Ms. Klinghoffer is senior associate scholar at the Political Science department at Rutgers University, Camden, and the author of Vietnam, Jews and the Middle East. She is also an HNN blogger. Ms. Klinghoffer is senior associate scholar at the Political Science department at Rutgers University, Camden, and the author of Vietnam, Jews and the Middle East. She is also an HNN blogger. Click here for her blog: http://hnn.us/blogs/3.html. She is also an SPME Member.

It’s time to stop beating around the bush: A growing pundit chorus is breaching the proposition that the creation of a Jewish state called Israel was a mistake and the “root cause” of Islamic terror. Hence, rectifying that mistake by dismantling the state of Israel will go a long way towards pacifying Jihadists like Zarqaui and securing the British (and other Western) homeland from terrorist attacks, argues Geoffrey Wheatcroft in a recent Financial Times column entitled, “Blair’s dubious logic on Islamism and Ireland”:

Where two different terrorist threats are concerned, in Northern Ireland and the Middle East, Tony Blair, the UK prime minister, has taken very different courses, making a distinction that is the more dubious the harder you look at it…. With regard to Islamist terrorists, in London or Iraq, Mr Blair has taken the… position [that he]… will not give an inch to them, will never compromise, and denies that they have serious political aims: “I don’t accept they really care about these causes, the perpetrators of this ideology.” But in Ulster he continues to take the… line: we have to talk to terrorists and address their demands. It implies that terrorists murder is less reprehensible when its objects are widely popular and negotiable.

This far I could not agree more. Nor can any more most of Gerry Adams’s supporters which is the reason he ultimately decided to end using terror to achieve his ultimate goal of a united Ireland. But that is not the conclusion Wheatcroft wishes to promote since as Khalid Khawaja noted a few days earlier in the same paper Zarqaui’s and Bin Laden’s supporters reached no similar conclusions: “no Imam would dare preach hate in a British mosque if we were standing as members of the congregation to hold him accountable.” The opposite is true. No Imam dares preach that homicide bombers are bound for hell rather than heaven. Moreover, as Wheatcroft himself admits, eliminating the state of Israel and even evicting the West from the Middle East is merely an immediate goal of the Islamists. Hence, satisfying Adams may be considered as Blair notes a price a reasonable person may consider high but one a “sensible person can negotiate on.” Paying the much higher price Islamist terrorists demand as a first down payment to their ultimate goals of “restoring the caliphate and purging the house of Islam of all infidel” is not one any “sensible person can negotiate on.” Wheatcroft understands as much. So, to make his argument he, like Chamberlain before him, chooses to set aside what he calls the Islamists’ “more exalted aims,” which he agrees “are not practical politics, as the phrase is.” Instead, he argues for satisfying what he calls Al Qaeda and Zarqawi’s “immediate” demand which he elegantly directs away from Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Kashmir, Philippines, Thailand, Albania, Kosovo, Bosnia, etc. and toward Israel, the country populated by the remnants of Jews already purged from the houses of Islam and Christianity. Take the Jews and leave us alone is Wheatcroft’s thinly veiled plea. Nor is he alone in making it as it is clear not only from Cindy Sheehan emails but from Norwegian newsmen’s questions. It enjoys a large worldwide constituency eager enough to see the dark cloud of terror dissipate to sell their soul for it. No one understands that better or counts on it more than the Islamists. Modernity enabled an ever growing number of people to lead a longer and safer life and they would naturally spend it in pursuing happiness than worrying about exploding fanatics. That is the reason that Bill Clinton wasted eight years of his presidency trying to appease them. He turned over to them Afghanistan, Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo and the majority of the West Bank and Gaza. In the process he bombed a European capital, orchestrated a change in the Israeli government, ignored their murderous ideology and treated their murder of increasing number of Americans and those who happened to stand next to them. In other words, Clinton and Blair tried to satisfy the immediate hunger of the beast and failed. What Wheatcroft seems to suggest is that if Clinton and Blair had enlarged one particular portion and agreed to eliminate Israel, the beast would have been satisfied. Nor is he alone. Rregardless of protestations to the contrary, George W. Bush, too, tried to calm the beast by pulling American troops out of the oil kingdom and by becoming the first American president to support the establishment of a Palestinian state. It helped as much as turning over the Sudetenland to Hitler helped. But he wants all of Czechoslovakia (excuse me, Israel), persist Wheatcroft and company, how can you expect him to be satiated with only the West Bank and Gaza? The Jews can find another place to live. After all, they have been wondering for generations.

But can they when even their dead cannot find a safe resting place outside Israel? The Israeli army is currently busy digging up Jewish graves in Gaza for reburial in Israel proper in a manner reminiscent of the ancient Hebrews who dug up Joseph’s grave when they exited Egypt all those centuries ago. After all, they entrusted his grave to the Palestinians a few years ago only to see it immediately vandalized. Indeed, despite strenuous efforts to distinguish between bad Israelis and good Diaspora Jews, had it not been impractical, the IDF should be digging up Jewish graves everywhere as it is open season on Jewish cemeteries all over the world. A quick Google search and the invaluable Forum Report of the Coordination Report of Countering Antisemitism revealed the following:

1. 1. August 28, according to local police, a Jewish cemetery in the central German town of Ebersburg was desecrated by vandals, who sprayed swastikas and other Nazi symbols on gravestones.

2. 2. August 22, authorities are investigating vandalism at a historic Jewish cemetery in Pensacola, Florida that left headstones from the early 1900s overturned and broken.

3. 3. August 16, Jews in Britain demonstrate against a French plan to expand an existing car park, to underground level, on the site of a Jewish cemetery.

4. 4. August 10, Antisemites vandalized Jewish gravestones in Tver, Russia. Around 50 gravestones in the Jewish section of the Dmitrovo-Cherkassakh were painted with swastikas; another eight were smashed. Antisemitic leaflets were posted throughout the cemetery in what Regnum characterized as a well-planned action by people who “were not just simple hooligans.”

5. 5. August 6, the AEN news agency added that 10 gravestones of Jews were smashed in Smolensk last month on the day where local people commemorate victims of the ghetto set up by the Nazis in Smolensk during the Holocaust.

6. 6. July 30, the Jewish cemetery in Stockholm, Sweden caretakers discovered that many tombstones had been smashed, some totally destroyed.

7. 7. July 14, six gravestones in the Jewish cemetery in Michalovce were vandalized. This is the third such incident in Slovakia over the past month.

8. 8. July 9, ten gravestones in a Jewish cemetery have been knocked down by vandals. Police are investigating the incident in Plunge, Lithuania;

9. 9. June 26, a number of gravestones were desecrated at the Jewish cemetery in St. Petersburg, Russia.

10. 10. June 27, The wall of the Jewish cemetery of Cochabamba, Bolivia, was daubed with swastikas and Juden Raus.

11. 11. June 15, antisemitic graffiti, huge swastikas and the words “Yids out”, daubed by unidentified vandals, were discovered on a wall at the Jewish cemetery in Rainham in Essex, England.

12. 12. June 15, vandals smashed about 130 gravestones in the Jewish cemetery in Budapest, Hungary.

13. 13. June 9, about 100 graves were desecrated in the Rainsough Jewish Cemetery in Prestwich, Manchester, England. The gravestones, some of which were 150 years old, were smashed and thrown on top of each other.

14. 14. May 25, 26 graves were desecrated in the Jewish cemetery in Kazan, Russia.
Swastikas were daubed on the gravestones.

15. 15. May 12-8, some 12 gravestones were smashed in the Jewish cemetery in La Tour de Pielz located in the Vevey-Montreux area of Switzerland.

16. 16. May 8, some 60 gravestones were smashed in the Jewish cemetery in Sarreguemines (eastern France) in the Alsace Lorraine region. A swastika was discovered on the door of the cemetery’s groundskeeper.

17. 17. May 5, the Jewish cemetery in Chisinau (formerly Kishinev) in Moldova was
desecrated. Six gravestones were smashed.

18. 18. May 3, vandals smashed 20 gravestones in the Jewish cemetery in the town of
Miasshevich, Belarus.

19. 19. April 13, a number of gravestones were desecrated with antisemitic graffiti in the Jewish cemetery located in the Montfavet section of Avignon, France.

20. 20. April 7-8, 28 gravestones were desecrated in the Jewish cemetery in the town of Rechica (southern Belarus). Several of the gravestones were knocked over some were smashed and others had paint sprayed on them.

With this evidence at hand, I cannot but repeat my question. If we cannot trust you with our dead, how can you ask us to trust you again with our living? And if we cannot, it is indecent of you not only to make Palestinians promises you will not be able to keep but to significantly increase Antisemitism in the process unless you are prepared to finish the job Hitler started.