RUTHFULLY YOURS

Arabs and Muslims have long lost faith in their leaders’ ability to deal with the crises plaguing Arab and Islamic countries. The civil war in Syria, which has been raging for more than five years and which has claimed the lives of more than half a million people, is seen as a shining best example of Arab and Muslim leaders’ incompetence and apathy.

Others are calling Trump “Lion of the Sunnis”, “Caliph of the Muslims” and “Defender of the Islamic Holy Sites.” Some wrote: “Blessed be the hands of Abu Ivanka al-Amiriki (Trump),” and expressed hope that he would do more to rid the Syrian people of their dictator. “We love you Trump” and “Trump is our hope” are two of many hashtags that have become extremely popular on social media, especially Twitter. Many of the writers are Syrians, Egyptians and Gulf citizens.

Many Arabs and Muslims perceive themselves to have been betrayed by the Obama administration. They felt, rightly, that the Obama administration turned its back on Washington’s friends and allies in the Arab world in favor of Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood.

A new hero has been born in the Arab world and his name is Donald Trump. And this is not a joke.

Arabs and Muslims love leaders who talk tough and do not hesitate to use force. In the Arab world, compromise is a sign of weakness.

Until recently, Trump was anathema to many Arabs and Muslims. So what happened? U.S. President Donald Trump did something Arab leaders have failed to do: he helped the Syrian civilians who were being gassed by their ruler.

Arabs and Muslims have long lost faith in their leaders’ ability to deal with the crises plaguing Arab and Islamic countries. The civil war in Syria, which has been raging for more than five years and which has claimed the lives of more than half a million people, is seen as a shining best example of Arab and Muslim leaders’ incompetence and apathy.

The most recent Arab League summit in Jordan, which brought together many Arab heads of state and monarchs, will be best remembered for the photos of leaders falling asleep during the discussions. These pictures, which have been circulating widely in the Arab media, feel like salt in the festering wound of Arab leaders’ indifference to their peoples’ plights.

The summit, which utterly failed to find a solution to the ongoing killings in Syria, Yemen, Iraq and other Arab countries, is now being sarcastically referred to by many Arabs as the “Sleep Summit.”

“According to one estimate, 10−15 percent of the world’s Muslims are Islamists. Out of well over 1.6 billion, or 23 percent of the globe’s population, that implies more than 160 million individuals.” – Ayaan Hirsi Ali, in her new book, The Challenge of Dawa.

That was Ronald Reagan’s major achievement in his long war against the Soviet Union: presenting communism as a joke — exposing the lies of the Soviet regime, exposing the misery under which its people were living, and explaining why Western values were preferable to Communist ones. This is exactly what the West, Hirsi Ali explains, should be doing with radical Islam.

Western civilization is a humanist vision in which Christianity integrated Jewish wisdom, Greek philosophy and Roman law, thereby giving Western culture its distinctive character: freedom of speech and of the press, equal justice under law, the primacy of the individual, separation of religion and state, freedom of religion and from religion, property rights, sexual equality, an independent judiciary, and independent education, among other values. This is what radical Islam wants to destroy. That is why terrorists are attacking our churches, the State of Israel and why they are subverting democracy to turn it into Islamic law, sharia.

Jihad is spreading violence — and succeeding. “Of the last sixteen years,” notes Ayaan Hirsi Ali in her new book, The Challenge of Dawa, “the worst year for terrorism was 2014, with ninety-three countries experiencing attacks and 32,765 people killed.”

“The second worst was 2015, with 29,376 deaths. Last year, four radical Islamic groups were responsible for 74 percent of all deaths from terrorism: the Islamic State (also known as ISIS), Boko Haram, the Taliban, and al-Qaeda. Although the Muslim world itself bears the heaviest burden of jihadist violence, the West is increasingly under attack”.

Jews of Cape Town want their government to retake land bought by a Jewish day school and, in place of a new campus, to erect low-cost housing for poor Gentiles – right in a suburb that many Cape Town Jews find unaffordable.

American Jews direct communal resources to black rights, refugee rights, LGBT rights, women’s rights, transgender rights – to any right that is not a Jewish right. Rabbis sign a petition to allow Muslim refugees from Jew-intolerant backgrounds into America. Democrat Jews dote on Barack Obama with a hostility to the State of Israel matched only by a friendliness to powers that would do away with that nation. Jews attend a downtown Johannesburg event to hear a BDS panel confuse the Holocaust with self-governing Palestinians growing at a birthrate above the norm.

All of the above are trendy causes. They also, one and all, pick on Jews and their outlaw country.

All that was thought about Jews in the past has found a home in what trendy movements think about Israel now. The left-wing element is prone to overlook that unlovely aspect.

Every year at Passover, we read in the Haggadah: “Go and learn what Laban the Aramean sought to do to our father Jacob[.] … He sought to destroy everything.” Laban has been the paradigm of anti-Semites from time immemorial. Jews parading and protesting with modern Labanites may be tolerable; but when rabbis defend them, willfully forgetting what Laban sought to do to Israel (né Jacob), such behavior is unfathomable.

The counter-intuitive mind of the Jew is uncanny. From the sin of the golden calf onward, Jews have done things that no one can figure out. Did the Almighty create them to be contrary?

Probably not, when you hear left-wing elements speak out with clarity and moral conviction. Jacob’s kindred were created to be a light unto the world. Working with unlikely bedfellows is not aberrant behavior. On the contrary, they as Jews are doing exactly what they were put on earth to do: stand for values and modes of caring as old as the Bible. In their helter-skelter to get Muslim refugees into America, or to help the poor live in a sought after part of Cape Town, Jews of conscience have no qualms about doing what they do. History and tradition (their word for God in the secular?) marked out the Jews to care for the stranger in their midst.

But we are given to believe that the sacred duty is very selective. Caring for the stranger is everything; caring for the Jew is nothing. Kith and kin in parts of Ukraine are caught in crossfire and go hungry; in France, they live, and perish, under dire threat. While Jewish terror victims go unsung, and Zionists on campus are bullied, and the new domain for Laban’s kindred is the internet – still the gut instinct of Jews for repairing the world is for that stranger out there.

The U.S. Army recently announced that it has horrifying video footage of Islamic State fighters herding Iraqi civilians into buildings in Mosul. The plan was not to use them as human shields–that is, to announce their presence in the hope of deterring American airstrikes. Rather, ISIS was deliberately trying to ensure that American troops killed them, by “smuggling civilians into buildings, so we won’t see them and trying to bait the coalition to attack,” an army spokesman saidat a briefing for Pentagon reporters. The motive, he explained, was hope that massive civilian casualties would produce such an outcry that the U.S. would halt airstrikes altogether.

There’s an important point to this story which the spokesman neglected to mention: This tactic is borrowed directly from Hamas. And it was borrowed because the world’s response to successive Hamas-Israel wars convinced ISIS that creating massive civilian casualties among residents of its own territory is an effective strategy. Admittedly, Hamas hasn’t yet been caught on video actually herding civilians into buildings before launching attacks from them. But there’s plenty of evidence that Hamas prevented civilians from leaving areas whence it was launching rockets or other attacks at Israel, thereby deliberately exposing them to retaliatory strikes.

During the 2014 Gaza war, for instance, the Israel Defense Forces warned civilians to evacuate the town of Beit Lahiya before launching air strikes at Hamas positions. But according to Palestinian human rights activist Bassem Eid, who based himself on interviews with Palestinians in Gaza, Hamas gunmen showed up and warned that anyone who left the town would be treated as a collaborator. Since Hamas executes collaborators, that was equivalent to saying that anyone who tried to leave would be killed on the spot. Thus, faced with the alternative of certain death at Hamas’s hands, most Beit Lahiya residents understandably opted to stay and take their chances with the IDF.

There’s also plenty of evidence that Hamas deliberately launched attacks from buildings where it knew civilians were present. Just last month, for instance, I wrote about a case during the 2009 Gaza war in which Hamas directed sniper fire at Israeli troops from the third floor of a well-known doctor’s home, thereby forcing the soldiers to choose between becoming sitting ducks or shooting back and risking civilian casualties. Unbeknownst to the soldiers, Hamas was also storing explosives in the house (using civilian buildings as arms caches or wiring them with explosives is standard practice for Hamas). Consequently, when the soldiers fired at the Hamas position, an unexpectedly large explosion ensued, killing three of the doctor’s daughters and one of his nieces.