Israel needs to fight on the battleground of the mind
I sure hope someone high up in the Israeli government reads this one from Melanie Philips. Denying that our war with our neighbors is a religious war is a national pastime in these parts. So is pretending that what's at issue between Israel and the 'Palestinians' is a question of borders and not of Israel's very existence. And so long as we continue to delude ourselves, the World will be deluded right along with us. Presented with the fallacy driving western opinion that the Arab and Muslim war of annihilation against Israel is actually a dispute between Israel and the Palestinians over dividing up the land, Israel fails to set the record straight -- and instead goes along with the fallacy.Read the whole thing.
Placed in the remarkable position in which the western world is requiring the victim of nine decades of exterminatory terror to make security concessions to its attackers even while they continue to attack it, Israel fails to challenge this unique double standard -- and instead meekly plays along with the fiction and makes concession after concession to the Arabs, thus actually helping America, Britain and Europe to compromise its security and strengthen its attackers.
Faced with an American President who is throwing Israel under the global bus at a time when Iran is at the point of obtaining its nuclear genocide bomb, Prime Minister Netanyahu chooses not to appeal over Obama’s head to the great mass of staunchly supportive Christian Americans, who need to be told precisely what is being done in their name against the ally in the Middle East that they so passionately support and what the lethal consequences may be.
Moreover, despite the fact that what it has been facing for the past nine decades is at root not a war over land but a holy war, driven by the fanatical Islamic belief that not just the Jewish presence but the historical claim by the Jews to the land of Israel must be expunged altogether, Israel never presents itself as the victim of Islamic fanaticism, thus failing to drive home to the west the fact that Israel is the front line of the west’s own defences against the jihad.
In part, this failure to tell the world these home truths derives from a progressive weakening of Israel as a result of the Oslo debacle, which invested Arab terror and propaganda with both weaponry and diplomatic credibility and cut the ground from beneath the feet of anyone who wanted to reconnect Israel with reality.
In part, it derives from Israel’s extreme vulnerability. This means it can be bullied by America; and because it feels it cannot take on the entire world, it feels it must observe the rules of the diplomatic game – even if that game is patently rigged, unjust and irrational.
More disturbingly still, it is reluctant to admit even to itself that it is facing not a war over territory but an Islamic holy war. As has been said to me on more than one occasion by members of Israel’s establishment: ‘Since we are surrounded by many millions of Muslims, a religious war against us is far too terrifying for us to acknowledge’.
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 3:00 PM
4 Comments:
Middle America is trying:
hhttp://toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100604/NEWS02/6040348
A friend and I attended a supposed PR lecture organised by the Israeli embassy in London, at the LSE.
They sent Gavri Bargil of Peace Now.
When I asked why israel persists with this garbage of land for (no)peace, all the little dhimmi students laughed patronisingly, and Bargil said that I "don't understand"!
Phillips is totally correct. Overall, Israel seems to let its enemies determine the narrative and then they respond to it, rather than putting its own narrative up.
Look at Turkey. It should be castigated for what it did; Israel should be yelling at it for aligning with terrorist states and if the Turks continue with making hostile claims of murder and genocide, Israel should remind the world of what the Turks have done to the Kurds (which can be a subtle reminder that the Armenians are also availble; but the killing of Kurds and their genocidal campaign towards them is current).
No one knows (in the West) if any rockets are fired from Gaza; or that the PA names streets after terrorists. These should be huge topics but...silence.
Israel's leadership has become a co-participant in facilitating their own destruction. My love for the Jewish people and admiration for Israel's achievements at times is tempered by the knowledge that Israel refuses to acknowledge the countries surrounding it and the Palestinians hate it and wish to wipe it off the map. The key to Israel's continued survival is facing the truth and acting accordingly. But it will be impossible to do that as long Israel continues to be captive of the dangerous fiction that peace with the Arabs is possible in our lifetime. Israel needs to change its thinking and this will not happen overnight - and still it must happen for Israel to defend itself in a dangerous neighborhood in which no mercy is shown to the weak.
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