THESE ARE TROUBLING TIMES. Israel and America are in danger, greater than they have ever been. Israel is fighting for its survival against an enemy that has the tacit support of most of the world’s governments and is determined to destroy it. Every man woman and child in America has been targeted for death by religious fanatics armed with modern weapons, including weapons of mass destruction, yet is only reluctantly supported – if at all -- by the rest of the world in its efforts to eliminate the threat.
As they confront these dangers, Americans need to understand that in radical Islam America and Israel are facing the same enemy. Yasser Arafat and the PLO invented suicide bombing of innocent civilians, created the first terrorist training camps, and are hand-in-glove allies of al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. Palestinian terrorists were part of the al-Qaeda team that blew up the World Trade Center in 1993 and the Khobar Towers, killing 19 American servicemen, in 1996.
One month after the second World Trade Center attack an editorial in the official newspaper of the Palestine Authority compared Rudy Giuliani to Adolf Hitler: "New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani hides his first name, chosen for him by his Italian father, so as not to remind Jewish voters of the infamous Rudolph Hitler. This is why he prefers to shorten it to Rudy." (October 17, 2001)
The Islamic radicals in the West Bank are not only illiterate when it comes to the leader of the Nazi state, they are filled with hatred against America. Two months later, on December 28, 2001 a sermon delivered in the Al Aksa Mosque on the Temple Mount and broadcast over Palestinian Authority’s official Voice of Palestine radio declared: "The infidel countries, led by the United States, invented the excuse and justification for their dirty war against Islam and Islamic movements all over the world, following the attack against it. The U.S. used, in its criminal aggression against Afghanistan, the most destructive bombs there are … Do the Muslims of today know how to realize Allah’s path, and to turn only to Allah? Not to turn to the evil United States, or to Europe so filled with hatred toward Islam and Muslims?"
And on Pearl Harbor day (December 7, 2001), Yasser Arafat’s official "Voice of Palestine" radio broadcast another sermon at the Al-Aksa Mosque delivered by Mohammed Hassin, which said in part: "The ‘Mongolians’ and ‘Crusaders’ are raising their heads and enlisting armies to fight the Islamic nations in an oppressive campaign, under the label of ‘terrorism,’ which the infidels are attaching to the Arabs and Muslims for the purpose of realizing their imperialist interests, and to spread their control over the Muslim countries and their resources."
This is but a small sampling of the available evidence, but it captures a truth that every American must grasp. Islamic radicals from Pakistan to Palestine, including government agencies in Iraq, Iran, and Palestine have summoned their people to a holy war against the modern, tolerant, democratic, Judeo-Christian and secular West. They hate us and have targeted us for who we are. This is a war whose outcome cannot be negotiated. It will be resolved only by the defeat of radical Islam or the destruction of the West.
Israel is a frontline nation in this battle, whose very survival is now at stake. Israel has been the target of a fifty-year holy war by the Arab states, which surround it and vastly outnumber it. The war against Israel is as much a prelude to the war against the West, as the Spanish Civil War was to World War II. The history of this fifty-year effort to expel the Jews from the Middle East has been all but forgotten.
The Western media reports the current battlefront as though it were an Israeli Goliath against a Palestinian David, or at best a moral equivalency between two irrational neighbors. But there is no moral equivalence here. The West Bank and Gaza were annexed by Jordan and Egypt fifty years ago with no Arab complaints. Israel has absorbed a million Jewish refugees from Arab lands and the Soviet Union with no complaints. The 3.7 million seething refugees who live abject poverty on the West Bank, and who have received more than a billion dollars in aid from Israel and the rest of the world are refugees only because the Arab states themselves have rejected them and kept them in poverty so they can be cannon fodder for the holy war to push the Jews into the sea. The "Palestinian problem," is entirely a creation of the Arabs themselves, a product of their refusal to live side by side with any infidels they think they can destroy.
September 11 signals the determination of radical Islam to extend a war it began in 1948 to the United States itself. In fact the war against America was begun with the attack on U.S. troops in Mogadishu in February 1993 and with the first attempt to blow up the World Trade Center in October of that year. Americans must arm themselves for the defense of their country. To be effective, this defense requires America and the democratic West to recognize that the defense of Israel is a defense of their own frontier.
- All quotes from The Case Against Arafat: The Campaign By Yasir Arafat and the Palestinian Authority to Destroy Israel, Introduction by Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick, published by the Zionist Organization of America, NY 2002.