Am I correct in thinking that “Ummah” is Arabic for the word “nation?”

Which means that if a Muslim says their only loyalty is to the Ummah then we should assume that if they live in a Western country then they intend to show no loyalty to that country?
It also means that they are failing to uphold the oath of loyalty, they or their elder relations took when emigrating to that Western country.
Which means they are in breach of contract.

Posted by: Odyessus at February 16, 2008 12:58 PM

Dear Hugh,
basically who the hell cares what the Muslims of that area of the Middle East want to call themselves, they can call themselves the Borg for all I care. What is so obvious is that they want to destroy Israel, and when they feel themselves strong enough they will have a go. This is not rocket science. I was listening to some idiot on the television a few weeks ago saying how the peace treaty with Egypt had kept the peace. The Israelis have not had a peace treaty with Syria and they have also been at peace. The only reason there is peace there at the moment is that the Israelis have a bigger stick in the IDF and they don't want to get a cracked skull. These talking heads are a danger to us all.

When they do feel strong enough they will try it on, most likely when they have got a dirty bomb whether it delivers radioactivity chemicals or germ. It doesn't make any difference really what is almost certain is that they are going to do it in the not too distant future. The result will be catastrophic to us all. When a wounded Israel retaliates with the Samson option. The Middle East will not only be a dust bowl but a radioactive one. The worlds global economy will go into permanent decline and the western states will finally stir themselves from there stupor and use there armies to put down the rioting muslim majorities because the rioting will be threatening the break up of the states themselves. Draconian laws will be implemented and the world will enter a new Dark age.

Meanwhile somewhere in the Middle East a group of people who have lost all contact with reality will be praying before a well hoping for someone to appear and lead them to the promised land. Little realizing that being far more intelligent than themselves is most likely eating iodine pills and reading old American manuals from the 50s on how to survive a nuclear attack. What a wonderful world we live in.

Posted by: Holger Dansker at February 16, 2008 3:01 PM

Hugh,

It's quite interesting that you compared Israel's fight to the Cold War. In the Cold War, the objective was to hold our own, and besides that to avoid a mutually destructive war with the opposition. But in the past 30 years, Israel has been trying to expand its territory, and to eliminate the enemy entirely.

Perhaps it would be wise to change our strategy. Instead of repeatedly trying (and failing) to eliminate our terrorist foes "once and for all", Israelis might be more prudent to simply prevent further attacks.

I think you're on to something...

Shlomo

Posted by: Shlomo_Michael at February 16, 2008 8:38 PM

"in the past 30 years, Israel has been trying to expand its territory, and to eliminate the enemy entirely."
-- from a posting by Muslim apologist "Shlomo Michael"

If during the past 30 years Israel "has been trying to expand its territory," then surrendering the entire Sinai, to Egypt, for worthless promises -- a vast and useful buffer area, making up more than 90% of the territory Israel won in the Six-Day War, a war of self-defense imposed on it by Gamal Abdel Nasser, and then removing Jewish villagers from their villages in Gaza, until not a single Jew was left in territory that had been originally been assignged to the Leage of Nations' Mandate for Palestine (set up for the express, and sole, purposes of creating the Jewish National Home), is not exactly the way to go about it.

And if during those same 30 years Israel, as you claim, has been "trying to eliminate the enemy entirely" then the negotiations and Oslo Accords it signed, and the way in which successive Israeli governments have not only not protested against, but actively encouraged use of the idiotic and loaded phrase "Palestinian people," and Israeli ministers travelled the globe (see Shimon Peres) raising funds for those same "Palestinians," and supplying those same "Palestinians" with medical supplies, often free medical care (just look at the charity wards of Israeli hospitals, especially in Jerusalem), and all kinds of other benefits does not, in my book, constitute "trying to eliminate the enemy entirely."

No, I'm afraid that if "Israel has been trying to expand its territory, and to eliminate the enemy entirely" then it has not been trying very hard.

Posted by: Hugh at February 16, 2008 9:41 PM

I agree with your first paragraph. But none of that happened in the past thirty years. After those peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan, the dynamics changed a bit. Israel occupied Lebanon for twenty years, built up settlements in the Gaza Strip and West Bank (which continued even during the Oslo period, and still continue today). They also tried to finish off Hamas and Hezbullah in summer 2006.

Regarding your views on the Hitkansut from Gaza...that's pretty unique logic. So if I take over your house for two weeks, and then decide for the third week that I'll only stand outside your door and ration your groceries, would you take that as a sign of charity on my part? The fact is that today, Israel is exercising collective punishment on the Gaza Strip. You can bet your bottom dollar that this has only increased terrorism. Indeed, the current Israeli strategy is antithetical to the U.S. Cold War strategy you just complimented.

During the Cold War, president after president repeated that we were not against the Soviet people, but only against the Communist elite. For at least the past 30 years, Israel seems to have had a different viewpoint. The result? As Israeli tanks were rumbling through Beirut and the IDF was diverting the Litani River, America was selling grain to its Soviet archenemy. (Incidentally, the end result of the IDF's "tough" antiterror policies was Hezbullah control in South Lebanon...the end result of the U.S.'s "softness" against Communism was...)

You seem to think my viewpoints make me a Muslim apologist, in that I actually want to work with the population instead of blowing it up. Do you also think General Petraeus is a Muslim apologist? He has decided that his fight is ONLY against a certain group of terrorists, not against the Iraqi population as a whole. The result is that his "Sunni Awakening" strategy has been a hammer blow against Al Queda in Mesopotamia, as the Sunni population has rallied against terrorism.

On July 25 1782, the Prussian Duke of Brunswick issued a manifesto, saying that Parisian civilians would be attacked if King Louis was harmed. On August 10 1782, a Parisian mob stormed his jail cell. This is human nature. When you declare war on an entire population for the actions of political or military elites, the population will be radicalized in favor of those elites. George F Kennan understood this. General Petraeus understands this. Why can't you?

Posted by: Shlomo_Michael at February 17, 2008 12:11 AM

"shlomo michael" is either a liar or an ignoramus. His account of Israeli relations with Gaza is false in any case. If we go back in history, we see that all Arabic-speaking countries outside of Arabia were arabized by conquest, by conquests that submerged pre-existing cultures, languages, religions, nations. So "shlomo michael's" cute little metaphor about "if I take your house for two weeks" is false. After WW2, by the way, Germany, as the aggressor nation, gave up huge territories to Poland and the USSR. The Arabs were aggressors in several wars against Israel.The Arabs in Gaza are occupying land --a small area, to be sure-- that rightly belongs to Israel.

Hugh, I am much intrigued by your quote from Mahmud al-Zahar in which he says that the "palestinian Arabs" are really Arabs first, part of the great Arab nation. Can you provide a link or reference to that statement?? I would like to refer to the statement myself in my own writings.

Posted by: Eliyahu at February 17, 2008 3:11 AM

I'm afraid, Mr. Fitzgerald, that apparantly seeking to find everything Islamic with regard to the Arab/Israeli conflict doesn't appear to do full justice to the basic facts of the situation, nor to the ethical and moral merits that are entangled in it.

For starters, not just Muslims, but Christians were mistreated, uprooted and dispossessed by Zionist machinations that came to full fruition as armed force against innocent people in 1947-48. Among these were Rev. Fr. Elias Chacour, a Byzantine Melkite Catholic clergy, who detailed in 'Blood Brothers' how Zionist Jewish forces threw out the Christian inhabitants of his hometown, Bilam, solely because they weren't Jewish, at the threat of obstinate inhabitants getting their heads blown off. This wasn't just an isolated case either, but he details how it happened all over Gallilee.

Is this how Christians are to be treated? Or is it alright to do so when they happen to be Arabs?

If we look at Palestinian fighting prior to the advent of Hamas, all information would appear to indicate that the movement was largely secular and included its share of Christian leaders and foot soldiers, such as George Habash who headed the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine divison of the PLO, as well as Naif Hawatmeh, who founded and originally headed up the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine division of the PLO.

While I'm no expert on Al Qaida, I'm willing to bet they have no prominent Christian lieutenants in their organization.

Any, objective, cursory review of the PLO in its heyday of the 1960s and 1970s would clearly indicate their primary affinity was with secular leftist extremists, such as the IRA, Red Brigades, Japanese Red Army, and Baader Meinhoff Gang, not with Islamic extremist organizations.

Lastly, whatever 'people' the Palestinians are and belong to is incredibly irrelevant to the moral issues at hand. All individual human beings enjoy the same rights as all others, regardless of what groups one cares to put them in. The Arabs in Palestine, however you wish to categorize them, enjoyed those rights as well, including not being subject to the subjective nationalist whims of a foreign, European, Zionist minority dictating what would happen to their territory without the collective consent of all who resided in that territory.

Posted by: fairuzfan at February 17, 2008 10:39 AM

Ladies and gentlemen

in the postings of 'shlomo' (probably 'suleiman') and 'fairuzfan' (possibly Persian Muslim 'firuz') above, we have two perfect examples of classic Arab Muslim anti-Israel, anti-Jewish propaganda as peddled to gullible Western Useful Idiots over the past four decades or so.

Every statement they make is either false, or a subtle distortion of the truth that is almost worse than a flat falsehood.

I will focus, however, on just one, from 'fairuz', who claims:

"If we look at Palestinian fighting prior to the advent of Hamas, all information would appear to indicate that the movement was largely secular and included its share of Christian leaders and foot soldiers, such as George Habash who headed the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine divison of the PLO, as well as Naif Hawatmeh, who founded and originally headed up the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine division of the PLO."

First: George Habash may have been baptised as an infant but I have gained the strong impression that the Christian faith had little or nothing to do with any of his actions throughout the whole of his adult life. The PFLP was not 'christian' in any recognisable sense of the word, but 'communist'.

Second: 'largely secular'?? The PLO? It may have chosen to appear so, to its non-Muslim allies, dupes, and sources of money and weapons, whether Western or Soviet. But at its core its motives and its aims were neither nationalistic nor socialistic.

Jacques Ellul, the French sociologist, who was far from ignorant about Islam, had this to say, in the mid-1980s, concerning the nature of any future 'palestinian' polity:
“The Palestinian republic will be, above all, a warrior republic. It will increase the dangers of war in the whole region, contrary to what people keep on repeating. I know indeed that those who think about these dangers of war are accused of being obsessed. I have read, only recently, that those who give as an argument the Arab military threat are silly people who don’t know anything about the Arab mind and are “obsessed”. I am desolated to fall into that category, but I am still waiting for someone to show me the contrary, instead of proceeding by insult and insinuation.
"This [Arab] state of mind, this will to war, is neither incidental nor ephemeral. We must be honest and consider that there is an all-consuming, general, religious affirmation of every Muslim’s obligation to take part in holy war against every infidel. [Against] the Jews first of all.
"The jihad - we didn’t make that up.
"How shall we believe that a whole people who have been educated in this ideology could endure to live in peace with a Jewish neighbour (without reducing him to servitude)?
"But, someone will say, 'this is all old, it’s the past, a theoretical view'. But: that’s false: we have analysed the PLO charter which is recent [and which is] a perfect expression of the jihad.” (Un Chretien Pour Israel, pp. 238-239).

Got that? The supposedly 'secular' charter of the supposedly 'secular' PLO. And what is it? - "A perfect expression of the jihad". A PERFECT EXPRESSION OF THE JIHAD.

Ellul continues:
"And which clearly announces that it will not stop at the ‘liberation’ of the West Bank. That must become a base from which to attack Israel.
"But, people will say, this Charter, no-one speaks of it very often.
"I agree – and then I will recall what is more recent: meeting at Taef, in late January 1981, thirty-eight Muslim chiefs of state proclaimed jihad against Israel.
"This proclamation was particularly solemn, the appeal for holy war was launched by Prince Fahd with his face toward the Kaaba at Mecca, and at Taef all the other Moslem chiefs of state associated themselves with it."

That is: in the 1980s Ellul concluded that the 'palestinian arab' war against Israel - indeed, the hostility of the entire Muslim world toward Israel - was a classic Jihad. He saw through the rhetorical concealments to the reality.

Posted by: dumbledoresarmy at February 17, 2008 11:10 PM

Dumbledore,

Talk about propoganda! It's quite clear to me that you don't have the nerve to truly address my arguments. Instead, you pretend to address them by lobbing random ad hominem attacks at me, attributing to me opinions I do not have, then attacking those opinions.

Personally, I'm more of a policy guy. It's largely insignificant to me when the Palestinian resistance acquired religious elements, because they are present now and must be addressed.

Anyways,

Do you also think Gen. Petraeus and the Cold Warrior presidents were "perfect examples of classic Arab Muslim anti-Israel, anti-Jewish propaganda"? Their policies more closely resembled what I suggest than the Likud Lunacy of the past two decades. Conservative icon Ronald Reagan presided over grain shipments to the Soviet people. Olmert decides to cut off supplies to the Gazan people.

Any true conservatives around? Doesn't anyone here like Ronald Reagan???

Posted by: Shlomo_Michael at February 18, 2008 1:37 AM

'shlomo'

As regards your second point, above: Israel is not to the Ummah as the USA was to the USSR.
A better comparison, though still far from exact, would be to say that Israel is to the Ummah as Finland was to the USSR, or as West Germany was to the Soviet bloc. Under those circumstances - a tiny country on one side of an undeclared war, facing a vast, implacable enemy on the other side - a certain intransigence and wariness is wholly comprehensible.

It was in the interests of the non-communist world, that West Germany – and powerfully-symbolic Berlin (think, Jerusalem) - remained free.

It is in the interests of the Infidel world that Israel - the Jewish state - remain undefeated and that Jerusalem, which means far, far more to Jews than to anyone else in the whole world, and which means more to Christians, even, on historic as well as spiritual grounds, than it has ever done to Muslims, should be in Jewish hands, and not be handed over to Muslim Arabs for their ‘trophy capital’, to be obscenely gloated over in mosques all around the world.

Under full Jewish control Jerusalem, and other sacred places, such as the Tomb of the Patriarchs, will be accessible to others. Under Muslim rule, to be blunt, THEY WILL NOT. The Muslim record on such matters is, frankly, atrocious. (If the Muslims wish to prove otherwise, let them give back Hagia Sophia to be re-dedicated as a Christian church, the purpose for which it was originally, and gloriously, built).

Which raises your first point:
"It's largely insignificant to me when the Palestinian resistance [sic] acquired religious elements because they are present now and must be addressed."

'Religious elements', eh? Yasser Arafat denying that there was ever a Jewish temple on the Temple Mount? Ikrima Sabri of the Al Aqsa mosque doing the same (while tonnes of telltale-artefact-saturated rubble is surreptitiously scraped up from that same Mount, carted off and dumped hugger-mugger, to try to ensure there is nothing for an archaeologist to find that might contradict the Muslim Big Lies).

All those hysterical Friday sermons, laced with Quran and Hadith and references to Khaybar and so on, whipping up hatred against the Jews (not only in the 1980s or the 1990s - go back to the 1920s, the 1930s, and you'll find Muslim mobs howling out of the mosque to go throw stones at, lynch, kill, rob and rape Jews, targeting those perceived as weakest and least likely to be able to defend themselves).

'Religious elements' - how about the desecration of Joseph's Tomb. Or, sixty years ago, the razing to the ground of 58 Jewish synagogues in the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem, by the Jordanian Muslims, after 1949, and the use of Jewish tombstones, from the ancient Jewish cemetery there, to construct latrines? I don't think those actions were driven by secular nationalism. They bear far too near a resemblance to countless similar actions recorded by Muslims attacking others' sacred places, for 1300 years, everywhere that they have got the chance to do so.

And 'MUST be addressed'? How, pray? Look at Hamas. Look at their insane Charter, and what it says about Jews. Look at what they're telling their little kids on TV. Do you seriously think these people will be satisfied with anything less than the death, conversion, or reduction to terrified, impoverished and grovelling dhimmitude, of every last Jew and Christian in the whole of the land of Israel?

Underlying and driving much of the so-called 'palestinian resistance' I see merely the ferocious resentment of Arab Muslims at the sight of uppity Jews who have defied the dhimma.

(By the way - I'm not 'Dumbledore', I wouldn't claim that honour - it's 'dumbledore's army', short for '[member of] dumbledore's army', selected because Mr Robert Spencer reminds me, just a little, of Rowlings' splendid headmaster. You may refer to me as DDA for short - other posters do).

Posted by: dumbledoresarmy at February 18, 2008 11:41 PM

Now for 'fairuzfan', who referred sneeringly to:

"the subjective nationalist whims of a foreign, European, Zionist minority".

Jews are not foreigners in the land of Israel, any more than the Spanish were in Moorish-dominated Spain, or the Greeks in Greece when it was groaning under the yoke of the Ottoman Muslim Turks. Or, for that matter, Hindus in Kashmir.

Pakistanis are foreigners in England - Glastonbury and Stonehenge and Arthur's Seat have nothing to do with them, mean nothing.

Jews are NOT foreigners in the land of Israel - the Kotel, Joseph's Tomb, the Temple Mount, Rachel's Tomb, Shiloh, the wells of Beersheba, the prophet Elijah's Mt Carmel, and the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron, have everything to do with Jews, mean everything to them and always have. Safed is the place where a renaissance-era Jewish community created Jewish mysticism, the Kabbalah, and set up the first printing-press east of the Bosphorus. The old and original placenames are HEBREW, NOT ARAB. The place is saturated with Jewish archaeology, all of it underlying - PRECEDING- any of the Muslim relics.

'European'? Throughout their entire period of residence in European 'christendom', and in Eastern Europe as well, Jews were reviled and suspected as FOREIGNERS, as ORIENTALS, and periodically attacked or driven out from this country or that. European, eh? They maintained a distinctive Hebraic culture, liturgy and ethnic appearance (these were often caricatured and denigrated by the Europeans around them). Yiddish is a Hebrew-German creole; Ladino a Hebrew-Spanish creole; the vocabulary of both is thick with words derived from the Hebrew thought-world and lexicon.

Meanwhile: Jewish communities existed, and persisted, IN THE LAND OF ISRAEL, all the way through, even despite the horrors of Muslim invasion and occupation from 7th century on. These INDIGENOUS MINORITY communities of oriental Jews in the land of Israel, at places like Gaza, Nablus/ Shechem, Jericho, Hebron, Safed, and Jerusalem itself, were subjected to a level of oppression, by their cruel, capricious, greedy, contemptuous and violent INVADING AND OCCUPYING Muslim overlords, that is truly ugly to behold.

Nothing the Israeli Jews have ever done to the 'palestinian' arab muslims, much less to the arabised 'palestinian' Christians, is anything like as bad as what the muslims did to the Jews - and to the Christians, too - during the 1300 years that Muslims ruled the roost.

(It is a while since I read Mr Chacour, but if I recall correctly, he rather glosses over the violence and manifest injustices that are abundantly recorded as having been practised upon dhimmi Christians by Muslims, 7th-19th century, and I am not sure either that he deigns to mention the ancient Jewish remnant that was always present in the Land, e.g. in Safed or Peki'in).

I offer a layman's observation from 1917, concerning the situation of the Jews in 'Palestine' at that time, which is a pretty good description of how it had been for centuries:
"I think this is the 17th (December, 1917). Yesterday we rode by numbers of vividly pretty little red-roofed towns. The inhabitants are very fair skinned, mostly Jews. They are by far the most cleanly people we have yet met. They are very hospitable although they do charge us a hefty/ p. 184 / price for brown bread, honey and tobacco.

"LOTS OF THEM HAVE HAD A HARD TIME FROM THE TURKS. THEY SEEM TO LIVE BETWEEN TWO DEVILS, THE TURK AND THE ARAB. APPARENTLY THE TURK PREVENTS THE ARAB FROM MASSACRING THEM OUTRIGHT, BECAUSE THE JEWS ARE A VERY HANDY PEOPLE TO SQUEEZE TAXES FROM." (And thus the author neatly summarises centuries of Jewish dhimmitude).

'Fairuzfan' carefully ignores the fact, also, that about half of Israel's present day population consists of JEWS FROM MUSLIM COUNTRIES, some of whom came to Israel as early as the mid-19th century (e.g. a large contingent of Jews from Yemen), but most of whom came in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, all of them driven out by greater or lesser degrees of oppression and violence by the Muslims.

Shall I mention the chattel slavery which was the lot of Jews in Yemen as late as the 1920s, and the forcible removal of orphaned Yemeni Jewish children from their families, to be reared as Muslims? Shall I mention the pogroms in Baghdad in the 1930s and 1940s?

Shall I start recounting what was done to the Jews of Algeria, Morocco, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Mesopotamia and Persia? (Jews whose ancestors had been living peacefully in those places, for more than a thousand years before the johnny-come-lately Muslim robbers and murderers burst onto the scene; and yet, how strange, the Muslims drove out the Jews?). When one looks at the history one finds that Jews from every part of the 'ummah' came to Israel to live, even as early as the high middle ages (the oldest surviving synagogue in Jerusalem dates back to the 13th century). 'Foreigners'? 'Europeans'? Rubbish!

(I repeat: they did not come because things were lovely under the Muslims. Things were terrible. But they still came, because they loved Jerusalem, and the Land, the land which held the bones of their ancestors, more than they feared hardship and suffering.)

BTW The level of intermarriage between Ashkenazis and Sephardis has been such, over the past thirty years, as to make the silly 'european colony' accusation look even more nonsensical than it did at its first appearance.

And although 'Zionist' has, by dint of careful manipulation in certain circles, come to have, for many, the insult-value of 'Nazi', it does not carry that meaning, for me.

All modern Zionism is, is Jewish nationalism - the expression of the fact that Jews are an ethno-linguistic group, a nation, and that they have a fully-documented and story-soaked homeland within which they have a perfect right to live, and in which some of them, despite everything, have always lived (and there is NO other place on earth to which they have ever expressed any comparable attachment - it is Israel, and Zion, the City of the Great King [who is YHWH] - or nowhere).

To put it bluntly: just like the Spaniards in Spain, or the Greeks in Greece, or the Bulgarians, or the Serbs, the Jews conducted a successful Dhimmi Revolt and Reconquista.

A large number of diaspora Jews rejoined, helped, revived and reinforced their kinsfolk, the remnant INDIGENOUS Jewish communities of the land of Israel, who were living as a despised and cruelly oppressed minority, and liberated them, and their homeland, thus breaking the dhimma by a. refusing to grovel b. refusing to pay 'protection' money c. claiming the right of self-defence, and d. claiming the right to openly, publicly and noisily practice their religion, and build synagogues without having to pay huge amounts of money to bribe Muslim overlords to let them do it.

If 'Palestinian' Arabised Christians resent the resurgence of the Jews, and side with the Muslims, they are cutting off their noses to spite their faces, for they will get - and have got - fairer treatment under the Jews than they ever got under the Muslims, and certainly better treatment than they have received from Fatah's standover men, or from Hamas' murderous thugs. Does the name Rami Ayyad suggest anything, 'fairuzfan'? How about you, 'shlomo'?

Posted by: dumbledoresarmy at February 18, 2008 11:53 PM

How is it that Hugh can expound on so many FACTS that the MSM, with all their mighty resources, apparently cannot discover and report on in any meaningful way?
In an attempt to understand this disparity, I'd like to propose that we simplify our view of people into two main categories of character, the strong and the weak.
The fearless strong report on the facts...no matter how ugly, unsettling, or offensive they may be to certain others.
The fearful weak twist or ignore the truth to avoid facing conflict, ugliness, or offending certain others.
Through modern technology, we bloggers consult the same resources the MSM uses to gather the facts, so we know that the incongruity seen in reporting is not due to ignorance.
We need more strong people in the MSM, or the weaklings will bring us all down.
Let's buy Hugh a couple three TV networks and several major publications!

Posted by: HawkWatcher at February 19, 2008 3:13 AM

DDA
"(By the way - I'm not 'Dumbledore', I wouldn't claim that honour - it's 'dumbledore's army', short for '[member of] dumbledore's army', selected because Mr Robert Spencer reminds me, just a little, of Rowlings' splendid headmaster. You may refer to me as DDA for short - other posters do)."

Oh Dear , a love letter to Roberto! Are you a 'he' or a 'she'?A 'Aussiegirl' or 'Aussieboy'? A "Harry" or a " Hermione"

Shlomo

I am sorry you dont recognise the fact that the indiscriminate raining of rockets down on Israel or the suicide bombings (yes those suicide bombings solely in order for a political two state solution arent they- NOT) are a form of collective form of punishment that begets the retaliation. You hide behind Gen. Petraeus and Ronald Reagan ( as if Iraq and the cold war are directly analogous to the Israeli conflict) all the while espousing views that sheet home the entire blame for the "Palestinian" misery to 'expansionist' Israel and the US - instead of the wilful Islamic rejectionism by the Arabs. Israel is ready to negotiate and set borders , the "Palestinians" are not , the Israeli's are ready to recognise a "Palestinian State" the Arabs are not ready to reciprocate.

Couching your Chomskyist world view , wrongly behind a conservative figure (I think you said 'icon') and a soldier makes me infer you are an intellectual coward. Please tell me how does one work with a 'population' like you suggest? Only through its leaders. Now tell me what 'moderate' leaders exist in Gaza and the West Bank. Does Israel open the Gaza and pull down the 'fence' and absorb the inevitable Israeli causalties as the moderate Arab leadership ,SOMEHOW emboldened by the gesture -goes against : the tenets of its religion , the teachings of its schools , the entrenched propaganda of grievence , the entrenched propaganda of Jihad and the actual armed Jihadist gangs? Hey , but what the heck , if Israel dies , its only a bunch of pesky Jews isnt it! And when this happens it wont be the Arabs fault either it will the the fault of all those dead Jews ! Apologist!

Posted by: David Xavier at February 19, 2008 4:13 AM

'david xavier'

your reply to 'shlomo' is well put.

Why then - if we are, it seems, for the moment, on something like the same page - combine it with what feels like a (totally offtopic) snide sideswipe at *me*?

First: you've been posting and reading here at jihadwatch QUITE long enough to know perfectly well, from things I've openly said in other postings, that I'm a middle-aged matron; so the remark "are you a 'he' or a 'she'? A 'Aussiegirl' or 'Aussieboy'? A "Harry" or a " Hermione?", however you intended it, came across as thoroughly disingenuous, indeed, like one long sneer.

And as a reading of my fairly restrained praise for Mr Spencer - "Mr Robert Spencer reminds me, JUST A LITTLE, of Rowlings' splendid headmaster" - your exclamation "Oh Dear, a love letter to Roberto!', sounds , well,...exaggerated, and even insulting, as if you mean to hint that my attitude toward Mr Spencer is that of a silly teenager enthusing over a pop star. (I am afraid that your own use of the term 'Roberto' sounds both over-familiar and condescending - I myself would never dream of talking like that).

'Frank', another regular, has regularly compared Mr Spencer's devotion to truth, logic, and justice, with that of John Quincy Adams and Abraham Lincoln. Others have been reminded of the dogged truthtelling of Churchill during the 1920s and 1930s. What's wrong with my drawing a judicious comparison between Mr Spencer, and a modern-day fictional hero of similar sort?

For the information of anyone else who may bother to read this exchange: my respect for Mr Spencer has arisen primarily from reading his books and articles, and his occasional postings here, and exchanges with others.

I am not some overwrought teenager, but a trained scholar (two degrees) who finds Spencer to be a thorough, clear-headed scholar who has the rare gift of being able to put his findings in an easily readable form. Moreover, to judge from the evidence of his words and deeds, in particular, his endlessly patient debating with slippery Muslim apologists, as seen even in this comments floor on occasion, he is a human being with deep reserves of patience, humility and charity. Such qualities I admire wherever I encounter them, in man or woman, in living people or the historic record, or in fiction.

Mr Spencer is very far from being my only 'hero'. There are a great many others, male and female, for whose character and works I praise God: some living, such as Bat Yeor or Phyllis Chesler or Ayaan Hirsi Ali, or Bp Nazir-Ali and Bp Patrick Sookhdeo, and some, like Jacques Ellul or Oriana Fallaci, no longer with us. May I say that I regard Jacques Ellul as one of the great teaching saints of the church in France? How's that for a 'love letter'? In connection with Israel, I could name the brilliant and brave, though eccentric, Orde Wingate; and the redoubtable campaigner against anti-semitism, James Parkes.

What gets my attention, whenever and wherever I see it, is personal integrity combined with artistic/ intellectual integrity - as, for example, outside the ranks of the counter-jihad entirely, in the Polish film-maker Kieslowski, or the Australian film-maker, Peter Weir.

So if you want to crow over me for a 'love letter' to Mr Spencer, you now have to face the fact that I have just expressed similar, or even stronger, sentiments concerning all of the persons that I have named above, whether living or departed.

So please, Mr Xavier, if you are indeed an ally in the counter-jihad campaign, refrain from sniping at me in future. If you can refrain from nasty little pin-pricks, I will refrain, in turn, for the moment, from expressing those suspicions as to your sincerity which have, from time to time, crossed my mind.

Posted by: dumbledoresarmy at February 20, 2008 8:26 AM