Tired of fighting: The first front and the second front

To learn to deal with terror and protect our citizens, stop criticizing Israel and realize that we must never get tired of winning.Op-ed.

By Howard Rotberg , INN  09/07/20

The first front in the war against western civilization is Israel and the second front is the U.S.

On both fronts, but right now mostly in the U.S., we have been witnessing an amazing appeasement of evil by politicians, media and professors and even some Judges. Whether it is the threat from the Islamists, an international menace, or the fascists and communists now threatening U.S. domestic freedoms, peace and security, it is sad to see how the elites give up in the face of violent protests and communist propaganda.

We see, almost every day, concessions granted to violent mobs under the aegis of Antifa or Black Lives Matter. In an age where American schools and universities (and some instructors in Israeli universities) mis-teach their students to hate America and Israel, two of the most moral nations on earth, perhaps the West is losing its desire to fight for liberty and freedom.

In certain cities, prosecutors seem to have lost their desire to keep criminals in jail. Hardened criminals with dozens of prior crimes are released into a vulnerable population – where “defunded” police forces will be unable to keep the peace.

We were mostly all shocked to see governmental and law enforcement inaction in America when domestic terrorists seized control of a six block section of downtown Seattle, including a police station and banned all police. This law of the jungle witnessed at least two murders, some rapes and looting and property damage.

We shall never forget the images of looting in places as disparate as Minneapolis and New York City where small business owners were abandoned by police and local government too weak, afraid and perhaps worn down by constant criticisms from the Left to fight this evil.

And America must never forget 9/11 and never stop fighting the evil behind it.

When Israel releases hundreds of convicted terrorists from jail in exchange for one captured Israeli soldier, many wonder why Israel continues to believe that unilateral concessions will serve any other purpose than encouraging Arab intransigence in their belief that the rest of the world will eventually submit.

From the concessions in the Oslo Process to the unilateral retreat from Gaza which then became a Hamas state dedicated to terrorizing Israel, unilateral concessions have been tragic in their results for the State which represents the first front in the Islamist war on the liberal democracies.

Those unilateral concessions, with the woolly thinking behind them, indicate more than anything that terrorism induces in the objects of terrorism delusional behaviour, similar to that shown by abused women and children who cling to the bizarre belief that they are responsible for the abuse and if they only try a bit harder the abuse will subside.

In my book, TOLERISM The Ideology Revealed, I argued that terrorism creates, on a societal level, a cultural Stockholm Syndrome, where the terrorized and abused try harder and harder to please the terrorists.

Never did I imagine that the Americans would elect, in Barack Obama, a President who would give support to the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, or that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would take as one of her closest advisors, Huma Abedin, a woman whose family and background are connected closely to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Terrorism is a spectacularly successful tactic. After 9/11, American Islamophilia and preoccupation with the censorship of supposed Islamophobes has shown the success of terrorism. After Fort Hood, President Obama tried to persuade us that Major Hassan was not, all evidence to the contrary, an Islamist terrorist, but was just evidencing “workplace violence”.

But how can we expect the Americans to understand and transcend Islamist terrorist tactics, when the liberal democratic country that lives with terrorism on an almost weekly basis, refuses to see reality? For in Israel, from Rabin to Sharon to Olmert to current Leftists we see large components of its political class, judiciary, media and academy – though not the man in the street and not the right – evidence the delusional ideology of meeting terrorism with love. See the great book by Mordechai Nisan The Crack-up of the Israeli Left.

The starkest language of concessionary ideology in Israel’s history came shortly after Israel endured the agony, some (such as the great Italian, Giulio Meotti,) would say, the New Holocaust of terror during the suicide bombings of the Second Intifada This came after Israel threw caution to the wind and reconceived its enemy, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, into something called the Palestinian Authority, even helping to arm and train it – to give it a training period of sovereignty over the people who continue to hate the very idea of a Jewish state in supposed once and forever Muslim territory.

The mouthpiece for this concessionary, defeatist, language, Ehud Olmert, followed Ariel Sharon’s prime ministership in believing the absurd idea that giving the Palestinian Arabs all of Gaza, even ejecting any Jews living there, so as to make the place, like all Arab countries, Judenrein, was somehow something that would change the Palestinian Arabs into friendly liberal democrats.

I believe that any of Israel’s critics who overlook what happened in Gaza and suggest that Israel do the same in Judea and Samaria (which they call the “West Bank”) are by that reason alone to be categorized as anti-Semites. The old saying comes to mind, “fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.”

Olmert’s infamous words on the reason for the “disengagement” or retreat from Gaza were as follows:

“It will bring more security, greater safety, much more prosperity, and a lot of joy for all the people that live in the Middle East. … Everything depends on the success of this disengagement. And we all desperately need it. We are tired of fighting, we are tired of being courageous, we are tired of winning, we are tired of defeating our enemies, we want that we will be able to live in an entirely different environment of relations with our enemies. We want them to be our friends, our partners, our good neighbors.”

At the end of George Bush’s presidency, a directive was signed by Donald J. Atwood, George H. W. Bush’s deputy secretary of defense, which was not a complete “ban” on firearms at military installations. It did explicitly authorize DOD personnel “to carry firearms while engaged in law enforcement or security duties, protecting personnel, vital Government assets, or guarding prisoners.”

However, it did try to “limit and control the carrying of firearms by DOD military and civilian personnel. The authorization to carry firearms shall be issued only to qualified personnel when there is a reasonable expectation that life or DOD assets will be jeopardized if firearms are not carried. .

The consequence? Failure to stop attacks at two sites – the shooting at the Washington Navy Yard in September 2013, which left 13 dead, where some 16,000 military and civilian employees worked in a “gun free zone”, and secondly when Islamist Major Hassan an Islamist U.S. Army psychiatrist (who had expressed anti-American, pro-Islamist words) started killing soldiers at Fort Hood military base, killing 13 people and injuring more than 30 others. So were Bush and Clinton tired of winning, tired of weapons, preferring a naïve dream that all people are good?

President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, can be viewed to have conspired to hide from the American people the nature of the terrorist attack on the American Embassy in Benghazi Libya by portraying it as some kind of response by the “Arab Street” to the U.S. allowing the use of its freedoms by an unknown Egyptian Christian to make a movie offensive to Islam. And so, Ambassador Stephen’s murder was evidently deserved and the American people are following the Israelis in believing that it is up to them “to live in an entirely different environment of relations with our enemies.”

If the western world wants to learn how to deal with terrorists and how not to, how to protect its citizens and how not to, it can do no better than to stop criticizing Israel for a while, and understand that the Western liberal mind, whether in Washington, London or Tel Aviv/Jerusalem, must never get tired of winning.

Obama in his sham agreement with Iran tried to allow Iran and its terrorist proxies to acquire nuclear weapons. (President Trump to his credit cancelled the Agreement, but we still see Jewish Democrats opposing Trump’s actions.) If the Western world cannot get behind Israel dealing with these problems, we shall undoubtedly have to eventually deal with them on our own streets, even during the running of famous marathons as in Boston.

If one looks at contemporary universities and media and European countries, there is an astounding hostility to Israel as well as to the United States, arguably two of the most moral countries on earth compared to the rest. I have studied all the suspect ideologies of our intellectuals in moving us towards a submission to the values of the Islamists who support a world-wide Caliphate, sharia law, abuse of women and children and gays and ethnic and religious minorities. I have written about this in my recent book, The Ideological Path to Submission… and what we can do about it.

We are now facing a bizarre alliance of the Leftists, Islamist and Globalists.

And many Jews in America support Black Lives Matter, which has a policy of supporting BDS against Israel. Are these Jews too tired to think?

We should study very carefully what has happened and what is happening to Israel as it confronts neighbors who want to commit genocide against it. Americans should know that if Israel loses the first front, it will make it very difficult to win the war in the Second Front, a front that is becoming more apparent all the time.

And if we are too tired to fight that war, then all will be lost.

Howard Rotberg is the author of four books on ideologies and values: The Second Catastrophe: A Novel about a Book and its Author; Exploring Vancouverism: The Political Culture of Canada’s Lotus Land; Tolerism: The Ideology Revealed; and The Ideological Path to Submission… and what we can do about it. He writes periodically for Frontpage Magazine, New English Review, Israel National News. Israpundit, Jewish Voice of New York and The National Telegraph, and has written for other newspapers such as the Vancouver Sun, the Vancouver Observer, the Waterloo Region Record, the Hamilton Spectator and others. He is president of Canada’s sole conservative values publishing house, Mantua Books, www.mantuabooks.com and lives in Hamilton, Ontario Canada