This post was first published on April 2, 2002.
It occurs to me that I need one simple question answered, and only one. Let’s for the moment drop all of my arguments about the Palestinian suicide bombings, the refugee problems; in fact, let’s assume for the moment that I agree with everything you say regarding the Palestinian side of things. Except for this.
I have one question, and one question only: In what way does blowing up families sitting down to the Passover dinner aid the Palestinian cause? Please explain this to me in short, simple sentences so that I may follow your logic. Let me repeat it in simpler phrases: How do suicide bombings advance Palestinian self-rule and solve the refugee problem?
No, don’t go on about how they’re driven to it by the wretched excesses of the Israeli oppressors, or the conditions of the camps, or the Right of Return, or for whatever other reason you can think of. Answer the question, simply and directly: In what way does blowing the arms and legs off old men and women and children solve the problems of the Palestinian refugees? You can start like this: “Blowing up innocent men, women, and children helps solve the Palestinian refugee problem because…”
When you can answer that question to my satisfaction, then I will begin to take your arguments seriously.
So, did you ever get any answers to this question? I don’t specify logical answers, or reasonable answers, just any answers at all?
Nope. But I did get called a hater because I wrote angry posts about the Netanya massacre and other Palestinian terrorist attacks. Lefties who had been reading my blog for a year sent me emails telling me that they’d stop reading me because I was now “angry and hate-filled.” My response now would be very different from the response I wrote then:
I believe now I’d be telling him not to let the door hit him in the ass, because he’s obviously too stupid to see the difference between terrorism and “resistance”. Also anger and hatred.
“In what way does blowing up families sitting down to the Passover dinner aid the Palestinian cause?”
Perhaps I can make a stab at explaining this commection. My explanation is based on observing what the Palestinian Arabs have done over decades, and reflecting on history. It may not make much sense to we Westerners; remember what I said above about the explanation not being either logical or reasonable.
The terrorism of the Palis is practiced as the attritional phase of a war they envisage lasting a century or two. Since the Arabs have been unable to defeat the Israelis by conventional arms they have settled on what is now called asymmetrical warfare, until they are able to fight conventionally again or until nukes are available to them. While waiting for that day they make constant, pinprick attacks on the Jews in order to demoralize them and reduce their numbers, either through emigration from Israel or through death. This practice of attrition is a common one in Muslim history. A Muslim empire, confronted by a non-Muslim one it cannot conquer immediately, sends raiders into the enemy’s territory to burn villages, plunder wealth, and carry off slaves. The Barbary pirates did this all along the coasts of Western Europe, at least once as far away as Iceland. The Byzantines faced such raiders for centuries, and develped a class of fighters called Akrites to defend the frontiers from Muslim raids. In the Balkans of Europe the Habsburgs had to set up a military border against the Ottomans and arrange for constant protection against such raiding through Grenzers or Croats, irregular soldiers who protected the frontier against Muslim raids and raided back in retaliation, in return for farm allotments.
So the Pali terrorists can see themselves as the successors of the Muslim Ghazis (heros) who made those raids in the past. Remember the plunder of the raids too. Plundering the infidel, including slave raiding, is the Muslim equivalent of doing well by doing good (jihad is good dontcherknow). The more terrorism the Palis perpetrated the more money Europe, the UN, the USA, and even Israel gave them. For some reason rich and lazy nations can always find the wherewithal to pay Danegeld.
The Palis believe the attrition will eventually wear down the Israelis and lead to their departure or surrender, after which the Palis can massacre them. Notice the Pali’s fondness for killing children, whether it is teenagers as a disco, the children at a school (Ma’alot), students on a schoolbus blown up by a suidcide bomber, bashing out a four-year-old’s brains with a rifle butt on the beach, or two heros of the jihad sneaking into a home in the night and murdering a five-year-old in her bed. These oh-so-heroic deeds are the Palis’ way of telling the Jews: “You have no future here. We are killing your posterity.”
The war the Palis are waging will continue until their attritinal strategy succeeds; or until Israel is destroyed by the wider Muslim antisemitic alliance, possibly in a nuclear war that probably will also kill off most of the Palis; or until Israel kills so many Pali men that the Palis become sick of being killed, and will actually physically prevent Arabs from making attacks on Jews in order to avoid the violent response the Jews will make. Absent this last situation, I do not believe the Palestinian Arabs will ever make a real peace with Israel. I do not think they want a state, if having a state means living at peace alongside a Jewish state (the Two-state solution as it is called). They just want to kill the Jews.
Michael, excellent post, you nailed it!
This is what the left refuses to comprehend until it literally later bites them in their own ass!
You are correct, Herschel, it will bite them, and hard. Leftist radicals want to ally with the jihadists to use them to destroy Western capitalism, then take over. They think that they will be able to outwit the religious fanatics once their mutual enemy (us) is destroyed. That was what they tried in the Iranian Revolution. There the religious fanatics proved able to outwit the leftists, because the latter were unarmed for a battle of wits by comparison with the Khomeinists. The same thing will happen worldwide if the jihadists win, for the left is hollow and without spiritual values, while Islam has at least some such values, and the jihadists can pretend to appeal to them. Islam can appeal to the spiritual longings of people whereas leftist ideology cannot, as was perfectly evident in the old USSR and contributed mightily to the fall of that empire.