John Dillinger 521.
(photo credit: Courtesy)
It’s a decade since 9/11, an anniversary that must provoke uneasy thoughts
everywhere – including, for instance, on US President Barack Obama’s
perspectives.
But does it? Kadima headliner Tzipi Livni recently granted
an interview to The Atlantic magazine in which she waxed ecstatic about Obama’s
pressure on Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and zealously recommended
more.It’s as if a cynical, self-willed disconnect from our realities
caused Livni to forget her own tenure as foreign minister and rendered her
bizarrely oblivious to Obama’s worldview.
Otherwise she’d have recalled
that two years ago, when addressing Turkey’s parliament, Obama expressed profuse
appreciation “for the Islamic faith, which has done so much over so many
centuries to shape the world for the better, including in my own
country.”
This is Obama’s recurrent and persistent theme. “We are not at
war with Islam,” he has declaimed repetitively on numerous occasions. By
inference, neither is Islam at war with America, or, for that matter with Israel
– to say nothing of any other democracy where Muslim terrorists have set off an
explosive device or two.
Suicide-bombing, we learn from the leader of the
sole superpower, is a disagreeable felony of which anyone anywhere is capable –
without infrastructure, broad backing, etc. Thus Obama has variously described
the perpetrators of 9/11 as “a sorry band of men” or “some small band of
murderers.”
Accordingly, what’s needed to counteract them isn’t resolute
and rigorous selfdefense – certainly not war – but something more akin to police
action.
Indeed, when Osama bin Laden was terminated, it was along the
lines of Melvin Purvis’s 1934 trap for John Dillinger. The “public enemy” was
gunned down without trial or fuss, just as Osama would be decades
later.
Like Dillinger, Osama – according to Obama – was just an obnoxious
hood.
That’s why, when announcing bin Laden’s violent demise, the free
world’s current commander-in-chief yet again made it his point to hone the
message that “we are not – and never will be – at war with Islam.”
ON THE
narrowest pragmatic plane, the sentiment isn’t entirely without
merit.
Why would America, Israel or any democracy desire to portray
itself as taking on the whole Muslim world? The last thing we wish or need – or
ever wished or needed – is a clash of civilizations.
But complicating our
wishful thinking is the not-so-negligible matter of whether this is also how
militant Islam interprets things. For the purposes of this deliberation, we can
justifiably dispense with the charade of “moderate Islam.” At best – if it’s at
all real and not an expedient-cumfraudulent façade – Islamic moderation cowers
abjectly in a murky twilight zone, mute and invisible.
The issue is
whether vehement Islam, whose inflammatory rhetoric resonates worldwide, doesn’t
regard itself as being in a war with us. Much as we abhor conflict, the choice
isn’t exclusively ours.
If Islamists incite to battle, can we make do
with sitting back, trying to see their point of view, making nice and attempting
to sooth their frenzy with brotherly blandishments? This precisely is Obama’s
advice. It’s not merely his tactic – not even a strategy – but his outright
ideology, the one Livni wants forced upon us.
OBAMA’S AGENDA is to remove
the seeming pretexts for Muslim rage. This is where we come in, big-time. We,
Israelis, are the much-demonized, purported fly in the Arab/Muslim
ointment.
To judge from Obama’s glib patter, he unreservedly subscribes
to the theory that all which kindles Arab/Muslim enmity toward Israel is the
territories Israel won in the Six Day War (never mind that said war was waged in
classic self-defense, imposed on a beleaguered small nation openly threatened
with genocide).
Browbeaten, we play along, in the desperate hope that
we’ll thereby gain a modicum of approval. Hence Netanyahu acquiesced, despite
himself, to the two-state cliché instead of exclaiming that it’s nothing but a
red herring – a propaganda ploy geared to divert international attention from
much more sinister ultimate objectives vis-à-vis the Jewish state. Little
Israel’s very existence ignites Arab passions, not its size.
But if
Netanyahu assumed he’d secure a breather by mouthing the two-state mantra, he
soon found himself faced with a new diktat – a return to the pre-1967 armistice
lines. That’s the inexorable nature of concessions. One leads to
another.
The land-swap supposed sweetener is in any case bitter, because
the Arabs insist they’ll agree – maybe – only to a 5-percent exchange tops, and
they want “quality trades.” In other words, there’s no point deluding ourselves
that we’d avoid excruciating punishment.
The gist of it is that Obama
demands we cede 95% of everything beyond 1949’s Green Line, and offer giveaways
for the remaining 5%. These are surrender terms rather than the victor’s
magnanimity. We often forget that we were forced to defend ourselves in 1967 and
that we won.
Wholesale retreat would mean the wholesale need to re-house
hundreds of thousands of uprooted Israelis, the encirclement of re-divided
Jerusalem, and the rise of a new Hamastan – on the direct doorstep of most of us
in densely packed central Israel.
Let there be no doubt: Hamas will
triumph in Judenrein Judea and Samaria just as it did in Judenrein
Gaza.
This is where Obama willy-nilly leads us, regardless of what soon
happens at the UN.
The General Assembly is merely a grotesque
sideshow.
OUR DELEGITIMIZATION is inextricably bound with Obama’s
perception that there’s no conflict with Islam and that peace on earth and
goodwill to all men would be at hand... if we weren’t in the way.
Just as
Jimmy Carter’s credulity bequeathed us the Ayatollahs’ theocracy and spawned a
belligerent Iran with nuclear ambitions, so Obama will leave us an Iranian proxy
atop Israel’s soft underbelly.
This is what Kadima, Labor’s leftovers,
Meretz and beyond abet. In at least Livni’s case, it’s for ill-disguised
partisan self-interest.
To hear her, our travails all begin and end with
“Netanyahu’s intransigence.”
But what if she were to win? What if
relatively less-harmful European leaders like Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy,
David Cameron and Silvio Berlusconi were replaced by more inimical sorts (as
well they might be)? And what if Obama is reelected in 2012 (a scenario that
mustn’t be written off)? We might then witness best buds Tzipi and Barack
reciting in wondrous harmony their profuse appreciation “for the Islamic faith,
which has done so much... to shape the world for the better, including in my own
country.” That’s the real danger.
www.sarahhonig.com
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