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…)

Just as the goal of the Hamas Covenant is the eradication of Israel, so—

The goal of the Israel Defense Forces should be the eradication of Hamas.

Anything less than this IDF goal is disproportionate.

No one should be deceived by the allegedly “even-handed” reporting of the war in Gaza by any media such as FOX News.

Even-handedness between Israel and Hamas is but a euphemism for moral equivalence, since it places a civilized country like Israel on the same level as Hamas, terrorist organization whose Charter unambiguously calls for Israel’s destruction.

John Bolton, former US ambassador to the United Nations, points out in his book Surrender is Not an Option, that “moral equivalency” permeates the State Department.

To be even more accurate, the policy of the State Department, hence of the United States government, toward Israel and its enemy, the Palestinian Authority, has ever been dominated by moral reversal. (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…)

Praise the Lord, all people of honest faith, praise the God of Israel.

See how His Chosen People, “despite” mediocre leaders, attacks Evil—the evil incarnate in Hamas, the proxy of Shi’te Iran, the epicenter of Islamic paganism veneered in monotheism.

But take note of how the world denounces Israel. Is there better proof of the Chosen People?

Hear ye, oh people of honest faith, rise and cheer the People of Israel, while one gentile nation after another wallows in envious hatred of Jews while crawling to Arab and Muslim despots—merchants of hatred, of black gold and murder.

Praise the Lord, the God of Israel, who uses even fools and scoundrels to reveal the inexhaustible righteousness of His Chosen People.

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…)

In the Prologue of Victor David Hanson, The Soul of Battle (Free Press, 1999), we read:

“…on March 9, 1945, a 400-mile trail of 334 B-29s left their Marianas bases, 3,500 newly trained airmen crammed in among the napalm. The gigantic planes each carried ten tons of the newly invented jellied gasoline incendiaries.… Planes flew over [Tokyo] in small groups of three, a minute apart…. Five-hundred-pound incendiary clusters fell every 50 feet. Within thirty minutes, a 28-mile-per-hour ground wind sent the flames roaring out of control. Temperatures approached 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit…. [Air Force head General Curtis] LeMay wished to destroy completely the material and psychological capital of the Japanese people, on the brutal, theory that once civilians had tasted what their soldiers had done to others, only then might their murderous armies crack…. People would not show up to work to fabricate artillery shells that killed Americans when there was no work to show up to. Solders who kill, rape, and torture do so less confidently when their own families are at risk at home….

“Over 80,000 Japanese died outright; 400,918 were injured; 267,171 buildings were destroyed. One million Japanese were homeless…. Unfortunately for the Japanese, the March 9 raid was the beginning, not the end, of LeMay’s incendiary campaign. He sensed that his moment—a truly deadly man in charge of a huge democratic force free of government constraint—had at last arrived, as the imperial Japanese command was stunned and helpless…. (more…)

To Israel’s General Staff: Lessons From A Master of War

Israel’s General Staff would do well to emulate George S. Patton, the general most feared by Nazi Germany.

On the eve of battle, Patton would admonish his soldiers: “The object of war is not to die for your country. It is to make the other poor dumb bastard die for his.” This requires confronting and killing the enemy on the battlefield.

“Never let the enemy rest.” No cease fires or hudnas. Unconditional surrender should be Israel’s proclaimed war aim!

“We want the enemy to know that they are fighting the toughest fighting men in the world!” This precludes benevolence (which Arabs despise). Just as Hamas terrorists would show no mercy to you, so you should show no mercy to them. These terrorists must be killed even if this results in civilian casualties.

“Forget about army regulations … [which] are written by those who have never been in battle…Our only mission in combat is to win.” Hence general officers may sometimes have to disobey orders of the political echelon! (more…)

Part I — Epaminondas

“Those who wish to enjoy peace must be ready for war.”

Referring to the democratic reformer Epaminondas, the warrior-philosopher whose Theban army defeated Sparta (370-369), military historian Victor Davis Hanson offers insights that Israeli generals and citizens as well as universities should take most seriously. The excerpts below are taken from Hanson’s The Soul of Battle: From Ancient Times to the Present Day, How Three Great Liberators Vanquished Tyranny (1999):

“I think it is almost axiomatic that if a general of a great democratic march is not hated, is not sacked, tried, or relieved of command by his auditors after his tenure is over, or if he has not been killed [as was Epaminondas] or wounded at the van, he has not utilized the full potential of his men, has not accomplished his strategic goals—in short, he is too representative of the very culture that produced him, too democratic to lead a democratic army …”

“… we of the academic class are sometimes reluctant to equate mastery of military command with sheer intellectual brilliance. But to lead an army of thousands into enemy territory requires mental skills far beyond that of the professor, historian, or journalist—far beyond too the accounting and managerial skill of the deskbound and peacetime officer corps.”

“From Epaminondas’s philosophical training [he was a Pythagorean], the corpus of his adages and sayings that have survived, and his singular idea to take 70,000 men into Laconia and Messinia, it is clear that, like both [William Tecumseh] Sherman and [George S.] Patton, he had a first-class mind and was adept in public speaking and knowledge of human behavior. Perhaps with the exception of Pericles and Scipio, it is hard to find any military leader in some twelve centuries of Gaeco-Roman antiquity who had the natural intelligence, philosophical training, broad knowledge, and recognition of the critical tension between military morale and national ethics as Epaminondas the Theban. In his range of political and strategic thought, he towered over his Greek contemporaries … in precisely the way Sherman did over all the generals of the Civil War, precisely as Patton dwarfed his British and American superiors. (more…)

Prince Klemens Wenzel von Metternich (1773 – 1859) was a German-Austrian politician and statesman and was one of the most important diplomats of his era. Henry Kissinger wrote his doctoral dissertation on Metternich.

As Metternich saw, to expect the leaders of a dictatorship (such as the Fatah- or Hamas-led Palestinian Authority) to be moderate is like asking them to destroy the foundation of their existence. What follows are some Metternichean principles of statecraft extracted from his writings:

(1) Any plan conceived in moderate terms must fail when the circumstances are set in the extreme. In any situation where each of the possible lines of action involves difficulty, the strongest line is the best.

(2) Compromise is the easy refuge of irresolute or unprincipled men. Of course compromise is appropriate when dealing with temporary and partial interests. But a nation’s survival is not a matter of compromise. (more…)

Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, written about 500 B.C.E., is the oldest military treatise in the world. Even now, after twenty-five centuries, the basic principles of that treatise remain a valuable guide for the conduct of war. Indeed, Sun Tzu may be of interest to the General Staff of the Israel Defense Forces, in view of the Arab Terrorist War that erupted in September 2000. Since then more than 1,600 Jews have been murdered and many thousands more have been wounded and maimed by Arab terrorists.

Referring to the IDF’s limited response to this Arab terrorism, former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said, “self-restraint is strength”! At first glance one might suspect that Mr. Sharon had been influence by Mother Theresa. It may well be, however, that he derived that dictum from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War—or rather, from a misreading of that treatise. Sun Tzu would have an army general exhibit, at first, “the coyness of a maiden”—to draw out the enemy—but thereafter he would have him emulate the fierceness of a lion.

Of course, when the forces of the enemy exceed your own or occupy superior ground, then self-restraint is prudence. But when this situation is reversed, self-restraint is weakness. In fact, Sun Tzu goes so far as to say, “If fighting is reasonably sure to result in victory, then you must fight, even though the ruler forbids it.”

In referring to various ways in which a ruler can bring misfortune upon his army and his people, Sun Tzu cautions a ruler against “attempting to govern an army in the same way as he administers a kingdom.” (more…)

Israel is at war. Israel’s General Staff would do well to emulate George S. Patton, the general most feared by Nazi Germany.

On the eve of battle, Patton would admonish his soldiers: “The object of war is not to die for your country. It is to make the other poor dumb bastard die for his.” This requires confronting and killing the enemy on the battlefield.

“Never let the enemy rest.” No cease-fires or hudnas. Unconditional surrender should be Israel’s proclaimed war aim!

“We want the enemy to know that they are fighting the toughest fighting men in the world!” This precludes benevolence (which Arabs despise). Just as Hezbollah warriors would show no mercy to you, so you should show no mercy to them. These warriors must be killed even if this results in civilian casualties. (more…)

Let us recall certain lessons on war by one of the greatest military scientists, General Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831).

Clausewitz’s magnum opus, On War, is studied in military schools to this day. He defines war as “an act of violence intended to compel our opponent to fulfill our will. Violence is the means; submission of the enemy to our will the ultimate object.” For as long as the enemy remains armed, he will wait for a more favorable moment for action.

The ultimate object of war is political. To attain this object fully, the enemy must be disarmed. Disarming the enemy “becomes therefore the immediate object of hostilities. It takes the place of the final object and puts it aside as something we can eliminate from our calculations.”

Clausewitz warns: “Philanthropists may readily imagine there is a skillful method of disarming and overcoming an enemy without causing great bloodshed, and that this is the proper tendency of the Art of War. However plausible this may appear, still it is an error which must be extirpated; for in such dangerous things as war, the errors which proceed from a spirit of benevolence are the worst.”

Not that Clausewitz advocates indiscriminate slaughter. (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…)

Back in 1920, an event took place in Israel that redounds to the honor and courage of many Jews, secular and religious. Indeed, since these Jews were then subject to British rule, their noble conduct shines all the more brilliantly when contrasted to the behavior of many Jews in the supposedly sovereign state of Israel—and I have especially in mind Israel’s ruling elites.

The event is recorded in Dr. Joseph B. Shechtman’s excellent biography of Vladimir Jabotinsky, from which I shall quote and paraphrase.

At the end of 1919, Jabotinsky formed the Jewish Defense Corp (Haganah) in reaction to Arab violence. On April 4, an Arab mob, inflamed by anti-Jewish speeches, began attacking Jews in Jerusalem. “Soon Jewish blood was shed and the mob rushed into the Jewish quarter to kill and to pillage, shouting: “El Dowleh ma’ana (the government is with us).”

“Instead of assisting the victims, Arab police either adopted a passive attitude or joined the attackers. The pogrom lasted two days and resulted in five Jews and four Arabs killed, 211 Jews and 21 Arabs wounded; two Jewish girls were raped.” (more…)