Israel changes its role in Mideast script, by Amoz Asa-El, Guest Columnist, Seattle Post Intelligencer 8.29.06

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Having just endured 4,000 rockets that smashed 6,000 of their homes, displaced 300,000 of their countrymen and sent another million of them into bomb shelters, Israelis are amused by the attempt to portray this frontal and unprovoked attack on innocent civilians and what came in its wake as all kinds of things except what it really was: an Islamist assault on freedom.

Yes, not all of those involved in the effort to confuse villains and victims do so deliberately, as part of the Islamism, Arabism, anti-Americanism or anti-Semitism that drives the rest of them. And yes, the spotlighting of a counterattack’s damage is often driven by the ignoramus’ impressionability rather than by premeditated emotional blackmail.

Still, a European-led effort to change the subject in the debate over Lebanon’s future is well under way and Westerners who care for their own future had better resist it.

What is immediately at stake in Lebanon is not the Islamist Revolution’s desire to expunge Israel, which its leaders are leaving for later, but their designs on Lebanon, the Arab world’s most Westernized enclave, which they judge as ripe for the picking.

The Khomeini Revolution has had many accomplishments since deposing the shah in 1979, but in terms of geopolitical conquests it has been a failure. Though it won over many hearts and slew countless infidels the world over, it failed in its attempts to depose Arab regimes, and it failed to lead into its orbit at least some of post-Soviet Central Asia. Even Afghanistan — whose Islamist rulers were anti-Iranian — has been lost to the West. The Islamist snatching recently of Somalia, while far from encouraging from a Western viewpoint, is nonetheless little consolation from an Islamist viewpoint; it’s just not much of a place. Beirut, however, indeed is.

The conquest by Islamism of the freewheeling metropolis once known as the Paris of the Middle East would be the equivalent of the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453. It would inspire and embolden Islamists wherever they be in ways that are difficult to predict, and surely will increase the chances of any Western person to be killed in an airplane, mall, train station, resort, restaurant, theater or school, the way so many innocent people already have been in situations that had nothing to do with the Middle East conflict and everything to do with Islamism’s obsessive quest to culturally challenge and physically cripple the West.

This is how we, the same Israelis who in the past backed land-for-peace deals with various anti-Islamist Arab interlocutors, now see the Lebanese situation. Sad to say, many elsewhere in the international system still delude themselves that the Lebanese situation is not about their own societies’ safety, values and dignity but merely about Arabs and Jews squabbling, yet again, about this hill, that river or those ranches.

And so, France is backtracking from its promise to send thousands of troops to south Lebanon; Russian officials, when shown Russian-made weaponry captured from Hezbollah fighters respond with anti-Israeli fury; and Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero allowed himself to wear a Palestinian scarf and accuse Israel of attacking and “abusing” Lebanon while ignoring Lebanon’s real abuse, the one done by Hezbollah, and which is so patently part of a broader scourge that threatens Spain itself.

Why? Why are so many Europeans so reluctant to face up to the Islamist menace, which, frankly, threatens them even more than it threatens Israel? How can they fail to connect the dots between the Islamist problems they face at home, and the prospective fall of Beirut abroad? How can Zapatero not understand what an Iranian conquest of Beirut would do to European Islamists who say Muslims should wrest all former Muslim domains, which happen to include the entire country of Spain?

The answer is simple: They suffer from a denial syndrome. And so, when Islamism peeks through the horizon, they run home, lock the door and scream, “I am not home.”

Dancing with wolves, courting the devil and compromising with freedom’s enemies long have been European specialties, so much so that it took foreigners to save Europe from both fascism and communism. Back in the 1930s, most Europeans remained deaf to warnings that Hitler was after them, preferring to delude themselves he was “merely” after the Jews, and that the beast could be soothed by feeding it the Jewish prey whose taste it simply could not resist. When Europe understood, well after Kristallnacht, that the Jews were merely Fascism’s warm-up act, it was too late.

Today a very clever Islamism is also telling Europe it merely wants the Jews, and, unfortunately, many Europeans still respond with the same moral understanding and political appeasement that only a few decades ago set their continent ablaze. Even more unfortunate, the Jews — that stiff-necked lot — are no longer prepared to play their part in the script: They fight.

Amotz Asa-El, formerly the Jerusalem Post’s executive editor, is now its senior columnist

Israel changes its role in Mideast script, by Amoz Asa-El, Guest Columnist, Seattle Post Intelligencer 8.29.06

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