a result of this, there was a Jewish refugee fleeing Arab/Muslim lands--where they were commonly known as kilab yahud...Jew dogs. Unlike Arabs, however, the Jews didn’t have almost two dozen other states (again, most conquered from non-Arab peoples) to choose from.

Those in India and elsewhere who still demand that Israel agree to suicide so that Arabs can have yet another state must also take the following into consideration…

How about allowing the creation of yet another Muslim state on Gandhi’s own Indian subcontinent--besides Pakistan and Bangladesh?

Not that I agree with this (I obviously don‘t), but there are still Indians today making the same arguments that Gandhi made earlier in terms of Israel and Zionism. And there are, after all, about 160 million Muslims in India...

With each new Arab or Arabized atrocity against India, those anti-Israel voices become fewer and fewer, but the ignorance leading up to those earlier positions must nonetheless be confronted head on.

The wars of the Dar ul-Islam and/or Arabism target any and all who dare stand in their murderous, subjugating way--be they in Kosovo, Darfur, Kurdistan, Israel, Lebanon, Egypt, the Philippines, Thailand, North Africa, and elsewhere…including India. The war against what Arabs call “their” kilab yahud--Jew dogs--has never been how big Israel is --but that Israel is.

Jews were murdered along with Hindus and others recently in Mumbai. Reports from Indian officials stated that the Jews were singled out for special torture… a rabbi and his pregnant wife included. The couple’s bloodied two-year old son had been clinging to his mother’s body and was saved by his Indian nanny.

I have, at last, one final thought (for now, at least) on these matters…

I’m hoping that, in death, this latest tragedy, committed in the name of the Dar ul-Islam, will bring closer together both India and the Jew of the Nations--Israel--to confront a common enemy which refuses to grant any justice whatsoever to any but its own.

[0] Trackbacks   [0] Pingbacks