The Foundation for Constitutional Democracy

[Edited transcript of the Eidelberg Report, Israel National Radio, October 23, 2006.]

The day after Saudi and Egyptian suicide bombers destroyed the World Trade Center, killing almost 3,000 people, President George W. Bush assured Americans that Islam is a “religion of peace.”

The British were offered the same soporific by prime minister Tony Blair after the July 7, 2005 jihadist bombings in London. The media were no different. In June 2006, after 17 Muslims were arrested in Canada on suspicion of plotting terrorist attacks against the Canadian Parliament building, The Ontario Citizen blamed Islamic “extremists.” Islam itself was innocent.

Six months earlier, the followers of the religion of peace erupted in rage over the famous (or infamous) Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad. Robert Spencer observed that the cartoons were much less offensive than what is routinely printed in every U.S. newspaper about American presidents. Some of the cartoons simply called attention to the fact that jihad terrorists claim Muhammad’s example and words as their inspiration.

The cartoons nonetheless triggered diplomatic protests throughout the Islamic world. Libya and Saudi Arabia recalled their ambassadors. Protests were issued by the World Muslim League, the Organization of the Islamic Conference, and other Muslim organizations. Death threats flowed from various Islamic countries. At least 139 people were killed and more than 800 were injured in Muslim riots around the globe

To this day, however, Western policy-makers and opinion-makers would have us believe that jihadists merely constitute a group of “militants” that have hijacked this so-called religion of peace.

They would also have us believe that the incessant Arab terrorist attacks in Israel are unrelated phenomena. Are pundits engaging in deception or in self-deception? Since Mr. Bush became president in January 2001—or let us say since Ariel Sharon became Israel’s prime minister in February 2001—Muslims have murdered more than 1,000 Jews. Ah, but this is about a territorial issue than about Islam—isn’t it?

Even while Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmanidejad threatens to wipe Israel off the map and construct a world without America, Islam is still portrayed as a “religion of peace”! Never mind the works of eminent scholars such as Bernard Lewis, Daniel Pipes, and Bat Ye’or who, like Robert Spencer, have thoroughly refuted this politically correct drivel.

But wait! If Islam is not a religion of peace, indeed, if its holy book, the Koran, is the “Mein Kampf of war—as Churchill has written—why have eight Israeli prime ministers since 1977 pursued the policy of “territory for peace” with Islamic regimes? Were they ignorant of the true nature of Islam?

Surely Israeli academics know better. No less than Hebrew University Professor Yehoshofat Harkabi, the mentor of Shimon Peres and onetime head of Israel Military Intelligence, did not regard Islam as a religion of peace. To the contrary, in his book Arab Attitudes to Israel, written just before the Six Day War of June 1967, Harkabi refers to Islam as a “combatant” and “expansionist” creed. “The idea of the Jihad,” he writes, “is fundamental in Islam.” Indeed, “hatred,” “hostility,” and “conflict,” he says, are endemic to Arab-Islamic culture.

Harkabi’s book is replete with hundreds of quotes from diverse Islamic sources vilifying Jews and Israel in the most lurid terms and promising the eventual annihilation of the Jewish state. In Harkabi’s lengthy tome one finds not a single exception to this ventilation of Arab hatred—not even from Islamic scholars.

How could Israeli prime ministers ignore this genocidal hatred and pursue the policy of “territory for peace”? By so doing, did they not convey to the world that the conflict between Jews and Arabs was over territory, hence, that religion or Islam was not the overriding issue? We shouldn’t be surprised, therefore, that American and British statesmen mistake Islam as a religion of peace when Israeli prime ministers have pursued a policy not inconsistent with this error—yes, and have propagated this error for more than thirty years.

By the way, Harkabi also served as the head of Israel’s war college, which does not mean he promoted his own well-documented conclusion that Islam is a religion of war. In fact, contrary to the mountain of evidence about the bellicose nature of Islam, Harkabi was convinced that a peaceful and political solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict was possible—to which end he advocated the establishment of a PLO-Palestinian state alongside Israel!

This logically absurd attitude is symptomatic of political schizophrenia. This malady is rampant in the democratic world, which is why I have called it “demophrenia.” I attribute this malady—this inability to draw the logical consequences of Islam’s inherent bellicosity—to the corrosive influence moral relativism, a doctrine that permeates every level of education in the democratic world, a doctrine that corrupts the intellect and impairs the ability of statesmen to acknowledge and adequately respond to the enormity of evil.

That policy-makers and opinion-makers in the democratic world avow that Islam is a religion of peace despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary also indicates that democracy’s ruling elites—politicians and judges, academics and journalists—lack the courage to face the awesome truth that a burgeoning, totalitarian religion threatens to engulf mankind.

The Danish cartoons may not have been in good taste, but if prohibited in a democracy, there is not only an end of freedom but the beginning of universal servitude under sharia, Islamic law. Here I am reminded of the purge trials and thought-control of the Soviet Union.

In May 1934, Soviet secret police arrested the Russian writer N. Mandelstam. He was brought to the Lubyanka, where he was forced to confess that he was the author of a poem, one line of which referred to Stalin’s “large laughing cockroach eyes.” He was condemned to the labor camps, where he died and was buried in a mass grave for Gulag prisoners.

There were countless “infidels” like Mandelstam in Communist Russia. Between 1935 and 1940, some 19 million people were arrested in the Soviet Union, of whom over seven million died, either in the Gulag or by execution. Over seven million! History records another slaughter of that magnitude, namely, Islam’s massacre of some seven million “infidels” in India.

Slaughter on this scale, now facilitated by weapons of mass destruction, cannot be prevented by democratic diplomacy. Nothing less than all out war against the “religion of peace” can save mankind from a new Dark Age.

To be more specific, the United States should:

1. Proclaim that it will sever diplomatic relations with any Islamic regime that violates the rights of women or persecutes any non-Muslim minority.

2. Attack Islam ideologically by exposing its true nature, citing renowned experts for this purpose, including alienated Muslims.

3. Terminate the funding of mosques, madrassas, and other activities in America by Saudi Arabia, Iran, and others.

4. Either demand the expulsion from the United Nations of any state that violates the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, or call for the dissolution of the UN and its replacement by an association of democratic countries.

5. Eliminate the Iranian regime, beginning with an attack on its nuclear facilities.

6. Declare that any attack on an American city by any Islamic entity will result in the destruction of Mecca and Medina.

7. Call upon Israel to use overwhelming force to destroy the entire terrorist network west of the Jordan River, and declare that any attack on Israel will be deemed an attack on the United States.

If the U.S. lacks the leadership or the will to pursue such a strategy—which seems to be the case—then America will eventually succumb to the fate hovering over Europe.