Part IX. Islamic Bellicosity: Blood Lust (cont’d)

1. The PLO in Lebanon

When the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) entered Lebanon in 1970 (after having been expelled from Jordan), they tipped the power-sharing arrangement between Christians, Muslims, and Druze in favor of the Muslims. The PLO was therefore a major cause of the civil war that followed.

The war lasted from 1975 to 1990 and resulted in more than 100,000 civilian fatalities. British journalist Patrick Sills of the London Observer filed a report on the war. To dramatize the world’s reaction to this fratricidal war, Israeli journalist Eliyahu Amiqam (a friend of the present writer) published a running commentary on Sill’s report for his (Hebrew-language) newspaper, Yediot Aharanot:

[Sill writes]: “In the corners of the streets of Beirut, small children exhibit bottles which contain human ears dunked in acid, like pickles or artichokes in vinegar. Bodies are lying in the streets immersed in their coagulated blood, some lacking their procreative organs, which were cut off and put in acid for exhibition by children….”

“This report [Amiqam remarks], was printed not in June 1982, during Israel’s Operation Peace for Galilee [to stop the PLO from bombing Jewish towns]. [No, it] was printed on January 25, 1976, during the Civil War in Lebanon.” We read further: “The number of those killed and wounded, and worse than anything, the kidnapped whose fate was usually horrible and awesome, [had already] reached about 40,000, with both sides [Muslim and Christian Arabs] competing between themselves for the most ferocious actions. Complete villages were pillaged, set on fire, and all their populations eliminated. The Palestinian terrorists were the most extreme and cruelly vicious of all....”

[Now Amiqam asks:] “What did the world say at that time to this frightening situation? Nothing. What did Pope Paul VI say when nuns were raped in front of their parents and brothers and afterwards had their elbows cut? His holiness did not say anything. He was busy at the time protesting against the construction that was going on in Jerusalem. What did the world do at that time to stop the carnage and the horror in Lebanon? Nothing. But six years later [during Israel’s ‘Operation Peace for Galilee’], the world saw various attempts [by the United States and Western Europe] to allow the [PLO] terrorists to remain in their positions where they had succeeded in destroying Lebanon, slaughtering tens of thousands of its population, while establishing a central base for exporting murder on a worldwide scale [all this with the arms of the Soviet Union, the money of Saudi Arabia, the military cooperation of Syria, and the diplomatic patronage of Egypt].”

Amiqam goes on to say: “Until then everything was just fine in Lebanon. The disaster started only after the Jewish army [of Israel] entered Lebanon and began its ‘genocide’ and its ‘final solution’ to the Palestinian problem. Now [all of a sudden] the world showed on TV screens the pictures of war, the killing and destruction, the mothers fleeing with their children in their arms.”

The “world” in this context is the one influenced by the mendacious media of the United States and Western Europe, which denigrated Israel and portrayed the Jew as the villain, more monstrous and ugly than any other.

C. The PLO in Israel: The True Nature of the PLO’s War against Israel

The Muslims and Arabs that slaughtered each other during the ten-year civil war in Lebanon are the kinfolk of the Muslims and Arabs who have committed atrocity after atrocity in Israel since the 1993 signing of the Israel-PLO Agreement. Yet, despite the blood lust of the PLO manifested year after year for decades, hence, despite this protracted record of murdering and maiming of more than 15,000 thousand Jewish women and children as well unarmed men in Israel, the governments of Israel—which is to say the cretins who serve as this country’s political leaders—persist in seeking peace with these savages! And one hears not a peep of protest by the military leaders of this country, who, after all, are directly responsible for the safety and lives of Israel's civilian population! Is it any wonder that there is no end in sight of Arab terrorism? But this means that Israel's government, which has no written constitution, hence no well-defined structure of political responsibility, is dysfunctional. It means that Israel’s leaders are lacking not only Jewish national pride and purpose, but also any grand national strategy. Hence the present writer has drafted a constitution with a Unitary Executive based on Hebraic and American principles to replace Israel’s current system of multiparty coalition governments, lest Israel’s wellspring of creativity and moral grandeur be desiccated by partisan politics in a protracted war with barbarians.

It’s a travesty to call this war a “clash of civilizations,” the term made famous by the eminent political scientist Samuel Huntington. Syrian-born psychiatrist, Dr, Wafa Sultan, denies that Islam is a civilization, and the American philosopher Lee Harris offers solid arguments for her position. He rejects the multicultural relativism spearheaded by American and European universities, according to which the West is simply one of many cultures, no better or worse than any other.

By civilization Harris means a standard that is trans-national and trans-historical. He sees civilization as having four prerequisites: a stable social order, the co-operation of individuals pursuing their own interests, the ability to tolerate or socialize with one’s neighbors, and a hatred of violence. Clearly, Islam lacks three of the four prerequisites of Harris’ view of a civilization. Hence it is all the more remarkable that Wafa Sultan arrived at the same conclusion. She denied there was clash between the West and Islamic civilization because, in her words, Islam is not a civilization!

But what shall we say of the government of a Jewish state that seeks peace with Islam despite Islam’s unmitigated hatred of Jews? What shall we say of a government that seeks peace with a consortium of Islamic despots that boast of a 1,400-year history of warfare, hence of blood lust? What shall we say of a government which, despite its having the most powerful military force in the Middle East, tolerates the murder and maiming and terrorizing of tens of thousands of its own citizens? What shall we say of the political and military echelons of a government that retreats from pillar to post, and, in the process, expels thousands of Jews from their homes, Jews whose love of the Land of Israel made deserts bloom—a government, moreover, that threatens to make hundreds of thousands of more Jews homeless in order to make room for the creation of a bellicose Arab-Islamic state in Judea and Samaria, the cradle of Jewish civilization?

Doesn’t such a government vitiate the human qualities we should associate with civilization? Where is the respect for reason and human greatness, where is the spiritedness and human compassion, where is the gratitude to the past and respect for traditional values, where is the rule of law without which no civilization is possible? We see instead a government that surrenders Jewish land to Arabs and thus transforms the Jewish state into a haven for jobbers and traitors.

True, Islam is not a civilization, but what has become of civilization in Israel despite its extraordinary medical and technological accomplishments? We contrast vis-à-vis do not dissociate These accomplishments lose their glitter when juxtaposed by the cruelty and destructiveness of a government that expelled thousands of Jews from their intellectually creative and flourishing communities. We thus behold in Israel not a genuine civilization so much as congeries of heartless party hacks and mindless apparatchiks digging their country’s grave. No wonder there are Jewish academics and prime ministers who lack the intellectual integrity or courage to describe the conflict between Jews and Muslims as a conflict of civilizations! Again, did Nazis use their children as human bombs? Does this barbarism cease to be barbarism because semi-educated academics and politicians genuflect to the myth that Islam is a religion based on ethical and intellectual monotheism—by which I mean the Hebraic monotheism from which we derive the primacy of reason, justice, and kindness in human affairs? Indeed, to paraphrase Rabbi Dr. Leo Adler, whoever wishes to understand biblical man must seek to understand him through his relationship with God beginning with these intellectual and moral categories.

As for Muslims themselves, they have never had any doubts about a civilizational conflict between Islam and the West. They have always divided the world into the territory of Dar al-Islam, where Muslims reign, and the territory of Dar al-Harb, where non-Muslims reign, and where Sharia racism requires Muslims to eliminate “infidels” in the name of Islam’s deified Hitler. For the devout Muslim, Western civilization is not merely misguided: it’s evil. Here is the way 'Abd al-Rahman al-Bazzaz, (1913-1973), Dean of Baghdad Law College, and a former Iraqi Prime Minister, described the clash between Israel and Islam: “The existence of Israel nullifies the unity of our homeland, the unity of our nation and the unity of our civilization, which embraces the whole of this one region. Moreover, the existence of Israel is a flagrant challenge to our philosophy of life and the ideals for which we live, and a total barrier against the values and aims to which we aspire in the world.”

The Imam Hasan al-Banna (1906-1949) of Egypt regarded the Western way of life as decadent—bounded in effect on practical and technical knowledge, discovery, invention, and the flooding of world markets with mechanical products. The West, he said, is incapable of offering to man’s minds a flicker of light, a ray of hope, a grain of faith.