Summaries of some articles recently up on THINK ISRAEL

ISRAELI AND JEWISH USEFUL IDIOTS: We are so used to blatant distortions and outrageous statements by anti-Israel Jews such as Noam Chomsky or Norman Finkelstein or Ilan Pappe, we have ignored the damage that can be done by Jews that Jack Berger calls "useful idiots" -- Jews that appear mild in manner and sound reasonable but damage Israel by omissions and by slanting the truth. And there are those that do Israel a disservice by sugar-coating the truth about Israel's neighbors so that the audience is left feeling good, though unenlightened. "'Useful idiots' are those who try to deny the obvious. Armed with excuses and rationalizations, they have created an art form of telling people what they wanted them to hear rather than what was actually happening."

GREEN TIDE RISING: Philip B. Haney points out that Hamas winning the election to head the Palestine Authority is not surprising. Contrary to what we'd like to believe, they've been much admired in the Arab world for some twenty years. They represent the global Jihadist movement and "at least four generations of Middle Eastern Arab Muslims ... have all been saturated from birth on the liberation theology of Jihad." Using democratic means to gain power, the Middle East Jihadist groups -- Hamas, Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood, the clerics in Iran and Saudi Arabia -- have a single objective: to impose Islamic Sharia'ah law on whatever country they control. The similarity between resurgent Islam and Nazi Germany -- their local popularity, their ability to sway crowds and intimidate their neighbors as well as their unabashed desire to conquer the world -- is both frightening and real.

ISRAEL'S NEW WAR: While so many politicians keep denying there is a loose confederacy among the multiple terror groups, their unification has reached the point that Caroline Glick suggests the new Israeli Kadima government rethink its plan to retreat from most of Samaria and Judea. We should take seriously the fact that Hamas is making Gaza into a wall-to-wall terror stronghold and bomb manufactory and the fact that Al Qaeda is sizing up the area as a base from which to attack both Israel and Jordan.

ALLAH BE APPRAISED: Considering that so many people -- including President Bush -- claim Islam is a peaceful religion, Burt Prelutsky finds it remarkable that "... wherever Islam gains a stranglehold, you will find the nightmare of slavery, genocide and female stoning and mutilation, the norm." Of course, the Muslim cult of death may have other causes -- the climate, "... too much sand in one's diet ... sharing one's life with camels, a notoriously nasty beast..."

ISLAM'S IMPERIAL DREAMS: Efraim Karsh explains that Islam's hostility to the West is not a new phenomenon engendered by legimate grievances. To the contrary, he points out that "[t]he last great Muslim empire may have been destroyed and the caliphate left vacant, but the dream of regional and world domination has remained very much alive" and has now been adapted by various radical Islamic groups. He also reminds us about historical inaccuracies about past Caliphates that are still current. You'll be glad you read this article the next time someone tells you that some horrible killing by the Arabs was only in response to (an event within the previous week).

ISLAM'S COMING CRUSADE: The theory is that only a few misguided souls are interested in terror and in conducting a jihad to install shari'a throughout the world. This is given the lie by polls that show "that 60 percent of Jordanians, Egyptians and Palestinians want Islamic shari'a law to be the sole source of legislation." There really is a clash of civilizations. ... The clash goes beyond differing interests. Hundreds of millions of Muslims who live alongside us and among us inhabit another mental world."

WAR AND PEACE: Yashiko Sagamori suggests that over much of the world, the choice, vis a vis the Muslims "is not between war and peace, because the war, whose name is jihad, is upon us, whether we are willing to admit it or prefer suicidal denial. Our choice is between fighting it and surrendering." Yet in many cases, people are ignoring the enemy and focusing on Israel as the easy-to-tackle bad guy. England would eliminate Iranian nuclear power, but it also wants to disarm Israel. Blaming Israel can only increase as Muslims take over more of Europe. And "with every passing year, the Europe of an overseas vacationer acquires more and more of the unreal quality of an amusement park. Its attractions are still running, but the place is now under new management." Israel is another place where Islam could be defeated. "The government of Israel has all the means necessary to defeat the enemy, but, along with a large percentage of the population, lacks the will to do so. Trying to avoid displeasing the world at all costs, they prefer to surrender their land and sacrifice their lives to a weak, inhumane enemy." And America will soon have its own struggle with a resident population of Muslims promoting shari'a.

THE FALL OF FRANCE AND THE MULTICULTURAL WORLD WAR: Fjordman is a Norwegian essayist who writes on Scandanavian affairs and Islam. In this essay, he expects that continued unrestrained Muslim immigration and their easily-sparked riots may end in a complete breakdown of French society, with France dominated by the Muslims or becoming an Islamic state, either with or without protracted protest from the natives. He suggests possible scenarios on what this process might mean for the rest of Europe.

CRISIS IN EUROPE: Bruce Bawer writes that most of the countries in Western Europe now have two very separate communities -- secular, liberal populations with a low birthrate and "self-segregating enclaves whose autocratic leaders despised democracy and whose population (thanks to high birth and immigration rates) was climbing rapidly." But few people talk about this division openly or have examined it critically. Bawer brilliantly summarizes the major analyses. Europeans contributed to the problem, because, ironically, out of respect for Muslim traditions, they didn't promote integration or force the Muslim immigrants to work but romantically "pursued ... an approach they saw as humane and multicultural." The Muslims responded with contempt. Conversely, practices sanctioned by the Koran and therefore intrinsic to Muslim society -- slavery, polygamy, oppressive attitudes toward women and infidels -- are antithetic to integration into the greater society. This is an excellent introduction to material on what is a serious problem in Europe.

THE ISLAMIZATION OF AMERICA: Phyllis Chesler focusses on how Muslims bent on islamization use America's tolerance and its freedom of expression against us. We feel virtuous when we admit admitted Jihadists into this country; we defend the right of imams to indoctrinate others with poisonous messages of hate; we welcome rabid hate groups to the campus. But there's no reciprocity. Newspapers are afraid to run cartoons of Mohammad; bookstores are afraid to stock anti-Muslim books; talk shows are afraid to say that all of the terrorists of 911 were Arab; and tracking the funding of the terrorists is a suable offense. Chesler suggests some remedies.

SPEAKING (AND NOT SPEAKING) ABOUT POLITICS, GENDER, AND RACE AT HARVARD: Richard Cravetts tells us about the events that led up to Lawrence Summers' resigning his post as president of Harvard University. Harvard has had a long-standing ban on ROTC on campus, even after 911. "Patriotism," Summers said at the Kennedy School of Government, "might actually be a positive and virtuous emotion for a wounded nation..." Bloing! He tackled a black racist. He rejected a petition to divest Harvard of funds invested in Israel from the "campus Left's campus Left's obsession with the Palestinian cause -- and its contemporaneous and subsequent demonization of Israel ..." Bloing! Bloing! Bloing! And he was finally shafted for daring to suggest that men and women might have built-in differences in mathematical ability. His real crime? Advocating diversity of opinion in an environment that believed in a restricted set of opinions that should not be questioned.

(For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and DISSECTING LEFTISM. My Home Page. Email me (John Ray) here.)

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