The promise by Obama in his AIPAC speech to "personally" take part in a renewal of Israeli-"Palestinian" negotiations is worrisome. Very. It should fill everyone with anxiety. For everything about Obama until now -- the people he has allowed to tell him all about "Palestine" (Rashid Khalidi), the people who were his early financial backers (Anton Rezko, who in turn is backed by an Iraqi billionaire), his early political backers (Rev. Wright, possibly Louis Farrakhan), his choice of foreign-policy advisers (Zbigniew Brezezinski, and Samantha Powers), his endorsement by Jimmy Carter, all point in one direction.And his endorsement of one undivided capital is "just words," until we see exactly what he means by this. And he should be asked. Does he mean Jerusalem as the Israelis now define it, and include the Old City? And what else does he mean?
Given all of Obama's connections in the past, given that he has not once spoken out about the texts and tenets of Islam, and not shown that he understands why the Iraq war makes little sense (it makes little sense because its goals as now set by the Administration will not weaken the Camp of Islam and Jihad; it would be far better to allow ethnic and sectarian fissures to fester and to widen), but is simply opposed to it for possibly all the wrong chomskyan reasons, the burden is on him.
Those who care about Israel's wellbeing should be doing two things. They should be attempting to persuade McCain to get unstuck from Tarbaby Iraq, and to begin to understand why the Iraq venture does not, and cannot, have much of an effect on the Money Weapon, Da'wa, and demographic conquest, in Western Europe, or elsewhere.
And the second thing they should be doing is trying to persuade Barack Obama that they don't want him involved, "personally" or otherwise, in any negotiations between Israel and the Arabs. Every single bit of peace-processing by any Americans has always led to pressure on the Israelis, and a cruel blackening of their image. Every single attempt has been one more effort where the Americans give credence to a false view of the Arab war against Israel, a war without end, a war that has no "solution" (as some seem to think it does, and even seem to assume that it does, with that silly phrase "the two-state solution").
There is no "solution," but that does not mean that open war is necessarily inevitable. If Israel stays strong, and overwhelmingly so, the principle of deterrence will continue to work. Egypt does not refrain from going to war because it "made peace" with Israel. It does not go to war for the same reason that Syria doesn't, or Saudi Arabia doesn’t. The consequences of such an act -- the damage that Israel could and would inflict -- are too great, and the Egyptian government knows it.
But every single negotiation and bit of peace-processing, every attempt to come to grips with what some American negotiators, such as the comical Aaron Miller, like to call, breathlessly, "thefourcoreissues....settlementsrefugeesjerusalemsecurity" -- misses the point. There are not, as the aaron-millers believe, "four core issues" -- settlemenets, refugees, Jerusalem, security. There is only one issue. And that issue is Islam, and the view that Islam inculcates, the view deeply imbedded in the texts and tenets of Islam: the view that no Infidel nation-state, whatever its size or status, can be permitted to exist on land that was once possessed by Muslims. And that is particularly true if the Infidels in question are the Jews, who under Muslim rule were seen as weak, and therefore to be treated with appropriate contempt, for they had no powerful friends in Western Christendom (as the Christians could at least think they did). And still worse, Israel is located right between the two wings of what the Arabs regard as the heart of Islamdom, the Arab Muslim domain.
Barack Obama, whose father was a Muslim, whose stepfather was a Muslim, who himself was treated as a Muslim when he lived in Indonesia from the ages of 6 to 10, does not see the necessity of learning about Islam, at least without the officious intervention of apologists such as the assorted espositos and MESA-Nostrans, those on the Saudi or other Arab payroll, or those who, being Muslims themselves, or having entered the field, as so many of the non-Muslims in it have, because they are deeply attracted to the idea of Islam. Such apologists would be for Obama dangerous guides indeed, if he is not capable of seeing why he needs to distance himself from Islam -- for the sake not only of those whose support he asks for as he presumes to claim a high office that requires of him the ability to both instruct and protect the citizens, but also so that Muslims do not think they have a secret friend in the White House. That might lead to all kinds of dangerous rashness -- especially since he doesn't understand as yet that the threat or menace of Islamic Jihad is not a fiction dreamed up by right-wing crazies, but has been a fact of world geopolitics for the past 1350 years, and in the past, before the Great Age of Inhibition, all of the keenest minds, from Hume to Tocqueville to Churchill, saw and wrote with apprehension about the nature of Islam.
He has time to educate himself. He is now done with any need to placate Farrakhan, or Wright, or Pfleger, or to limit his learning to that smyler with the knyf under the cloke, a former propagandist for the PLO in Beirut, so we are told -- and the recipient of the no-courses-and-no-waiting D. Phil. that Albert Hourani used to hand out to Arab and Muslim graduate students without too much fuss, with their favorite topic being, bien entendu, "The Construction of a Palestinian Identity."
He's got to do this. This undivided capitol stuff just won't do. He's got to understand what prompts the endless Arab and Muslim war against Israel, because he should not repeat the mistakes of the past presidents, including Bill Clinton, in devoting time and energy to an impossible and depleting and pointless task that can only help the Arabs and weaken Israel (and make many enemies in this country, who will not forget in 2012). He should forget about Israel and the Arabs, and concentrate on the big questions -- the menace of Islam, and the instruments of Jihad that really count, such as Da'wa and deployment of the Money Weapon in a Western Europe about which Barack Obama seems to take no interest. He has said he wants to spend $50 billion in Africa, and there is a very great third-world element to his outlook that, while hardly surprising, is unsettling and potentially dangerous for those who still think the West matters, and the heart of the West, without which the West has no meaning, is Europe.
Will he rise to the occasion? Or will he sink into the swamp of that peace-processing that in and of itself inevitably becomes anti-Israel, for it is Israel that is always asked to give up the tangible for the intangible promise, and Israel that, in every single agreement with the Arabs it has ever made, has scrupulously fulfilled its obligations, only to see the other side breach its own in any way it can, and to do so without the United States stepping in to remind that country that it did, after all, agree to this or to that. Egypt has failed to live up to the only thing it was asked to do under the Camp David Accords, which was to encourage friendly relations and an end to hostility. Mubarak has only once, and only at the border, gone to Israel -- save for Rabin's funeral. The Der-Stuermer-like campaign in the Egyptian press, and on television, including a series based on "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," does not constitute living up to the solemn commitments Egypt -- not Saint Sadat but Egypt -- made under the Camp David Accords. And not once has the American government, which forced the Israelis to make concession after concession, dared to remind Egypt of all this, despite Egypt’s being the recipient so far of $65 billion in disguised Jizyah. For "Jizyah" is the money that is given by Infidels out of fear, and that Muslims receive as by right, without any felt gratitude -- which exactly describes the aid given by the Americans to Egypt.
No one who worries either about Israel's fate, or about the fate of the Infidels, should be consoled by this speech. Obama will have to address, and intelligently, the texts and tenets and attitudes and atmospherics of Islam. He has to offer a strategy for dealing with campaigns of Da'wa, for ending the Money Weapon -- with the Saudis alone having spent nearly $100 billion to promote Islam's spread in Infidel lands, not least by building mosques and madrasas and conducting propaganda campaigns, and buying up academic centers, and employing a small army of Western hirelings -- ex-diplomats, ex-C.I.A. agents, businessmen eager for contracts, journalists, teachers.
He's got to do this. He's got to see Islam plain, and not mimic this Administration's failure to have thought things through, that still rules the day. For that would make even many now applauding his AIPAC speech rue the day.
By god, if he looked at this task in the right way, he would see that it is manageable, if only he doesn't get distracted and sinks into the swamp of "Israeli-'Palestinian' negotiations, and hudnas, and treaties of Al-Hudaibiyya that the Muslim side has a right and a duty to breach whenver it can.
I'd put up right here a dozen things that could be done to divide and demoralize the Camp of Islam and Jihad -- for less than a billion dollars. And that compares favorably with the 2-3 trillion that the fiasco in Iraq, based on messianic sentimentalism (for how else to describe the project of bringing "freedom" to "ordinary moms and dads" in the Middle East?), except that I'd rather not allow others in the enemy camp to listen in.
Yes, Obama has to do all of this.
And so, too, of course, does McCain.
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