A Cartography Of Lunacy: Bush, Olmert And The Winding 'Road

HBendor — Sun Dec 02, 2007 1:13 pm

Author: HBendor

Posted: Sun Dec 02, 2007 1:13 pm

A Cartography Of Lunacy: Bush, Olmert And The Winding 'Road Map' To
Nuclear War (Part I)

By:Louis Rene Beres Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Back in August 2007, the Palestinian Authority (PA), Prime
Minister Olmert's "partner in peace," named a soccer tournament after
Ziyad Da'as, a Fatah-Tanzim terrorist who had been eliminated by
Israel exactly five years earlier. The Palestinian Da'as was
responsible for the heroic January 2002 attack in which gunmen opened
fire with an M-16 at a Bat Mitzvah in Hadera, murdering six and
seriously wounding thirty. With equal courage, he had also planned
the kidnapping and murder of two Israeli civilians in Tulkarem in
2001.

Such grotesque stories of official PA honors bestowed upon
Palestinian terrorists are quite common. In the matter of Ziyad
Da'as, the PA shamelessly identified a repeat murderer of women and
children "as one of the brave people of the Palestinian resistance."
The daily newspaper proudly carrying the story, Al Hayat Al Jadida,
is an organ owned by the Palestinian Authority.

What's wrong with this picture? For some reason, President
Bush � indifferent to the PA's true colors � continues to prod Prime
Minister Olmert to follow the "Road Map." Making matters even worse,
Messrs. Bush and Olmert, unimpressed by history and indifferent to
facts on the ground, now proceed smugly with their stillborn plan to
aid one Palestinian terrorist group against another. Moreover, in a
corollary policy of self-deception, they also supply even larger
packages of military assistance to those very same Arab governments
who mentor and sustain a broad spectrum of Islamist (anti-Israel/anti-
U.S.) terrorists.

Are our governments in Washington and Jerusalem
consciouslyself-destructive? In the sordid matter of arming Fatah
against Hamas (some time ago, both Israel and the US were actually
aiding assorted Islamist forces for presumed geopolitical benefit),
it is manifestly a policy built upon sand. Yet, both governments
accept the glaringly false presumption of a real difference between
two murderous terror organizations.

On the somewhat related issue of arming Sunni Arab states
against a Shiite Iran, the Bush policies are merely the latest
example of a time-dishonored expression of American Realpolitik; that
is, seeking some sort of tangible balance in regions of exceptional
competition and conflict. Admittedly, the metaphor of equilibrium is
neat and satisfying, but it bears no relation to the real world.

Searching for dynamic equilibrium in Middle Eastern politics
will inevitably spawn catastrophic failure. This is now especially
evident when we consider the profoundly destabilizing prospect of
Iranian nuclear weapons development. Taken together with the U.S.-
supported birthing of "Palestine," this increasingly probable impact
will produce various force multipliers with distinctly negative
synergies for both Israel and the United States.

What is really going on here? Bowing to the president of the
United States, the Olmert government now fully intends to conform to
the prescribed Road Map. These partisans of a starkly delusionary
diplomacy still believe, contrary to all ascertainable evidence and
to all recent history, that a process of unilateral dismemberment
(former Prime Minister Sharon called it "disengagement;" current
Prime Minister Olmert calls it "realignment") can somehow bring
mutually gainful resolution to the longstanding dispute between
Israel and its enemies.

Why such blinders? What these national leaders steadfastly
refuse to recognize is that the now-unavoidable civilizational
struggle against Arab/Islamic "genociders" has almost nothing to do
with territory. Rather, it has to do with an irreconcilable
configuration of foes that seeks not land, but religious hegemony.
From the standpoint of the PA or any of its kindred states and
movements, there can simply be no Jewish state in the midst of the
dar al-Islam, the world of Islam. Never. Period.

Ultimately, all Jihadists seek something far more personal
and far more elusive than land. They seek the ultimate form of power.
They seek immortality.

On its face, all world politics is a struggle for power. But
in this interminable struggle, there can be no greater power than the
power over death. The core dispute with the Palestinians, therefore,
will never be about any sort of political compromise. It will always
be about G-d

From 1948 to the present, the Arab/Islamist world's
existential opposition to Israel has stemmed from a deeply doctrinal
hatred of a Jewish state in the region of Islam � indeed, of any
Jewish state that dares to take hold in the "dar al-Islam."

Even now, this manifestly obvious observation seemingly
needs to be re-stated. After all, if Arab/Islamist opposition to
Israel were only about West Bank (Judea/Samaria) and Gaza, why were
there so many Arab terrorist attacks against Jews between 1948 and
1967? At that time, these disputed territories were still in Arab
hands. What exactly were these terrorists seeking to "liberate"
before there were any "Israel-occupied territories?"

The Palestine Liberation Organization was first formed in
1964, three years before the Six-Day War. What precisely was the PLO
seeking to "liberate"?

For that substantial portion of the Arab/Islamic world that
remains fully dedicated to Israel's annihilation, an inventive
cartography is merely part of a much wider strategy of genocide � a
term that is used here in the literal, jurisprudential sense; that
is, the explicit meaning codified at the 1948 Convention on the
Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Unambiguously,
the Road Map is merely the latest diplomatic routing to Jewish
extinction in the Middle East. First fashioned by the so-called
"Quartet" (the U.S., Russia, EU and UN), it is accepted by many
others only on an understanding of Israel as the individual Jew in
macrocosm.

To be sure, in the generally acknowledged Arab/Islamist
view, Israel is always the singular Jew writ large. The Jewish State
must thereforealways be loathed. Significantly, this insidious view
is a far cry from the wishful vision of the supporters of the Oslo/
Road Map/Disengagement/Realignment. For these more "optimistic"
archeologists of Jewish and American ruins-in-the-making, Israel
should be pleased that it is despised only because it is an
"occupier."

What can possibly sustain such "optimism?" We don't hear any
such territorial explanations of Arab/Islamist hatred from within
elements of the Arab/Islamist world. On the contrary, each and every
Israeli, every young Jewish infant and child as well as every
uniformed soldier, is hated in the Arab/Islamic world because he is a
Jew. That is the whole story � the whole indisputable story.

An authoritative expression of this mainstream Islamist view
was clarified in an important article in Al-Ahram. Here, the
religiously prominent Dr. Lufti Abd al-Azim wrote straightforwardly
and unhesitatingly: "The first thing we have to make clear is that,
no distinction must be made between the Jew and the Israeli.... The
Jew is a Jew, through the millennia.... in spurning all moral values,
devouring the living and drinking his blood for the sake of a few
coins. The Jew, the merchant of Venice, does not differ from the
killer of Deir Yasin or the killer of the camps. They are equal
examples of human degradation. Let us therefore put aside such
distinctions and talk about Jews."

The regionally and Islamically revered Dr. Abd al-Azim is
hardly alone in this position. A current Egyptian textbook on ARAB
ISLAMIC HISTORY � widely used in teacher training colleges �
expresses the following revealing sentiments:"The Jews are always the
same, every time and everywhere. They will not live save in darkness.
They contrive their evils clandestinely. They fight only when they
are hidden, because they are cowards.... The Prophet enlightened us
about the right way to treat them, and succeeded finally in crushing
the plots that they had planned. We today must follow this way and
purify Palestine from their filth."

Some April 2006 postings from the Muslim Brotherhood
Children's Website (based in Egypt, a country "at peace" with Israel)
are also worth mentioning:

"Did you know that the Jews murdered 25 of the Prophets of
Allah, and that their black history is full of crimes of murder and
corruption?"

"Did you know that the criminal Jews frequently revile and
curse our Lord?"

"Did you know that the Jews made several attempts to murder
our beloved Prophet, but that Allah the Omnipotent saved him from
their plot?"

"Did you know that the corruption and deviance widespread in
the world today are the result of activity and planning by the Jews,
who are interested in leading people astray, away from the path of
Allah?"

"Did you know that the Jews who occupy our land and our holy
places in beloved Palestine are planning to occupy the rest of the
Muslim countries and to establish a Greater Israel, from the
Euphrates to the Nile, and that they are interested in excavating in
the tomb of our beloved Prophet?"

"Did you know that today the Jews are inciting the entire
world against Islam and the Muslims, on the pretext of the war
against terror?"

How, then, shall we understand current advocates of peace in
the Middle East through further diplomatic negotiations? Some
supporters of the Road Map and its attendant disengagements and
realignments base their position on the Palestinian claim to
territories (Judea/Samaria/Gaza). Leaving aside the very questionable
nature of the underlying demographic argument (e.g., the commonly
stated and unsupported assertion that current Palestinians are
descended directly from the ancient Canaanites), these supporters
conveniently ignore the continuous Jewish presence in these lands.

They also ignore that more than one million Palestinians are
now full citizens of Israel, enjoying substantially more legal rights
(especially women) than do their counterparts in the Arab/Islamic
world. Also generally forgotten, is that 900,000 Jews were
slaughtered or expelled from Muslim area states after 1948 � states
that even today deny Jews any parallel rights of dignity or
nationality. Yet, it is the Palestinians � not the Israelis � who
cling relentlessly to the grotesque idea of Jihad.

The "sacred" struggle to evict "The Jews" from "all of
Palestine" (that is, from Israel as well as from Judea/Samaria/Gaza)
is driven by high expectations of Holy War. According to certain
Islamic orthodoxy, the Prophet is said to have predicted a final war
to annihilate the Jews. Mohammed, it is reported, had stated: "The
hour (i.e., salvation) will not come until you fight against the
Jews; and the stone would say, `O Muslim! There is a Jew behind me:
come and kill him.'"

Israel's Peace Process supporters, in advancing Palestinian
"legal" claims, forget that the PLO once urged Saddam Hussein to
launch annihilatory attacks upon Israeli noncombatants during the
1991 Gulf War. Then, Yassir Arafat had enthusiastically embraced
Saddam Hussein in Baghdad, openly sending units of the Palestinian
Liberation Army (PLA) to join in the inter-Arab killing, rape and
torture of Kuwaitis. Following the Iraqi aggression, Arafat and the
PLO supported Saddam's Baghdad in many different ways. At the Cairo
Summit of August 10, 1990, Arafat tried to deflect attention from the
barbarous invasion toward the crises in Afghanistan and Kashmir.
Abdul Abbas sent his own paramilitary forces into the occupied state
to help "police" the sheikhdom. So, too, did the PFLP's George Habash
and the DFLP's Nayef Hawatmeh. At the time, Mohammed Milhem, senior
aide to Arafat, publicly threatened Fatah-led terrorism "everywhere"
in support of Iraq. This is the very same Fatah that Israel and the
United States now arm and support � the same "moderate" Fatah.

Copyright� The Jewish Press, November 30, 2007. All rights
reserved

LOUIS REN� BERES (Ph.D., Princeton, 1971) lectures and
publishes widely on Israeli and US counter-terrorism and nuclear
security policies. Chair of Project Daniel, he is Strategic and
Military Affairs columnist for The Jewish Press, and the author of
ten major books dealing with international relations and
international law.

MEPE

A Cartography Of Lunacy: Bush, Olmert And The Winding 'Road