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Jewish World Review Dec. 22, 2006 / 1 Teves, 5766 Privatizing the war of ideas By Caroline B. Glick
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
The domestic and international debate about the Palestinians has become thoroughly
detached from reality. On the one hand there are the friendlies. These include the
Olmert government, the Israeli media, the Bush administration and some European
governments. The friendlies say that the "moderate" Palestinian Authority Chairman
and Fatah terror organization commander Mahmoud Abbas is the key to peace.
Everything must be done they say, to strengthen Abbas against the Hamas terror
organization, which they oppose.
But if this week's bloody battles between Fatah and Hamas terrorists in Gaza showed
anything, they showed that Abbas is anything but weak. When he wishes to confront
Hamas, he is more than capable of doing so. The reason that peace has eluded us is
not because Abbas is weak but because he doesn't want peace with Israel. He will
battle Hamas to enhance his power but not to secure chances of peace with Israel.
Far from the key to ending the Palestinian jihad against Israel, Abbas is part of
the problem.
Pitted against the friendlies, are the unfriendlies. These include people like EU
foreign policy chief Javier Solana, UN officials, the European press and Ha'aretz
columnists. Although members of this group adore Abbas, they object to the
friendlies' refusal to accept Hamas's rise to power in the PA.
The unfriendlies call for Israel negotiate with Hamas on the basis of Hamas Prime
Minister Ismail Haniyeh's offer for a ceasefire with Israel in exchange for an
Israeli retreat to the 1949 armistice lines. If Israel refuses to accept Hamas's
offer, this camp warns, it is liable to find itself facing Al Qaida rather than
Hamas in the future, and that, they claim, would be much worse.
As Johann Hari, from Britain's Independent put it this week, "Every time the Israeli
government rejects a Palestinian leader because he is too hard-line, they do not get
a cuddly Gandhian moderate in his place. They get somebody more hard-line still."
Hari, who went on to advocate that Israel recognize Hamas and give it Judea, Samaria
and Jerusalem wrote these lines after he visited with Al Qaida terrorists in Gaza
and described how these jihadists are terrorizing Gazans into accepting Taliban-like
repression of women and modernity.
Both the friendlies and the unfriendlies share a fundamental assumption and
acceptance of Palestinian jihadism. They assume that Palestinian society will never
be anything but a jihadist society and that the only change it will undergo will be
one of further radicalization. By limiting their argument to whether Israel should
either give its land to Fatah or Hamas, they accept as legitimate the view that for
the Palestinians all roads lead inevitably to Osama bin Laden and Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad. For both groups, the goal of diplomacy is to arrest, not reverse this
trend. And both believe Israel should be willing to pay whatever is necessary to
appease those who hate it less, or face those who hate it more.
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What Abu-Jased and his friends need most desperately is for someone to offer them
the opportunity to support something other than competing terrorist organizations.
But no one gives them this opportunity.
Israel of course has options other than surrendering to either Hamas or Fatah. It
could defeat them. A policy aimed at victory would be based first of all on a
recognition that today there is no power structure in the PA, including the PA
militias, that is not a terrorist organization. It would similarly recognize that
there is no such thing as a good terrorist organization. Consequently, a strategy
for winning would recognize that Israel must launch a concerted campaign aimed at
defeating and dismantling the PA as a whole.
A policy for victory would also start from a recognition that the common thread
joining all the Palestinian terror factions together is jihad. In light of the
ideological nature of their common war against Israel, a campaign based on military
might alone cannot bring about any long-term sociological or political change in
Palestinian society. Unless the ideology of jihad is defeated, a new crop of
jihadists will rise up to replace the current one.
Since jihadist ideology is what makes the Palestinian war against the Jews
intractable and vests it with its central importance to the global jihad, the defeat
of this ideology in the marketplace of ideas will go a long way towards defeating
the global jihad as a whole. And the ideology of jihad is far from indestructible.
With its call for genocide of Jews and subjugation of all other non-Muslims, and
with its demand that Muslims live under a literal interpretation of Shariah law
which enslaves women and abolishes the very notion of human freedom — jihad is an
inhuman ideology. It is inherently unattractive to people who sanctify life rather
than death. So central to a strategy for beating the Palestinian jihad would be an
Israeli ideological assault on jihad.
The unattractiveness of the notion of jihad is most apparent to the jihadists
themselves. This is why they spend billions of dollars on a never-ending stream of
propaganda aimed at brainwashing as many people as possible. The aim of the jihadist
mosques, television and radio stations and internet sites is twofold. First they
work to indoctrinate and mobilize supporters. Second they serve to demonize anyone
who fights them — be that George W. Bush, Tony Blair, Salman Rushdie, or Israel.
The Olmert government's inability to recognize the actual state of Palestinian
society and act accordingly has two major sources. First, the government is
incompetent. As with the Palestinians so with Iran, Syria, and Hizbullah, the Olmert
government is simply incapable of conceptualizing policies capable of defending
Israel.
Yet, aside from the specific incompetence of the Olmert government, in its inability
to contend with the ideological nature of the war being waged against Israel, the
Israeli government is little different from Western governments from Washington to
Brussels. Six years after the Palestinians launched their jihad, and five years
after the jihadist attacks on the US, the governments of the free world remain
deeply hesitant about engaging in a true ideological struggle with jihad.
It is not merely that fearing accusations of racism, the leaders of the world's
democracies are averse to noting the monstrous nature of an ideology that
marginalizes life and embraces death. Terrified of being falsely labeled fascists,
Western leaders, held intellectually hostage by the multicultural police, refuse to
assert what ought to be obvious: Liberal, free societies, which uphold human freedom
and sanctify life, are superior to jihadist societies that do the opposite. Not only
must the free world win the war against the global jihad, we deserve to win it,
because we are the good guys and our enemies are the bad guys.
If our leaders are incapable of conceiving a policy for victory or of explaining to
either themselves or to our enemies why we must win and they must lose, is their any
reason to hope that we can survive, let alone emerge victorious in this war?
This week we received a clear sign that indeed, we can win. On Tuesday, Likud leader
Binyamin Netanyahu embraced an initiative launched last Thursday by the Jerusalem
Center for Public Affairs. Led by former UN ambassador and Netanyahu advisor Dore
Gold, the JCPA launched an effort to have Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
indicted under the Genocide Convention and tried as a war criminal at the Hague for
his calls to annihilate Israel. This campaign is the first constructive Israeli
public relations campaign against Iran. If backed by mass protests of Jews in Israel
and in international capitals calling for the overthrow of the genocidal mullahs in
Teheran, this initiative could form the basis for an effective Israeli political
campaign against Teheran. And it is a completely private initiative.
What the JCPA's campaign shows us clearly is that just as private groups can wage
political war against Iran even if Olmert is too incompetent to do so himself, so
too, private groups and individuals can wage an ideological war against the ideology
of jihad far more effectively than our governments can. For while the Olmert
government and its Western counterparts are at the mercy of the multicultural
commissars, private citizens are under no such constraints. And Israelis are better
positioned than any Western society to launch such a war.
Tens of thousands of anti-jihadists Israelis — both Jewish and Arab — are completely
fluent in Arabic, contemporary culture and the internet. A private initiative to
operate hundreds of Arabic language websites with anti-jihadist, liberal,
pro-American and (dare we say) Zionist messages would constitute a serious challenge
to jihadist predominance over Palestinian and pan-Arab consciousness.
Philanthropists in Israel and worldwide should have no difficulty investing a few
million dollars for a project that would do nothing more than state the patently
obvious: The path of jihad is immoral, inhuman and no fun at all while the path of
human freedom is moral, just and can be highly enjoyable.
After Netanyahu presented the JCPA initiative to indict Ahmadinejad to foreign
ambassadors, Defense Minister Amir Peretz was asked if he agrees that Ahmadinejad is
a war criminal. Peretz did agree. Although he hadn't considered the issue himself,
Peretz could not possibly have opposed what is obviously true and obviously an
Israeli interest.
So too, were Olmert asked whether he agrees that Zionism and the notion of human
freedom it embodies are superior to the notion of jihad, no doubt, Abbas's most
enthusiastic champion would say yes. This is so not simply because Zionism is
objectively better than jihad. It is so because it would be politically foolish for
Olmert to say otherwise.
Although the dangers our world presents us with mount by the day, much of the power
to surmount those dangers lies in our hands as citizens of Israel and of free
societies more generally. By acting privately, we can force our leaders to defend us
publicly and to adopt policies based on reality that see victory rather than
surrender as our best option moving forward.
JWR contributor Caroline B. Glick is the senior Middle East Fellow at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, DC and the deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post. Comment by clicking here.
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