The First Symptom
by Michael Devolin
Doctor Michael Phelps once said, “The trouble with heart disease is that the first symptom is often hard to deal with: sudden death.” Likewise it is difficult for Israel to deal with what is always the first symptom of war with her Muslim neighbors: their intended genocide of every living Jew residing in the Middle East. Iran’s “Supreme Leader” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei recently had his “strategy specialist” Alireza Forghani compose a document declaring that it would be a “jurisprudential justification” for the Iranian military to wipe out the nation of Israel and all its Jewish inhabitants.
Aside from even touching on the subject of Islamic-incited, anti-Jewish hatred and genocide as being somehow connected to any type of “jurisprudential” philosophy other than the various kill-the-Jews themes found in the Koran, one has to wonder at how the Jews of Israel, especially women and children, go about their daily business after hearing the news that their Persian neighbors are keen to stomp their guts into the sand.
And this is not a new thing. Israel’s Jews hear I’m sure every other day from some Arab-Muslim sage how it should be the dream of every devout Muslim to kill Jews and to remove the “cancerous tumor” (f words) Israel and all her Jews from off the face of the earth. Same old, same old for Jews living in the Muslim Middle East. The thing I find most bizarre about this peculiar Islamic constant (Islamic death threats against Israel and her Jews) is that Western journalists continue to exculpate Islam the religion as being innocent of such malefic proclamations.
The UK tabloid Daily Mail even referred to the Iranian web-site (Alef), from whence the document was first released, as “conservative.” Conservative? If issuing genocidal death-threats against the Jewish people and the nation of Israel is “conservative,” then a majority of Western journalists are not to be trusted when it comes to their take on any subject relating to the Jewish people and the State of Israel.
A website that insouciantly releases a document justifying the extermination of the Jewish people and the destruction of their sovereign state is a racist or “extremist” website. Period. It is not “conservative.” Not as we understand “conservatism” in the Western world.
But even conclusive evidence on a variety of subjects can be grossly transmogrified when observed through the dark lens of Islam.
On January 26, 2004 Israel’s Representative to the Fourth Stockholm Conference On the Prevention of Genocide remarked that “we must be prepared to honestly report that which will be invariably evident. States which respect themselves cannot and should not evade the obvious by requiring field reports to be phrased euphemistically.”
The “Arab Spring” has been sweeping though the Middle East, and the Western media to this day is reluctant to call it what it really is: a resurgence of Islamic extremism. Darfur has in recent years been in the news because of the atrocities committed there by Arab militias.
The UN was sent there to find for certain whether or not genocide was being committed. The UN? That’s like sending a fox on a fox hunt. And this blatant posturing only after the Western world had seen television images of smoldering desert dwellings and charcoaled human remains laying nearby. The UN could have saved a lot of time and money by reading Gerald A. Honigman’s shamelessly, honest summation on the issue: “The atrocities committed in Darfur are Arab racism and chauvinism, pure and simple, being conducted by those very same folks who like to lecture the rest of the world about ‘racist Zionism’.”
I’ve never read the UN report. Why would I? The world knew already that there was a genocide happening in Darfur, only the world chose not to recognize it as such. The same psychopathic quiescence sealed the fate of the Jews of Europe during the Holocaust, but on a much larger scale. An immeasurably larger scale.
How can the State of Israel therefore, a second time around, expect such a willfully blind and callous world to publicly recognize the stark reality of the religiously-inspired genocide being impatiently dreamed about by her Muslim neighbors? Israel would be imprudent and foolishly naive to entertain such an expectation. At this time in history, Israel’s Jews remember, as do probably most Jews outside of Israel, that when things cannot get any worse for the Jews, it’s almost always because things cannot get any better. This is an exclusively Jewish impasse. Ask the Jewish fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Ask the Jewish Partisans of Eastern Europe. Ask any Jew who survived the death camps. This impasse is situated on the brink of total extermination, where the Jews of Israel exist today.
So please don’t talk to me about “disproportionate response.” Don’t talk to me about “Israeli aggression.” When your country exists proximate to an enemy whose first symptom of war is a complete and infrangible genocide, there can be no trust, no abatement of military deterrence. The unenviable conundrum facing the Jews of Israel today is that if at first they don’t succeed, they are dead. All of them. Simple as that.
Regardless all the excoriations hurled at her, Israel has no choice but to survive. There is no other path of resistance for her Jews. Gershom Gorenberg and all unctuous fools like him can pretend Israel is nothing but an “accidental empire,” but the Jew who remembers correctly and deeply enough into history knows that the State of Israel is no accident. It was a necessity become a life-saving reality. Jews did not survive all their horrors by making themselves door mats for madmen. They survive today because they know how to deal with the first symptom most commonly displayed by their enemies, which is the threat of genocide.
Israel can be peaceful and diplomatic better than any other nation on the planet. Read the news. Think “land for peace.” What other country gives away conquered land for the sake of peace? I know Canada doesn’t. But this peculiar type of diplomacy is maintained only until she’s pushed to the edge of extinction, where she now dwells. It’s then that Jewish experience comes to the fore. Enter the Israeli Defense Force. Or as Damon Runyon wrote long ago: “The race may not be to the swift nor the victory to the strong, but that’s how you bet.”
Michael Devolin is a Canadian writer and new contributor to the Israeli Advocate….
If I were an Israeli, I think I would be trumpeting what is going on in Syria right now: the Syrian army has been sent to kill their Arab brethren. Does that not make totally credible an Israeli claim that if the Muslims get the opportunity they will seek a genocide against the Jews?
Inciting genocide, which is routine in the Muslim world, is a crime against humanity under the genocide convention. Israel’s efforts to defend itself are routinely denounced as war crimes, yet no-one ever seems the least bit concerned about incitement to genocide.
Perhaps the time has come to call their bluff and pronounce the emperor naked.
Israel should announce that the first missile conventional or otherwise from this date will be answered with a nuclear response on the source of the launch ie; Lebanon, Syria,Iran etc.
Secondary targets can be all of the ME oil fields, which could kill in a few months 2/3’s of all life forms on the planet. Known as Nuclear Winter. (NO SUN)
There is only one way to possibly stop this madness and that is for Israel to be perceived as a Mad (crazy) State willing to bring down the world if pushed to it. Some call it the Samson option but what matters is we are believed and feared more than are our enemies.
Speaking in conventional terms is counter productive to our survival and national interests. We can never compete with the abilities of the major economic and military powers or with the resources of oil rich enemy states run by dictatorial regimes who can allocate unlimited resources at the expense of their populations.
America loves their profitable arms race in our region as they can offer protection against the clients using the very arms America has sold or given them.
Batya, are you seriously asking whether Israel can survive any type of onslaught without the help of any nation? Is the help of any nation the reason we are still around as a people? What is the sole reason were are here? These are not lessons that are learned as a child and repeated at the seder table only to have no real meaning during the rest of the year. We are living in Israel because G-d wants us to. We will weather any storm and are not reliant upon any one else to provide the shelter.
Do you really think any enemy wants to be in a war with Israel and Israel runs out of bullets? What do you think Israel will use then? The mushrooms will be sprouting…
The question now is: can Israel go it alone, without the backup of the US? Can it sustain a protracted war (because it seems as though that is what it might be) without shipments of US supplies? Does America not realize it is almost as at risk of Iranian nuclear armament as Israel? Perhaps, yet Obama keeps his choke hold round Israel’s throat, threatening her (not for the first time in US/Israeli relations) that if she goes alone, she remains alone. It is not the first time that Obama has demonstrated a disconnect between what he says and what he does. Now, he seems to be waiting for Israel to front the war, take the blame, and keep him free from recrimination. Or worse. Way worse. Is he hoping Israel will lose?
And why should there be recrimination? How much hatred can the world harbor that it can blame Israel for wanting to survive?
Only this morning we in Be’er Sheva had to run into our safe rooms when the sires went off warning of another Grad rocket attack from Gaza . What I do not want is these rockets to be nuclear tipped and that can only be achieved if Israel destroys the Iranian nuclear sites. But the Europeans have no clue of the real danger Israel ( and they for that matter ) are under. This morning William Hague, British Foreign Secretary, talked about the Cold nuclear War with Iran! Now this is wishful thinking. See How about a real nuclear war, Mr. Hague? http://www.madisdead.blogspot.com
Israel should never have allowed the fakestinians to play the victim card and get the upper hand. Look at the crap Gingrich had to deal with when he told the TRUTH about who these occupiers really are. Rockets are still being lobbed into Israel which should have wiped out arafat and his swine decades ago. Not only do they put up with rocket attacks, they are allowing drivers to have rocks thrown at them. No matter what, Israel will always be demonized by “world opinion”. It is astounding to me that the free world still does’nt understand that the ONLY way to deal with these muslim savages is through STRENGTH and not weakness. As a proud Jew, I don’t expect to be liked or need to be liked. I do demand to survive and history, remote and recent tells us that the only way to do this is to fight fire with fire. No surrender, no appeasement,no “land for peace”, no more surgical strikes, no more door-to-door searches,no more prisoner swaps, no more BS! Never again means NEVER AGAIN!!!!!!!