vin/020404.html
Many in Congress and the hand-wringing "world community" -- whoever that is -- assert that President Bush must intervene more dramatically (and needless to say, "even-handedly") to stop the Palestinian Arabs and the Israelis from fighting over who shall occupy and have sovereignty over the lands of Israel.
Pardon me? Can I hear that read back again? Are any Israeli or Jewish terrorists blowing themselves up at family holiday feasts in Jordan -- that half of the old British protectorate of Palestine which was given to the Palestinians as their own state (yes, a "sovereign Palestinian state") generations ago -- murdering non-combatants in order to win territorial or other concessions from the Jordanians?
No. Yet that is precisely what a 25-year-old Palestinian Arab terrorist linked to Yasser Arafat's organization did last week in Israel, killing 20 guests (including small children) as they sat down to their Passover Seder supper at a hotel in the coastal town of Netanya.
That's worse than murder. "Murders" tend to be isolated and aberrant acts, unlikely to spread like a contagion, unlikely to win endorsement by any part of society. But these suicide bombings, precisely by being randomized, are designed to spread terror among an entire people. They are political terrorism, as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld correctly pointed out Monday -- no different from what Americans saw right here at home on Sept. 11.
A justifiable cause? If we assert that any cause justifies the willful murder of innocent children, we release our grip on any safety line which can be called "civilization."
But in fact, the time for enervating moral relativism is at an end. The Israeli and Palestinian causes are not morally equivalent. At the risk of oversimplifying, suppose you hand each of two children a Hostess Twinkie. The overweight boy wolfs his down (the Palestinian Arabs happily accept their proffered state of Jordan, kicking out most Jews who were resident there up through 1922, with no compensation for their looted property, and proceed to turn in into just one more backward, impoverished medieval satrapy), while his sister wisely sets hers aside for later (the Israelis -- including Jews uprooted from Jordan -- "get over it" and set about making their desert bloom.) Soon you hear the children shrieking, and enter the room to find the boy -- who has already consumed his own Twinkie -- trying to grab his sister's.
Is the correct answer to "even-handedly facilitate a negotiation of how the second Twinkie shall be divided" -- even as the boy insists he's going to take the rest as soon as you leave the room, no matter what terms his smaller sister reluctantly agrees to?
How do you sponsor a "negotiation" between a victim and her would-be rapist or murderer? Do you urge her to submit as long as he promises to "pull out early"? Would you declare "good progress is being made" if the would-be killer vows to "only cut off her arm ... this time"?
While the Bush Doctrine calls for the ouster of any leaders who sponsor terrorism or harbor terrorists, Yasser Arafat of the PLO has long been granted an exemption based on the theory that he has "agreed to a peace process."
But has he? The first premise in any legitimate "peace negotiation" is that the two parties come to the table as as equals, each acknowledging the other's legitimate right to exist. Has Yasser Arafat ever renounced -- in public, in Arabic, to his own people, and in writing -- that section of the PLO charter which calls for the destruction of the state of Israel, for "pushing the Jews into the sea"?
He has not. He and his radical Arab backers -- including professional assassin Saddam Hussein of Iraq, who has now upped his payoff from $10,000 to $25,00 for the surviving family of each Palestinian suicide bomber -- will not even condemn these suicide attacks. One of last week's Palestinian suicide bombers has previously been identified as a terror suspect by Israeli police -- his name duly turned over to Arafat's PLO. The intended murderer was detained for a few days, and then released, in a procedure typical of the "revolving door" which Arafat uses to make a mockery of his cynical promises to "curb the violence" by apprehending and dealing with the perpetrators.
Hey, "Good progress"!
Did Arafat try to import a shipload full of modern munitions from Iran last fall because he hopes for and anticipates any kind of "final peace"?
Radical Arab elements have been unable to defeat Israel in three traditional wars since 1948, so they are now attempting to advance the same agenda through the terror tactic of the suicide bomber. If they are allowed to succeed, disenfranchised groups around the world will take note of their success and emulate this tactic.
Arafat is fair game
Make no mistake, Israel is seen as our surrogate in this struggle. If Washington pulls Israel's choke-chain one more time, our common enemies will draw the perfectly sensible conclusion that Washington will take the same stance -- whimpering appeasement -- when the terror bombers next strike Chicago and New Orleans and Los Angeles.
If we want to see more terror attacks on the model of Sept. 11, right here at home, all we need do now is insist that President Bush intervene and give the Palestinian Arabs some further part of what they want from Israel -- buying in, for instance, to the cynical Saudi "peace plan" in which Israel would withdraw to her indefensible pre-1967 borders, with no guarantee or even likelihood that the same grind-'em-down terror tactics won't resume again in a few months, or a few years.
(The lands occupied by Israel since 1967 are really only the latest pathetic pretext, of course -- the Palestinians and Egyptians and Syrians were loudly and publicly vowing to "push the Zionists into the sea" just as enthusiastically from 1948 to 1966, when all the lands now in question were safely in Arab hands. In fact, the main difference since 1967 is that Israel now allows Muslims access to their holy sites on the West Bank, as the Arabs never allowed Jewish and Christian access before 1967 ... competing religions being largely banned in Arab lands under penalty of imprisonment.)
In fact, imposing the cynical Saudi peace plan would only encourage the terrorists' brethren around the world to explore new and more innovative uses for the suicide tactics which we would thus endorse and reward.
Why is it American policy not to negotiate with hostage takers? For the same reason. When you reward one, a dozen more spring forth to give it a try.
Didn't Secretary Rumsfeld say Monday, "We cannot afford as a country to not seek out the terrorists and the countries that harbor terrorists"?
Didn't State Department deputy spokesman Philip Reeker add, "Terror will never advance Palestinian political aspirations"? Yet that's precisely what will happen if the United States now enforces more Twinkie-splitting.
Yasser Arafat must be held directly responsible for the waves of terror now embroiling Israel. The Palestinians' "exemption" from the "War on Terror" must end. Israel is now fighting a war on behalf of the entire civilized world. Ariel Sharon has vowed to "destroy the terrorist infrastructure." Doesn't that describe precisely what we've been attempting in Afghanistan -- and what we now ponder undertaking in Iraq and (hopefully) in northeast Pakistan? Why is it appropriate to urge any "restraint" in such a campaign? Wouldn't that be like taking only half the dose of antibiotics needed to get the job done -- just as we coaxed Israel to do in 1967, and again in 1973, all in the interest of "regional stability"?
Does anyone doubt who's on our side, here? Didn't the Palestinian Arabs dance in the streets and throw candy in celebration when they saw the World Trade Center towers collapsing on Sept. 11? No Israelis did that.
The AP reports from Jerusalem, April 2: "Israeli soldiers foiled a suicide bombing by shooting at explosives strapped to the attacker's chest, detonating the bomb and killing the man before he could get close enough to harm others, the military said Wednesday.
"Soldiers began firing at the man, who appeared to have something bulky around his torso, after he charged them Tuesday night at a checkpoint in Baka al-Sharkiyeh, a Palestinian village along the line between Israel and the West Bank, the military said. The bombing was the seventh such attack in seven days. ..."
Under such circumstances, my question is not why Israelis aren't treating young Palestinians with more civility in the West Bank, but how they have so far avoided shooting a lot more of them on sight. During the battle of Okinawa, did our forces wait to see which Japanese planes were kamikazes before shooting them all down? The reason soldiers wear uniforms is so we can distinguish them from the non-combatants in their own populace. Launch a war with no uniforms, in which terrorist child-murderers cleverly and quite purposely and systematically disguise themselves as "non-combatants" to slip through the lines, and what tactic do you suppose you're going to eventually force the other side to adopt?
Yet the Palestinians now complain the Israelis are "harassing non-combatants"?
Good one, Yasser. Could you hold your head up a bit higher?
'Anything you need?'
The long-term effect of America financial aid to Israel is to prop up a protectionist, socialist welfare state. Cut off that aid -- and our equivalent Danegeld to Egypt -- and the resulting transition to more entrepreneurial, free-market regimes will benefit everyone in the region.
Cut off the financial aid, by all means. It's blatantly unconstitutional, to begin with.
But when the Arabists urge us to "stop intervening to support Israel," they should beware the risks of having their wish come true. The main impact of American interventions in the Middle East in the past 50 years has been to restrain Israel from whupping the Arabs convincingly enough to upset the "stability" of the absurd, strutting clown princes we systematically set up and protect (the "king" of Saudi Arabia hasn't been able to sit up and feed himself for years, for heaven's sake -- is anyone even sure he's not embalmed?) on the absurd premise that whoever replaces them might refuse to sell us their oil.
What else are their successors going to do with the stuff, use it as a laxative?
Far from intervening in the interests of "peace and stability" -- the kind of ongoing "peace and stability" Israelis have been enjoying of late, mind you -- America's goal in the Mideast today should be to promote war and instability -- the kind of war and instability that freed England in 1649, America in 1781, and France in 1789.
When the current condition of a people is abject ignorance, slavery and impoverishment, war is a very effective crucible for social change. Utter defeat did wonders for Germany and Japan in 1945; it might be just the medicine for the Arab world today.
When was the last time anyone held a free election in Egypt, Syria, Jordan or Saudi Arabia? When was the last time those regimes tolerated a free press or competing religions, free to loudly condemn their current crop of kleptocrats?
The problem is not tiny Israel, which voices no ambitions, either murderous or territorial -- it's a depraved, paranoid, backward, sexually repressed Arab world whose leaders have been deflecting attention from their own thievery, corruption, greed, and failure through the classic mechanism of the "Jewish scapegoat" for 80 years.
In the short term, if George Bush were to call Ariel Sharon this week, far from urging restraint, the only presidential remarks that would make any sense would be: "Way to roll, Ariel. What took you so long? Think you can get the job done this time? Anything you need? Napalm?"
Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the daily Las Vegas Review-Journal, a monthly contributor to "Shotgun News," and the author of "Send in the Waco Killers." For information on his monthly newsletter, "Privacy Alert," or on his new book, "The Ballad of Carl Drega," dial 775-348-8591, e-mail privacyalert@thespiritof76.com, or write 561 Keystone Ave., Suite 684, Reno, NV 89503.
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Vin Suprynowicz, vin@lvrj.com
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