Do not use my tax dollars for disengagement

Ariel Sharon prides himself on being a pioneer, Israel's human bulldozer, the man who is always out in front, who achieves the impossible, who breaks through all barriers. Well, chalk up yet another first to this stubbornly audacious man, for Sharon is the first Israeli prime minister to have caused Israel's staunchest allies, America's evangelical Christians, to come out against the Israeli government.

It is indeed a singular achievement to take your greatest friends and make them into enemies. Sharon has now done this twice. First, with the settler community, who were hoodwinked into believing that Sharon was their ally. But the loss of the settler community is of little concern to Sharon, judging by his contemptuous treatment of them. But when it's 80 million American evangelical Christians that Sharon has alienated, maybe he should begin paying attention.

The news that CIPAC, the Christian Israel Public Affairs Committee, is lobbying Congress to reject Jerusalem's request for additional millions of dollars in aid to fund the retreat from Gaza should be a grave embarrassment to the Sharon government.

CONSIDER, if you will, an enormous group of Christian Americans, patriotic in the extreme, who have tied America's future to Israel's; who believe that the foremost foreign policy of the world's foremost superpower should be to protect a small and vulnerable nation halfway across the world; who believe in Israel's blessed place among the nations, and who believe that when the United States is not squarely behind Israel it is acting immorally.

But then along comes Ariel Sharon and pursues a policy that American evangelicals consider doubly blasphemous. First, they are incredulous that any Jewish government would willfully uproot Jews from their homes with army troops. Is this what the US gives Israel billions of dollars per year in military aid for, to be used not against the terrorists but against those who peacefully grow lettuce and tomatoes?

Second, they are astonished at Israel's retreat before terrorism. And they see in the cowardly retreat from Gush Katif not only a sinful action against God's chosen people but a willful abrogation of the American-Israel alliance. Isn't America also fully engaged in the war against terrorists? Hasn't the United States made it clear that it will never retreat in the face of terror?

And along comes the Israeli government and forces its Jewish citizens to leave their homes because Hamas has taken over the surrounding area.

AMERICA'S evangelicals are smart enough to see through Ariel Sharon's deceitful use of language.

Yes, he calls this a disengagement. But who is he kidding? Does anyone seriously believe that after Israel's flight from Gaza Israel will suddenly be disengaged from the Palestinians? That Israel will never hear from the Palestinians again? Does anyone in their right mind believe that this unilateral retreat will bring even a small measure of closure to the Arab-Israeli conflict, or even a diminishment of terror on the part of the Palestinians?

The last great rupture in the America-Israel relationship took place during the presidency of George Bush, Sr. when he famously refused to grant Israel $10 billion in loan guarantees to help settle hundreds of thousands of immigrants from the former Soviet Union unless Israel guaranteed they would not be settled in Gaza, Judea or Samaria.

On that occasion Israel's American friends were flabbergasted that the administration could so capitulate to Arab pressure, and Bush Sr. paid an enormous price in evangelical support because of his obstinacy. His abandonment by his evangelical base led in no small measure to his defeat in the polls in the 1992 presidential race.

Look at how Sharon has completely reversed the circumstances. Now we see how Israel's friends are pressuring the US to refuse Israel's request for aid in order that Israel itself be prevented from closing off these areas to Jewish settlement. Who would have believed Sharon would one day be cast in the role of George Walker Bush?

Sharon has succeeded not only in alienating our foremost allies, but in completely confusing the good guys with the bad guys in the eyes of the global community. People around the world are watching the forced retreat from Gaza and concluding that "stubborn extremist settler Jews" are the obstacles to peace rather than the Palestinian "gunmen" who fire on them even as they are forcibly removed from their homes.

In the wake of the Jonathan Pollard spy affair, the allegiance of the American Jewish community was called into question. But that was peanuts compared to the conflicting allegiances Sharon has now forced on all of us American Jews.

Who are we supposed to support in this tragic retreat? The Israeli government, which is asking the American taxpayer for billions of dollars, or the brave settlers who will thrown out of their homes using that money?

I, FOR ONE, have no sense of conflict. While I am the proudest American and the proudest Jew, my first allegiance is neither to the United States nor to the State of Israel, but to morality and justice. The reason I so love both the US and Israel is because they are staunchly moral countries firmly committed to doing the right thing. And when the policies of either is wrong, we must oppose the policy and do what is right.

Israel's humiliating and discriminatory treatment of the Jewish residents of Gaza is a moral abomination and, as such, I, as an American citizen, condemn any use of American taxpayer money to be put to this corrupt end.

If Israel had requested billions of dollars to deport peaceful and patriotic Arab citizens from any part of Israel, I would fight it. The same is no less true when it seeks to uproot its most patriotic Jewish citizens. Honest Americans, committed to justice and righteousness, must combat such aberrant policies.

How tragic that Israel's highest government official has succeeded in turning tens of millions of American Christians and Jews against his government. This is the magnitude of Sharon's failure. For a bulldozer that flattens victim rather than culprit has lost its guidance mechanism and should be retired.

August 12, 2005, 8:13 a.m.
Keep Quiet And Listen!
The words of radical Islam speak for themselves.

"You will find that the Jews were behind all the civil strife in this world. The Jews are behind the suffering of the nations."

When and where did that venom come from?

This last May — and out of the hateful mouth of a prominent Palestinian cleric, Sheik Ibrahim Mudeiris. He was broadcast on a Palestinian Authority station.

The televised Sheik finished with an even more frightening thought: "The day will come when everything will be relieved of the Jews — even the stones and trees which were harmed by them…The stones and trees will want the Muslims to finish off every Jew."

Nothing could be clearer than that promise of another holocaust — and promised explicitly on state-run Palestinian television, a public megaphone of the Palestinian Authority, itself the beneficiary of past and apparently promised future American financial aid.

Still, don't hold your breath that the passive/aggressive sheik is about to lead a pan-Islamic army a few miles across the border to "finish off every Jew," since he might then end up like Sheik Ahmed Yassin, whose threats of death earned him instead an early paradise.

Throughout this war we have an understandable, if ethnocentric, habit of ignoring what our enemies actually say. Instead we chatter on, don't listen, and in self-absorbed fashion impart our own motives for their hatred. We live on the principles of the Enlightenment and so worship our god Reason, thus assuming that even our adversaries accept such rational protocols as their own.

So they talk on and on of beheading, suicide bombing, another holocaust, and blowing thousands of us up, while we snooze, now and again waking in the midst of a war to regurgitate Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, flushed Korans, the abusive Patriot Act, and the latest quip of Donald Rumsfeld.

But again keep quiet, and listen to radical Islam.

Take the August 4 declaration of al Qaeda's second in command, Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri. He promises even "more destruction" for London, and tells us precisely why.

Many in the West assume that those mass murders were payback for the United Kingdom's presence in Iraq, even though its troops are mostly confined to non-Wahhabi areas in the south.

But no, the Dr. instead lists a number of grievances beyond Iraq that justify his terrorist cadres murdering innocents. One complaint, for example, is "Stopping the robbing of our oil and resources."

Examine that gripe carefully.

Oil is now at record highs. I just filled up with regular gas at $2.89 on a California interstate. It costs the Middle East about $3-4 a barrel to pump petroleum that was discovered, developed, and marketed for the Gulf autocracies through hated Western expertise — and is now selling at over $60. Despite Zawahiri's rants, billions of poor the world over are being price gouged to enrich a Muslim world flush with petrodollars.

And some of those obscene profits have ended up in coffers of Zawahiri himself. Indeed, his al Qaeda blackmailers depend on recycled petrodollars from Gulf State sheikdoms. Nothing either he or bin Laden has ever done themselves warrants the type of cash that flowed into al Qaeda's banks — a con operation that extorted oil dollars from autocratic price gougers who in turn got their revenues largely from inventive and productive Indians, Chinese, and Westerners.

Zawahiri next went on to cite, "Stopping your support for the corrupt and corrupting leaders."

Did the terrorist Dr. read the text of Condoleezza Rice's June 20 address in Cairo? There she rightly repudiated past American realpolitik that blinked at Arab dictatorships, and then prodded Arab governments to democratize?

Or maybe it was precisely that fresh support for democracy that grieves Zawahiri?

For clarification of al Qaeda's ideas about democracy, we can turn to Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, the spiritual leader of the terrorists in Iraq. He recently warned that, "We have declared a fierce war on this evil principle of democracy and those who follow this wrong ideology."

That pathological hatred of democracy was also amplified in the latest al Qaeda video of August 10: "Democracy, human rights, and freedom are all but hollow illusions, with which they tranquilize inhabitants."

Western critics of America's attempt to introduce democratic reconstruction in Iraq should ask why al Qaeda is so furious at the effort. The answer is clear: Radical Islam can no longer blame the United States for propping up dictators, but instead is terrified that there is a third choice — the people's freedom — between creepy strongmen and even creepier pre-modern theocrats.

But back again to the good Dr. Zawahiri, who had still more complaints beyond oil and corrupt leaders that explain why he, of course, plans on more murdering of Westerners.

"What you have you seen, O Americans, in New York and Washington and the losses you are having in Afghanistan and Iraq, in spite of all the media blackout, are only the losses of the initial clashes."

And we know precisely what were our perceived pre-September 11 wrongs that caused "New York and Washington" since Dr Zawahiri's boss, bin Laden himself, spelled them out in a 1998 fatwa.

"The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies — civilians and military — is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque [Mecca] from their grip."

Note that bin Laden omits any reference to American efforts to save Muslim Kuwait (a war in which in vain he also volunteered to fight against Saddam Hussein), to save Balkan Muslims (which his own mujahadeen had failed utterly to do), or to stop the Soviet killing of Afghan Muslims (a war in which his resistance counted on American arms to save his fellow Muslims).

The constant theme of this envious and insecure motor mouth? Americans saved Muslims, while bin Laden's minions talked big, but couldn't do much against much stronger Baathist Iraqis, godless Soviets, and nationalist Serbs.

September 11 was the promised answer to bin Laden's fatwa. Later when America withdrew all troops from the land of Mecca, his death promises increased rather than ceased.

Remember that Dr. Zawahiri lists both Afghanistan (his former headquarters) and Iraq in the same breath as reasons for his attacks to come. We in our civil discord tend to distinguish the two theaters; al Qaeda in its unity does not.

So as we try to assess the causes of Islamists' venom toward the West, it seems wiser to listen to what they say rather than what we say they say.

If we would do that, we would conclude that the hatred of radical Islam is fed by envy, frustration, and pride — and thus existential: They despise Americans for who we are.

That's why al Qaeda must constantly find new grievances, whether the West Bank, Israel itself, Jews, oil prices, troops in Saudi Arabia, Oil-for-Food, Afghanistan, or Iraq.

Indeed, the latest two-hour training video is little more than cut-and-paste from the Michael Moore Left and hand-me-downs from Euro anti-globalist radicals. Thus America, al Qaeda assures us, "seeks to ravage the entire globe for the interest…of corporate companies," and so kills the sons of Islam "in Palestine, Afghanistan, the Balkans, Indonesia, the Caucuses, and elsewhere."

Apparently about three billion Europeans, Asians, Russians, and Indians have been picking on poor suicide bombers and terrorists, who, in fact, are incognito environmentalists bent on stopping corporate exploitation of Mother Earth.

Yet there is one and only one legitimate objection of the crackpot radical Islamists that rings true: We in the West don't listen to them when they promise us our deaths.

We should. They are yelling as loud as they can to tell us something that we don't really want to hear.

— Victor Davis Hanson is a military historian and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His website is victorhanson.com.

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