Posted on 04/12/2002 9:54:05 PM PDT by Jean S
Since President Bush now has two sets of standards for which victims of terror can be avenged, I have a question for him:
What’s the difference between American victims of terrorism and Israeli ones?
Despite a cornucopia of well-fertilized lines from U.S. officials, it’s time to be intellectually honest. There is only one difference: The second group is Jewish.
That’s the only reason the U.S. can get away with scolding Israel for attempting to nip terrorism in the bud, while go full-speed ahead in Afghanistan.
Sure, Ari Fleischer and the rest of the White House spinsters can cast this situation through various phony prisms to make their limp case for this ludicrous double-standard regarding the response to mass-murder. They can say—as they do—well, Arafat won a (undeserved) Nobel Peace Prize, so we should deal with him. They can pontificate on how Arafat took part in (phony) peace negotiations in the past. They can come up with a million and one excuses and distinctions without a difference.
But despite self-flagellating U.S. diplomatic statements to the contrary, Israel is dealing with the same enemy as we are—the same enemy that utilizes the same unjustifiable, unacceptable, unconscionable tactics.
The Bush Administration claims it’s a different enemy—that Bin Laden is different from Bin Arafat or Bin Hamas or Bin Hezbollah. But they represent multiple heads of the same incubus—an anti-Western, Saudi- and Saddam-funded, Islamist incubus. If FOX News’ recent reports--that over 30 Al-Quaida fighters were on the ground assisting Palestinian militants and suicide bombers—aren’t enough evidence of that, how about Al-Quaida files purchased, vetted, and excerpted by the Wall Street Journal back in January?
A frightening summary of the files, obtained on the market in Kabul, published in the Journal, and posted on MSNBC.com, details the activities of the “Shoe Bomber,” Richard Reid--referred to by his alias, “brother Abdul Ra’uff.” Before trying to blow up a US-bound December flight from Paris with his high-tops, Reid went to Israel to try to do the same on an El-Al flight. About a month before 9/11, Reid a/k/a Ra’uff was casing out suicide bombing opportunities for Bin Laden’s Al-Quaida in Israel. It’s more than enough evidence that the identical group that blew up the WTC towers was looking for sites to blow up in Israel—and is likely heavily involved there now, beyond the 30-odd Bin Laden fighters.
In the files, Ra’uff reported to Al-Quaida superiors on the prospects for blowing up the holiest of Jewish religious sites, the Western Wall of the Temple in Jerusalem. He wrote that it would be an incredible moral victory for Al-Quaida Muslims. Just as blowing up the WTC was. He also reported on Israeli bus stations, noting which colors of buses carried the most Jews and would be the best bombing targets.
Same terrorist group, same types of targets. The only difference is the religion and ethnicity of most of the victims. As for Arafat, not only is he working in unison with the Al-Quaida crowd, but there’s ample intelligence he took part in the 1993 WTC bombings, and the 2001 version on 9/11. Senator Charles Grassley--later chided for disclosing information in Secretary Rumsfeld’s intelligence briefing to Congress--told the press that the briefing yielded solid intelligence that Arafat’s Fatah played a role in the WTC/Pentagon terror. And lest we forget, Arafat’s minions certainly cheered it on video, for every Al-Jazeera viewer to join along with at home.
There is no difference between Arafat’s actions and Al-Quaida’s; between Arafat’s victims and Al-Quaida’s. And there should be no difference in the response thereto.
But the double-standard against a proper response by Israel is allowed to proceed because anti-Semitism is more prevalent today than it has been since the era of the Third Reich. Sadly, Arafat’s Islamic World supporters are not the only active fomenters of the same venom spewed by the Nazis. The so-called “peacemakers,” the allies of the U.S. in Europe and elsewhere are showing signs of their revolting behavior that gave rise to Hitler.
Opinionjournal.com excerpted the Norwegian newspaper, “Dagbladet,” which reported that a friend of Norwegian Parliament member Jan Simonsen, was ordered yesterday by Parliament security guards to remove his jacket because a Star of David was displayed on the chest pocket. After the man, Ingmar Tveitt, talked in the Parliament restaurant with Parliament members he was sought out by security guards who asked him to come with them 'because they had received reactions' to Tveitt's Jewish star symbol. The guards escorted him to change his “offensive” clothing.
In France, Molotov cocktails and arsonists hit synagogues in Kremlin-Bicetre and Marseilles and flammable material is found in the Strasbourg-Cronenbourg Jewish cemetery. The Maccabi Bondy French-Jewish soccer team is attacked, as is a Paris school bus of Jewish kids. None of these victims are Israeli, and they aren’t in allegedly occupied territory, but they are attacked anyway. Because they are all Jewish. Even in Michigan--where Arabs and Muslims have their third highest population concentration outside the Middle East and claim they’ve fallen victim to post-9/11 harassment--only 4 anti-Muslim/anti-Arab crimes were reported in 2001, but 19 anti-Semitic ones, according to The Detroit News.
But these attacks on Jews, and a President unwittingly pawning off terrorism in the Middle East as a Jewish problem that’s acceptable--unworthy of a swift, harsh, military response--misses the point.
The latest Time Magazine, like President Bush, doesn’t get it, either. The April 8th issue features a story instilling fear in the reader that if we don’t remain “even-handed” against Israel, we’ll feel the Islamists’ wrath here in the U.S. The headline: “Could Suicide Bombings Happen Here?”
What was September 11th . . . a garden party? Suicide bombings are already here. And, whether it’s here or in the Middle East, it’s not acceptable against Americans or Jews.
State Department Spokesman Richard Boucher explains
why blowing up Israelis different than blowing up
Americans
DAILY PRESS BRIEFING
Richard Boucher, Spokesman
Washington, DC; September 27, 2001
...
QUESTION: To what extent does this campaign -- as you constantly review your Middle East
policy, what -- how much influence does this campaign against terrorism have in that? What's the
input? How does it weigh in here? See what I mean?
MR. BOUCHER: No, I don't.
QUESTION: It's obviously a factor --
MR. BOUCHER: We have talked about this on and off over the last few days. We recognize that
there is an influence. Some have said it affects the atmosphere, the Palestinian/Israeli issues
affect the atmosphere of cooperation. But, essentially, there are, on some planes, two different
things. One is that there are violent people trying to destroy societies, ours, many others in the
world. The world recognizes that and we are going to stop those people.
On the other hand, there are issues and violence and political issues that need to be resolved in
the Middle East, Israelis and Palestinians. But we all recognize that the path to solve those is
through negotiation and that we have devoted enormous efforts to getting back to that path of
negotiation.
And we have called on the parties to do everything they can, particularly in the present
circumstance, to make that possible.
I guess that's about as close as I can come to the kind of sophisticated analysis I'm sure you will
want to do on your own. But they are clearly issues that are different, not only in geography but
also, to some extent, in their nature.
--------------------------------------------
IMRA - Independent Media Review and Analysis
Website: www.imra.org.il
Upon seeing Arafat chant this to the crowds, I got it.
And that justifies letting an allied democracy
go belly up under terrorist attacks. I don't
think so. That kind of immoral cynicism
is attractive to the socialist left, anyway, and
not conservatism.
You can say that again... and I posted this so you would.
A beautifully made point that illustrates Orwell's old saying, that in times of moral confusion the first duty of sane people is to restate the obvious.
Murdering innocent civilians is alright with you? I don't care if they're Americans or Jews. Murder is murder in my book.
You are operating from the assumption that the US does not have the power to control any piece of the middle east we require, without toading to whatever the radicals pretend they want this week. Well, in reality the radicals want us dead, and proved in on 9-11. So our interest with regard to them is pretty clear. It is not to appease them, it is to annihilate them, wherever they take power.
It is not the cold war anymore, you know. We can do things like that. There isn't any big bad wolf to deter us from it anymore, as even the gulf war showed. I quite agree with you that US interests are first, but US interests are no longer served by vacillation, delay, weakness, and appeasement. We don't have to do everything by proxy anymore, and we can't afford continued appeasement after 9-11.
For all those reasons, Israeli and US interests are now much more closely aligned than they were during the cold war. The traditional difference between them, which some stripes of US opinion made much of back then to distinguish themselves from other blocs, has largely evaporated. But those blocs still cling to the pretended violent clash between our interests and theirs, for reasons that no longer have anything to do with preferring US interests, and instead have everything to do with self-identification, or with dislike of Israel.
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