Sheikh Ahmed Yassin was a perfect symbol of Islam: blind, deaf, unable to experience life the way normal people do, and full of murderous hatred towards them. Now, the analogy is broken, because the sheikh is dead while Islam is very much alive, and so is Hamas.
    A few short hours after the demise of Sheikh Yassin, Dr. Rantisi firmly stepped in to fill the sudden vacancy. The same would have happened if, instead of an IAF missile, the bloody sheikh's death had come from a really bad case of flu, an accidental fall from a window, an alien abduction, or any other theoretically possible cause. Hamas continues functioning. In his inaugural interview, Dr. Rantisi assured the New York Times reporter that Hamas could not be dismantled.
    This evokes an obvious question: how exactly does the killing of Sheikh Yassin constitute a victory for Israel?
    Oh, it could have very well become the beginning of a victory, had it been the first step in the complete, systematic eradication — not dismantling — of Arab terrorist forces in Gaza, Judea, and Samaria. But immediately after the elimination of the evil sheikh, Israel resumed sitting on its hands. Apparently, Prime Minister Sharon had not planned any real action. What did he plan then?
    When Israel withdrew from Lebanon, Arabs quite correctly perceived the step as their victory. The killing of Sheikh Yassin was an attempt to prevent them from coming to the same conclusion when Israel leaves Gaza. Obviously, this attempt failed.
    Notwithstanding propaganda lies about "Palestinian" territories, Gaza, Judea, and Samaria are integral parts of Israel. Jews know it, Arabs know it, and everyone who ever read an honest history book about the region knows it, as well. Quitting Gaza will be an act of surrender of Israeli territory to the enemy. No matter how the government of Israel tries to sell it to the public at home and abroad, no mater how loudly it slams the door on exit, it will be a victory for the Arabs and a defeat for Israel.
    Of course, had Israel decided to kill every terrorist in Gaza before the withdrawal, then, after the withdrawal, Gaza would have remained empty, because, just like Judea and Samaria, its population today consists of exactly two categories of people: Jews and terrorists. Sharon is removing the Jews, leaving terrorists to live on Israeli land. Compared to Oslo, this is an important step forward: Oslo, at least in theory, was supposed to be land for peace; Sharon is giving away land for nothing.
    Every advocate of peace with "Palestinians" assumes that at least some of them oppose terrorism and would want to live in peace with Israel under, at least, some circumstances. Facts do not support that theory. For terrorists to operate with impunity from small towns or overcrowded refugee camps where everyone knows what's cooking in everyone else's kitchen, they must enjoy the unanimous support of the population. And they do. Whenever they doubt the sincerity of someone's support, they murder him on the spot as a "collaborator". For some inexplicable reason, these actions remain largely ignored by human rights defenders all over the world; just as the ongoing mass murder of Israeli citizens fails to ignite their righteous anger. Apparently, the world believes that Arabs have a right to kill, while Jews have a duty to be killed.
    In recent weeks, the Israeli security forces caught several Arab children carrying explosives. Amnesty International condemned the use of children commissioned for terrorist acts, but failed to condemn the murder of children in the very same acts. That's understandable: the victims are Jews, while the murderers are Arabs. Since Arabs, themselves, did not rise up in anger, the incident has proven once again, this time more conclusively than ever, that they hate Jews more than they love their own children.
    The elimination of the evil sheikh has once again demonstrated that the enemy our civilization is facing, like the Hydra of myth, cannot be decapitated. George W. Bush has had a very similar experience in Iraq, where the capture of Saddam Hussein has failed to make a dent in the resistance to the American-led occupation. In light of these experiences, common sense demands that we question the wisdom of spending billions of dollars and risking the lives of our soldiers trying to capture Osama bin Laden; after all, WWII was won even though Hitler was never captured. But common sense seems to be a rare commodity nowadays among both the powers that be and the public, and the definition of victory in the American War on Terror remains as elusive as the definition of terrorism itself. The Madrid bombing convincingly showed that the two years of war have not made our world any less vulnerable to terrorism, but rather more psychologically susceptible to it.
    Are we doing something wrong? Is there a flaw in our approach to the problem? Judging from the results or, rather, lack thereof, these questions must be deemed purely rhetorical. They are rhetorical not just because the answers to them must be obvious to everyone. Unfortunately, those obvious answers contradict commonly shared misconceptions, and most people are simply not willing to adjust their beliefs in order to accommodate reality. Instead, most people prefer to adjust reality to accommodate their beliefs, which is one of the main reasons why our reality is in such disarray.
    What misconceptions am I talking about? Here is one: Islam is just another religion, and deep down Muslims are not that different from us. Obviously, this is a politically correct point of view, but how does it relate to facts? Before you answer, please take a look at recent pictures from Falluja, Iraq, where an Iraqi mob murdered four American civilians and turned the mutilation of their bodies into a mass celebration. This was nothing unusual in the Muslims world. The event bears a striking resemblance to the behavior of Muslims crowds in Mogadishu ("Black Hawk Down") and Ramallah, where in October, 2000, two Israeli reservists were literally torn apart by an Arab mob. If you sincerely believe that deep down you are not so different from those people, maybe you belong with them, rather than in a civilized society; maybe you should convert to Islam and begin preparing your children for the glories of martyrdom.
    Contrary to what multiculturalists want us to believe, there are objective criteria allowing us to assess a foreign, as well as our own, culture without succumbing to ethnocentrism. Here are a few simple tests:
 
  • How far is a given society willing to bend the truth in promoting its concepts of right and wrong?
  • What does it do with the bodies of fallen enemies?
  • How socially acceptable in that society is the hatred of Jews?
 
Try applying these criteria to the Muslim culture, and you will come to an inescapable conclusion: whether deep down or on the surface, they are fundamentally different from us. Different to the point of full incompatibility, and unless we honestly admit it and begin acting accordingly, we are bound to lose this jihad.
    Unfortunately, one dead sheikh doesn't really make a difference, especially one who never was really alive in the first place.

1/4/04   http://www.middleeastfacts.com/

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