Taliban On The Med

Jonathan Rothenberg cites this quote from a top Pal and asks the rhetorical question, "We want to give these people a state because...?"

In the days of Saddam there was stability, calm; there was a government, a people, funding, a state, and institutions...

. ...state terror, rape rooms, torture chambers, mass graves, a million corpses, a Grand Central Station of terrorism, regional aggression, weapons of mass destruction....

Who made them [suicide terrorists] love death? Britain and the U.S. with their actions. And the American and British peoples will pay the price if they don't put an end to these governments. [emphasis added]

Think ol' Mr. Al-Tamimi doesn't speak the language of his target audience? Though take a closer look at his choice of words - don't you think "put an end to these governments" means something a great deal different to him than an electoral change of regime at the next scheduled canvass? I daresay he's referring to throwing out the cavass and everything else - violently - in favor of the Islamic Caliphate, or he and his jihadi comrades will do it for us. Or so he dreams.

Thing is, though, the direction that events in the Holy Land are going, with the withdrawal of Israel from Gaza and the rise of Hamas to dominance - with apparently broad public support - over the Palestinian "terrortories" - and with Western (including American) backing, we may be setting ourselves up to face the very sort of wrath for which Councillor Al-Tamimi pines:

Gaza isn't Eden, and this isn't the apple of knowledge. It's a Rohypnol-like apple of ignorance, and it is blinding us to the danger America faces — a danger our Islamofascist enemies see clearly and are primed to take advantage of. We think Gaza is all about Israel and the Palestinians; our enemies know it's mainly about us. We think we are encouraging Israel to hand Gaza over to Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah party, local Palestinians with purely local ambitions — ambitions that encompass the whole of Israel, perhaps, but nothing beyond it — ambitions that have nothing to do with us. Our enemies know that behind a Fatah fig leaf, we are handing Gaza over to Hamas, an international terrorist organization of global reach and ambition that is one of America's deadliest enemies. We think Hamas only attacks Jews. They know that Hamas is a main recruiting agent for Arab jihadists, not just from among the 2.4 million Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank and from the much larger numbers of Palestinians scattered in strategic enclaves throughout the region and the world, but for other Arabs too. We think Hamas sends all these jihadists only to Israel. They know Hamas sends a never-ending stream of them to Afghanistan, Chechnya, the Balkans, Kashmir, Lebanon and, most critically for us right now, to Iraq. And when our press insistently refers to Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the master terrorist who directs the foreign jihadists in Iraq, as "a Jordanian," our enemies laugh. They know Zarqawi has always called himself a Palestinian, and is recognized as such, in Jordan and throughout the Middle East.

To see what Hamas control of Gaza will mean for us in Iraq, we have to see it as our enemies do — not just Hamas, but its parent organization, the Brotherhood, and its longtime partners Hezbollah, al Qaeda, and the Wahhabi and Salafist movements. To do that, forget Israel entirely for a moment. Look only at the terror war against America, and at the geography of Islamofascism that supports it. Place Gaza in that context, and its strategic location jumps out at you. Control of Gaza gives Hamas and its partners direct access to the land border with Egypt, as well as access by sea to terrorist supply ports in Lebanon and Syria, and from them, overland, to the terror training camps in Syria, Lebanon, and Iran and to the ratlines from Syria into Iraq.
This is the reality we face: The "Palestinian democracy" we rattle on about is a mirage no desert-dweller is seduced by....

Hamas is taking over, with or without elections or invitations, and most Palestinians are glad. Hamas is a disciplined terrorist organization, and they are sick of chaos and corruption. Besides, like their Islamofascist brothers everywhere, they believe that it is Hamas that is forcing the Israelis to retreat in Gaza, and America with her. They see it as another terrorist victory, a harbinger of more to come. Meanwhile, they are enjoying the sight of the great American Samson, stumbling about, "eyeless in Gaza." They think our acquiescence in the once-mighty Sharon's appeasement plan puts us "at the mill with slaves," and they are jubilant.

The GWOT is indivisible. It can't be neatly compartmentalized. It rages on the West Bank and Gaza just as surely as in Baghdad and London and Madrid and Bali and Washington, D.C. and New York City. Israel is our close ally as much as the Brits and Aussies, and Hamas is our enemy every bit as unequivocally as al Qaeda or Bashar Assad or the mullahgarchy in Tehran. And yet we are not only welcoming but bankrolling (again!) the creation of another Taliban right smack in the middle of the most strategic real estate on the planet. And it is Ariel Sharon's idea!

I wrote yesterday about how decadence, in the form of moral/cultural confusion, is the West's greatest weakness in this war because armies and bomber fleets and ICBMs don't necessarily provide us cover. There is no identifiable front line somewhere else far away on the globe. The front line is, potentially, everywhere, and the enemy makes no distinction between military and civilian personnel; to them we're all "infidels" and all "guilty" in the only way that matters to them: not surrendering to the Caliphate. Combatting such a foe and such tactics requires a robust self-confidence and belief in the fundamental rightness and superiority of traditional Western culture. We simply no longer have the feted luxury of indulging in the leisured spinning of "isms" the "progressive" direction of which is suicidally unmistakable and unsustainable.

And yet here is the Jews' greatest warrior of his generation leading the feeding of the proverbial crocodile in the vain hope that it might get full - for a while. And George Bush is helping him, as though Israel's fate isn't a variation on our own a generation further down the line, or perhaps sooner, if we don't right their ship now.

The flight from Gaza embarks in a little under four weeks. One can't help but wonder how long after that will follow our own retreat from Iraq and/or Afghanistan. For all the phony moral equivalencies tossed about by the anti-war crowd, here's one that's as real as roast beef. Something the President might want to reconsider before yet another "regime change" operation has to be added to CenComm's itinerary.

UPDATE 7/24: Caroline Glick of the Jerusalem Post delivers a moral hammerblow to the Israeli flight from Gaza and Northern Samaria that effectively equates it to Czechoslovakia having both coughed up the Sudetenland to Hitler without Anglo-French "mediation" in 1938 and cleansed it of Jews besides:

The tens of thousands of law-abiding citizens – estimates of their actual numbers run between 30,000 and 60,000 – were exercising their democratic right to protest the government's plan to expel 10,000 Israelis from Gaza and northern Samaria and destroy the communities they built from sand next month. The protesters oppose this plan for moral reasons. It is simply obscene, they say, to carry out these expulsions. These people are set to be thrown out of their homes and their farms just because they are Jews.

Israel receives nothing in return. These people's homes will be either destroyed or turned over to the same Palestinian terrorist forces that have been attacking them continuously for the past five years. Their hothouses and livestock are set to be turned over to the Palestinians as well.

The plan's proponents argue that the expulsion of 10,000 Jews from their farms and communities in the Land of Israel is necessary to maintain Israel as a democratic, Jewish society. Yet, what these opponents of the expulsion plan experienced, in their efforts to even voice their opposition, is that in insisting on carrying out this plan – which Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was reelected overwhelmingly in 2003 by promising to oppose – the government is trampling and endangering both Israel's democratic form of government and its character as a Jewish state.

Are we cutting and running from Iraq? From Afghanistan? Emptying Gitmo? Withdrawing from the Middle East? Conferring privileged special group rights status upon our own Muslim community as the EUnuchs have theirs? Yet we are encouraging and subsidizing the Israeli government in exiling their own people from their own homes, built with their own hands on their own territory. Why? To achieve "peace".

Ms. Glick adds that the expulsion, "all but ensures that Hamas will take over Gaza." My addendum to hers is that if the Jews, with their two-millenia heritage of diaspora, persecution, and genocide, can be worn down by their Islamist enemies to the point of doing their dirty work for them, we ourselves can be similarly overcome, and a whole lot quicker.

The Israeli fate the Bush Administration - the Bush Administration! - is abetting makes it more likely that we will eventually share it, or pay a significantly stiffer price to avoid it.