Because They Hate: A Survivor of Islamic Terror Warns America (31 page)

Furthermore, in the thirty centuries preceding the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, there have been only two periods when there was an independent, internationally recognized state in the area that now comprises Israel. Both of them were Jewish states.
²¹
Even when this land was part of the Arab empire (AD 638 through AD 1099), there was never an independent Arab state in “Palestine,” by that name or any other.
²²
No wonder the Arabs are donating millions of dollars to U.S. colleges for Middle Eastern schools of study. They have a lot of hard historical evidence to rewrite in the young minds of students.

Finally, the Jewish people have a distinct national identity. Religion is only one of the unique characteristics that define this national identity. (A large majority of Israeli Jews, 70-80 percent, do not practice the Jewish religion as a belief but more as tradition, although they are still Jewish.) In addition to a unique religion, the Jewish people have a separate and distinct language, culture, and customs, with a documented history of development over the past three thousand years. The Jewish people have created a vast body of art and literature, both secular and religious, which reflects the connection of the Jewish people to the land of Israel. The Dead Sea Scrolls, written when the descendants of the Maccabees ruled an independent Judea, demonstrate that the Jewish people, both in the Holy Land and in exile all over the world, have been reading and writing secular and sectarian literature in the same distinct language for over two thousand years. In contrast, the Arabic language and culture and the Muslim religion of the Palestinians are essentially indistinguishable from those of the wider Arab world. Prior to the mid 1800s there is no trace
whatever
of uniquely “Palestinian” art, literature, music, or any other manifestation of a distinct culture. If you find this hard to believe try to think of one “Palestinian” book, or author, or artist, from the year 1300 through the year 1800. That’s a period of five hundred years. There must be one book written by a “Palestinian” Arab author. There must be one painting by a “Palestinian” Arab artist.

Guess what?
There are none.
If you still don’t believe it, ask a Palestinian nationalist or a Columbia University professor of Middle Eastern history to name one. The most honest response you will get is silence. The most likely response you will get is
taqiyya.

In terms of historical presence and sovereignty in the land of Israel, and distinct characteristics of national identity, the Jewish claim of national rights in the land of Israel is at the minimum equal to the Palestinian claim. Any objective observer would conclude from the facts that the claim of the Jewish people to national identity and sovereignty in the land of Israel is much stronger than that of the Palestinians in every respect. However, Israel does not deny Palestinian national rights. On the contrary, the State of Israel, and the Zionist movement that preceded it, have accepted in good faith or initiated every proposal for a genuine “two-state solution” that has ever been put forward. In contrast, the Arab world, Palestinian nationalists, and radical Islamists have consistently denied Israel’s right to exist, and they have responded to every settlement proposal with extreme violence. The missed opportunities for peace include the 1937 Peel Commission proposal,
²³
the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan,
²⁴
UN Security Council Resolution 242 in 1967,
²⁵
and the proposals made by Israel at Camp David in 2000.

Even after the death of Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian nationalist movement and the wider Arab Muslim world
still
do not accept Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. This has not changed with the ascension of Mahmoud Abbas to president of the Palestinian Authority, despite the mantle of “moderate” conferred upon him.

Abbas was Arafat’s devoted acolyte and loyal henchman for four decades. Abbas is sometimes referred to as “Doctor,” perhaps to conjure up the image of a kindly family physician making a house call. In fact, he received a Ph.D. from Moscow’s Oriental University in the early 1980s. The title of his doctoral thesis is typical of Arab reasoning; “The Secret Relationship Between Zionism and Nazism.” In addition to parroting conventional Holocaust-denial formulations (there were no gas chambers, less than a million Jews were killed, and so forth), Abbas’s tract contained one original and imaginative assertion: that Zionists provoked the Nazis into perpetrating the Holocaust in order to spur Jewish immigration to what was then called Palestine. Doctoral candidate Abbas wrote, “The Zionist movement led a broad campaign of incitement against the Jews living under Nazi rule, in order to arouse the government’s hatred of them, to fuel vengeance against them, and to expand the mass extermination.” I wonder where he stands on who brought down the World Trade Center. Abbas’s doctoral dissertation also asserts that Hitler did not decide to exterminate European Jewry until he was provoked by David Ben-Gurion’s declaration of war on the Nazis in 1942. “Doctor” Abbas has never retracted the assertions upon which his doctoral thesis is based (see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/israeli-palestinian_history_denial
).

As prime minister of the PA in 2003, Abbas was touted as “independent” and “moderate” because he frequently clashed with Arafat and eventually resigned in frustration. However, the clashes and resignation occurred because Arafat refused to relinquish any real power to Abbas, not because of any strategic difference between the two. Abbas began calling for a halt to terrorist bombings against Israeli civilians not because the intentional targeting and murdering of civilians is wrong, but because it had been tactically ineffective and had a negative public relations impact on the Palestinian cause. As both a candidate for president of the PA and as its president, Abbas has
never
questioned the morality of terrorist bombings and murders. His
sole
criticism (and the occasional criticism of his PA cronies) has been limited to asserting that suicide bombings, terrorist shootings, and rocket and mortar attacks against Israeli civilians “harmed Palestinian national interests."
²⁶
This is tantamount to intentionally running your car into a crosswalk full of schoolchildren, and then saying it was a bad thing to do because it dents your fender.

As one who speaks both English and Arabic, I have seen how the Arabs are the best at taking advantage of the language barrier between them and the West. While they mechanically issue tepid, self-pitying “condemnations” to Western news agencies
in English,
²⁷
the PA-controlled media, mosques, and schools continue to glorify the terrorist murderers in Arabic, and incite others to commit terrorist acts. Neighborhoods, streets, schools, and even a children’s soccer tournament are named after
shahids,
"martyrs.” Financial incentives are still paid to the families of terrorist murderers.
²⁸
Further, Abbas has repeatedly stated that he will
not
disarm and dismantle the terrorist organizations, as required by step one of the “road map.” Instead, he has incorporated Hamas and Islamic Jihad into the Palestinian security services, putting their gunmen and bombers on the Palestinian Authority payroll
²⁹
In explaining to the terrorist organizations that his opposition to violence was only tactical, he stated that negotiation with Israel is “a phase,"
³⁰
and that, therefore, “[t]his is not the time” to launch terrorist attacks into Israel.
³¹
So, are we to wait for a better time, Commander Abbas?

Most important, although Abbas purports to accept the “two-state solution"—two independent and democratic states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side—such acceptance is specifically conditioned on an unlimited “right of return” for Palestinian “refugees.” Abbas has insisted many times, as prime minister of the PA and as its president, that the Palestinian “right of return” is nonnegotiable. According to this “right of return,” some 5 million Palestinian refugees would have the right to live within Israels pre-1967 borders, relegating Israeli Jews to minority status in their own country almost overnight. This is the strategy by which Abbas and the “moderate” Palestinians seek to destroy Israel by demographic rather than military means. This “moderate” strategy has very little support in the Palestinian “street.” In a June 2003 Pew Research poll, “80 percent of Palestinians said their 'rights and needs' cannot be met as long as Israel exists."
³²
The vast majority of Palestinians don’t even pretend to accept Israel’s right to exist.

If the Arab Muslim world had chosen to accept Israel’s right to exist, in 1947, or 1967, or 1993, or 2000, or at any time in the past half century, by now Israel would have helped them make their deserts bloom. Instead, the Arab world has chosen to fertilize the land with the blood of Israeli children. Could anything be more barbaric and depraved? Yes. In response to Ehud Barak’s offer at Camp David in July 2000, the Palestinians chose to sacrifice the blood of their own children to satisfy their hatred of Israel. The more Israel has tried to defend itself, the further into the forefront the Palestinians have pushed their children. First the Palestinians gave their children stones to throw. Now they wrap their children in dynamite and nails and send them to blow themselves up in Israeli restaurants and religious observances.
³³
Now Palestinians rejoice at the death of not only Israeli children, but their own.

In an attempt to mitigate or explain away this barbaric depravity, the Palestinian nationalist movement and its apologists cite the “desperation” that Palestinians experience because of the Israeli “occupation” of the West Bank and Gaza. However, Israel’s presence in the West Bank and Gaza began in June 1967. The first major terror bombing committed by Arabs against the Jewish state occurred more than nineteen years
before
the Israeli presence in the West Bank and Gaza. In fact, it occurred ten weeks before Israel became an independent state. On Sunday morning, February 22,1948,
in anticipation of
Israel’s independence, a triple truck bomb was detonated by Arab terrorists on Ben Yehuda Street in what was then the Jewish section of Jerusalem. Fifty-four people were killed and hundreds were wounded.
³⁴
Thus, it is obvious that Arab terrorism is caused not by the “desperation” of “occupation,” but by the
very thought
of a Jewish state.2
³⁵

Further, and even more significantly, throughout history there have been populations that have lived in desperation, and none of them have resorted to the intentional targeting and murder of children as an officially practiced and widely praised mode of achieving political ends. When extremist elements of otherwise legitimate liberation movements such as the Republican Sinn Fein have committed such atrocities, their actions have been unconditionally condemned by the civilized world, and their political objectives have been discredited by their vile crimes. This is not so with the Palestinians. Once upon a time there was a special place in the lowest depths of hell for anyone who would intentionally murder a child. Now that place is in the pantheon of Palestinian heroes. Now that behavior is legitimized as “armed struggle” against Israeli “occupation” by, among others, the United Nations General Assembly, the UN Human Rights Commission, and the European Union.

Since the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the rise of Hamas in 1987, the campaign to destroy Israel has taken on an ugly, fanatic religious tone. Holy obligation reinforces (and is replacing) Palestinian nationalism as the motivation for committing terrorist murder. As we have seen the secular, “moderate” factions of the Palestinian nationalist movement (such as Abbas’s Fatah Party) will shrink into insignificance, and is replaced by terrorist Islamic factions such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Hamas receives financial and material support from the same sources as al Qaeda, and from al Qaeda directly. Islamic Jihad receives financial and material support from Iran, directly and through Hezbollah. These are the same international criminal entities that wage religion-based terror war against the United States. They do it for the same reason and by the same means: to make Islam supreme in the world, by the sword or the suicide bomb.

Hamas' sweeping victory in the Palestinian election was a loud declaration by the Palestinian people to elect a radical Islamic movement dedicated to wiping Israel off the map.

The august international organizations charged with preserving peace and human dignity in the world—the UN, the EU, among others—would have preferred that terrorist atrocities be limited to Israel. However, once the intentional mass murder of innocent civilians was legitimized against Israel, it was legitimized
everywhere,
constrained by nothing more than the strongly held beliefs of those who would become the mass murderers. Because the Palestinians were encouraged by most of the world to believe that the murder of innocent Israeli civilians is a legitimate tactic to advance the Palestinian nationalist cause, the Islamists believe that they may commit mass murder anywhere in the world to advance their holy cause. As a result, we suffer from a plague of Islamic terrorism, from Moscow to Madrid, from Bali to Beslan, from Nairobi to New York, authored and perfected by the Palestinians. Israel and the United States are not separate targets of Islamic terrorism. The whole world is its target. Israel and the United States share the bull’s-eye.

From birth, people are born with physical differences and into different political, social, religious, and economic situations. Some have higher IQs than others. Some have greater physical challenges than others. Some are born deaf, blind, crippled, or mentally challenged. Some are blessed with health throughout their lives, and some suffer from aches and pains and develop diseases at a young age. Some live to be a hundred and some die of a heart attack at forty-five. Some of the situations we face are drawbacks which are permanent and impossible to change or overcome. Others require a frank recognition of the problem, finding a solution, then implementing the solution and moving on. What sets individuals, nations, and cultures apart is how they overcome their physical or social and cultural challenges and develop into productive people making the world a safer, happier, and better place to live.