The real danger

Sarah Honig

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 self-defense – 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-cum-fraudulent 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