RUTHFULLY YOURS

The first rule of intelligence work is that there are no coincidences. A horrifying terror attack at a pop concert Monday night at the Manchester Arena followed by hours the first-ever visit by a sitting American president to the Western Wall of the ancient Temple at Jerusalem. We do not know except in generic terms who bombed the children and teenagers who gathered to hear Ariana Grande, but we know the message: “We will murder your children.” It is a message designed not only to terrify but to horrify. We do not know either what occasioned the timing of the atrocity, But we know how large looms Jerusalem in the civilizational war of our times.

The importance of President Trump’s visit to the Western Wall–in Hebrew, the Kotel–cannot be underestimated. Even though the United States announced the visit as a personal rather than an official one, and even though Israeli officials were excluded from the visit, the image of an American president standing in awe before the embodiment of the three-thousand-year Jewish presence in Jerusalem was a diplomatic gesture on the grand scale. It came on the eve of Israel’s celebration of the 50th anniversary of the unification of its ancient capital during the Six-Day War of 1967. While the President of the United States touched the ancient stones in reverence, his Jewish daughter Ivanka prayed a few meters away at the women’s section.

With this gesture, President Trump buried years of diplomatic maneuvering to deny the Jewish connection to Jerusalem and the Temple, which is a synecdoche for the Jewish presence in the Holy Land. Jerusalem is the tipping point for American diplomacy. Last December 26 the outgoing Obama Administration refused to veto UN Resolution 2334, which called Israel’s presence in East Jerusalem an illegal settlement. The decisive phrase, which America’s veto had suppressed until then, referred to “Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem,” including the Western Wall. Israel rightly regarded Obama’s abstention as a stab in the back.

Two months earlier, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) passed a resolution that airbrushed away the entire Jewish connection to Jerusalem, in obeisance to Arab claims that no Jewish Temple ever existed in the city. Throughout 2015, a wave of paranoia spread through the Muslim world with rumors that Israel planned to seize control of part of the Temple Mount and turn one of the Moslem mosques build atop the Temple ruins into a synagogue.

President Trump has not acted on his campaign promise to recognize Israel’s sovereignty over Jerusalem and to move Israel’s embassy there, but his Kotel visit sent an electrifying message to the Muslim world: America stands by Israel’s 3,000 year claim to its ancient capital. In stark contrast to the Obama Administration, President Trump repudiated years of Muslim diplomacy focused on the sole objective of evicting the Jews from their holiest site. He did so after telling Muslim leaders assembled in Riyadh that it was their responsibility to extirpate the terrorists from their mosques, communities and countries.

The Manchester bombing well may have been radical Islam’s first response. Through Islam’s religious lens, the Temple Mount embodies Jewish sovereignty, and the Jewish return to Zion challenges the supercession of Islam itself. Did not the Jews and Christians pervert and falsify the original revelation given to them by Allah, and did not Mohammed restore this true revelation as dictated to him by the Archangel Gabriel? Have not the Jews lived as dhimmi in abject humiliation and dependence, as living evidence of the truth of Islam and as punishment for their perversion of the true revelation? Jewish preeminence in arms, science, technology and business humiliates the Muslim world: How is it possible that a few million Jews could defeat the armies of 300 million Arabs in war after war since Israel’s founding in 1947? Innumerable conspiracy theories that blame American imperialism circulated to make sense of this. Parts of the Arab world are reconciled to the permanent presence of Israel, notably the Egyptian government (although not necessarily the Egyptian street). But Arab hope has not died that the existence of the State of Israel is a temporary aberration that will be erased like the Crusader state that persisted from 1090 to 1291. All the bad things that happened to the Arabs, in this vision, will one day come untrue.

At least 19 people, including some children, were killed and 59 wounded when a suicide bomber struck as thousands of fans streamed out of a concert by U.S. singer Ariana Grande in the English city of Manchester on Monday.

Prime Minister Theresa May said the incident was being treated as a terrorist attack, making it the deadliest militant assault in Britain since four British Muslims killed 52 people in suicide bombings on London’s transport system in July 2005.

Police said the attacker detonated the explosives shortly after 10:33 pm (2133 GMT) at Manchester Arena, which has the capacity to hold 21,000 people. Children were among the dead, police said.

“We believe, at this stage, the attack last night was conducted by one man,” Manchester Chief Constable Ian Hopkins told reporters. “The priority is to establish whether he was acting alone or as part of a network.

“We believe the attacker was carrying an improvised explosive device which he detonated causing this atrocity,” said Hopkins, who declined to answer questions about whether the attacker was British.

A witness who attended the concert said she felt a huge blast as she was leaving the arena, followed by screaming and a rush by thousands of people trying to escape the building.

A video posted on Twitter showed fans, many of them young, screaming and running from the venue. Dozens of parents frantically searched for their children, posting photos and pleading for information on social media.

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Last week, Amalia Rubin, an American Jew who works as an English teacher in the Mongolian capital Ulaanbaatar, received a robust round of applause when she sung Moishe Nadir’s 1927 Yiddish classic, “The Rebbe Elimelech,” live on one of Mongolian TVs most popular programs, the Mongolian equivalent of American Idol.

Rubin also sings in both Mongolian and Tibetan and she is popular the Tibetan Diaspora for being one of the few westerners to promotes traditional Tibetan songs long repressed by China.

For utopians viewing the world stage there is war or unending conflict and peace. However, the reality of world affairs offers nuanced meaning of each. Every action can be understood horizontally through a sequence of causes and vertically in the structure of things. The precipitating factors for war involve causes such as territorial claims, alliance commitment, ideological fervor and competing national interests. Beyond these material factors are the historic factors and genetic disposition for conflict. The tocsin in the air is often an expression of DNA.

At the moment the world is in disarray, Kim Jong Un, the North Korean leader, expresses concern that the nations of the world are arrayed against him. His saber rattling gestures include everything from missile testing to rhetoric that describes inflicting devastation on the United States. What no one knows is what motivates this leader of the Hermit Kingdom other than financial concessions from the West in return for empty promises. Like his father and grandfather before him, Kim is an extortion artist.

Denuclearizing the Korean peninsula makes sense from an American perspective, but North Korea has nothing to trade or influence to save its nuclear arsenal. As a consequence, a military option to eliminate the threat of nuclear exchange cannot be removed from the negotiating table. Yet war in the nuclear age is a prospect so horrific that it cannot be “another option;” it is the unpalatable option.

Hence the real option in most cases of conflict is stability. In the North Korean case, this may entail protocols and verification on the testing, use and placement of nuclear weapons.

There is a difference between crime and tragedy. The world now unfolding is comprised of many criminals whose notion of war defies the horror of nuclear exchange, believing as they do that the West will never use weapons of mass destruction even if it means surrender.

Solzhenitsyn made it clear that the elimination of war is a grand theme that enters the realm of the utopian and non-existent. The opposite of war is not peace, but stability. Should one consider this to be the appropriate backdrop for analysis, North Korean nukes must be controlled since their elimination is likely to lead to war. And this may be achieved through regional negotiation among China, South Korea and Japan.

Solzhenitsyn also noted that a state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny. Surely North Korea reinforces this claim. The country is in a dire condition since it can neither feed itself, nor provide electricity. War chatter has a chilling effect on North Koreans and an even more frightening effect on regional neighbors. That explains why the U.S. is the “Great Satan.” The challenger, in this case the U.S. – it is argued – doesn’t lead the free world; it coerces allies into the adoption of key policies.

Where this crisis is headed is anyone’s guess, but I am persuaded that the conditions for stability will emerge even if they are unclear at the moment. Should North Korea actually precipitate a war, it would be eliminated from the map in minutes. However erratic Mr. Kim may be, he knows that.

In Leo Tolstoy’s majestic novel, War and Peace, fact or fiction merge into a tapestry of Russian life in the Napoleonic Wars. What the book demonstrates is the moral depravity and philosophical stagnation as war’s effect. Despite the devastation, war holds out promise of resolution, of that moment when stability emerges – a reprieve from horror. That is the only realistic prospect for North Korea now that the beasts of war have been unleashed and the threat is so great a response is inevitable. It is hoped that cool heads will seek the pathway to stability without the bombs bursting in air. God help us if this isn’t the case.