Veterans of various Middle East conflicts have advised us not to go to Israel this spring, but I’m holding out. After all, there have been conflicts there throughout recorded history. “A group of Americans traveling on a bus in the West Bank would be a tempting target,” said a Navy Seal officer in San Diego last month where two of my sisters went to attend my nephew Mike’s graduation. Our itinerary would take us to Bethlehem, Masada, the Dead Sea, and Qumran - to the caves where the ancient Essenes hid the Dead Sea Scrolls - and all these are in the West Bank. There would be several days in Jerusalem and several days in northern Israel as well.
My sisters and my wife took the tour in May, 2000 and they want to go back with us, their husbands. We were supposed to go in October, but Hezbollah was rocketing Tiberius and Caesaria in the north. Now, Hamas has announced they will be targeting Americans for death because of our support of Israel.
On October 31st, Al Qaeda released an updated version of “A Guide for the Undecided on the Legitimacy of Killing Christians.” It promises that more attacks against America are coming soon and offers both an historical and theological rationale for killing Christians everywhere, especially Americans. Not good.
Weeks earlier, Al Qaeda released a manual titled “How to Fight Alone.” Frontpagemagazine.com describes it as “a how-to guide for Muslims to conduct their own ‘Jihad of One’ against the ‘Crusader-Zionists’ . . .[with] instructions on how lone Muslims can take the battle to the infidels.” Hmm. The infidels. That would be us on a bus. Crusaders without weapons.
Recommended methods for lone jihadists include “stabbing, feeding overdoses of cocaine or heroin, injecting air via needles, assassination with guns, burning down homes, putting poisonous snakes in cars, tampering with car brakes, planting explosives in vehicles, running over people, and luring people and then killing them.”
That’s not all. “The book also highly recommends poisoning targets and includes various methods of preparing and obtaining lethal toxins, including botulism. The book also gives instructions on making improvised explosives.”
It’s been over six years since the female members of my family made their pilgrimage. The September 11th attacks occurred sixteen months later and Palestinians all over Gaza and the West Bank danced in the streets when they heard the news. Why? Obviously they were happy Americans were massacred by Arab Muslims like them. The Palestinian Authority threatened western journalists who recorded the celebrations, saying they couldn’t guarantee their safety if the images were broadcast.
Here in the United States, most Americans believe a few radicals hiding in the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan are the only Muslims we have to worry about. Any others who hate us are justified by American foreign policy, they insist. Newspaper editors who profess to champion free speech worry interminably about offending Muslims if they publish children’s cartoons of Muhammad, though they have no qualms publishing photos of a crucifix in urine or the Virgin Mary in elephant dung. Though there have been few if any attacks on Muslims in the United States, they fret about the invented syndrome “Islamophobia,” as if any American fear of Islam is irrational.
Some of us, however, are coming to believe that the only irrational fear Americans have about Islam is the fear of taking a hard look at what it is becoming. We keep repeating that Islam is a religion of peace in spite of mounting evidence that it isn’t anymore, if it ever was. We go to great lengths to deny what is staring us in the face - that Islamic terrorist groups like Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas and all the rest are very popular with Muslims all around the world. That diplomatic approaches to the Palestinian problem, the Iraqi problem, the Syrian problem and the Iranian problem amount to little but appeasement and will only postpone an inevitable showdown. We’re deathly afraid that we may well have to use our overwhelming military power to destroy our enemies. That’s what we really fear, so we continue trying to appease them. Winston Churchill summed it up a half-century ago. “The appeaser,” he said, “feeds the crocodile in the hope that it will eat him last.”
It should be pretty clear by now that a Palestinian homeland in the West Bank and Gaza is not going to appease Muslims. They want Israel gone. That’s what conservative Israelis have claimed all along but we didn’t believe it. Now we do. After 9-11 and a three years in Iraq, we know our enemies and Israel’s are the same. They will not run out of suicide bombers and they will soon have nukes if they don’t already. It’s not a matter of whether they’ll use them against Israel and against us, but when. All it will take is one to wipe out Israel and nobody knows that better than Israel.
Israelis understand crocodiles better than Americans or Europeans do. Their long history has taught them. They’re not going to feed it much longer and they’ve had nuclear weapons for decades in preparation for exactly the threat now looming. Have I painted the picture clearly enough?
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