Monday, May 25, 2009

from NY to Israel Sultan Reveals The Stories Behind the News











If It Wasn't for Israel...


Posted: 24 May 2009 11:21 PM PDT


When early in the 20th century Germany faced a variety of complex
economic, military and political problems, the Nazi propaganda organ,
"Der Sturmer" boiled them down to a simple message, "Die Juden
sind unser Ungluck". In a flash, Germany's defeat in WW1, the worldwide
economic depression and its political turmoil could all be blamed on the
Jews. And of course if the Jews were gone, everything would be alright in
Germany again.




That same message has dominated the diplomatic and political rhetoric
on the Middle East, with American and European diplomats, pundits and
politicians claiming that the problems in the Middle East would be healed
if only it wasn't for Israel. This latest echo of, "Die Juden sind unser Ungluck"
in regard to the Middle East blames the existence of Israel for the general
instability, violence and terrorism in the Middle East.

An accompanying illustration naturally features a Der Sturmer caricature
of a Jewish "lobbyist" controlling American foreign policy.

If you were to believe this Sturmeresque critique of what's wrong in the
Middle East, if we simply removed the tiny state of Israel, 1/80th the size
of Iran. Islamic terrorism would go the way of the Dodo, women and religious
minorities would have rights and Europe, America and the Muslim world
would be able to join hands and sing Kumbaya.

If only it wasn't for Israel.

Never mind that much of the actual instability comes from the fact that the
map of the Middle East was a clumsy colonial hodgepodge of imaginary states
with ancient names, ruled by bandits and warlords, styling themselves Kings
and Emirs. Virtually every ruling house in the Middle East that was backed
by the England, France or the US... is despised by their own populations.

The Egyptian and Iraqi monarchs were deposed. The regime of the Shah
was overthrown. Their replacements, Nasser and Saddam, were Soviet
allied and anti-American thugs and dictators. This had nothing to do with
Israel, and everything to do with the fact that the same Western foreign
ministries now blasting Israel, tried to rule the Middle East through weak
and unpopular governments. Something the USSR was happy enough to
take advantage of.

It was a problem that recurred in Asia with spectacularly deadly results
and two devastating wars involving the United States. All without Israel
ever being in the area. Indeed without Israel ever being located there,
the same pattern of Marxist dictatorships and Muslim terrorists have
rampaged through the region.

This did not prevent Gandhi from regurgitating his own version of "Die
Juden sind unser Ungluck", arguing that India would be at peace, if the
Muslims were just allowed to have Jerusalem. Yet despite the Jordanian
seizure of East Jerusalem, Partition went ahead anyway, not to mention
the bloodbaths in Bangladesh, Kashmir and East Timor. Or the current
nuclear standoff between Pakistan and India. Thus far no one has tried to
claim that the problem could be resolved by Israel giving up its capital.




But the spectacular dishonesty of insisting that Israel is the cause of the
Middle East's instability goes on. Somehow Shia and Sunni would have
stopped fighting each other, Syria would stop dreaming of conquering
Lebanon for good, Saddam would have never tried for Kuwait, and the
Saudis wouldn't be pouring all their resources into promoting Islamism
abroad-- if only it wasn't for Israel.

Yet if anything Israel has served as a stabilizing factor, creating buffer
zones between many of the Arab regimes that would otherwise be doing
their best to swallow each other. Israel was the only reason Syria hadn't
taken Lebanon and Jordan. Instead Arab nations have been forced to
stage their conquests in a direction away from Israel, witness Egypt
going West to Yemen, or Syria nibbling away at Lebanon, without being
able to take the whole thing in one bite.

The squabbling Arab League has only one common interest, and that is
Israel. The barest fragments of Arab unity are directed around Israel.
It has actually been pressure to make peace with Israel that has been
far more destabilizing, than the presence of Israel itself.

Too much of the world has swallowed the Arab argument that Israel
is all that stands in the way regional stability, the same argument
that Hitler made over Czechoslovakia. The Peace Process has been an
attempt to stabilize the region by creating a terrorist state run first by
Arafat, and now by his successors and Hamas. This "Experiment in
Terror" has not brought stability, on the contrary it has increased
terrorism and spread instability... something for which Israel is
paradoxically being blamed.

But that is the whole point of "Die Juden sind unser Ungluck", to distill
a complex set of problems, into a single bigoted tautology. Whether in
Germany or the Middle East, it is easier to blame the Jews, than to
address the real problems. Nazism and Islamism were both violent
reactionary responses to real social problems. The Muslim world, like
post-WW1 Germany, has experienced humiliating defeats
in war and responded with irrational violence and hate, backed
by a paranoid mythology of persecution. And those who cannot learn from
their mistakes find it much easier to brandish a Koran or Mein Kampf,
and cry for the death of the infidels.


And as in the Pre-WW2 period, too many in the West have bought into the
victimology of the sociopathic mass murderers and the idea that conceding a
country or two to them, might buy us "peace in our time".

Now some 70 years after Munich, Barack Hussein Obama is pressuring Israel
to let itself be carved up in order to appease Islamic terrorists, claiming that
the solution to the Middle East's problems lie through Israel. 130 years after
a liberal politician coined the phrase, "Die Juden sind unser Ungluck",
Western liberals are back to reducing a complex series of regional
problems to the "Jewish Question".















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