RUTHFULLY YOURS

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas separately offered Christmas greetings to the world on Thursday. Because both leaders operate in the Middle East and neither is Christian, their respective messages are particularly worthy of note.

Netanyahu began his address by mentioning the festive nature of the holiday, calling it a “special opportunity to spend time with loved ones.”

He continued by expressing empathy for less fortunate Christians who are “experiencing violence, persecution and fear” in every part of the region except the Jewish state, where “religious freedom is a sacred principle” and “Christian citizens enjoy the full blessings of freedom and democracy, their equal rights enshrined in Israeli law.”

He ended by saying, “Let us remember the common heritage and values that unite us in the face of extremism and hatred, which we will never accept. From Jerusalem, the eternal capital of the Jewish people, the city of peace, I join Christians everywhere, and especially those in the Middle East, in a common prayer for a more peaceful and tolerant world.”

To understand ISIS, you have to understand the difference between terrorists and Islamic terrorists.

Ordinary terrorists have two goals; to compel the enemy to meet their political demands and to rally their supporters to consolidate their class, race or national identity group behind them.

Islamic terrorists are not interested in the “political demands” part. They will occasionally accept concessions and even offer Hudnas, temporary truces, but no permanent separate peace can be achieved with them. It’s why Israel’s peace process with terrorists has gone on failing for decades. It’s why the attempt by Gaddafi to achieve peace with the LIFG ended in a civil war and his death. It’s why Obama’s attempts to negotiate with the “moderate Taliban” failed miserably.

Al Qaeda and ISIS are not “negative” protest movements formed in response to our foreign policy. That’s a foolish self-centered idea held by foolish self-centered Westerners. Al Qaeda and ISIS are “positive” movements that seek to achieve larger religious goals entirely apart from us. Islamic terrorists are not responding to us. They are responding to the Koran and to over a thousand years of history.

Osama bin Laden did not carry out 9/11 to inflict harm on Americans. That was a secondary goal. His primary goal was to rally Muslims to build a Caliphate by encouraging them to attack America.

In his “Christmas Message”, like Arafat before him, PA chairman Mahmoud Abbas portrayed Palestinian terrorists as victims of Israeli oppression and urged, “international intervention is “desperately needed to protect the Palestinians.”

How do you square this with the daily growing number of Palestinians attacking Israelis by stabbing, car ramming shooting and stoning?

David Bukay, professor of Middle East Studies at the University of Haifa, explains what’s behind Abbas’ deception: “The Muslim leadership and the useful idiots portray Muslims as peaceful, tolerant human beings, and non-Muslims as aggressors, imperialist-colonialist occupiers. Thus, all Muslims, even those who are potential victims must fight to defend themselves and retaliate against the Kuffar (non-believer), who always instigates war.

“These clearly contradictory characteristics of Arab-Islamic political culture mean that Muslims can viciously attack at every possible opportunity while at the very same time crying out they are victims of oppression and aggression. They can perpetuate obscene inhuman acts of violence, terrorize and intimidate while accusing the infidels of colonialism, apartheid, racism, and Islamophobia.”

JERUSALEM–The Election of Israel is in the news again, with the report of a Vatican Commissionthat affirms the eternal validity of God’s covenant with the Jewish people. The Western elite long ago dismissed the subject as superstition. The vast majority of American Jews, think Election is a Jewish folk-belief like dybbuks or the Golem. (By contrast, 70% of Israeli Jews believe that the Jews are God’s chosen people).

The Western elite wants people to act rationally and considers all supernatural claims an affront to rationality. The trouble is that people aren’t rational (neither is the Western elite, but that’s another story). We want to live forever or we don’t want to live at all. When we lose faith, we stop reproducing. There might be a stray philosopher here and there so convinced of the immortality of the spirit as to despite death itself, as Socrates claimed to do (although I have my doubts even about him). We can’t live forever, to be sure, but we can take part in a culture that links our ancestors and descendants in an immortal chain.