RUTHFULLY YOURS

Two news items over the past two weeks provide timely reminders of why Israel’s willingness to take military action in its own neighborhood makes it an unparalleled strategic asset for the West – including those Westerners who deplore military action and prefer to rely exclusively on diplomacy. At first glance, neither report has anything to do with Israel. Yet both underscore its vital role in Western security.

The first was a New York Times report on the Islamic State’s efforts to obtain red mercury – a material that, “when detonated in combination with conventional high explosives,” is rumored to “create the city-flattening blast of a nuclear bomb.” Proliferation experts all say red mercury is a hoax, but it’s a hoax widely believed in many corners of the globe. The terrorist group was therefore willing to pay ‘‘whatever was asked’’ to procure it, as one Islamic State official told the arms dealer he tasked with the mission. Nor was this a passing fancy: The official “kept inquiring about red mercury for more than a year … pressing for results” until he disappeared (presumably because he was killed).

The right-on are always raising concerns, and raising the political heat, over what they refer to as the Siege of Gaza by Israel. But what about the siege of Israel by Europe?

It might not be a military siege – although many a supposedly peacenik European dreams of Israel having its knuckles rapped by external powers – but it’s a siege nonetheless.

What we have today is a moral, intellectual siege of Israel, by the academic and media elites of Europe’s chattering-class citadels. They’ve turned Israel into Global Enemy No1, the source of all the world’s sorrow, a nation to be railed against more than any other on Earth.

My dictionary says a siege is the “surrounding of a place” with the intent of making its inhabitants surrender. Could there be a better description of European progressives’ myopic singling out of Israel for invective, and their shunning of its wares, books and even people via the BDS movement? People in Israel feel this moral siege, this intellectual blockade, very strongly.

When I visited last month, almost everyone I met asked me: “What the hell has happened to Europe? Why do they hate us?” During a dinner debate, a woman whose son was killed by terrorists asked the assembled European hacks why our media is more angry about Israel than any other nation. In soft, wavering tones, she accused us of anti-Israel bias. A spokesman for the Israel Foreign Ministry wrung his hands over Europe’s dodgy double standards on Israel. He was especially exercised by the EC’s recent decree that things made in Israeli settlements must be branded as such, lest some pure PC person in Europe unwittingly eat an olive made in a disputed bit of the Golan Heights and become morally compromised as a result. The EC doesn’t make other nations that are embroiled in conflict over territory – the Ukraine, say – stick such moral warnings on their produce. Just Israel.

Operation Thunderbolt, in which Israeli commandos stormed a Ugandan airport terminal in 1976 to rescue hostages hijacked on an Air France flight, remains what Max Hastings calls “the high water mark of Israel’s standing in the world.” In hisnew book on the rescue mission, Saul David provides a fast-paced, suspenseful account of those tense summer days. While there have been several books (and movies) about the operation, this one draws on new sources and explores the motivations of the terrorists more deeply than earlier efforts.

Each chapter covers a single day over an eight-day period, from hijacking to rescue. Within each chapter the events are organized down to the hour, quarter-hour, and sometimes to the minute.

The rescue itself began when four C-130 Hercules aircraft, crammed with 91 commandos and paratroopers from Sayeret Matkal, otherwise known as “the Unit,” flew a hazardous 2,500 miles from Israel to Entebbe Airport. As the first Hercules landed, the ramp lowered and out drove Israeli commandos. They made their way past the cordon of Ugandan soldiers using a black Mercedes and Land Rovers—the typical vehicles used to shuttle around high-ranking Ugandan government officials. Once they reached the terminal where the hostages were held, they shot the terrorists, freed the hostages, and blew up 11 Russian MiGs.

The Great Pumpkin of Islam was carved out of the hallucinatory imagination of a certified imbecile, illiterate, brigand, rapist, murderer, and tyrant.

A “Peanuts” TV special in 1966 had Linus, the blanket-clinging tot in the cartoon series, concocting a kind of “religion” or “cult” around the Great Pumpkin rising out of a pumpkin patch on Halloween night. Linus spends that night in the pumpkin patch, to witness its appearance. It never manifests itself, neither in form nor in echo-chamber voice. Nor even as a burning pumpkin. Linus falls asleep, clutching his blanket. I guess. I was never a fan of the cartoon strip and I certainly didn’t watch the TV special. Story details can be read here.

In Islam, the Great Pumpkin can be likened to Allah, and Linus to Mohammad. The “prophet” imagined he was getting the Koran directly from Allah (the name of an already existing pagan god) via the angel Gabriel, and rode to Paradise on a horse sporting a woman’s head, but all that and more, if the Koran is to be taken literally as a record of true events, must have been the result of delirium, hallucinations, dehydration, starvation, or sunstroke. He was living in a cave near Mecca, ostensibly to meditate, but actually to escape the ridicule and wrath of his Meccan neighbors. One can imagine him passing his days subsisting on goat jerky and imbibing essence of distilled mimosa, or the local version of Kickapoo juice.

Of course, I don’t take any of it literally, the Koran and its companion texts too likely having been works-in-progress over centuries, cadging from the Christian, Judaic, Zoroastrian, and pagan religions and liturgies. Robert Spencer torpedoes the existence of Mohammad himself in his rigorously researched book, Did Muhammad Exist?: An Inquiry into Islam’s Obscure Origns.

In short, Allah was Mohammad’s Great Pumpkin. Or, if you prefer, his dancing, grand pink elephant, a deity greater than the Hindu Ganesha. Allah, who shares the metaphysical impossibility of all deities, together with the contradictory attributes of omniscience and omnipotence, has never manifested himself to Muslims or infidels, either. He is, to put it tactfully, reality-shy. He exists only in the delusional minds of those who wish to believe in such an entity. A figment of one’s mysticism-inebriated imagination can’t be conjured into spatial existence no matter how earnestly or often one prays, hopes, or wishes.

A Facebook friend of mine, whom I shall refer to for security reasons as “Lois Lane,” conducted a four-year poll and survey of Muslims, largely over the Internet using an avatar or pseudonym to disguise her identity, testing Muslims’ knowledge of the Koran and the Hadith, an anecdotal compilation of Mohammad’s sayings and “exploits.” She compiled about 3,000 responses and reports some revealing information about our “peaceful” Muslim neighbors, friends, and overseas pals. She focused on asking them about whether or not they adhered to or agreed with the abrogating violent verses or with the earlier “peaceful” ones. Here is a handy, short explanation of those verses on YouTube, “Three things you probably don’t know about Islam.” Lois Lane wrote:

Three thousand sounds like a lot, but over four years that’s less than half a Muslim a day. Some days I’d have quite a few conversations, and during vacations, none. Almost all was done online and under screen names, so there was no reason for the Muslims to hide what they really thought. They came from all over the world. They had internet access, meaning access to other ideologies. I have to be careful with my identity as I get a lot of death threats.