The Terrorist Next Door (33 page)

This stance is not only immoral, it is inherently destructive to American interests. Above all, it flies in the face of Islamic history and ideology. Since its miraculous rebirth in 1948, the tiny state of Israel has borne the
brunt of the fury of Islamic terrorism. And this outpost of democracy, freedom, and human rights has been the canary in the coalmine for the rest of Western civilization. Israel, surrounded by a sea of frothing Islamic radicals, is the first line of defense for the West in the struggle against global jihad. If this lone bastion of Western values in the world's most violent—and, due to oil, arguably its most strategic—region is overrun, the floodgates are open. Or as the former prime minister of Spain, José María Aznar, told me when I interviewed him for CBN in 2010, “If Israel goes down, we all go down.”

Aznar was so dismayed by the Obama administration's abandonment of the Jewish State, which we'll examine shortly, that in 2010 he helped start an organization called “Friends of Israel” comprising several leading Western political figures and thinkers. Aznar and his colleagues fully grasp the ramifications of “First the Saturday people, then the Sunday people.”

Islamist ideology demands that sharia law be established worldwide, and that any country not living under the banner of Islam is
Dar al-Harb
, or the land of war. In other words, Islam must be spread to the ends of the earth by any means necessary, as mandated by the Koran. That means, obviously, that the elimination of Israel is only the beginning. The throw-Israel-under-the-bus crowd, if it surveys Islamic history, has to know this. If Israel is indeed the root cause of Islamic rage against the West today, as they argue, then why did Muslims embark on two great waves of conquest against Europe—first in the eighth and ninth centuries and then again in the heyday of the Ottoman Empire—during a period when the state of Israel did not even exist?

From 70 A.D.—when the Romans destroyed the Second Temple in Jerusalem and the Jews were subsequently scattered around the globe—until 1948, there was no nation of Israel. Yet during that period, Muslims conquered Spain, Sicily, the Balkans, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, and Greece, drove to the gates of Vienna twice, and even reached as far as central France in the eighth century. They also frequently raided southern Italy, sacking Rome in 846 AD.

Since there was no Israel during this time, the unrelenting jihad against Europe clearly had to be motivated by something else. That something was Islamist ideology. Yet segments of the Left and isolationist Right would have us believe that the third great wave of jihad that began in the latter part of the twentieth century and persists today is due mainly to Israel's supposed occupation of “Palestinian land.” As for the steady Islamic aggression against the West that transpired over much of the 1,378 years before the state of Israel was reestablished, why acknowledge the facts when you can blame that reliable scapegoat, the Jews?

Surveying the seething cauldron of terrorism and anti-Western animus that is the Middle East, the Obama administration, too, believes it's all Israel's fault. The central problem, we're led to believe, is Israel's construction of apartments in Jerusalem—for over 3,000 years, the capital of the Jewish people—and its building of additions, like a children's playroom for a growing family, onto existing homes. The Obamis argue that if only Israel would stop building so-called Jewish “settlements”—in places like East Jerusalem and the biblical heartland of Judea and Samaria, also referred to as the West Bank—then Israel and the Palestinians could finally come to a comprehensive peace agreement and all would be right with the world. They don't seem to notice that Israel's so-called “partner for peace,” the Palestinian Authority, has little credibility on the West Bank street and only controls half the Palestinian territories (with the other half, Gaza, controlled by Hamas terrorists), or that Israel's withdrawal from both Gaza and southern Lebanon has resulted in both those areas becoming permanent jihadist bases used for attacking Israel.

Despite these glaring red flags and the steady diet of anti-Semitic blood libels and incitement broadcast daily by official Palestinian Authority television, the Obama White House believes now is the time for Israel to offer concessions to the Palestinians, cede Israeli territory—including half of Jerusalem—and strike a lasting peace deal. If Israel does so, three things will supposedly happen: 1) Other Arab regimes will be inspired to strike similar peace deals with Israel and will finally recognize the Jewish State's
right to exist. 2) Other Arab regimes will join Israel and the West to form a united front that will successfully dissuade Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. 3) Islamic terrorism against the West will decrease dramatically.

This theory is known inside the Washington beltway as “linkage,” because it directly ties stopping Iran's nuclear weapons program to establishing a Palestinian state. Give the Palestinians a homeland of their own, the liberal political establishment intones, and Iran and its proxies will be significantly weakened, deprived of the “Palestinian card” they have used as a hammer against Israel for so long. Israeli leaders, quite rightly, would rather deal with Iran's nuclear weapons program first, and revisit the Palestinian issue down the road.

After all, the Iranian regime, which is devoted to Israel's destruction, may very well have a nuclear weapon by 2012. Such a development would pose an immediate threat to Israel's very existence and, in the Israelis' view, must be countered with the utmost urgency. On the other hand, the Palestinians are ruled by two opposing factions, Hamas and the Palestinian Authority—both of which refuse to recognize Israel's right to exist—and have shown no desire to renounce terrorism against Israeli interests. In other words, the Palestinians are a disjointed, radicalized mess with zero capability of forming any type of moderate, cohesive state in the near future. Therefore, let's deal with Iran first, the Israelis reason, and then we can talk about the Palestinian issue later. It makes perfect sense ... unless you are an Obama administration official.

In early February 2011, as Muslim nations like Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, and Yemen, among others, were being roiled by massive protests and civil unrest that had nothing whatsoever to do with Israel, recently retired Obama national security advisor James Jones delivered an address proclaiming—you guessed it—the importance of linkage. To make matters worse, Jones delivered his remarks before an Israeli audience:

Something tells me God would not favor giving Palestinian Muslims half of Jerusalem—a city that is never even mentioned in the Koran but is mentioned in the Bible hundreds of times as Israel's eternal capital. Regardless, the ultimate problem with Jones's assessment is one of ideology, not theology. He and his former cohorts in the Obama administration have very publicly made “illegitimate” Israeli settlements, not Palestinian terrorism or Iranian belligerence, their core Middle East issue. From the cozy confines of Washington, D.C., they arrogantly dictate to the people of Israel, a sovereign nation, where Jews can and cannot live in the Jewish ancestral homeland.

Meanwhile, they refuse even to mention a fundamental problem with their plans—that Christian holy sites in East Jerusalem and elsewhere are far less likely to remain protected, as they have been for decades by the Israelis, if they are turned over to Palestinian control. Recall the desecration of Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity in 2002, when gunmen from the PLO, Hamas, and other Palestinian groups seized the building to avoid capture by Israeli troops. With the Israelis refusing to storm the church, a thirty-nine-day standoff ensued. During that time, in a house of worship revered as the birthplace of Jesus, the Palestinians held the clergy hostage, set fire to part of the church compound, looted golden icons, tore up Bibles, and most alarmingly, planted around forty bombs throughout the church that the Israelis had to dismantle after the attackers surrendered.
¹⁴

The appalling violation of the church was by no means an isolated incident. Indeed, in recent years Middle Eastern Christians have been subject to a concerted attack by their Muslim neighbors. On March 8, 2011, thirteen people were killed in Cairo, Egypt, after a Muslim mob attacked thousands of Christians protesting the burning of a church by another Muslim mob.
¹⁵
This came just three months after twenty-one people were killed in a suicide bombing outside a Christian church in
Alexandria, Egypt. In light of similar, ongoing attacks on the dwindling Christian communities in Iraq, Indonesia, Pakistan, and beyond, the Obama administration's enthusiasm for securing Palestinian control of Christian holy sites seems incomprehensible. Yet, in light of Obama officials' unshakeable belief in the peacefulness and greatness and tolerance of Islam, and their dogged pursuit of Muslim outreach even at the expense of Americans' physical security, we see that their policy on this issue reflects a ruthless consistency in their agenda.

As part of this strategy, Obama administration officials have openly and repeatedly excoriated Israel over apartment units in Jerusalem, with UN ambassador Susan Rice, in an undiplomatic insult, labeling them as “folly” in February 2011.
¹⁶
Is it any wonder that concern is growing in Israel that the United States, under the Obama administration, can no longer be trusted to veto the Arabs' never-ending parade of anti-Israel measures at the UN?

The Obama administration's stunning disrespect for Israel reached a low point in March 2010, when Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited the White House. Netanyahu—the elected leader of a steadfast and pivotal U.S. ally—was ushered in the back door of the building and denied even the standard photo opportunity with Obama. The Israeli delegation was not invited to join the president for dinner, and Obama actually left them to dine on his own when they wouldn't agree to his demands to halt Jewish building in East Jerusalem.
¹⁷

Rest assured that Israel's enemies were overjoyed when details of Obama's White House snub of Netanyahu emerged. In a vain attempt to appear “even-handed” and court America-hating jihadists, the Obama administration has made a great show of publicly slamming Israel—the only reliable and stable U.S. ally in the Middle East and a bulwark against Islamic terror. Their efforts have left Israelis feeling completely isolated at a dangerous time. Global anti-Semitism is on the rise, as is a movement advocating that nations divest from, boycott, and sanction Israel—the so-called “BDS movement.” Furthermore, the European Union and the UN are applying relentless pressure on the Israelis to throw caution to
the wind, surrender territory, and create a Palestinian state
right now
, current conditions on the ground and potential disastrous consequences be damned. And this solution, mind you, would largely consist of a peace treaty much like the one with Egypt for which Israel gave up the Sinai Peninsula—a treaty that leaders of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt's possible future rulers, are already declaring “null and void.”
¹⁸

Israel surveys its immediate neighborhood and sees, aside from the looming threat of a nuclear-armed Iran, a Turkey that has gone from an ally to a heated Islamist adversary; an Egypt that has gone from friend (in relative terms) to possible Muslim Brotherhood-run foe; another relatively friendly country, Jordan, that is facing its own serious internal unrest, led largely by the Brotherhood; and nasty possible outcomes of revolutions in other Middle Eastern states where fanatical, anti-Israel Islamists could come to power. For Israel, circa 2011, the only thing that is 100 percent certain is that Iran, Syria, Hamas, and Hezbollah are licking their chops and waiting for the right moment to strike—we should take these entities' own word on that. Unwavering American support used to be a certainty as well, until President Obama decided to throw it out the window in favor of hopeless “engagement” with the sworn enemies of Israel and America.

One such example occurred in February 2010 when, just days after the Obama administration announced it was appointing an ambassador to Syria for the first time in five years—effectively rewarding a state sponsor of terrorism for continued bad behavior—Syrian president Bashar al-Assad held a public dinner meeting in Damascus with Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. In flaunting his relationship with Iran and Hezbollah, Assad delivered a message to Obama that was deliberate and clear: you can engage us all you want, but we will never respect you nor cease our quest to destroy the Jews. The next time the Obama administration accuses someone of “folly,” it may want to look in the mirror.