The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
Variously attributed to Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, et al.
The staccato of Peace Drums can be heard emanating from the usual suspects in the Middle East. The Israeli government and the Israeli Left are desperately looking for someone to surrender more land and sovereignty to (even if in reality the Palestinians have minimal attachment to Jerusalem.) Mahmoud Abbas is a poor choice, not only a corrupt yet urbane thug, Holocaust denier, supporter of Palestinian terrorism, but also weak and vacillating as a bonus. At the moment he is apparently the best that the Israelis and their American enablers can find. Threats and demands have been variously reported and, as usual, Israel, having gone some way toward re-establishing deterrence via their strike on Syrian nuclear facilities last month, are now expected to make concessions from a position of strength. Of course, were Israel to actually lose a war, no one would expect the Arabs to make concessions form a position of strength. Since there would no longer be an Israel, such an expectation would be moot, in any event. For Israel, every war is an existential struggle; they live in a bad neighborhood, surrounded by genocidal Jew Haters, so defeat would not offer an opportunity to return to some mythical status quo ante.
At the moment, it is fair to say that Civilization is threatened by radical Islam, a supremacist, racist, anti-Semitic ideology based on the Koran. While it is proper and expectable that any religion believe that it offers the best and most fitting avenue to approach God, only Islam insists that anyone who raises questions about it deserves death. This leads to such quaint customs as beheading infidels, heretics, and apostates, and suicide bombing, which the Arabs did not invent but have gone a long way toward perfecting. It also suggests a commonality of outcome for Israel and those other nations most at risk from the depredations of Imperialist Islam.
As is traditional, Israel is civilization's "canary in the coal mine" and their experience is likely to be instructive. Yesterday the Jewish Chronicle posted an article by David McAvoy (who spent a year in Syria from July 2006 to August 2007) which helps explain why Israel will never be defeated by the Arabs and why Islam will ultimately fail in their efforts to take over Europe. [HT: Dissecting Leftism]
Letter from... Damascus: Syria: where 1930s Germany meets Borat
The Jews did 9/11. They control the mass media, international banking, the UN, and Washington. The Holocaust never happened, or if it did, the Jews orchestrated it to exploit public sympathy for their “entity” in Palestine.
Welcome to Syria, best described as 1930s Germany meets Borat, a land of paranoia where everyone is being watched. And that includes you.
It is easy to miss this if, like most foreigners, you study Arabic at the university and your contact with locals is limited.
But leave campus, speak only Arabic, immerse yourself in the society, and a totally different picture emerges.
When I first arrived, a lot of people told me: “We are not against Jews, we are only against Zionists.” But cross the language threshold and the extent and ferocity of the antisemitism hits you like a slap in the face.
The guy who ran the corner shop near my flat refused to sell Coca-Cola because: “It is a Jewish corporation. Everyone knows that!”
Walk into any Damascus bookshop and you will find all the classics, from Mein Kampf to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
I once found a book entitled Jews of Damascus. Just don’t ask why all the photos are black and white.
The state-run newspapers will not acknowledge Israel by name, only as Occupied Palestine, the Zionist Entity, or if they really have to, “Israel”. I asked someone, “Why the quotes?”
“Because it’s an entity, not a country.”
“Are there any other entities on the planet, or is it just Israel?”
You will not make many friends asking that question. This is a society held together by fear.
...
But some of the Kurds from the north are very pro-Israel. For them, Israel is what they aspire Kurdistan to be: a democratic country set up by a race of people who have been historically persecuted.
I was with Davo, a Kurdish friend, when I made what I thought was an obvious, corny joke.
Instead, he could not stop laughing.
The joke involves switching the first two letters of “Ba’ath” so it becomes “Ab’ath”. It changes the meaning from Ba’ath Party to Party of Absurdity.
When I asked why nobody had previously come up with the most obvious joke in Syria, Davo just looked at me and said, “We’re too frightened to even think it.”
The ideology of radical Islam is first and foremost based on Jew-hatred. Certainly the Islamists hate Christians, Hindus, et al, with a great deal of conviction, but they save their fullest flowering of hate for the Jew. The despised Jew, descendants of pigs and dogs, who came with nothing straight form the death camps, into the Arab's home, and turned the desert and swamps of Palestine into a modern wonder. It is hard to describe the envy and loathing the Israelis very existence evokes int heir Arab neighbors. Imagine seeing oneself as the final fruition of God's plan, followers of the perfect religion which has superseded all others, with the right to command all others to submit, and having these upstart Jews mock you by their very existence. One either despairs and questions one's God given right to be supreme or strives to destroy the infidel. It is quite clear what the Arab and Muslim has been trying to do for the last 60 years.
Historically, all Jew-haters have ultimately been consumed by the disorder. They have, most unfortunately, been able to achieve short term Pyhrric victories, but all Jew-haters have succumbed to their hubris, often in short order.
Hatred curdles the mind. It is the most destructive emotion because it emerges from intolerance of internalized object-representations. In other words, the hater hates something within himself and projects the intolerable parts of himself onto others, who then become the focus of the hatred. However, since the internalized object can only be destroyed by destroying oneself, the outcome almost always includes quasi-suicidal behavior. Hatred then includes a disavowal of all that is best within the human being; the "enemy" can be allowed to have no redeeming qualities, thus hatred can only destroy. And, because it is fueled from internal sources, no amount of destruction can ever satisfy the blood-lust. The hater cannot build because his rage can only destroy. Every attempt to appease the hater only forces him to up the ante and eventually even all but the most committed suicidal Leftist can not fail to notice that he is on the firing line.
This is why the Arabs can never win. Since they can never be satisfied with concessions, they will always find a way to demand unacceptable terms; they will always find ways to be insulted and enraged; they will always find ways to convince themselves Islam is under attack and use their paranoid projection to justify (premature) attacks on heir imagined oppressors.
If Arab culture were healthy, devoted to creating a better world for its people and devoted to recovering lost territory and Honor, they would bide their time, act as if they are civilized human beings, lull the Israelis into complacency, build up their industrial capacity and their military capabilities, and then, and only then, strike with everything they have. They will never do that. The minute the Palestinians get a missile with a slightly longer range, they literally cannot restrain themselves from trying to kill Jews. If they are ever unlucky enough to hit the wrong target (a school, an apartment building with mass casualties) even Olmert, quite possibly the worst leader Israel has ever had, will be forced to respond and Ehud Barak, the new Minister of Defense, is no Amir Peretz.
As desperately as Israel wants peace, and just as desperately as thew Europeans want to appease their angry Islamists in the service of their suicidal multi-culturalism, the Islamists will never tolerate a benign outcome as long as there exist Jews and other infidels whose existence is anathema.
Thus will the Arabs once again rescue the Jews (and Europeans) from themselves.
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