Fitzgerald: Surely You're Joking, All You Muslims!

A week has passed now since this happened, and what has changed?

Eight people have been killed and nine wounded by a Palestinian gunman who infiltrated a Jewish seminary in West Jerusalem, Israeli officials say.

Witnesses said the gunman went into the library at the Mercaz Harav seminary in the city's Kiryat Moshe quarter and opened fire.

Much should have changed in the minds of the powerful. It is absurd for Abbas to be allowed to feign indignation over Israel's attempts to stop rockets reigning down on its cities, and to call a halt to negotiations. It is even more absurd for the Israelis themselves to be seen urging him to continue, or at least acquiescing in Rice's attempts to urge him to do so. For god's sake, it is Israel that should cut off the negotiations, period, never to resume them -- and the "never" can be represented to the world not as a "never" but as something else: after there has been a complete halt, for one year, on ALL terrorist attacks on Israel, whether from rockets fired indiscriminately into cities, or attacks on civilians such as this one, by individual or groups of Arab attackers, then we will think about opening negotiations again. Since there never will be such a year, the negotiations, and the idiotic peace-processing that only those heedless of Islam could conceivably put any stock in, would stop.

And they must stop. For all such negotiations, and all such agreements or accords or even "treaties" that result, will as always be scrupulously observed by Israel, which will always and everywhere be asked to give up tangible assets, necessary for its security and the possession of which are fully justified by appeals to law, morality, and history (but don't expect the olmerts and ramons and livnis to know about any of that), in exchange for promises which will not, cannot possibly be, observed by the Muslim Arabs with whom they make these agreements.

The basis of Arab treaty-making with Infidels or Infidel nation-states is, and always has been, the treaty of Al-Hudaibiyya signed by Muhammad with the Meccans in 628 A.D. After 18 months, on a pretext, Muhammad attacked them. And according to Muslims he was right to attack them, for his goal justified any and all means: the goal to spread Islam, and to make Islam dominate. There is no other goal. It is the only goal that counts. The Western notion, that Western governments including those of the United States and Israel, fondly assume are universally shared, that Pacta Sunt Servanda -- Treaties Are To Be Obeyed -- has nothing to do with the Islamic Law of War and Peace.

You don't believe me? Read any of the authoritative commentators and scholars. Start with Majid Khadduri's War and Peace in the Law of Islam. Study how Arafat referred to the treaty of Al-Hudaibiyya in explaining their negotiations with the Infidels to Arab audiences. Go from there. And for god's sake, learn to take seriously, and not to dismiss as if it were all just one incredible joke, what Muslims actually believe, and what they are taught to believe and have been taught to believe, for more than a millennium. There are two separate tasks: finding out about Islam, its texts and tenets and the attitudes that naturally arise in states and societies suffused with Islam, and then, taking those texts, those tenets, those attitudes seriously. That seriousness is not to be confused with taking seriously the charmers among the Arab diplomats and other representatives, who are all well-versed in double-talk, taqiyya and kitman, and are adept at running circles around the naive, easily deceived Infidels of every stripe and kind.

Is that too much to ask? Just to find out what Islam is all about? And then, having found out, taking it all seriously, and not in the spirit that Richard Feynman captured in the title of one of his books, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman?

No. Surely You're Joking, All You Muslims just will not do. It never did. But it certainly won't do now.

It has been seven days since this latest confirmation of the Muslim desire to destroy Israel. When will Bush and Rice and Olmert and Livni take note?