RUTHFULLY YOURS

There are different kinds of bombs.

Presently we are experiencing bombs falling on Israel, launched by a terrorist government whose goal is the demise of the State of Israel and the annihilation of all its Jewish citizens.

Simultaneously Israel is returning the favor, not in an effort to kill all Gazan Arabs, rather to exterminate the animals who are causing ‘Red Alert’ to be sounded, not only in Sderot, Ashkelon and Ashdod, but also in Beit Shemesh, Jerusalem, Haifa, Caesarea, Tel Aviv, Nes Tziona, Rishon L’Tzion, and many other places, and yes, including even Hebron. (The unconfirmed rumors are that the missile aimed at us fell in the Arab village Daharia, in the Southern Hebron Hills, killing three Arabs.)

Last night one of my granddaughters, who lives in Beit Haggai, in the southern Hebron Hills, where too there was a siren yesterday, called me. Her father (my son) was called up a few days ago in the emergency draft. In tears she whispered, “Saba, I’m afraid.”

There are major differences between our bombs and their bombs. They are aiming for Ben Gurion airport. Their primary targets are civilians.Apartment buildings. Factories. Shopping centers. Wherever. The more dead, the better. After all, that’s the goal.

Before Israel releases its bombs, the intended ‘house’ is notified. Not once, rather twice. “Get out, we are going to bomb this house.” The people inside have, not 15 seconds, but five minutes to evacuate. Then a ‘warning flare’ is released. “We are serious about this.” And only after both these warnings, is the building destroyed.

Of course, these are not random dwellings. These are the home bases of the beasts trying to destroy Israel. If the people inside take the alerts seriously, they are not injured. But lately, the Hamas terror leadership in Gaza has told its citizens to ‘ignore’ the Israeli forewarning. Not only don’t they care if their own civilians are killed. To the contrary, they prefer it. That way they have good photos to show the international media and at the UN.

The goal of Israel’s war against Hamas’ terrorism – which has systematically and deliberately launched missiles at civilians – must not be another ceasefire, but the devastation of the entire infrastructure of Hamas’ fire – logistically, operationally, financially, educationally and politically.

The goal of Israel’s war against Hamas’ terrorism – which has grown in power following each round of clashes and ceasefire – must not be an end to the current cycle of violence, but ending the cyclical pattern of violence, by destroying Hamas’ terrorist capabilities.

The goal of Israel’s war against Hamas’ terrorism – which directly impacts Israel’s confrontation with Iran, regional Islamic terrorism, Hezbollah and other enemies – must be the restoration of Israel’s posture of deterrence, which has been severely undermined by the twenty-one year-old Oslo-driven policy of engagement and containment – rather than devastating – the dramatically expanding Palestinian and Hezbollah infrastructures of hate education, terrorism, in general, and missile capabilities, in particular. Israel’s posture of deterrence has also been crippled by putting up with systematic Palestinian non-compliance, while rewarding Palestinian belligerence and terrorism with territorial, diplomatic and economic concessions; tolerating the deliberate and extensive Palestinian destruction of Temple Mount archeology; and the massive release of Palestinian arch-terrorists.

Israel’s posture of deterrence constitutes the most crucial axis of Israel’s national security in the face of the rising tide of Islamic terrorism, the Arab Tsunami and increasingly violent Muslim intolerance towards the “infidel” Christians and Jews, contending that the Middle East (as well as Spain, Portugal, Southern France, Sicily and parts of Italy’s mainland) is divinely-ordained to Muslims.

A national posture of deterrence is doubly crucial in the Middle East, the world’s leading breeding ground of terrorism, where compromise, concession, retreat and the lack of unyielding posture are perceived by the Muslim/Arab street as indecisiveness, insecurity and weakness, thus fueling further radicalism, violence, terrorism and war.

This op-ed was co-authored with Dr. Daniel Mandel, Director of the ZOA’s Center for Middle East Policy and author of H.V. Evatt & the Creation of Israel (Routledge, London, 2004).

Israelis were traumatized in recent weeks by the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli youths — Eyal Yifrah, 19, Gilad Shaar, 16, and Naftali Fraenkel, 16 — by the Hamas terrorist group, now part of Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah Palestinian Authority (PA) regime. Days later, an Arab Israeli teenager, Muhammad Abu Khdeir, 16, was murdered by what appears to have been a violent underworld group of Jewish Israelis. Former Jerusalem Post editor, David Horovitz, immediately wrote a tendentious article, painting an inaccurate and ugly image of Israeli society, ‘A sobering moment for complacent Israel’ (July 7), in which he contended that “the killing of Muhammed Abu Khdeir must rid us of the illusion that we enjoy a distinctive moral superiority over our neighbors … [without] a reverence for life, we have no particular right to be here at all.”

Indeed, Horovitz thinks that this admittedly horrific, bestial crime tells us something about Israelis in general that we didn’t know, or care to think, before: “We Israelis knew we had nothing in common with those Hamas killers who so callously ended the lives of three innocent Israeli teenagers; we were wrong.”

But it is David Horovitz who is wrong. First, Israel’s national existence, like that of other countries, is not conditional on a “distinctive moral superiority” — which Israel actually possesses over its enemies. Second, the way to gauge whether a society supports or reviles terrorism is to observe its reaction to it. Comparison here is instructive.

Mahmoud Abbas’ Palestinian Authority (PA) has institutionally glorified terrorism against Jews as a national and religious duty. The PA honors, lauds and rewards terrorists — by naming schools andstreets after them; by calling them ‘martyrs’ and paying condolence calls on their families when they’re killed; by hiding wanted terrorists in Abbas’ presidential compound; by paying stipends to those imprisoned and pensions to the families of those deceased; and by demanding the release of jailed terrorists by Israel as precondition of further negotiations.

“I believe that adulterers should be stoned to death. I believe that we should cut the hands off of thieves. I believe the Sharia should be implemented in Denmark. Maybe we should change the Christiansborg Palace [the Danish Parliament building] to Muslimsborg to have the flag of Islam flying over the parliament in Denmark. I think this would be very nice.” — Anjem Choudary, while in Denmark to establish Islam4dk in June 2014.

“[Choudary’s network] has now been proscribed as a terrorist organization operating under 11 different names, but neither he nor any one of his associates has so far been prosecuted for membership of an illegal group.” — Times of London.

“The cure for depression is jihad.” — Abdul Raqib Amin (aka Abu Bara al-Hindi), Scottish jihadist.

The British government has banned three groups linked to Anjem Choudary, a Muslim hate preacher who wants to turn the United Kingdom into an Islamic state.

The move comes after the groups were found to have organized jihadist recruitment meetings in which two Muslim youths from Cardiff were persuaded to fight with Islamic insurgents in Syria.

The Home Office said on June 26 that the groups Need4Khilafah, The Shariah Project and The Islamic Dawah Association are all aliases of al-Muhajiroun, a Salafi-Wahhabi extremist group that was banned in 2006 but has continued to operate ever since then by using different names.

Al-Muhajiroun (Arabic for “The Emigrants”) has also operated under a host of other names, including al-Ghurabaa (Arabic for “The Strangers”), The Saved Sect (aka The Savior Sect), Muslims Against Crusades, Muslim Prisoners, Islamic Path, Islam4UK, Women4Sharia and Islamic Emergency Defence, which is still operational.

Al-Ghurabaa and The Saved Sect were both banned in July 2006, after they organized a march through downtown London to protest the publication of cartoons depicting Mohammed. Demonstrators linked to the groups waved placards reading, “Butcher those who mock Islam,” “Kill those who insult Islam,” and “Europe you will pay, your 9/11 is on the way.”

Islam4UK was banned in January 2010. At the time, the group described itself as having been “established by sincere Muslims as a platform to propagate the supreme Islamic ideology within the United Kingdom as a divine alternative to man-made law” to “convince the British public about the superiority of Islam, thereby changing public opinion in favor of Islam in order to transfer the authority and power to the Muslims in order to implement the Sharia [in Britain].”

Muslims Against Crusades was banned in November 2011, after the group launched a campaign to turn twelve British cities into independent Islamic states. The so-called Islamic Emirates were to function as autonomous enclaves ruled by Sharia law and operate entirely outside British jurisprudence.

All of the bans have been based on the Terrorism Act 2000, which states that a group can be proscribed if it “commits or participates in acts of terrorism, prepares for, promotes or encourages terrorism or is otherwise concerned in terrorism.”

Section 1.1 of the Act defines terrorism as the “use or threat of action designed to influence the government or an international governmental organization or to intimidate the public or a section of the public…for the purpose of advancing a political, religious, racial or ideological cause.”

Announcing the latest ban, Britain’s Minister for Security and Immigration, James Brokenshire, said, “Terrorist organisations should not be allowed to escape proscription simply by acting under a different name.” He continued:

The irrevocable Islamic and Koranic injunction upon all Muslims is to wage relentless war against any non-Muslim nation state that exists within what Islam decrees as the Dar al-Islam (the House of Islam). Wherever the Muslim foot has trod triumphal in the name of Allah, that territory is considered eternally Islamic land. If it is lost, then it enters the Dar al-Harb (the House of War) and must be retaken and the population either forcibly converted to Islam, forced into dhimmi degradation, or exterminated.

According to Abraham I. Katsh, who wrote the following as far back as 1954 in his book, Judaism and the Koran:

“The duty of Jihad, the waging of Holy War, has been raised to the dignity of a sixth canonical obligation … To the Moslem, the world is divided into regions under Islamic control, the dar al-Islam, and regions not subjected as yet, the dar al-harb.

“Between this area of warfare and the Muslim dominated part of the world there can be no peace. Practical considerations may induce the Muslim leaders to conclude an armistice, but the obligation to conquer and, if possible, convert never lapses. Nor can territory once under Muslim rule be lawfully yielded to the unbeliever. Legal theory has gone so far as to define as dar al-Islam any area where at least one Muslim custom is observed.

“Thanks to this concept, the Moslem is required to subdue the infidel, and he who dies in the path of Allah is considered a martyr and assured of Paradise and of unique privileges there.”

It is not only Israel, the Jewish state, that is to be warred and aggressed against by the followers of the “religion of peace” but all lands that have been lost to erstwhile Muslim invasion and occupation: They include Spain, Portugal, Sicily, parts of France and Italy, Hungary, Austria, the Balkans, Greece, southern Russia, India—all lands considered to be in the Dar al Harb. And the Islamic war is against not only Christians and Jews, but Hindus, Buddhists, Bahai, and all non-Muslim faiths or those who have no faith.

As a veteran, and as a governor who has supported Texas National Guard deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, I can understand the emotions behind isolationism. Many people are tired of war, and the urge to pull back is a natural, human reaction. Unfortunately, we live in a world where isolationist policies would only endanger our national security even further.
That’s why it’s disheartening to hear fellow Republicans, such as Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.), suggest that our nation should ignore what’s happening in Iraq. The main problem with this argument is that it means ignoring the profound threat that the group now calling itself the Islamic State poses to the United States and the world.
In the Islamic State, which came to prominence in Syria and now controls ample territory, weapons and cash in both that country and Iraq, the world is confronting an even more radicalized version of Islamic extremism than al-Qaeda. This group is well-trained, technologically sophisticated and adept at recruitment, with thousands of people with European passports fighting on its side, as well as some Americans.
This represents a real threat to our national security — to which Paul seems curiously blind — because any of these passport carriers can simply buy a plane ticket and show up in the United States without even a visa. It’s particularly chilling when you consider that one American has alreadycarried out a suicide bombing and a terrorist-trained European allegedlykilled four at the Jewish Museum in Brussels.
Yet Paul still advocates inaction, going so far as to claim in an op-ed last month in the Wall Street Journal that President Ronald Reagan’s own doctrines would lead him to same conclusion.
But his analysis is wrong. Paul conveniently omitted Reagan’s long internationalist record of leading the world with moral and strategic clarity.
Unlike the noninterventionists of today, Reagan believed that our security and economic prosperity require persistent engagement and leadership abroad. He, like Eisenhower before him, refused to heed “the false prophets of living alone.”
Reagan identified Soviet communism as an existential threat to our national security and Western values, and he confronted this threat in every theater. Today, we count his many actions as critical to the ultimate defeat of the Soviet Union and the freeing of hundreds of millions from tyranny.