The Foundation for Constitutional Democracy

Israel is at war. Hence, it is of crucial importance for Israeli politicians and journalists to understand and relate appropriately to Israel’s enemy, especially what the enemy thinks of Jews. For this purpose, allow me to recall what happened some ten years ago when a Jewish reserve soldier, Shmuel Meiri, was lynched by Arabs in Ramallah. I do so because the photographs taken of the faces of his Arab assailants convey a hatred of visceral and demonic proportions. This hatred reminded me of what has been said of the feelings of Muslims Chechens toward Russians.

Writing on the subject in The New York Times (December 18, 1994), Steven Erlanger quotes the celebrated Russian author Leo Tolstoi.

Tolstoi writes of the Russian destruction of a Chechen village: “The emotion felt by every Chechen, old and young, was stronger than hatred. It was not hatred, it was a refusal to recognize these Russian dogs as men at all, and a feeling of such disgust [and] revulsion … that the urge to destroy them—like the urge to destroy rats, venomous spiders, or wolves—was an instinct as natural as self-preservation.” This aptly describes what Muslims feel toward Jews, as was evident in the faces of the Arabs who lynched Shmuel Meiri.

There is a streak of paganism in their boundless hatred. Let me describe how the late Syrian president Hafaz Assad celebrated the tenth anniversary of the Yom Kippur War. (more…)

Edited transcript of the Eidelberg Report, January 5, 2009, Israel National Radio.

The defeat of Hamas, if realized, will not end Israel’s existential problem. If the Palestinian Authority regains control of Gaza, this will be followed by a major U.S.-led effort to establishe a Palestinian state encompassing Judea and Samaria, the heartland of the Jewish people. Not only President Bush and his successor Barak Obama, but also the Olmert-Livni-Barak government are committed to this end. As predicted in the Zohar (Exodus 7b), certain kinds of Jews are primed to betray the Land and people of Israel.

We waited nineteen centuries for this land, and this land waited for us. This land is ours, and again the nations want to rob us of this land! To rob us of this land, a fictitious people has been fabricated—an assortment of Arab clans and tribes that call themselves “Palestinians”—and so they are called by the nations. An ethnic and historical lie has become a murderous media truth.

These self-styled “Palestinians,” who have no language or culture of their own, have unwittingly named themselves after the extinct Philistines—pagans! And while they claim the Land of Israel as their own, these neo-pagans are oblivious of the fact that the name “Philistines” is derived from a Hebrew word that means and stamps them as “trespassers” or “invaders.” By their self-chosen name these Arabs give the lie to their claim to the Land of Israel!

These Arabs are further removed from peoplehood or nationhood than the Catholics of the United States. They are fragments of the Sunni Muslim majority that dominates the Middle East. They wear the veneer of monotheism that Muhammad borrowed from the Jews; but beneath the surface one sees not a love of life but a pathological love of death. That Arabs and Muslims use women and children as human shields and as human bombs means that Islam has never transcended its pagan origin. (more…)

In a message honoring the heroes of the Warsaw ghetto, Albert Einstein declared:

The Germans as an entire people are responsible for the mass murders and must be punished as a people if there is justice in the world and if the consciousness of collective responsibility in the nations is not to perish from the earth entirely. Behind the Nazi party stands the German people, who elected Hitler after he had in his book [Mein Kampf] and in his speeches made his shameful [genocidal] intentions clear beyond the possibility of misunderstanding.

Does not the Hamas Covenant, which begins with the words, “Israel will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it,” make the genocidal intentions of Hamas also “clear beyond the possibility of misunderstanding”?

Is this not also true of the Fatah Constitution of the Palestinian Authority, which calls for “The complete liberation of Palestine and the economic, political, military and cultural elimination of Zionism”?

Did not the Palestinian Arabs repeatedly hear Yasser Arafat’s declarations of war against Israel but nonetheless elected him as their Fuhrer? (more…)

“Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it …” Thus begins the Hamas Covenant of Death officially known as “The Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement.” To grasp the true nature of the war that is being waged against the Jewish State of Israel, and not only by the Arabs in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, let us examine this Covenant of Death.

In discussing Islam’s war against the Jewish state, the Covenant refers to the Arabs of Judea, Samaria, and Gaza as but a single “squadron” of the “vast Islamic world.” “Our struggle against the Jews is very great,” and this struggle will go on “until the enemy is vanquished and Allah’s victory is realized.”

The Covenant also refers to the Islamic Resistance Movement as “one of the wings of [the] Moslem Brotherhood in Palestine.” It calls upon all Moslems to “raise the banner of Jihad in the face of the oppressors, so that they would rid the land and the people of their uncleanness, vileness and evils.” Contrary to the puerilities of the media, the Moslem Brotherhood is not a fanatical sect of Islam; it is Islam authentic and resurgent. (more…)

From Samuel Huntington, Who Are We? (Simon & Schuster, 2004, p. 188):

“Muslims, particularly Arab Muslims, seem slow to assimilate compared to other post-1965 groups…. A study of Los Angeles Muslims found ambivalent attitudes toward America: “a significant number of Muslims, particularly immigrant Muslims, do not have close ties or loyalty to the United States.” When asked whether they had “closer ties or loyalty to Islamic countries (perhaps your country of birth) or the United States,” 45 percent of the immigrants said Islamic countries, 10 percent the United States, and 32 percent about the same. Among American-born Muslims, 19 percent chose Islamic countries, 38 percent the United States, and 32 percent about the same. Fifty-seven percent said that “if given the choice, [they] would leave the United States to live in an Islamic country.”

Now for a problem of national interest:

Suppose the United States attacked Iran to stop its development of nuclear weapons.

Alternatively, suppose Israel attacked Iran for the same reason—and it was believed, rightly or wrongly, that the United States had helped Israel.

Could the police or the National Guard quell Muslim riots in any of the major cities of the United States—riots instigated by imams?

Islam’s deep theological structure includes themes that render the notion of “three Abrahamic faiths” ultimately misleading in understanding Islam’s faith and practice—particularly if this trope is understood in the popular imagination as a matter of three equivalent legs propping up a single monotheistic stool.

George Weigel

Contrary to long established opinion, Islam’s deity, “Allah,” is not the God of the Bible—certainly not the God Jews refer to by the Ineffable Name HaShem and designated by the Tetragrammaton YHVH.

The Zohar (87a) states: “Thou shalt have no other gods upon My face,” meaning “Thou shalt even avoid conceiving Me in those aspects (faces) which form Ishmael’s religion [i.e., Islam].”

Islam actually contradicts the Biblical conception of man’s creation in the image of God. Thus, in 1985, Iran’s delegate to the United Nations, Said Raja’i-Khorassani, declared that “the very concept of human rights was ‘a Judeo-Christian invention’ and inadmissible in Islam.”

Although the Quran refers to Allah as the “compassionate,” his most conspicuous function in that highly polemical work is to consign unbelievers to hell. To be sure, the Quran contains many verses that preach peace and tolerance, but more typical are verses that sanction war against non-believers. (more…)

The Nature of the Enemy the West Does Not Want to See or Face

Muslims never forget; indeed, they are taught never to forget the assaults of their enemies even if such assaults occurred more than a thousand years ago.

Reza Aslan is a Muslim apologist. Much of his book No god but God (Random House 2006) is a shockingly disingenuous exercise in obscuring the savage and genocidal history of Islam.

Askan points out that the Ayatollah Khomeini “deliberately cast Iran’s horrific eight-year war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq as revenge for the massacre of Husayn and his family at Karbala” at the end of the seventh century!!!

Without being judgmental, about Iran in its war with Iraq, he says, “In fact, the ten thousand Iranian children who were thrown into the front lines of the war as human mine sweepers wore ‘keys to Karbala around their necks and headbands emblazoned with the word Karbala to remind them that they were … walking in the footsteps of the martyrs.” (more…)

The Eidelberg Report, Israel National Radio, December 29, 2008.
Dedicated to Tsafir Ronen (z”l).

Binyamin Netanyahu’s plan to elevate the economic well-being of the Palestinians to facilitate the “peace process” coincides with a policy paper written by former Chief of General Staff Moshe Yaalon, now with the Likud Party. The paper is entitled “Israel and the Palestinians: A New Strategy.”

Yaalon’s paper begins by analyzing the reasons why the Oslo accords failed to bring peace. “Fifteen years ago,” he says, “the signing of the Oslo accords with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) raised hopes that Israel had boarded the ‘peace train.’ Over the years, however, it became clear that the train was not headed for the promised destination.” Nevertheless, Israel’s leadership has foolishly remained on the same train.

However, Yaalon obscures the covert objective of Oslo’s architects, which was the creation of a Palestinian state in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza (Yesha) as the only means of achieving peace. He fails to see or say that only the “two-state” solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could induce Yasser Arafat to sign a deal with Israel—as Shimon Peres and Yossi Beilin surely knew and concealed. Only a sovereign Palestinian state could be legally bound by any peace agreement.

Yaalon does not really oppose a Palestinian state. He simply criticizes the decision of Israel’s leaders to withdraw from Yesha before the Palestinians had achieved the economic, political, and judicial infrastructure required to become a responsible state.

The Palestinian Authority (PA) is a kleptocracy. (more…)

If anyone wants to know how enlightened Muslims look upon ecumenism he can hardly do better than read the works of Seyyed Hossein Nasr, perhaps the most erudite Muslim philosopher of our time.

Nasr, who received his Ph.D. in the History of Science and Philosophy at Harvard and subsequently served as Chancellor of Aryamehr University in Iran, has taught and lectured at America’s most prestigious universities.

“Ecumenism,” he writes, “is becoming an instrument for simple relativization and further secularization.” By “relativization” he means this. The tendency of ecumenism is to deny that any religion is the repository of exclusive truth. Ecumenism thus reinforces the doctrine of cultural relativism according to which there are no objective and universally valid standards by which to determine whether the beliefs and practices of one people are superior to those of another.

Moreover, because relativism denies what Nasr calls “transcendental truths,” it inevitably breeds secularism. That some religionists are also relativists or quasi-relativists is only evidence of their superficiality or desire for popularity. Many ecumenicals fit this description. (more…)

A comment on the excellent article “Still Asleep After Mumbai” by Daniel Pipes.

Islam is at war with the West. The West cannot win this war unless it defines the enemy. Europe has all but surrendered to Islam, and America is in the process of doing so because their common enemy has not been defined. The same may be said of Israel, whose leaders are afraid to name the same enemy.

Using such terms as “Islamism,” Islamic fundamentalism,” “extremist Islam,” “radical Islam,” “militant Islam,” “political Islam,” “IslamoFascism” fails to expose the unique political and theological nature of the enemy, and this failure is a strategic error.

The fact that the Qur’an exalts the Muslim who “slays and is slain” for Allah (Sura 9:111) suggests that Islam is a religion of death.

However, defining Islam exposes you to the canard of racism. It can also lead to violent backlash. But inasmuch as Islam is waging war against the West, the West will lose this war if its political and intellectual leaders fail to educate public opinion about the true nature of the enemy.

One way to avoid the issue is to speak of “Muslim moderates.” (more…)

Faith in reason is the cornerstone of Jeffersonian democracy: “Fix reason firmly in her seat and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion.”

Jefferson’s faith in reason coincided with his faith in the common man, provided he was literate and self-supporting, in which case he would not be readily deceived by demagogues or succumb to moral relativism. Of course, television did not exist in Jefferson’s time, when Americans read the Bible and many could quote Shakespeare.

A product of the “Enlightenment”—which was nothing if not egalitarian and secular—Jefferson believed that reason, through science, would eventually triumph over force and usher in a New World Order of peace, prosperity, and democracy.

Contrast the nineteenth-century social democrat Ferdinand Lassalle, whose faith in reason is armed with a sword. In his drama Franz von Sickengen, there occurs a dialogue between a Lutheran chaplain, a pacifist, and Ulrick von Hutten, the great sixteenth-century humanist. (more…)

A review of Middle East Rules of Thumb: Understanding the Complexities of the Middle East—A Handbook by Steven Carol. iUniverse, Inc., New York (2008), publisher.

Middle East Rules of Thumb  is an appropriate title of an extraordinary book authored by historian Professor Steven Carol. This handbook clarifies the complexities of Arab-Islamic history during the past 1,400 years with an array of current facts comprehensible to students even at the high school level. Carol’s book should also be read, however, by college and university students so many of whom are misled by “politically correct” academics and journalists as well as by Arab propagandists.

This reader-friendly volume provides much needed factual data about the Israel-Israeli conflict. It should be on the bookshelves of Hillel Houses and Jewish Community Centers, and it should be brought to the attention of all friends of Israel, so often in need of solid facts to defend the one and only Jewish homeland.

Edited transcript of the Eidelberg Report, Israel National Radio, December 15, 2008.

Islam is at war with the West. The West cannot win this war unless it defines the enemy. Europe has all but surrendered to Islam, and America is in the process of doing so because their common enemy has not been defined. The same may be said of Israel, whose leaders are afraid to name the same enemy.

Using such terms as “Islamism,” Islamic fundamentalism,” “extremist Islam,” “radical Islam,” “militant Islam,” “political Islam,” “IslamoFascism” fails to expose the unique political and theological nature of the enemy, and this failure is a strategic error.

Henri Boulad, an Egyptian Jesuit and specialist in Islam, boldly states, “Islamism is Islam.” This statement, he says,

is perfectly consistent with history and geography, with the Qur’an and the sunna, with the life of Muhammad and the evolution of Islam, with what Islam says about itself. I reject the position of people—Muslims or Christians—who bury their heads in the sand like ostriches … refuse to see the situation objectively, or take their wishes for realities, on behalf of dialogue and tolerance.

The Qur’an exalts the Muslim who “slays and is slain” for Allah (Sura 9:111). Islam, therefore, is a religion of death. (more…)

Prof. Eidelberg’s comment on article: “Still Asleep After Mumbai” (see below).

As I have elsewhere documented via a variety of sources, it is misleading as well as a strategic error to use euphemisms when speaking of Islamic terrorism. I mean the following: “Islamism,” Islamic fundamentalism,” “extremist Islam,” “radical Islam,” “militant Islam,” “political Islam,” and even “IslamoFascism.”

Henri Boulad, an Egyptian Jesuit, and a specialist in Islam, states in an article, “L’Islamisme, c’est l’Islam” (”Islamism is Islam”):

This statement [that Islamism is Islam] is perfectly consistent with history and geography, with the Quran and the sunna, with the life of Muhammad and the evolution of Islam, with what Islam says about itself. I reject the position of people—Muslims or Christians—who bury their heads in the sand like ostriches … refuse to see the situation objectively, or take their wishes for realities, on behalf of dialogue and tolerance.

Of course, naming Islam as the enemy exposes one to the canard of racism. It can also lead to violent backlash. But we are at war, and we cannot possibly win this war if we fail to identify the enemy.

Therefore, it is misleading to speak of “Muslim moderates.” Granting there are such Muslims, but this is not strategically relevant in a time of war. (No doubt there were “moderate Nazis.”) (more…)

It is becoming increasingly apparent that Israel is in the grips of a democratically elected dictatorship at war with Jewish nationhood. Driven by the remorseless logic of the Oslo Agreement or “land for peace,” this dictatorship is collaborating with Israel’s enemies.

Oslo has produced a Palestinian Authority consisting of well-armed terrorist organizations. PA leaders wax fat with money from the U.S. and the European Union. Their strategy of stages is designed to facilitate the ethnic cleansing of 250,000 Jews from Judea and Samaria. Israel’s ruling elites are prepared, if not eager, to sacrifice these Jews on the altar of “peace.” These elites use the illusion of peace to retain power.

Meanwhile, Arab leaders baldly declare that “peace” means the destruction of Israel. The policy of land-for-peace arouses Arab contempt for Jews and incites Arab violence. The “peace process” will explode in a catastrophic war in the very near future.

Can such a war be averted? Not by a Likud-led government, most emphatically not by a Kadima-led government, and not by a government of national unity headed by Binyamin Netanyahu who has yet to overcome the Oslo syndrome.

If catastrophic war is to be averted—or if Israel is to emerge victorious—three basic conditions are in order. (more…)

This article was first published in December 2000.

YAMIN ISRAEL
The Truly Jewish Constitutional Party
P.O. Box 23678, Jerusalem 91236 Israel
Tel. 972-2-624-5676 • 972-54-407-581 • E-mail: Yamin@barak-online.net

Israel’s survival obviously depends on the loyalty of its citizens. Therefore:

●  Whereas a large majority of Israel’s Arab citizens do not identify themselves as Israelis but as “Palestinians”;

●  Whereas an undisclosed number of Israel’s Arab citizens are members of terrorist organizations such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad;

●  Whereas thousands of Israel’s Arab citizens have openly committed acts of violence against the security forces of the State of Israel in violation of Part II, section 11(a)3 of the Citizenship Law, which empowers the Minister of Interior to revoke the citizenship of any Israel national who “has committed an act of disloyalty to the State”; (more…)

Part I. Analysis

The best analysis I have read of America’s foreign policy failings since the unfinished Persian Gulf War of 1991 will be found in the writings of Ralph Peters, a retired American army Intelligence officer who worked and studied in dozens of countries as well as in the U.S. Executive office.

If there is a single power the U.S. underestimates it is the power of collective hatred, meaning the hatred that animates the Arab-Islamic world. This failing applies to Israel.

Like their American counterparts, Israel’s ruling elites do not “understand the delicious appeal of hatred.” They will not face the fact that man is a killer. They have learned nothing from the genocidal wars and wholesale massacres of the twentieth century, not merely in Nazi Germany, but also in Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Bangladesh, Iraq, Sudan—to name only a few.

There is at least a minority of human beings who enjoy killing. That minority may be small, says Peters, but it does not take many enthusiastic killers to trigger a genocidal war. The Arab Palestinian Authority consists of such killers. Indeed, they have educated a generation of Arab children to become killers. (more…)

Judea and Samaria activist Yechiel Leiter, a possible candidate on the Likud Party list in the February elections, is promoting a plan that calls for immediate steps that will lead to the annexation of 50% of Judea and Samaria.

Since Leiter has served as an adviser to Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu, it’s reasonable to assume that his proposed plan expresses Netanyahu’s position. If so, this plan corresponds to Netanyahu’s policy of “reciprocity” in dealing with the Palestinian Authority.

What is more significant, however, is that Leiter’s plan—he’s religious—may be a political consequence of Netanyahu’s secular mentality, manifested in a statement he made before a joint session of the United States Congress shortly after becoming Israel’s Prime Minister in May 1996. There he baldly denied any “clash of civilizations” between Israel and her Arab-Islamic neighbors.

This denial reflects a widespread inability in the secular democratic world to acknowledge the true nature of Islam. By the “true nature of Islam” I mean the demonstrable fact that Islam is, in the words of Bat Ye’or, a “culture of hate”— (more…)

1.  America is threatened by two enemies: one internal, the other external. America needs a non-governmental organization consisting of the finest minds to formulate and implement a comprehensive strategy to overcome these two enemies.

2.  The internal enemy is the university-bred doctrine of moral relativism also known as multiculturalism. Relativism is demoralizing the American people; it is eroding their heritage, their sense of national pride and purpose. Relativism permeates every level of American education. It infects the news and entertainment media. It influences all three branches of American Government. It therefore corrupts the opinion-makers and policy-makers of the United States. (This same doctrine has emasculated England and Europe.)

3.  America’s external enemy is Islamic imperialism. This enemy has two power centers: Iran and Saudi Arabia, the former involves Shi’ite Islam, the latter Sunni Islam. These two countries control most of the oil flowing through the Persian Gulf—the energy sources on which the American and the world economy largely depends. Petrodollars have built thousands of mosques in the United States and Europe. These mosques propagate ideas and values subversive of civilization: respect for human life and individual freedom as well as humane desire to resolve differences through speech and moral suasion as opposed to force and violence.

4.  We cannot expect the Government of the United States to initiate and pursue the policies required to overcome its internal and external enemies, if only because the Government has been corrupted by moral relativism. (more…)

A day after 9/11, the present writer pondered the problem of how to deal with Islamic Jihad. Here is a brief scenario.

The President calls in the ambassadors of every Islamic country. He hands them the draft of a message and instructs them to send to it the heads of their respective states. The message reads something like this:

The President of the United States requests that you assemble your religious leaders and inform them that, unless they publicly renounce the ethos of Jihad and abrogate Islamic verses referring to non-Muslims as subhuman, the United States will take the following actions:

1. The American ambassador to your country will be recalled. (more…)