Friday, July 21, 2006

The high price of appeasement

The high price of appeasement

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Posted: July 21, 2006
1:00 a.m. Eastern

© 2006

Israel has tried to appease its enemies. Beginning in September 1993, Israel embarked on a policy of appeasement under the euphemism "land for peace."

Israel surrendered land to the Palestinians, who immediately used that land to stage lethal attacks against the "Israeli occupation." The "Israeli occupation" of Gaza was the declared reason for the attacks on Israeli targets that eventually forced Israel to build a security barrier along its border with Gaza.

When Israel finally capitulated and pulled out of Gaza, the so-called Israeli occupation ended. But since Israel withdrew, the attacks have grown even more intense. What's the excuse now? Since the withdrawal, Hamas has launched more than 1,000 rockets into Israel from "unoccupied" Gaza.

Israel's "occupation" of South Lebanon ended in 2000. As in Gaza, the purpose of the occupation was to prevent attacks against Israel from just across its borders in southern Lebanon.

Hezbollah has done to South Lebanon exactly what Hamas has done to Gaza – turned it into a military base and terrorist operations center for launching war against Israel.

As we have seen repeatedly on television, South Lebanon bristles with Hezbollah's thousands of new missiles from Iran and Syria that puts all of northern Israel in jeopardy.

By now, it should be abundantly clear to everyone that the "occupation" of Gaza and South Lebanon was not the problem. As soon as Israel traded these areas for the promise of peace, the attacks intensified.

Simply put, the goal of the vast majority of the Muslim world is the destruction of its mortal enemy: Israel. When they use the euphemism of "Israeli occupation," they really mean Israel's presence anywhere in the Middle East.

There's not a map in any Palestinian schoolbook that even depicts a state of Israel. In the present situation, Israel can only stop the attacks emanating from Gaza and South Lebanon by re-taking those territories. Occupying both areas long enough to root out its adversaries is Israel's only option for defeating the deeply embedded enemy it now faces. Hopefully, the appeasers will learn that if your death is the enemy's goal, cutting off your hand isn't going to appease him. It will just make it harder to fight him.

All of this demonstrates the insanity of both the Oslo Accords and the Roadmap to Peace. How can these plans work when the vast majority of Palestinians back both Hamas and Hezbollah? They have proven they don't just want a nation in part of the land. They want all of "Palestine" ethnically cleansed of Jews.

Muslims will never accept the state of Israel. Israel has only two choices: Give up and get out or be ready to fight and not give another meter of ground for the enemy to use as a base against it. These are the hard facts.

We have to also factor in the growing animosity of Muslims everywhere against the West.

In mid-June, the Pew Research Organization released a poll taken among Muslims. It was titled "The Great Divide: How Westerners and Muslims View Each Other."

Solid majorities of Muslim respondents across the Middle East, together with Muslims living in Europe, Russia and North America agreed with the statement, "Relations between Muslims and Westerners are generally bad."

Apparently, a majority of Muslims blame the West for their lack of prosperity. They do not attribute it to massive government corruption, a lack of education or Islamic fundamentalism.

The poll also revealed a much deeper hatred of the West among Muslim populations than vice-versa. The opinion in the Islamic world is that the war is the West's fault. The poll asked if Muslims believed the attacks of September 11 were carried out by Arab Islamic jihadists. Across the Islamic world, a solid majority believes there was no Islamic connection to 9-11.

From the majority Muslim perspective, the September 11 attacks were an invention designed by the West as an excuse to steal Arab oil.

All of the Muslim populations polled display a solid majority of support for Osama bin Laden. Likewise, suicide bombing is alarmingly popular. It's impossible to square the attitudes expressed in the Pew Poll with the Western fiction that we are really at war with only a small minority of Islamic "fundamentalists" out of a majority of peaceful practitioners of a great religion of peace and love. The majority believes the United States government is so depraved that it murdered 3,000 of its own citizens to justify a war so it could steal Islamic oil wealth.

With this kind of general attitude in the Muslim world, we should certainly not be pressing Israel to give into any more demands of giving "land for peace." That is a fiction that needs to be abandoned forever. As I said above, the Israelis are faced with only two options: Give up and get out – or stay prepared to fight and give no more advantages to an enemy that has sworn to annihilate them.

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