GIVE PEACE A CHANCE
By: Joseph Puder Director of the Interfaith Taskforce for America and Israel (ITAI) January 22, 2004
On my way to work, I invariably come across bumper stickers on cars. The latest I noticed is one that reads,“give peace a chance.“ can well imagine who the authors and promoters of these stickers are. They obviously opposed the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. These same people believe that we can“talk“ to the Islamic terrorists rather than “fight them.”
In Israel, a similar phenomenon exist, it is called Peace Now! These dreamers want to command peace to come now! Regrettably, in both cases: that of the American Left and the Israeli Left, their appeal goes to the wrong people -the victims of hate. The practitioners of hate and murder: Arab Muslim Palestinians, Iraqis, Saudis, Egyptian, Syrian, etc. who also engage in bumper sticker propaganda, theirs read however “Jihad against the Jews and the Crusader is ordained by G-d -or“kill the infidel.”
I too believe in giving peace a chance, and want Peace Now. Unfortunately there are two sides to every issue, and the other side-the terrorists in Gaza (Hamas) Southern Lebanon (Hizbullah) or Iraq and Afghanistan (Al Queda), and the Muslim states that sponsor them, is rather uninterested in “giving peace a chance.”
They have a clearly defined enemy they seek to destroy: Christians and Jews, Western democracy, laws which uphold human and civil right, the right of assembly and free press, and most of all, the separation of Church and State, and our enshrined freedom of religion.
The naive American or Israeli Left “worldliness” comes from listening to the BBC on NPR. To them, a British accent is a guarantee of truth and credibility, history and reality are to be damned. Political Correctness and Moral relativity, the current leading trend as reflected in the liberal media, has had little use for history. Still, while on the subject of history let us recall events in the year 1938
Neville Chamberlain, then Prime Minister of Great Britain decided to “give peace a chance” by flying to Munich, Germany to appease Adolph Hitler, the Nazi dictator who had just swallowed Austria. To appease the Nazi aggressor’s appetite for conquest and power, Chamberlain agreed to sacrifice a peaceful democratic nation in the heart of Europe called Czechoslovakia.
I could understand Chamberlain’s motives. WWI destroyed a whole generation of Britons, and Chamberlain was resolved to avoid war at all cost. What Chamberlain missed in 1938, and what the Leftist in America and Israel fail to understand today, is that you cannot make peace with ideologies of hate. Just as Nazism was uncompromising in its quest for world domination, racial superiority, and the destruction of Jews, Slavs, and other undesirables, Islamism or Jihaddism as some call political Islam, seeks to impose Islam and Sharia laws on all of humanity.
For Islamic ideologues, Islam is the only way towards human salvation, and there is no room for compromise. Saudi Arabia is a perfect example of this attitude. It forbids public worship of any religion other than Islam in its territory.
American presidents, since Jimmy Carter in 1979, have attempted to appease the hateful ideology of Islam. Presidents Carter, Clinton, and Bush senior, failed to grasp the undeniable truth, that you cannot appease ideologies of hate. You must defeat them in order to “give peace a chance.”
George W. Bush is beginning to understand that the haters and killers of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Fatah, Hizbullah, and al Queda must be defeated in battle or else they will destroy our civilization and us. In Iraq, the US has acted to prevent a would be Hitler from going any further. Chamberlain and all of humanity learned the bitter lesson of appeasement. In trying to overlook the Nazi ideology of hate and its consequences, Chamberlain contributed to the global devastation known to us today as WWII-with a cost of 60 million dead
Neither Israel nor America can afford to engage in illusion of peace and historic compromises with ideologies of hate. No Israeli concessions would change the endemic hate carried by the Palestinians. It is the Palestinians themselves, who must cure the affliction of their soul. To paraphrase the late Golda Meir “until the Palestinian care more for their own people (and refugees) then for killing Jews” for the sake of Jihad, peace has no chance.
My heartfelt advise to the promoters of the “give peace a chance” -bumper stickers, is to distribute them in schools and the in streets of Gaza, Nablus, Jenin, Cairo, Riyadh, Jeddah, Damascus, Basra, Tikrit, Samara, and Baghdad. They, the Arabs, whether Palestinian, Saudi, Egyptian or Iraqi need to be persuaded to “give peace a chance.” Our societies, whether in America or in Israel prosper in peace, we worship peace in song, plays, and prayers. It is the other side, the Muslim side, which needs to undergo a reformation in its religious ideology of hate. That is where “give peace a chance“ is never heard, much less practiced. It is in the Arab Muslim world that your bumper stickers are desperately needed.