RUTHFULLY YOURS

LONDON—Rifle-toting soldiers in camouflage took up positions around Buckingham Palace and patrolled Westminster on Wednesday, as Britain joined European neighbors in deploying military force against terrorism at home.

The U.K. government sent troops to the streets a day after raising the country’s terror-threat alert to its highest level while investigating the bombing of a concert in Manchester, England. The Monday night attack, which killed at least 22, added to the catalog of recent terror that has bloodied some of Europe’s biggest cities, including London, Paris, Berlin, Brussels and Nice, France.

Britain joins France and Belgium, which have also had high-profile military personnel deployments to bolster domestic police and security forces in the wake of attacks. For tourists, soldiers in military fatigues clustered at airports, train stations and museum entrances have been jarring and grim reminders of the heightened state of alert the continent has adopted.

For many Europeans, it has also become a part of life. Troop deployments in France and Brussels were initially seen as temporary measures. In both countries, soldiers are still patrolling alongside police more than a year after rolling out.

“It is easy to get soldiers on the streets,” said Ben Barry, senior fellow for land warfare at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. “It is much more difficult to get them off.”

France, which has suffered the brunt of recent attacks, has adopted a particularly visible domestic war-footing. Military troops carrying assault rifles patrol the boulevards of Paris. Security officials conduct bag checks in front of grocery stores and cinemas.

Security officers have set up cordons around tourist sites like the Louvre museum. The vast space under the Eiffel Tower, long a gathering place for tourists and locals alike, is now accessible only after passing through metal detectors. Temporary barriers erected around the structure are being replaced with a permanent, eight-foot-tall glass wall that will be finished by autumn.

French President Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday proposed extending France’s state of emergency—in place since November 2015—for another five months. The emergency status allows warrantless searches and house arrest.

France has dispatched 7,500 troops across the country to augment police and other security forces. About half are in Paris. The home-front deployment involves about the same number of troops currently involved in France’s various overseas commitments, including in places such as Iraq and Mali. CONTINUE AT SITE

In the months before weeping little girls with nails in their faces were carried out of the Manchester Arena, the authorities of that city were hard at work fighting the dreaded threat of Islamophobia.

While Salman Abedi, the second-generation Muslim refugee terrorist who maimed and killed dozens in a brutal terrorist attack, stalked the streets wailing, “There is no god but Allah and Mohammed is the messenger of Allah”, Manchester police were busy with more important things.

The Greater Manchester Police are one of only two police forces to list Islamophobia as a hate crime category. Earlier this year, Chief Constable Ian Hopkins honored Tell Mama for fighting Islamophobia. Tell Mama had lost funding earlier when its claims of a plague of violent Islamophobia fell apart.

Shahid Malik, the chair of Tell Mama, had been photographed with the leader of Hamas. Appearing at the Global Peace and Unity conference, where plenty of terrorism supporters have promenaded, he boasted, “In 2005 we had four Muslim MPs. In 2009 or 2010 we’ll have eight or ten Muslim MPs. In 2014 we’ll have 16 Muslim MPs. At this rate the whole parliament will be Muslim.”

Last year, Hopkins had appeared at a Muslim Engagement and Development (MEND) event at the European Islamic Centre along with Azad Ali. Ali has praised Anwar Al-Awlaki and other Al Qaeda figures. He justified the murder of British and American soldiers, he praised Hamas and Hezbollah.

Instead of arresting him, the Chief Constable appeared at the same forum with a terrorist supporter.

Also present was Greater Manchester Police Crime Commissioner and Interim Mayor Tony Lloyd who came by to talk about “eradicating hate”. This was at an event attended by Anas Altikriti of the Cordoba Foundation, who had backed terrorists murdering British soldiers and accused Jews of dual loyalty.

Tony Lloyd will be the Labour candidate in Rochdale; home of the Muslim sex grooming cover-up.

Both Manchester Mayor Burnham and Chief Constable Ian Hopkins had appeared at MEND events. MEND’s Director of Engagement is Azad Ali.

After the attack, Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham vowed on camera, “terrorists will never beat us”. The terrorists don’t need to beat Burnham. He’ll eagerly collaborate without so much as a single slap.

After hearing of the Manchester terrorist attack, politicians once more communicated their by now old-routine of “shock” and “grief” at the predictable outcome of their own policies.

Most dumbfounding of all, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said that she was watching the developments in Manchester “with grief and horror” and that she found the attack “incomprehensible”.

Every time a European leader publicly endorses Islam as a great faith, a “religion of peace”, or claims that violence in Islam is a “perversion of a great faith”, despite massive evidence to the contrary, they signal in the strongest way possible that with every devastating attack, the West is ripe for the taking.

When ISIS attacked the Bataclan Theater in Paris in November 2015, it did so because, in its own words, it was “where hundreds of pagans gathered for a concert of prostitution and vice.” A year earlier, ISIS had forbidden all music as haram (forbidden). Many Islamic scholars supports the idea that Islam forbids the ‘sinful’ music of the West.

It should, therefore, not be a surprise to anybody that Islamic terrorists might target a concert by the American pop singer Ariana Grande in Manchester on May 22. In addition, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security warned last September that terrorists are focused on concerts, sporting events and outdoor gatherings because such venues “often pursue simple, achievable attacks with an emphasis on economic impact and mass casualties”.

Islamic State claimed responsibility for the Manchester suicide bombing, in which a device laced with screws and bolts was detonated. Twenty-two people, children and adults, were murdered in the explosion that ripped through the Manchester concert area; more than 50 people were wounded. While the media is describing the use of nail bombs at the concert hall as a new and surprising tactic, it is in fact an extremely old one, practiced by Arab terrorists on Israelis for decades.

British police on Tuesday identified the terrorist bomber who blew himself up outside Manchester Arena on Monday night as Salman Abedi, a 22-year-old born in Manchester. This means Britain has been terrorized again by a native-born Muslim who became radicalized while enjoying the freedoms of Western society.

Islamic State took credit for the attack, and we’ll learn more in the days ahead about how Abedi turned to jihad. But the Manchester bombing follows the vehicular assault near Parliament in March that was also perpetrated by a native British Muslim.

This is the devilish challenge Western officials face as they attempt to stop attacks like Monday’s on teenage and preteen girls attending a show by pop star Ariana Grande. At least 22 were killed and 58 wounded in the deadliest attack in Britain since the London Underground bombings of July 7, 2005.

British security forces have a better record than many European governments in foiling terror. Prosecutors convicted 264 people on Islamism-related terror offenses between 1998 and 2015, according to an open-source study by the London-based Henry Jackson Society. The figures don’t include cases that don’t end in convictions and often remain classified.

Yet the homegrown radical who is increasingly recruited by groups like Islamic State is hard to identify and stop. This is why governments must tackle the problem at its roots in Muslim communities that are isolated from mainstream society in major cities such as Manchester, Paris and Brussels.

British opinion surveys consistently find gaps between the attitudes of Muslims and the liberal ethos of the wider culture, on everything from homosexuality to women’s rights to anti-Semitism. One survey last year found that 7% of British Muslims support an Islamic caliphate while 4% believe terrorism is an acceptable form of protest—a large pool of potential jihadists. Promoting integration involves deeper questions about belonging and identity that don’t have easy answers. But one way to start is to consistently enforce British laws in all communities.

Prime Minister Theresa May on Tuesday halted her re-election campaign and vowed “to take on and defeat the ideology that often fuels this violence.” Speaking in the West Bank, President Trump condemned the “evil losers in life” who carry out such violence. That note about “losers” is welcome even as it’s jarringly colloquial, since Islamists see themselves at the vanguard of a triumphant millenarian ideology. Leaders should look for opportunities to undermine that narrative.

Muslims will have to take ultimate responsibility for rooting out radicals in their midst. British Muslim groups such as the counterterror Quilliam Foundation have made strides, but they are often in the minority among imams and community leaders. As long as that continues, the failure of integration will pose a mortal threat to Europe.

The world will have to take Pyongyang’s hackers as seriously as its nuclear weapons and missile programs. That’s one conclusion from Monday’s evidence from a private cybersecurity firm that North Korean hackers are behind the Wannacry ransomware that froze computers and encrypted data around the world on May 12.

Symantec says it found the digital footprints of the Lazarus Group, a hacking syndicate that took data from Sony Entertainment in 2014 and stole $81 million from Bangladesh’s central bank last year. While computer forensics can’t finger hackers with 100% certainty, the code, techniques and servers point to Pyongyang.

The Symantec findings come as Reuters published new details this week about North Korea’s growing cyberwarfare capabilities. According to a former computer-science professor who defected in 2004, a unit within the country’s spy agency hacks into foreign financial institutions to steal cash. The Wannacry worm demands that victims pay in Bitcoin to get their data back. So far it’s extorted about $100,000. But the North’s hackers are capable and persistent. They appear to have built the worm in part with hacking tools stolen from the U.S. government and released on the internet last month.

State-sponsored hacking for profit is unique to North Korea—a useful reminder that it isn’t so much a country as a criminal syndicate operating for the benefit of the Kim family. As sanctions close off other avenues for earning foreign currency, Pyongyang will likely step up its cyberattacks.

Pyongyang has suffered little retaliation for its cyberwarfare, which includes the hacking of a South Korean nuclear plant. After the Sony attack three years ago, Barack Obama promised to retaliate: “We will respond proportionally, and we’ll respond in a place and time and manner that we choose.” But the follow-through was underwhelming: A few North Korean institutions and individuals were barred from doing business in the U.S.

Last year Congress passed Rep. Ed Royce’s bill to sanction banks facilitating North Korea’s finances, and the Trump Administration can move to implement it. This month a new bill from Rep. Royce to toughen sanctions on the North’s shipping and exports of slave labor passed the House with bipartisan support. That would be another good way to make Pyongyang pay a price for its criminal acts.

…….Donald Trump jets about the Middle East distributing olive branches it is timely to recall the Oslo Accords and the folly of cutting deals with remorseless killers. Enabling the PLO to build a terrorist kleptocracy in the West Bank has achieved nothing, other than stressing the need for a new approach.

The 1993–95 Oslo Accords bore the promise of peaceful co-existence between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). The Palestinian political leadership would reconfigure itself as the Palestinian Authority (PA) and begin an interim period of self-government in the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) followed by the establishment of an independent Palestinian mini-state. Israel and the PLO were going to “beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks” and neither nation would “train for war any more”.

Can you spot the glitch in this fine-sounding sentiment? You are exactly right—the PLO was never a nation. Yasser Arafat’s PLO was a militia-terrorist coalition formed in 1964 with the connivance of the Soviet Union and, by various accounts, the Romanian secret service. Clearly the establishment of a Palestinian mini-state in Judea and Samaria was not the PLO’s original goal since, at the time, Jordan occupied those territories. The PLO’s agenda, according to its 1968 Covenant, demanded the liberation of the lands of the Palestinian mandate—“an indivisible territorial unit”—in its entirety. In other words, the PLO’s maximalist objective was to subjugate every last town, village and city “from the river to the sea”, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

The PLO, by the time of the Oslo Accords, was claiming to have down-scaled its goal from crushing the “Zionist invasion” to co-existing with the State of Israel. For instance, the September 9, 1993, letter from Yasser Arafat to Israeli Prime Minister Rabin: “The PLO affirms that those articles of the Palestinian Covenant which deny the right of Israel to exist … are now inoperative and no longer exist.” I recall, as a young man, wondering if Yasser Arafat’s volte-face might turn out to be as significant as the November 9, 1989, opening of the Berlin Wall or even the dissolution of the Soviet Union on December 26, 1991. The notion of “the end of history”, à la Francis Fukuyama, was not entirely nonsensical in the early 1990s.

In one sense, at least, the PLO’s seeming compliance with the vision (or fantasy) of Western statesmen, diplomats and idealists can be linked to the collapse of the Soviet empire. Moscow was quick to recognise the State of Israel in 1948 but, by the time of Leonid Brezhnev, the Kremlin had accomplished the anti-Israel, anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic trifecta. However, the downfall of the Soviet Union and its satellite states left the PLO without a major power sponsor. In this context we begin to understand Yasser Arafat’s “epiphany” and subsequent participation in the Oslo Accords, not to mention his apparent acquiescence to the two-state solution.

In reality, neither Yasser Arafat nor Mahmoud Abbas ever abandoned the rejectionism of their antecedent, Haj Amin al-Husseini. The Arab nationalist leadership spurned a two-state solution in 1936, 1947, 1948, 1950, 1967, 2000, 2001, 2008 and 2013-14. Some might detect a pattern here. These days, regrettably, PA Television, the Palestinian Teachers’ Union, PA educators and PA schools all routinely—in the words of the Palestinian Media Watch site—“glorify and honour terror, demonise Jews and Israel, and deny Israel’s right to exist in any borders”. Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama each insisted that some version of “the two-state solution” was the only viable answer to the Israeli-Arab problem, even though the Arab population of the West Bank has become, if anything, less reconciled towards the State of Israel over the past quarter-century.

Fatah and its Arab nationalist allies who control the PA were always more secular than the apocalyptic millennialist rulers in Gaza. That said, Hamas, the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, has proven to be somewhat pragmatic on occasion given its neo-Salafist/violent jihad ideology. The PLO, on the other hand, has gone in the opposite direction. The 1968 Covenant made no mention of religion, and yet in 2003 the Fatah-dominated PA recognised Islam as the only official religion in Palestine and sharia law as the basis for all future legislation. Fatah and the PA progressed from Arab chauvinism to Islamic supremacism, the common factor being Judeophobia. Today the “experts” on PA TV insist there was never any Jewish presence in Jerusalem, Solomon’s Temple and the Second Temple included, and that the ancient (and non-existent) Canaanites are one and the same people as modern-day Palestinian Arabs.

The Obama administration’s confidence that it could impose a two-state solution on such fantasists beggars belief, and yet Secretary of State John Kerry visited Israel at least thirteen times in a futile attempt to force a round peg into a square hole.

Reports are now identifying the suicide bomber who struck following an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester as 23-year-old Salman Abedi:And ISIS has claimed credit for the attack:

As with virtually all Western terror attacks (as I’ve reported many times here at PJ Media — see below), this appears to be yet another case of “Known Wolf” terrorism. The suspected bomber had been known to authorities beforehand.

In this case, as in so many others, he apparently had been deemed not a threat: The “Known Wolf” terrorism problem has become so ubiquitous in these Western terror cases that it has become the rule, not the exception:While I have been reporting on the “Known Wolf” phenomenon since October 2014, others are now just starting to catch on:

The UK’s parliamentary elections are in just a few weeks, and undoubtedly Prime Minister May’s opposition will try to capitalize on last night’s security failure.

But has any major Western political party made the problem of “Known Wolf” terrorism an issue?

Back in March, after two “Known Wolf” terror attacks in only five days, I asked here how many more have to die before Western authorities begin to address the issue. The resounding answer has been: many more.

Sadly, I’ll have to continue updating the ever-growing list of “Known Wolf” terror attacks:

Oct. 24, 2014: ‘Lone Wolf’ or ‘Known Wolf’: The Ongoing Counter-Terrorism Failure

Dec. 15, 2014: Sydney Hostage Taker Another Case of ‘Known Wolf’ Syndrome

Jan. 7, 2015: Paris Terror Attack Yet Another Case of ‘Known Wolf’ Syndrome

Feb. 3, 2015: French Police Terror Attacker Yesterday Another Case of ‘Known Wolf’ Syndrome

Feb. 15, 2015: Copenhagen Killer Was yet Another Case of ‘Known Wolf’ Terrorism

Feb. 26, 2015: Islamic State Beheader ‘Jihadi John’ Yet Another Case of ‘Known Wolf’ Terrorism

Apr. 22, 2015: Botched Attack on Paris Churches Another Case of “Known Wolf” Terrorism

May 4, 2015: Texas Attack Is Yet Another Case of ‘Known Wolf’ Terrorism

June 26, 2015: France’s Beheading Terrorist Was Well-Known By Authorities

July 16, 2015: Report: Chattanooga Jihadist Was Yet Another ‘Known Wolf’ Terrorist, Anonymous Feds Dispute

Aug. 22, 2015: European Train Attacker Another Case of ‘Known Wolf’ Terrorism

Oct 14, 2015: Yet Again: Turkey, Israel Terror Attacks Committed by “Known Wolves”

Nov 14, 2015: One Paris Attacker Was Previously Known to Authorities, Marks Fifth ‘Known Wolf” Attack in France This Year

Feb 16, 2016: Machete Attack in Ohio Yet Another Case of ‘Known Wolf’ Terrorism

May 16, 2016: News Reports Yet Another Case of ‘Known Wolf’ U.S. Terrorists

June 12, 2016: Orlando Night Club Attack by “Known Wolf” Terrorist Previously Investigated by FBI

July 14, 2016: Senate Intelligence Committee to Investigate “Known Wolf” Terrorism Problem

July 26, 2016: ISIS Suspect in Normandy Priest’s Killing Already Known to French Authorities

August 10, 2016: Canadian ‘Known Wolf’ Terrorist Planned Suicide Bombing of Major City, Killed in Overnight Police Operation

August 19, 2016: Man Who Stabbed Rabbi Thursday in Strasbourg, France Involved in Prior Attack

Sept. 20, 2016: NY-NJ Bomber Ahmad Khan Rahami Already Known to Law Enforcement Authorities

Sept. 28, 2016: “Known Wolf” SCANDAL: In at Least 12 of the 14 Terror Attacks Under Obama, FBI Already Knew Attackers

Dec. 21, 2016: Suspect Sought for Deadly Berlin Terror Attack, Anis Amri, Yet Another Known Wolf

March 23, 2017: Five Days and Two ‘Known Wolf’ Terror Attacks, Yet No Apparent Concern From Western Governments

March 26, 2017: ’60 Minutes’ Whitewashes Massive FBI Failure in 2015 ISIS Texas Terror Attack

March 26, 2017: ’60 Minutes’ Whitewashes Massive FBI Failure in 2015 ISIS Texas Terror Attack

No exception to the perennial folly of American administrations, regardless of party, President Trump dreams of forging peace between Israel, our ally in the Western democratic tradition, and the Palestinians, an amalgam of sharia supremacists and hard-Left kleptocrats, for whom the obliteration of the Jewish State is the ne plus ultra. Thus, did the president have the misfortune of being in the company of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas when news broke of the terrorist attack targeting children and young adults at a concert in Manchester.

Trump and Abbas stood side-by-side in Bethlehem as the American president condemned the terrorists as “evil losers in life” — “radical Islamic terrorism” having evidently been retired from Trump’s repertoire while he meets with regimes that support radical Islamic terrorism.

Abbas, it bears emphasizing, is an utterly unfit “peace partner.”

Though he still clings to power in the thirteenth year of his four-year term, he does not even control the Palestinian territory — his rival, the Hamas jihadist organization, runs Gaza. His Fatah faction, the legacy of master-terrorist Yasser Arafat, sports its own terrorist wing (the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade). It spends much of its time glorifying jihadists who mass-murder Jews, including Jewish children, naming streets and monuments in their honor.

Abbas’s presence during Trump’s remarks about an especially barbaric terrorist attack called to mind a similarly savage incident I described in The Grand Jihad:

In 1979, Smadar Kaiser, her husband Danny, and their two small daughters, four-year-old Einat and two-year-old Yael, were awakened in their northern Israel apartment at midnight by gunfire and exploding grenades. A team of terrorists sent by Abu Abbas’s Palestine Liberation Front was in the neighborhood. While a trembling Smadar hid with Yael in the dark, suffocating crawl space, the terrorists grabbed Danny and Einat and marched them down to a nearby beach. There, one of the four shot Danny in front of his daughter so that his death would be the last sight she’d ever see. Then the ruthless ringleader, Lebanese-born Samir Kuntar, bashed in the four-year-old’s skull against a rock with the butt of his rifle.

Hours later, upon finally being “rescued” from the crawl space, two-year-old Yael, too, was dead — accidentally smothered by her petrified mother in the effort to keep her quiet as the terrorists searched for more Jews to kill.

The Israelis captured Kuntar, who was sentenced to life in prison. For years, however, Palestinian leaders and masses agitated for his release,lionizing this monster as a “brave leader” and “model warrior.” In 2007, the [Israeli] government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert finally capitulated, exchanging Kuntar and other imprisoned terrorists for the remains of two deceased Israeli soldiers.

Damn these jihadist murderers of children. And damn the politicians who have, in many cases, helped make these murders possible but who are quick, this time and every time, to serve up empty declarations of “solidarity”even as the bodies of innocents are still being counted.

London mayor Sadiq Khan (who recently dismissed terrorist attacks as “part and parcel of living in a big city”): “London stands with Manchester.” Orlando mayor Buddy Dyer (who, in the wake of the Pulse nightclub massacre, proclaimed a CAIR-backed “Muslim Women’s Day”—you know, the kind of event that proclaims hijabs “empowering”): Orlando “stands in solidarity with the people of the UK.” L.A. mayor Eric Garcetti (who went berserk when Trump tried to impose that temporary travel ban from a half-dozen Muslim countries): “Los Angeles stands with the people of Manchester.”

Meaningless words, all of them. But Angela Merkel takes the cake: “People in the UK can rest assured that Germany stands shoulder to shoulder with them.” Well, isn’t that . . . reassuring. In what way do such words help anybody to “rest assured” of anything? In any case, how dare she? This, after all, is the woman who opened the floodgates—the woman who, out of some twisted sense of German historical guilt, put European children in danger by inviting into the continent masses of unvetted people from the very part of the world where this monstrous evil has its roots.

Then there was this from European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker: “Once again, terrorism has sought to instill fear where there should be joy, to sow division where young people and families should be coming together in celebration.” Beneath the innocuous-seeming surface of this statement is a slick rhetorical ruse: Juncker to the contrary, these savages aren’t out to “sow division”—they’re out to kill infidels. By introducing the concept of “division,” Juncker, like so many others, is implying that the important message here is: Hey, whatever you do, don’t let this little episode put any bad thoughts about Islam into your head!

Manchester City Council leader Sir Richard Leese also spoke of “fear” and “division”: “Manchester is a proud, strong city and we will not allow terrorists who seek to sow fear and division to achieve their aims.” Guess what, pal? Theydid achieve their aims: they killed 22 people, including children, and injured several dozen. Dead infidels: that’s their objective, period. (Or, as you would say, full stop.)

Naturally, Manchester’s mayor, Andy Burnham, put out a statement. Burnham, as it happens, is a radical socialist who has wrung his hands for years about Islamophobia and has fought tooth and nail against a nationwide “anti-extremism” program called Prevent on the grounds that it “singles out one community for different treatment.” After yesterday’s atrocity, Burnham said: “We are grieving today, but we are strong.”

Strong? No, Mr. Burnham, you are anything but strong. You are cowards, all of you. You are more scared of being called bigots than of the prospect of children under your official protection being slaughtered by jihadists.

Three-quarters of a century ago, Britain stood shoulder to shoulder in true solidarity while under violent assault by the diabolical ideology of Nazism. Today, its leaders speak of the same kind of solidarity—but it’s nothing but talk. In Rotherham, gangs of Muslim men sexually abused 1,400 girls—and police and other officials who knew about it did nothing for years lest they be accused of racism or Islamophobia. Almost certainly, similar mass-scale rapes are still occurring right now in other British cities, with similar silence and inaction on the part of pusillanimous authorities. Today, British leaders refuse to deport imams who preach murder but ban from their shores respected writers and knowledgeable critics of Islam who dare to take on those imams and their theology.

Strength? Don’t you dare speak of strength. You have the blood of innocent children on your hands.

http://mailchi.mp/meforum/this-time-the-loser-writes-history?e=bb334ea86b

May 23, 2017: Fifty years ago today, state-run media in Cairo announced that Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser had closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, cutting off the Jewish state’s access to the Red Sea. Then-President Lyndon Johnson later said of the Six-Day War, which erupted two weeks later, “If a single act of folly was more responsible for this explosion than any other, it was the arbitrary and dangerous announced decision that the Straits of Tiran would be closed. The right of innocent, maritime passage must be preserved for all nations.”

A half-century later, however, a “historiographical rewriting” of the Six-Day War has “effectively become the received dogma, echoed by some of the most widely used college textbooks about the Middle East,” as Gabriel Glickman explains in this advance-release article from the Summer 2017 issue of Middle East Quarterly.

A cartoon from 1967 shows Nasser kicking Israel over a cliff. Jerusalem’s attempt before the Six-Day War to prevent hostilities is completely ignored or dismissed while the Arab war preparations are framed as a show of force against an alleged, imminent Israeli attack on Syria.

It is a general law that every war is fought twice—first on the battlefield, then in the historiographical arena—and so it has been with the June 1967 Arab-Israeli war (or the Six-Day War as it is commonly known). No sooner had the dust settled on the battlefield than the Arabs and their Western partisans began rewriting the conflict’s narrative with aggressors turned into hapless victims and defenders turned into aggressors. Jerusalem’s weeks-long attempt to prevent the outbreak of hostilities in the face of a rapidly tightening Arab noose is completely ignored or dismissed as a disingenuous ploy; by contrast, the extensive Arab war preparations with the explicit aim of destroying the Jewish state is whitewashed as a demonstrative show of force to deter an imminent Israeli attack on Syria. It has even been suggested that Jerusalem lured the Arab states into war in order to expand its territory at their expense. So successful has this historiographical rewriting been that, fifty years after the war, these “alternative facts” have effectively become the received dogma, echoed by some of the most widely used college textbooks about the Middle East.[1]
Grandstanding Gone Wrong

The first step to absolving the Arab leaders of culpability for the conflict—especially Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, who set in motion the course of events that led to war—was to present them as victims of their fully understandable, if highly unfortunate, overreaction to a Soviet warning of an imminent Israeli attack on Syria. Taking at face value Nasser’s postwar denial of any intention to attack Israel, educated Westerners—intellectuals, Middle East experts, and journalists—excused his dogged drive to war as an inescapable grandstanding aimed at shoring up his position in the face of relentless criticism by the conservative Arab states and the more militant elements within his administration.

The remains of a Syrian fortification on the Golan Heights following the Six-Day War. Nasser realized that no Israeli attack on Syria was in the offing yet continued his reckless escalation toward war.