Daniel Luria, executive director of Ateret Cohanim spoke with Fox News about John Kerry’s speech last week as well as Jewish life in Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria.
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“The UN resolution from this week suggests that this is occupied territory and should be handed over to those enemies.
“Obviously, that’s absurd. Israel will stay here forever. No speech and no Security Council resolution will change that fact.”
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In 1989, following her tenure as President Ronald Reagan’s ambassador to the UN Jeane Kirkpatrick described how the Palestinians have used the UN to destroy Israel.
Following outgoing US President Barack Obama’s assault on Israel at the UN Security Council last Friday, longtime UN observer Claudia Rossett wrote an important article at PJMedia where she recalled Kirkpatrick’s words.
In “How the PLO was legitimized,” published in Commentary, Kirkpatrick said that Yassir Arafat and the PLO worked “to come to power through international diplomacy – reinforced by murder.”
Kirkpatrick explained, “The long march through the UN has produced many benefits for the PLO. It has created a people where there was none; a claim where there was none. Now the PLO is seeking to create a state where there already is one. That will take more than resolutions and more than an ‘international peace conference.’ But having succeeded so well over the years in its campaign to delegitimize Israel, the PLO might yet also succeed in bringing the campaign to a triumphant conclusion, with consequences for the Jewish state that would be nothing short of catastrophic.”
As Rossett noted, in falsely arguing that Obama’s support for Friday’s UN Security Council Resolution 2334 is in line with Reagan’s policies, Obama’s UN ambassador Samantha Power deliberately distorted the historical record of US policy towards Israel and the PLO-led UN onslaught against the Jewish state.
In stark contrast to Power’s self-serving lie, neither Reagan nor George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton nor George W. Bush would have ever countenanced a resolution like 2334.
Obama’s predecessors’ opposition to the war against Israel at the UN was not merely an expression of their support for Israel. They acted also out of a fealty to US power, which is directly targeted by that war.
It is critical that we understand how this is the case, and why the implications of Resolution 2334 are disastrous to the US itself.
Resolution 2334 is being presented as an “anti-settlement” resolution. But it is not an anti-settlement resolution.
Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria and neighborhoods in Jerusalem are being used – as they always have been used – as a means of delegitimizing the Jewish state as a whole, and legitimizing Palestinian terrorists and Islamic terrorists more generally. Resolution 2334 serves to criminalize Israel and its people and to undermine Israel’s right to exist, while embracing Palestinian terrorists and empowering them in their war to annihilate Israel.
America’s historic refusal to countenance such actions at the UN Security was never a purely altruistic position. It was also a stand for American power and the inherent justice of American superpower status and global leadership.
Throughout most of its history, the UN has served as a proxy battlefield first of the Cold War, and since the destruction of the Soviet Union, for the war against the US-led Free World.
Beginning in the early 1960s, the Soviets viewed the political war against Israel at the UN as a means to undermine the moral basis for the US-led West. If Israel, the only human rights defending state in the Middle East, and the US’s only stable ally in the region could be delegitimized, then the very coherence of the US-led Western claim to moral superiority against the totalitarian Soviet empire would be undone.
Hence, the first Soviet attempt at the UN to castigate Zionism, the Jewish national liberation movement, as a form of racism was made in 1965, two years before Israel took control of Judea and Samaria and united Jerusalem in the Six Day War.
That attempt failed. But nine years later the wording first raised in 1965 was adopted by the UN General Assembly which passed resolution 3379 slandering libeled Zionism as “a form of racism.”
With their automatic majority in the General Assembly and all other UN organs, the Soviets used the Palestinian war against Israel as a proxy for their war against America. After the demise of the Soviet Union, the Islamic bloc, backed by members of the former Soviet bloc, the non-aligned bloc and the Europeans continued their campaign. The only thing that kept them from winning was the US and its Security Council veto.
When Obama chose to lead the anti-Israel lynch mob at the Security Council last week, he did more than deliver the PLO terrorist organization its greatest victory to date against Israel. He delivered a strategic victory to the anti-American forces that seek to destroy the coherence of American superpower status. That is, he carried out a strategic strike on American power.
By leading the gang rape of Israel on Friday, Obama undermined the rationale for American power. Why should the US assert a sovereign right to stand against the radical forces that control the UN?
If US agrees that Israel is committing a crime by respecting the civil and human rights of its citizens to live in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, then how can America claim that it has the right to defend its own rights and interests, when those clash with the views of the vast majority of state members of the UN?
Following Obama’s assault on Israel Friday, Senators Lindsay Graham and Ted Cruz called for the US to end its financial support for the UN at least until the Security Council abrogates Resolution 2334. They are correct.
But it isn’t anger at how Obama has and is expected to continue to use the Security Council to imperil Israel that should inform the incoming Trump administration’s actions. Rather a determination to maintain US power and secure its national security requires that the UN be permanently defunded and defanged.
For eight years, through his embrace and empowerment of US enemies, betrayal and weakening of US allies, emaciation of the US armed forces and repeated apologies for America’s past assertions of global leadership Obama has waged a determined war against US superpower status. The last vestige of the strategic and moral rationale for US power was the protection America afforded Israel at the Security Council.
Now with that gone, it has become a strategic imperative for the US to render the UN irrelevant. This can only be undertaken by permanently defunding this corrupt institution and using the US’s Security Council veto to end the UN’s role as the arbiter of international peace and security, by among other things, ending the deployment of UN forces to battle zones.
Only by stripping the UN of its financial wherewithal to assault US allies and American interests and by denying it the institutional and operational capacity to serve as an arbiter of disputes morally and legally superior to the US can America protect its sovereignty and advance its interests.
Only by denying those associated with the UN the prestige that confers to an institution legitimized by democrat and autocrat alike can the incoming Trump administration rebuild America’s reputation and power.
It is not surprising that Obama is carrying out the final act of his presidency at the UN. Obama has made no attempt to hide his desire to eliminate America’s independence of action. By elevating the post of UN ambassador to a cabinet level position at the outset of his presidency, Obama signaled his conviction that this corrupt institution is the equal of the US government.
This early signal was transformed into an open policy when Obama used the Security Council as a means to bypass the US Senate in implementing his nuclear deal with Iran.
Now, by ignoring the near consensus position of both parties that the US should block anti-Israel resolutions from being adopted at the Security Council and plotting further action against Israel at the Security Council in his final weeks in office, Obama has made clear his position and his aim.
Obama is not leading the war against Israel at the Security Council simply to advance the PLO’s war for the annihilation of Israel. He is acting in this manner to undermine the legitimacy of American power.
Obama’s strategic campaign against his country can only be defeated by a counter campaign by his successor.
Luckily, by eschewing multilateral entanglements in favor of bilateral partnerships during his presidential campaign, President-elect Donald Trump has demonstrated that he understands the threat and will adopt the only possible means of countering it. To reassert and rebuild the rationale for American power, the Trump administration must permanently defund the UN and reject its legitimacy as an institution of global governance.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.
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Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy sadly fits the classic description of insanity: “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” The identical assumptions – land-for-peace and the two-state solution, with the burden primarily on Israel – stay permanently in place, no matter how often they fail. Decades of what insiders call “peace processing” has left matters worse than when they started, yet the great powers persist, sending diplomat after diplomat to Jerusalem and Ramallah, ever hoping that the next round of negotiations will lead to the elusive breakthrough.
The time is ripe for a new approach, a basic re-thinking of the problem. It draws on Israel’s successful strategy as carried out through its first 45 years. The failure of Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy since 1993 suggests this alternative approach – with a stress on Israeli toughness in pursuit of victory. This would, paradoxically perhaps, be of benefit to Palestinians and bolster American support.
I. The Near Impossibility of Compromise
Since the Balfour Declaration of 1917, Palestinians and Israelis have pursued static and opposite goals.
In the years before the establishment of the new state, the mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, articulated a policy of rejectionism, or eliminating every vestige of Jewish presence in what is now the territory of Israel.[1]It remains in place. Maps in Arabic which show a “Palestine” replacing Israel symbolize this continued aspiration. Rejectionism runs so deep that it drives not just Palestinian politics but much of Palestinian life. With consistency, energy, and perseverance, Palestinians have pursued rejectionism via three main approaches: demoralizing Zionists through political violence, damaging Israel’s economy through trade boycotts, and weakening Israel’s legitimacy by winning foreign support. Differences between Palestinian factions tend to be tactical: Talk to the Israelis to win concessions from them or not? Mahmoud Abbas represents the former outlook and Khaled Mashal the latter.
On the Israeli side, nearly everyone agrees on the need to win acceptance by Palestinians (and other Arabs and Muslims); differences are again tactical. David Ben-Gurion articulated one approach, that of showing Palestinians what they can gain from Zionism. Vladimir Jabotinsky developed the opposite vision, arguing that Zionists have no choice but to break the Palestinians’ intractable will. Their rival approaches remain the touchstones of Israel’s foreign-policy debate, with Isaac Herzog heir to Ben-Gurion and Binyamin Netanyahu to Jabotinsky.
These two pursuits – rejectionism and acceptance – have remained basically unchanged for a century; today’s Palestinian Authority, Hamas, Labor, and Likud are lineal descendants of Husseini, Ben-Gurion, and Jabotinsky. Varying ideologies, objectives, tactics, strategies, and actors mean that details have varied, even as the fundamentals remained remarkably in place. Wars and treaties came and went, leading to only minor shifts. The many rounds of fighting had surprisingly little impact on ultimate goals, while formal agreements (such as the Oslo Accords of 1993) only increase hostility to Israel’s existence and so were counterproductive.
Palestinian rejection or acceptance of Israel is binary: yes or no, without in-betweens. This renders compromise nearly impossible because resolution requires one side fully to abandon its goal. Either Palestinians give up their century-long rejection of the Jewish state or Zionists give up their 150-year quest for a sovereign homeland. Anything other than these two outcomes is an unstable settlement that merely serves as the premise for a future round of conflict.
The “Peace Process” That Failed
Deterrence, that is, convincing Palestinians and the Arab states to accept Israel’s existence by threatening painful retaliation, underlay Israel’s formidable record of strategic vision and tactical brilliance in the period 1948 to 1993. Over this time, deterrence worked to the extent that Israel’s Arab state enemies saw the country very differently by the end of that period; in 1948, invading Arab armies expected to throttle the Jewish state at birth, but by 1993, Arafat felt compelled to sign an agreement with Israel’s prime minister.
That said, deterrence did not finish the job; as Israelis built a modern, democratic, affluent, and powerful country, the fact that Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims, and (increasingly) the left still rejected it became a source of mounting frustration. Israel’s impatient, on-the-go populace grew weary with the unattractive qualities of deterrence, which by nature is passive, indirect, harsh, slow, boring, humiliating, reactive, and costly. It is also internationally unpopular.
That impatience led to the diplomatic process that culminated with the handshake confirming the signing of the Oslo Accords on the White House lawn in September 1993. For a brief period, “The Handshake” (as it was then capitalized) between Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat and Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin served as the symbol of successful mediation that gave each side what it most wanted: dignity and autonomy for Palestinians, recognition and security for Israelis. Among many accolades, Arafat, Rabin, and Israel’s Foreign Minister Shimon Peres won the Nobel Peace Prize.
The accords, however, quickly disappointed both sides. Indeed, while Israelis and Palestinians agree on little else, they concur with near-unanimity on Oslo having been a disaster.
When Palestinians still lived under direct Israeli control before Oslo, acceptance of Israel had increased over time even as political violence diminished. Residents of the West Bank and Gaza could travel locally without checkpoints and access work sites within Israel. They benefited from the rule of law and an economy that more than quadrupled without depending on foreign aid. Functioning schools and hospitals emerged, as did several universities.
Yasir Arafat promised to turn Gaza into “the Singapore of the Middle East,” but his despotism and aggression against Israel instead turned his fiefdom into a nightmare, resembling Congo more than Singapore. Unwilling to give up on the permanent revolution and to become the ordinary leader of an obscure state, he exploited the Oslo Accords to inflict economic dependence, tyranny, failed institutions, corruption, Islamism, and a death cult on Palestinians.
For Israelis, Oslo led not to the hoped-for end of conflict but inflamed Palestinian ambitions to eliminate the Jewish state. As Palestinian rage spiraled upward, more Israelis were murdered in the five years post-Oslo than in the fifteen years preceding it. Rabble-rousing speech and violent actions soared – and continue unabated 23 years later. Moreover, Palestinian delegitimization efforts cost Israel internationally as the left turned against it, spawning such anti-Zionist novelties as the UN World Conference against Racism in Durban and the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanction (BDS) movement.
From Israel’s perspective, seven years of Oslo appeasement, 1993-2000, undid 45 years of successful deterrence; then, six years of unilateral withdrawals, 2000-06, further buried deterrence. The decade since 2006 has witnessed no major changes.
The Oslo exercise showed the futility of Israeli concessions to Palestinians when the latter fail to live up to their obligations. By signaling Israeli weakness, Oslo made a bad situation worse. What is conventionally called the “peace process” would more accurately be dubbed the “war process.”
The False Hope of Finessing Victory
Why did things go so wrong in what seemed so promising an agreement?
Moral responsibility for the collapse of Oslo lies solely with Yasir Arafat, Mahmoud Abbas, and the rest of the Palestinian Authority leadership. They pretended to abandon rejectionism and accept Israel’s existence but, in fact, sought Israel’s elimination in new, more sophisticated ways, replacing force with delegitimization.
This said, the Israelis made a profound mistake, having entered the Oslo process with a false premise. Yitzhak Rabin often summed up this error in the phrase “You don’t make peace with friends. You make it with very unsavory enemies.”[2] In other words, he expected war to be concluded through goodwill, conciliation, mediation, flexibility, restraint, generosity, and compromise, topped off with signatures on official documents. In this spirit, his government and all its successors agreed to a wide array of concessions, even to the point of permitting a Palestinian militia, always hoping the Palestinians would reciprocate by accepting the Jewish state.
They never did. To the contrary, Israeli compromises aggravated Palestinian hostility. Each gesture further radicalized, exhilarated, and mobilized the Palestinian body politic. Israeli efforts to “make peace” were received as signs of demoralization and weakness. “Painful concessions” reduced the Palestinian awe of Israel, made the Jewish state appear vulnerable, and inspired irredentist dreams of annihilation.
In retrospect, this does not surprise. Contrary to Rabin’s slogan, one does not “make [peace] with very unsavory enemies” but rather with former very unsavory enemies. That is, enemies that have been defeated.
This brings us to the key concept of my approach, which is victory, or imposing one’s will on the enemy, compelling him through loss to give up his war ambitions. Wars end, the historical record shows, not through goodwill but through defeat. He who does not win loses. Wars usually end when failure causes one side to despair, when that side has abandoned its war aims and accepted defeat, and when that defeat has exhausted its will to fight. Conversely, so long as both combatants still hope to achieve their war objectives, fighting either goes on or it potentially will resume.
Thinkers and warriors through the ages concur on the importance of victory as the correct goal of warfare. For example, Aristotle wrote that “victory is the end of generalship” and Dwight D. Eisenhower stated that “In war, there is no substitute for victory.” Technological advancement has not altered this enduring human truth.
Twentieth-century conflicts that ended decisively include World War II, China-India, Algeria-France, North Vietnam-United States, Great Britain-Argentina, Afghanistan-U.S.S.R., and the Cold War. Defeat can result either from a military thrashing or from an accretion of economic and political pressures; it does not require total military loss or economic destruction, much less the annihilation of a population. For example, the only defeat in U.S. history, in South Vietnam in 1975, occurred not because of economic collapse or running out of ammunition or battlefield failure (the American side was winning the ground war) but because Americans lost the will to soldier on.
Indeed, 1945 marks a dividing line. Before then, overwhelming military superiority crushed the enemy’s will to fight; since then, grand battlefield successes have rarely occurred. Battlefield superiority no longer translates as it once did into breaking the enemy’s resolve to fight. In Clausewitz’ terms, morale and will are now the center of gravity, not tanks and ships. Although the French outmanned and out-gunned their foes in Algeria, as did the Americans in Vietnam and the Soviets in Afghanistan, all these powers lost their wars. Conversely, battlefield losses suffered by the Arab states in 1948-82, by North Korea in 1950-53, and by Iraq in 1991 and 2003 did not translate into surrender and defeat.
When a losing side preserves its war goals, the resumption of warfare remains possible, and even likely. Germans retained their goal of ruling Europe after their defeat in World War I and looked to Hitler for another try, prompting the Allies to aim for total victory to ensure against the Germans trying a third time. The Korean War ended in 1953, but North and South have both held on to their war goals, meaning that the conflict might resume at any time, as could wars between India and Pakistan. The Arabs lost each round of warfare with Israel (1948-49, 1956, 1967, 1973, and 1982) but long saw their defeats as merely transient and spoiled for another try.
II. The Hard Work of Winning
How might Israel induce the Palestinians to drop rejectionism?
For starters, a colorful array of (mutually exclusive) plans to end the conflict favorably to Israel have appeared through the decades.[3] Going from softest to toughest, these include:
- Territorial retreat from the West Bank or territorial compromise within the West Bank.
- Lease the land under Israeli towns on the West Bank.
- Finding creative ways to divide the Temple Mount.
- Developing the Palestinian economy.
- Encouraging Palestinian good governance.
- Deploying international forces.
- Raising international funds (on the Marshall Plan model).
- Unilateralism (building a wall).
- Insisting that Jordan is Palestine.
- Excluding disloyal Palestinians from Israeli citizenship.
- Expelling Palestinians from lands controlled by Israel.
Trouble is, none of these plans addresses the need to break the Palestinian will to fight. They all manage the conflict without resolving it. They all seek to finesse victory with a gimmick. Just as the Oslo negotiations failed, so too will every other scheme that sidesteps the hard work of winning.
This historical pattern implies that Israel has just one option to win Palestinian acceptance: a return to its old policy of deterrence, punishing Palestinians when they aggress. Deterrence amounts to more than tough tactics, which every Israeli government pursues; it requires systemic policies that encourage Palestinians to accept Israel and discourage rejectionism. It requires a long-term strategy that promotes a change of heart.
Inducing a change of heart is not a pretty or pleasant process but is based on a policy of commensurate and graduated response. If Palestinians transgress moderately, they should pay moderately; and so on. Responses depend on specific circumstances, so the following are but general suggestions as examples for Washington to propose, going from mildest to most severe:
When Palestinian “martyrs” cause material damage, pay for repairs out of the roughly $300 million in tax obligations the government of Israel transfers to the Palestinian Authority (PA) each year. Respond to activities designed to isolate and weaken Israel internationally by limiting access to the West Bank. When a Palestinian attacker is killed, bury the body quietly and anonymously in a potter’s field. When the PA leadership incites to violence, prevent officials from returning to the PA from abroad. Respond to the murder of Israelis by expanding Jewish towns on the West Bank. When official PA guns are turned against Israelis, seize these and prohibit new ones, and if this happens repeatedly, dismantle the PA’s security infrastructure. Should violence continue, reduce and then shut off the water and electricity that Israel supplies. In the case of gunfire, mortar shelling, and rockets, occupy and control the areas from which these originate.
Of course, these steps run exactly counter to the consensus view in Israel today, which seeks above all to keep Palestinians quiescent. But this myopic viewpoint formed under unremitting pressure from the outside world, and the U.S. government especially, to accommodate the PA. The removal of such pressure will undoubtedly encourage Israelis to adopt the more assertive tactics outlined here.
True peacemaking means finding ways to coerce Palestinians to undergo a change of heart, giving up rejectionism, accepting Jews, Zionism, and Israel. When enough Palestinians abandon the dream of eliminating Israel, they will make concessions needed to end the conflict. To end the conflict, Israel must convince 50 percent and more of the Palestinians that they have lost.
The goal here is not Palestinian love of Zion, but closing down the apparatus of war: shuttering suicide factories, removing the demonization of Jews and Israel, recognizing Jewish ties to Jerusalem, and “normalizing” relations with Israelis. Palestinian acceptance of Israel will be achieved when, over a protracted period and with complete consistency, the violence ends, replaced by sharply worded démarches and letters to the editor. Symbolically, the conflict will be over when Jews living in Hebron (in the West Bank) have no more need for security than Palestinians living in Nazareth (in Israel).
To those who hold Palestinians too fanatical to be defeated, I reply: if Germans and Japanese, no less fanatical and far more powerful, could be defeated in World War II and then turned into normal citizens, why not the Palestinians now? Moreover, Muslims have repeatedly given in to infidels through history when faced with a determined superior force, from Spain to the Balkans to Lebanon.
Israel enjoys two pieces of good fortune. First, its effort does not begin at null; polls and other indicators suggest that 20 percent of Palestinians and other Arabs consistently accept the Jewish state. Second, it need deter only the Palestinians, a very weak actor, and not the whole Arab or Muslim population. However feeble in objective terms (economics, military power), Palestinians spearhead the war against Israel; so, when they abandon rejectionism, others (like Moroccans, Iranians, Malaysians, et al.) take their cues from Palestinians and, over time, will likely follow their lead.
Palestinians Benefit from Their Defeat
However much Israelis gain from ending their residual Palestinian problem, they live in a successful modern country that has absorbed the violence and delegitimization imposed on them.[4] Surveys, for example, show Israelis to be among the happiest people anywhere, and the country’s burgeoning birth rate confirms these impressions.
In contrast, Palestinians are mired in misery and constitute the most radicalized population in the world. Opinion surveys consistently show them choosing nihilism. Which other parents celebrate their children becoming suicide bombers? Which other people gives higher priority to harming its neighbor than improving its own lot? Hamas and the Palestinian Authority both run authoritarian regimes that repress their subjects and pursue destructive goals. The economy in the West Bank and Gaza depends, more than anywhere else, on free money from abroad, creating both dependence and resentment. Palestinian mores are backward and becoming more medieval all the time. A skilled and ambitious people is locked into political repression, failed institutions, and a culture celebrating delusion, extremism, and self-destruction.
An Israel victory liberates Palestinians. Defeat compels them to come to terms with their irredentist fantasies and the empty rhetoric of revolution. Defeat also frees them to improve their own lives. Unleashed from a genocidal obsession against Israel, Palestinians can become a normal people and develop its polity, economy, society, and culture. Negotiations could finally begin in earnest. In all, given their far lower starting point, Palestinians would, ironically, gain even more from their defeat than the Israelis from their victory.
That said, this change won’t be easy or quick: Palestinians will have to pass through the bitter crucible of defeat, with all its deprivation, destruction, and despair as they repudiate the filthy legacy of Amin al-Husseini and acknowledge their century-long error. But there is no shortcut.
The Need for American Support
Palestinians deploy a unique global support team consisting of the United Nations and vast numbers of journalists, activists, educators, artists, Islamists, and leftists. No obscure African liberation front they, but the world’s favored revolutionary cause. This makes Israel’s task long, difficult, and dependent on stalwart allies, foremost the U.S. government.
For Washington to be helpful means not dragging the parties back again to more negotiations but robustly supporting Israel’s path to victory. That translates into not just backing episodic Israeli shows of force but a sustained and systematic international effort of working with Israel, select Arab states, and others to convince the Palestinians of the futility of their rejectionism: Israel is there, it’s permanent, and it enjoys wide backing.
That means supporting Israel taking the tough steps outlined above, from burying murderers’ bodies anonymously to shuttering the Palestinian Authority. It means diplomatic support for Israel, such as undoing the “Palestine refugee” farce and rejecting the claim of Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital. It also entails ending benefits to the Palestinians unless they work toward the full and permanent acceptance of Israel: no diplomacy, no recognition as a state, no financial aid, and certainly no weapons, much less militia training.
Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy is premature until Palestinians accept the Jewish state. The central issues of the Oslo Accords (borders, water, armaments, sanctities, Jewish communities in the West Bank, “Palestine refugees”) cannot be usefully discussed so long as one party still rejects the other. But negotiations can re-open and take up anew the Oslo issues upon the joyful moment that Palestinians accept the Jewish state. That prospect, however, lies in the distant future. For now, Israel needs to win.
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Where are the tears for Aleppo’s Christians and Jews?
250,000 Christians lived in Aleppo before the Sunni-Shiite Islamic civil war began. Today their numbers have fallen to 40,000.
There were no worldwide protests over this ethnic cleansing of Christians from Aleppo as there are over the fall of the Sunni Islamic state whose Jihadis are euphemistically described as rebels. There were no photos of crying Christian children blanketing every media outlet. But today you can hardly open a newspaper without seeing a teary Sunni Muslim kid allegedly being evacuated from Aleppo.
Given a chance, the weeping Sunni Muslims did to their Christian neighbors in Aleppo what they had done to them back during the Aleppo Massacre a hundred years ago when they were upset that the decline of Islamic Sharia power led to Christians gaining some civil rights. The Jewish population of Aleppo, which had once made up 5% of the city, had already been wiped out in the 1947 Muslim riots.
The last Jewish family was evacuated from Aleppo to escape the Sunni Jihadis two years ago.
The destruction of the Jewish and Christian communities of Aleppo happened without a fraction of the hysterical tumult over the defeat of the Sunni Jihadis and their fellow Muslim religious dependents.
“Aleppo will join the ranks of those events in world history that define modern evil, that stain our conscience decades later,” Samantha Power declared at the United Nations.
Why doesn’t the ethnic cleansing of 210,000 Christians stain Power’s conscience? Or the church bombings by Islamists in Egypt, the stabbings of Jewish women in Israel and the Boko Haram genocide of Christians in Nigeria? True modern evil is the righteous conviction of liberals that only Muslim lives matter and that their Christian, Jewish and other non-Muslim victims somehow have it coming.
The fall of the Sunni theocracy is denounced as an outrage that will stain the conscience of the world. Journalists have taken a break from their ski vacations to lecture us on how we should have done something. That “something” being the thing they didn’t want us to do in Iraq, where Saddam Hussein had butchered hundreds of thousands, but that is somehow now a moral imperative in Syria.
Why do the Sunni Muslims of Aleppo matter while the ethnically cleansed Christians of Aleppo don’t? And why was removing Saddam Hussein, a Sunni, a crime that liberals still howl about while removing Assad, an Alawite Shiite, is a moral imperative? Because the “righteousness” axis of our foreign policy is controlled by the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood, the Sunni Saudis and the rest of their Sunni Gulfie ilk.
The Muslim Brotherhood set our agenda for the Arab Spring. It’s why our government and our human rights organization backed the popular overthrow of Mubarak, but fought the popular overthrow of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Morsi. Kenneth Roth, the head of Human Rights Watch, an organization which despite its name has solicited money from the Saudis, the sugar daddies of the Sunni Jihad, sneers at Copts for supporting the “persecution” of the Muslim Brotherhood. That’s not just Orwellian. It’s evil.
The outrage over Aleppo is a surreal partnership between Islamist butchers and their left-wing enablers.
“Are you truly incapable of shame?” Samantha Power demanded of Syria, Russia and Iran at the UN.
It goes without saying that three brutal dictatorships whose crimes run the gamut from raping teenage girls so that they won’t die as virgins and be allowed into Islamic paradise to radioactive poisonings of its political opponents have nothing that resembles shame or conscience.
But where is Samantha Power’s shame? The Iranian advance in Aleppo is funded by illegal cash shipments that Obama put on unmarked cargo planes and delivered to Iran’s Shiite Jihadists. Iran’s military budget increased 39% thanks to Obama’s cargo pallets full of Swiss Francs and Euros.
The barrel bombs that Power so angrily condemns were bought and paid for by her own boss. They were enabled by every American liberal who switched from defending the proposed Iranian nuclear genocide of millions of Jews to bewailing the Iranian attack on the Muslim Brotherhood in Aleppo.
Where is their shame? Is the American leftist even capable of shame anymore?
Obama’s inaction in Syria wasn’t caused by any philosophical struggle over the limits of intervention, as his media lackeys would have us to believe. The truth is uglier, simpler and more outrageous.
The Nobel Peace Prize winner couldn’t make up his mind if he wanted to back the Sunni or Shiite Islamists. Russia, which went all in on the Shiites, won. Obama tried to play both Islamist sides, funneling arms to the Sunni Jihadists in Syria and cash pallets to the Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. He backed the Shiite regime in Baghdad over the Sunnis in Iraq. But he aided the Sunni Jihadis in Syria over the Shiite government in Damascus. Yet he was afraid to go all in for fear of trashing the Iran nuke sellout that even he admits will create a Shiite bomb in a little over a decade.
All the noise over Aleppo doesn’t testify to an atrocity, but to the enormous power of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Saudi lobby to control not only our politicians, but our national narratives.
There is no doubt that the Shiite Jihadist gangs will extract their blood price from Sunnis in Aleppo, that money and gems will disappear, women will be raped and bodies will wind up in mass graves. But the death toll will fall far short of the hysterical rhetoric about Rwanda. And what will happen to Sunnis in Aleppo is the same thing that happened to Shiites when Sunni Jihadists seized a town or village.
There are no good guys in an Islamic civil war. Both sides operate by Mohammed’s ancient Islamic rules that treat the property and women of conquered populations as the rightful loot of the attackers. The atrocities of Shiites and Sunnis, Iranians and Alawites, ISIS, Al-Nusra and the countless Sunni bands are not aberrations from civilized norms, they are the entire horrid purpose of this Islamic conflict.
There are no innocent victims in an Islamic civil war because neither side believes in anything except demonstrating the Allahu Akbaring supremacy of their religious doctrine by subjugating the other.
Beheading captives, raping their wives and looting their belongings was how Islamic Jihadis, dating back to Mohammed, knew that Allah was on their side and favored their murderous cause.
The Jewish population of the Middle East now exists almost entirely in Israel, protected by guns wielded, as often as not, by the descendants of Jewish refugees from Islamic oppression in Syria, Egypt, Iraq and Iran. The Christian population, lacking an independent state of its own, continues to dwindle, dependent on the shaky goodwill of dictators like Mubarak or Assad who find them temporarily useful.
There is no future for non-Muslims in the Muslim world. Christians and Jews in the Middle East first achieved civil rights when European powers gained sway over the region. As Muslim migrants swarm into Europe, Jews and Christians now face Muslim persecution in France, Sweden and Germany.
But the media is far less interested in the tears on the face of 8-year-old Miriam Monsonego in Toulouse when a Muslim terrorist grabbed her by the hair, put a gun to her head in the schoolyard where she had been playing moments ago and pulled the trigger. The gun jammed. He switched guns and shot her. Then, as she lay bleeding, he lifted up her little head and shot the dying Jewish girl two more times.
Muslims in France consider the Muslim terrorist who did this a hero. A child was even named after him.
The Sunni Muslim Jihadis fleeing Aleppo like rats are the same breed of Allah’s killers as the murderer of a little girl in Toulouse, as the hijackers of September 11, as the San Bernardino shooters, the Boston Marathon bombers, the Benghazi militias, the rapists of Yazidi girls and the bombers of Coptic churches.
They are human predators that have nothing that resembles a conscience as we understand it. Their religious doctrine has taught them that preying on non-Muslims and the wrong kind of Muslims is their duty. They believe that their rapes and murders are proof that they love Allah and Allah loves them.
It is as impossible for us to coexist with Islamic supremacists as it was for the Christians and Jews of Aleppo. You can share a room with a tiger, but eventually the tiger will try to eat you.
Aleppo is a tragedy, but not because of the hypocritical theater of lies that the media has put on for us. The tragedy of Aleppo isn’t that of the Sunni Jihadis who failed to conquer the city and complete their ethnic cleansing of the last Christians living there, but of the endless war of Islam against non-Muslims.
And of the collaboration of those who call themselves liberals in that war against human civilization.
Aleppo was once a great center of civilization. Under Islam, it became a sad remnant of its former past. Whoever wins in Aleppo, it is a victory for Islamist triumphalism and a defeat for human civilization.
The bigger question is not who wins in Aleppo, but who will win in Paris, Brussels and Rome.
Originally published on FrontPageMag.
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