Levitt Letter Extra News

By Jacob Laksin
FrontPageMagazine.com | July 28, 2006

Question: What’s the difference between the Arab League and the academic Left that despises Israel? Answer: Only the Arab League is willing to condemn Hezbollah.

The surreal politics of this war finds Saudi Arabia attributing “full responsibility” to Hezbollah and calling on the terrorists to “alone shoulder the crisis they have created;” it finds Kuwaiti journalists lauding the “operations of Israel in Gaza and Lebanon [that] are in the interest of people of Arab countries and the international community,” even as hundreds of American professors rush to denounce Israel for firing back at genocidal killers sworn to her destruction.

More than 1,000 such professors have signed a petition that is currently circulating on American college campuses. Written in the name of “academics who condemn Israel’s aggression against Lebanon and Gaza,” the petition waxes indignant about Israel’s alleged crimes, including a “brutal bombing and invasion of Gaza,” and “acts of Israeli state terrorism” in Lebanon.

More noteworthy, however, is what the petition does not say. Not only is there no mention of Hamas or Hezbollah, but reading the petition one might conclude that terrorism plays no part in the current conflagration. Instead the petition calls for the immediate release of jailed terrorists, euphemistically described as “Palestinian and Lebanese political prisoners,” and effectively erases the role of anti-Israel terrorism in precipitating the current by asserting that “Israel’s destructive and expansionist policies are primarily to blame for the seemingly perpetual ‘Middle East crisis.’”

Never mind that Israel has withdrawn from both Gaza and Lebanon, and that the current offensive was prompted by the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers, first by Palestinian terrorists and then their Lebanese counterparts. Never mind, too, that the “expansionist policies” in the region have been pursued by Arab powers who launched four major wars against Israel since 1948; by Islamist jihadists who have never reconciled themselves to a Jewish presence in the Middle East; and by rogue states like Iran and Syria, who rely on terrorist surrogates to succeed where the earlier efforts failed. These details are aggressively ignored for, as a review of the petition’s signatories makes clear, the rewriting of history to serve the interests of Israel’s enemies commands no small following in the increasingly radicalized academic world.

In fact, some professors have gone far beyond the petition in declaring their support for the terrorists’ war on the Jewish state. Chief among them is Rabab Abdulhadi, the Palestinian-born director of the Center for Arab American Studies at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. To appreciate the depth of Abdulhadi’s disdain for Israel, one need only consider that she dismisses as a “myth” the easily demonstrable fact of “Arab armies invading Israel in 1948.” Adapting a theme from the Hamas charter, which lays claim “to the land of Palestine,” Abdulhadi has charged that Israeli settlers are “living on stolen Palestinian land, sucking out the water which is very much needed from Palestinians and making lives.” Not only that but, according to Abdulhadi, “what Israel is doing in the occupied territories, in some instances, looks like what Nazi Germany did.” Abdulhadi consequently sees the Palestinian Authority’s admonitions against terrorism—infrequent and never unequivocal—as evidence that the PA is “exercising maximum reserve.”

Yet Abdulhadi is moderation personified next to another name that appears on the petition. Dr. El Guindi, an Egyptian-born professor of anthropology at the University of Southern California, has alleged that “Israel is engaged in practices muted by the media: massacres and genocides, trafficking of human organs, genetic experimentations, inhumane torture.” Hamas’s most zealous propagandists could not improve on the inflammatory rhetoric. And much like them, El Guindi has never offered any evidence for the charges, relying on innuendo and conspiracy theories to make her case. Failing that, she considers terrorism the answer to the Palestinians’ woes. In contrast to the petition, which at least condemns the killing of civilians in Israel even if it absolves the actual murderers, El Guindi has embraced anti-Israel terrorism as an acceptable form of “resistance.” Of Palestinian terrorism, she has written that “[i]t is a universal and legitimate right,” one appropriate to “colonized people.”

Similar sentiments frequently issue from Middle Eastern Studies departments. In keeping with tradition, the most notorious of these departments, Columbia’s department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures (MEALAC), boasts no fewer than four representatives in the recent petition. Most prominent among them is Hamid Dabashi, the Columbia professor of Islamic studies who despises not only Israel, which he views a “ghastly state of racism and apartheid,” but also Israeli Jews, to whom Dabashi ascribes a “vulgarity of character that is bone-deep.” His crude bigotry notwithstanding, Dabashi has his followers at Columbia, among them the Iranian-born Golbarg Bashi, a visiting scholar and a protégé of Dabashi specializing in “anti-colonial theory” and “black and Third World feminisms,” whose name likewise appears on the petition. Other MEALAC faculty who endorsed the petition are Suhail Shadoud, a Syrian professor of Arabic language, and Jeffrey Sacks a lecturer in Arabic who in recent years emerged as a leading advocate of divestment from Israel at Columbia. MEALAC’s reputation as a hotbed of political extremism is plainly well deserved.

Although the petition attracted the support of many disgruntled Arab and Muslim academics—such as New York University professor Sinan Antoon, an Iraqi exile who has written that “America tattoos its imperial insignia into the bodies of Iraqi children”—it also underscored the fact that some of Israel’s most unscrupulous antagonists are themselves of Jewish ancestry, including three of the most prominent signatories: MIT’s Noam Chomsky; Norman Finkelstein of DePaul; and Joel Beinin of Stanford University.

Why these professors would sign on to a petition assailing the “psychic terror of the Israeli military campaigns in Gaza and Lebanon” while maintaining a studied silence on the actual terror that was its cause is readily explained. Chomsky is a longtime defender of Hezbollah, a sympathy born of a common hatred for the United States and Israel and demonstrated most recently when the aging radical traveled to Lebanon to pledge his support for the Shiite terrorist militia and to defend its refusal to disarm and, implicitly, to carry on its campaign of targeting Israeli civilians. Along with Chomsky, Beinin has urged that Hezbollah be regarded as an “activist” movement rather than as a terrorist group. Finkelstein, for his part, has little interest in the activities of terrorist organizations, preferring to focus on what he calls the far more egregious “state terrorism” supposedly practiced by Israel.

Behind the obscene double standard set forth in the petition, wherein Israel is attacked for defending its right to exist and terrorists escape all blame, is a conviction, all too common among the academic Left, that Israel’s very existence is both regrettable and undesirable. Thus Judith Butler, another Jewish academic who signed the petition, has declared against Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, writing that “political sovereignty based on religious status is misguided, undemocratic, and discriminatory, in principle and in practice.” (That this is precisely the end sought by Hamas, Hezbollah and their terrorist brethren is a contradiction conveniently ignored by Butler.) Another signatory, Marguerite Rosenthal, a professor of Social work at Salem State College, is an activist with a radical group calling itself Jewish Women for Justice in Israel Palestine, which blames Israel for the 60-year war waged against it. Sighing over the “desperate suicide attacks by Palestinians,” the group claims that “[f]ifty years of conflict have increasingly compromised the ideals that contributed to Israel’s founding.” In the eyes of Rosenthal and countless others who committed their signatures to the petition, Israel alone can do wrong.

Of the more than twenty professors contacted for comment about the petition by FrontPageMag.com only one, NYU’s Sinan Antoon, responded. But rather than explain why he supported a petition demanding that Israel cease defending itself, while urging no such restraint on terrorist groups seeking its annihilation, Antoon attacked FrontPageMag.com contributor Daniel Pipes, whom he called “fascist and racist,” saying that the magazine‘s association with Pipes made it “fruitless to engage.”

Indeed, the only acknowledgement of the existential threat underlying Israel’s current offensive was apparently made in jest. The petition carried the signature of one “Mr. H. Nasrallah,” who identified himself as the occupant of the “Joseph Goebbels Chair in Communications, Duke.” How telling that the only professor backing the petition to cast Hezbollah in its proper light doesn’t even exist.

By Dennis Prager
www.JewishWorldReview.com

I believe the Left has been wrong on virtually every great moral issue in the last 30 years.

During that period, it was wrong on the Cold War — it devoted far more energy to fighting anti-communism than to fighting communism.

It was wrong for attacking Israel for its destruction of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear reactor.

It was wrong on welfare.

It was wrong in its demanding less morally and intellectually from black Americans than from all other Americans.

It was wrong in advocating bilingual education for children of immigrants.

It was wrong in generally holding American society rather than violent criminals responsible for violent crime.

It was wrong in imposing its view on abortion on America through the courts rather than through the democratic process.

It was wrong in teaching a generation of men and women that men and women differ because of socialization not because of innate sex differences.

It was wrong in reducing sex to a purely biological and health issue for a generation of young Americans.

It was wrong in identifying “flag waving” with fascism.

It was wrong in supporting the teachers’ unions rather than students and educational reform.

It was wrong in allying itself with trial lawyers and blocking tort reform.

It was wrong in blocking the military from recruiting on campuses and teaching a generation of young Americans that “war is not the answer” when war is at times the one moral answer.

It was wrong in arguing that America is not based on Judeo-Christian values, but on secular ones like Western Europe.

It was wrong in advancing multiculturalism, which is an extreme form of moral relativism that holds all cultures morally identical and which is a doctrine designed to undermine American national identity.

In just about every instance, one could say that the Left was foolish, the Left was naive, the Left was wrong, even that the Left was dangerous. But in all of those cases, one could imagine a decent person holding any or even all of these positions.

But we now have a bright line that divides the decent — albeit usually wrong — Left from the indecent Left.

The Left’s anti-Israel positions until now were based, at least in theory, on its opposition to Israeli occupation of Arab land and its belief in the “cycle of violence” between Israel and its enemies. However, this time there is no occupied land involved and the violence is not a cycle with its implied lack of a beginning. There is a clear aggressor — a terror organization devoted to Islamicizing the Middle East and annihilating Israel — and no occupation.

That is why the Israeli Left is almost universally in favor of Israel’s war against Hezbollah. Amos Oz, probably Israel’s best-known novelist and leading spokesman of its Left, a lifetime critic of Israeli policy vis a vis the Palestinians, wrote in the Los Angeles Times:

“Many times in the past, the Israeli peace movement has criticized Israeli military operations. Not this time… This time, Israel is not invading Lebanon. It is defending itself from daily harassment and bombardment of dozens of our towns and villages… There can be no moral equation between Hezbollah and Israel. Hezbollah is targeting Israeli civilians wherever they are, while Israel is targeting mostly Hezbollah.”

Likewise, another longtime liberal critic of Israel, historian and Boston Globe columnist James Carroll, wrote last week:

“As one who rejects war, I regret Israel’s heavy bombing of Lebanon last week, as I deplored Israeli attacks in population centers and on infrastructure in Gaza… Yet, given the rejectionism of both Hamas and Hezbollah … is the path of negotiations actually open to Israel? … There is no moral equivalence between enemies here… It seems urgent [to] reaffirm foundational support for Israel… The fury of anti-Israel rage among Arabs and Muslims is accounted for only partially by the present conflict. It resuscitates … the long European habit of scapegoating Jews… No one should think that embedded contempt for Jews — anti-Semitism — is not part of the current crisis.”

Amos Oz and James Carroll are men of the Left who have been tested and passed the most clarifying moral litmus test of our time — Israel’s fight for existence against the primitives, fanatics and sadists in Hezbollah and Hamas and elsewhere in the Arab/Muslim world who wish to destroy it. Anyone on the Left who cannot see this is either bad, a useful idiot for Islamic terrorists, anti-Semitic or all three. There is no other explanation for morally condemning Israel’s war on Hezbollah.

Eric Hoffer was a longshoreman who turned into a philosopher, wrote columns for newspapers and some books. Eric Hoffer was a non-Jewish American social philosopher. He was born in 1902 and died in 1983, after writing nine books and winning the Presidential Medal of Freedom. His first book, The True Believer, published in 1951, was widely recognized as a classic. Here is one of his columns from 1968.

The Jews are a peculiar people: things permitted to other nations are forbidden to the Jews.

Other nations drive out thousands, even millions of people and there is no refugee problem. Russia did it, Poland and Czechoslovakia did it, Turkey threw out a million Greeks, and Algeria a million Frenchman. Indonesia threw out heaven knows how many Chinese—and no one says a word about refugees.

But in the case of Israel the displaced Arabs have become eternal refugees. Everyone insists that Israel must take back every single Arab. Arnold Toynbee calls the displacement of the Arabs an atrocity greater than any committed by the Nazis. Other nations when victorious on the battlefield dictate peace terms. But when Israel is victorious it must sue for peace.

Everyone expects the Jews to be the only real Christians in this world. Other nations when they are defeated survive and recover but should Israel be defeated it would be destroyed. Had Nasser triumphed last June [1967] he would have wiped Israel off the map, and no one would have lifted a finger to save the Jews. No commitment to the Jews by any government, including our own, is worth the paper it is written on.

There is a cry of outrage all over the world when people die in Vietnam or when two Blacks are executed in Rhodesia. But when Hitler slaughtered Jews no one remonstrated with him. The Swedes, who are ready to break off diplomatic relations with America because of what we do in Vietnam, did not let out a peep when Hitler was slaughtering Jews. They sent Hitler choice iron ore, and ball bearings, and serviced his troop trains to Norway.

The Jews are alone in the world. If Israel survives, it will be solely because of Jewish efforts. And Jewish resources. Yet at this moment Israel is our only reliable and unconditional ally. We can rely more on Israel than Israel can rely on us. And one has only to imagine what would have happened last summer [1967] had the Arabs and their Russian backers won the war to realize how vital the survival of Israel is to America and the West in general.

I have a premonition that will not leave me; as it goes with Israel so will it go with all of us.

Should Israel perish the holocaust will be upon us.

By Mark Steyn
www.jewishworldreview.com

There are several ways to fight a war. On the one hand, you can put on a uniform, climb into a tank, rumble across a field and fire on the other fellows’ tank. On the other, you can find a 12-year-old girl, persuade her to try on your new suicide-bomber belt and send her waddling off into the nearest pizza parlor.

The Geneva Conventions were designed to encourage the former and discourage the latter. The thinking behind them was that, if one had to have wars, it’s best if they’re fought by soldiers and armies. In return for having a rank and serial number and dressing the part, you’ll be treated as a lawful combatant should you fall into the hands of the other side. There’ll always be a bit of skulking around in street garb among civilian populations, but the idea was to ensure that it would not be rewarded — that there would, in fact, be a downside for going that route.

The U.S. Supreme Court has now blown a hole in the animating principle behind the Geneva Conventions by choosing to elevate an enemy that disdains the laws of war in order to facilitate the bombing of civilian targets and the beheading of individuals. The argument made by Justice John Paul Stevens is an Alice-In-Jihadland ruling that stands the Conventions on their head in order to give words the precise opposite of their plain meaning and intent. The same kind of inspired jurisprudence conjuring trick that detected in the emanations of the penumbra how the Framers of the U.S. Constitution cannily anticipated a need for partial-birth abortion and gay marriage has now effectively found a right to jihad — or, if you’re a female suicide bomber about to board an Israeli bus — a woman’s right to Jews.

The old-school wars were Britain vs. Germany, Japan vs. Russia, that sort of thing. But we don’t hold those as often as we once did, so, for the new school of warfare, Justice Stevens and his chums took refuge in Geneva’s Common Article Three, which begins as follows:

In the case of armed conflict not of an international character occurring in the territory of one of the High Contracting Parties…

The “High Contracting Parties” are nation states that are signatories to the treaties: America, Belgium, Fiji, Peru and so on. So what might an “armed conflict not of an international character” mean? Well, it refers mostly to civil wars and internal conflicts — say, when the Northern Wackistani Liberation Army takes on the Southern Wackistani Patriotic Front. As a cursory glance at Rwanda, Sudan or the Balkans shows, these are some of the most depraved slaughterfests. But the aim of the article is the same as that for your full-scale France vs. Prussia fixture: to persuade the parties to wage war in a “civilized” manner.

And what did the Supreme Court do? They decided first that Afghanistan was a signatory to the Conventions and thus the various ructions were “occurring in the territory of one of the High Contracting Parties.” They then decided that it was an “armed conflict” and not only that — here it comes, folks — but it was an “armed conflict not of an international character.”

Hang on a minute. At the time most of the Gitmo detainees were picked up, Afghanistan had more teams than the World Cup: There were Americans, Brits, Aussies, Saudis, Pakistanis, Yemenis, Iranians, Chechens, Uzbeks and all kinds of other fellows running around. Few “armed conflicts” have had so many “international characters.” The country was in the process of being bombed by the U.S. Air Force from bases on the British colony of Diego Garcia. It was being invaded by two permanent members of the U.N. Security Council.

Ah, but you’re not a Supreme Court justice. The reason why this was an “armed conflict not of an international character” is that al-Qaida is not a nation. So an article designed to cover internal local conflicts in signatory states within a convention designed to exclude unlawful combatants has been extended to cover non-signatory unlawful combatants in a global jihad taking place on every continent — and, in effect, read into U.S. law. Congratulations! Why not throw in a complimentary gay marriage for Osama and Mullah Omar while you’re at it? Justice Stevens and his pals have now upgraded every terrorist to the rank of field marshal. Wherever you’re picked up by the United States anywhere on the planet, chances are it’s the “territory of one of the High Contracting Parties” — Afghanistan, Brazil, Singapore, the world’s your oyster — and therefore, as you’re a member of al-Qaida, by definition it’s an “armed conflict not of an international character.”

And, of course, al-Qaida never need to sign the Conventions now, do they? As the ultimate beneficiaries of the progressive mindset, they get all the benefits with none of the obligations. We’re bound, they’re not. If you’re captured with the severed head of a U.S. soldier in your knapsack, you’re covered by Geneva — and, as your victim learned a mile back up the road, it’s too late for him to call his lawyer.

In the broader scheme, Justice Stevens and co, in torturing the language to explain why the international jihad is not “international,” have paradoxically conferred quasi-sovereignty on al-Qaida and its affiliates. The obvious question then is: doesn’t that also apply to every other “non-state actor” out there? When Hezbollah blew up that Jewish community center and killed 100 people in Buenos Aires in 1994, surely that too was (as Justice Stevens would see it) an “armed conflict not of an international character occurring in the territory of one of the High Contracting States.” In fact, under this definition, what isn’t?

By Joe McCain (brother of U.S. Senator John McCain)

There is a lot of worry popping up in the media just now — “Can Israel Survive?” Don’t worry about it. It relates to something that Palestinians, the Arabs, and perhaps most Americans don’t realize — the Jews are never going quietly again. Never. And if the world doesn’t come to understand that, then millions of Arabs are going to die. It’s as simple as that.

Throughout the history of the world, the most abused, kicked-around race of people have been the Jews. Not just during the holocaust of World War II, but for thousands of years. They have truly been “The Chosen People” in a terrible and tragic sense.

The Bible story of Egypt’s enslavement of the Jews is not just a story, it is history, if festooned with theological legend and heroic epics. In 70 A.D. the Romans, which had for a long time tolerated the Jews — even admired them as ’superior’ to other vassals — tired of their truculent demands for independence and decided on an early “Solution” to the Jewish problem. Jerusalem was sacked and reduced to near rubble, Jewish resistance was pursued and crushed by the implacable Roman War Machine — see ‘Masada’. And thus began The Diaspora, the dispersal of Jews throughout the rest of the world.

Their homeland destroyed, their culture crushed, they looked desperately for the few niches in a hostile world where they could be safe. That safety was fragile, and often subject to the whims of moody hosts. The words ‘pogrom’, ‘ghetto’, and ‘anti-Semitism’ come from this treatment of the first mono-theistic people. Throughout Europe, changing times meant sometimes tolerance, sometimes even warmth for the Jews, but eventually it meant hostility, then malevolence. There is not a country in Europe or Western Asia that at one time or another has not decided to lash out against the children of Moses, sometimes by whim, sometimes by manipulation.

Winston Churchill calls Edward I one of England’s very greatest kings. It was under his rule in the late 1200’s that Wales and Cornwall were hammered into the British crown, and Scotland and Ireland were invaded and occupied. He was also the first European monarch to set up a really effective administrative bureaucracy, surveyed and censured his kingdom, established laws and political divisions. But he also embraced the Jews.

Actually Edward didn’t embrace Jews so much as he embraced their money. For the English Jews had acquired wealth — understandable, because this people that could not own land or office, could not join most of the trades and professions, soon found out that money was a very good thing to accumulate. Much harder to take away than land or a store, was a hidden sock of gold and silver coins. Ever resourceful, Edward found a way — he borrowed money from the Jews to finance imperial ambitions in Europe, especially France. The loans were almost certainly not made gladly, but how do you refuse your King? Especially when he is ‘Edward the Hammer’. Then, rather than pay back the debt, Edward simply expelled the Jews. Edward was especially inventive — he did this twice. After a time, he invited the Jews back to their English homeland, borrowed more money, then expelled them again.

Most people do not know that Spain was one of the early entrants into The Renaissance. People from all over the world came to Spain in the late medieval period. All were welcome — Arabs, Jews, other Europeans. The University of Salamanca was one of the great centers of learning in the world — scholars of all nations, all fields came to Salamanca to share their knowledge and their ideas. But in 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella, having driven the last of Moors from the Spanish Shield, were persuaded by the righteous fundamentalists of the time to announce “The Act of Purification”. A series of steps were taken in which all Jews and Arabs and other non-Christians were expelled from the country, or would face the tools and the torches of The Inquisition. From this ‘cleansing’ come the Sephardic Jews — as opposed to the Ashkenazis of Eastern Europe. In Eastern Europe, the sporadic violence and brutality against Jews are common knowledge. ‘Fiddler’ without the music and the folksy humor. At times of fury, no accommodation by the Jew was good enough, no profile low enough, no village poor enough or distant enough.

From these come the near-steady flow of Jews to the United States. And despite the disdain of the Jews by most ‘American’ Americans, they came to grab the American Dream with both hands, and contributed everything from new ideas of enterprise in retail and entertainment to becoming some of our finest physicians and lawyers. The modern United States, in spite of itself, IS the United States in part because of its Jewish blood.

Then the Nazi Holocaust — the corralling, sorting, orderly eradication of millions of the people of Moses. Not something that other realms in other times didn’t try to do, by the way, the Germans were just more organized and had better murder technology.

I stood in the center of Dachau for an entire day, about 15 years ago, trying to comprehend how this could have happened. I had gone there on a side trip from Munich, vaguely curious about this Dachau. I soon became engulfed in the enormity of what had occurred there nestled in this middle and working class neighborhood.

How could human beings do this to other human beings, hear their cries, their pleas, their terror, their pain, and continue without apparently even wincing? I no longer wonder. At some times, some places, ANY sect of the human race is capable of horrors against their fellow man, whether a member of the Waffen SS, a Serbian sniper, a Turkish policeman in 1920’s Armenia, a Mississippi Klansman. Because even in the United States not all was a Rose Garden. For a long time Jews had quotas in our universities and graduate schools. Only so many Jews could be in a medical or law school at one time. Jews were disparaged widely. I remember as a kid Jewish jokes told without a wince — “Why do Jews have such big noses?”

Well, now the Jews have a homeland again. A place that is theirs. And that’s the point. It doesn’t matter how many times the United States and European powers try to rein in Israel, if it comes down to survival of its nation, its people, they will fight like no lioness has ever fought to save her cubs. They will fight with a ferocity, a determination, and a skill, that will astound us.

And many will die, mostly their attackers, I believe. If there were a macabre historical betting parlor, my money would be on the Israelis to be standing at the end. As we killed the kamikazes and the Wehrmacht soldaten of World War II, so will the Israelis kill their suicidal attackers, until there are not enough to torment them.

The irony goes unnoticed — while we are hammering away to punish those who brought the horrors of last September here, we restrain the Israelis from the same retaliation. Not the same thing, of course — We are We, They are They. While we mourn and seethe at September 11th, we don’t notice that Israel has a September 11th sometimes every day.

We may not notice, but it doesn’t make any difference. And it doesn’t make any difference whether you are pro-Israeli or you think Israel is the bully of the Middle East. If it comes to where a new holocaust looms — with or without the concurrence of the United States and Europe — Israel will lash out without pause or restraint at those who would try to annihilate their country.

The Jews will not go quietly again.

By Jonathan Garthwaite
www.townhall.com

September 11th was a confusing day for all Americans, but especially for our youngest citizens. Children were confused. Teachers were unprepared. Kids all over America had questions as they headed home early. Living so close to the Pentagon made it seem personal to my children. My daughter’s first question to me was, “Dad, why do they want to kill us?”

Back on September 11th, most of us hadn’t been studying up on al-Qaeda or really even considering the possibility of terrorism happening on American soil. I fumbled around for a few minutes trying to think up something to say that would be profound yet sensitive to the emotions of a young child. I can’t remember my exact words, but the blank gaze on my daughter’s face made it obvious that I hadn’t eased her confusion. I tried to explain religious fanaticism and suicide bombers, but I didn’t succeed there either.

It was all too simple to her young mind though: “They don’t like us, do they?”

How could I explain to a child how an eighteen-year-old boy could strap a bomb to his waist, casually walk into a cafe filled with women and children, and blow himself to bits? My daughter had no ability to grasp that degree of hate and insanity.

For the past five years, our children have been shielded somewhat from further images of terror, but our friends and allies overseas haven’t been as fortunate.

In 2002, over 200 died in Bali. In 2003, nearly 60 died in Istanbul. In 2004, nearly 200 died in the Madrid train bombings. In 2005, nearly 60 died in the London subway and nearly 90 died in bombings in Egypt. And these were just the big ones.

September 11th wasn’t a fluke, once-in-a-lifetime event. It just was up-close and personal for America that day. Some may say that our allies are just collateral damage in a war between America and the Islamic terrorists. They’re not. They are the target, just as we are, because they share the ideals of democracy, freedom, and prosperity that the enemy hates.

For the past few years, appeasers have argued that it is our presence in Iraq that motivates further terror attacks. The evidence proves otherwise. Our enemies don’t attack us because we’re an “empire.” They attack because they want an empire of their own. One without us.

This week nearly 200 Indians were killed by bombs aboard commuter trains in Mumbai (formerly Bombay). These weren’t soldiers in the war on terror. They were simply innocent men and women coming home from a long day’s labor to see their families. They were crowded by the hundreds onto train cars thinking about their evening plans instead of the War on Terror. They were helpless victims of a vicious enemy that follows no rules of combat and shows no mercy. Yet our own Supreme Court recently granted al-Qaeda prisoners the rights of the Geneva Convention, a treaty that terrorist organizations have never signed and certainly weren’t following when they videotaped beheadings of innocent people.

Even American adults are unable to comprehend this degree of irrational hatred, though we spend hours listening to experts and pundits explain the complexities of the terrorist mindset.

Perhaps we could learn from our youngest citizens. Perhaps there are people out there who simply just hate us. Sometimes it really is as simple as it first seems.

The images of the Mumbai bombings are on the television now and it’s impossible for children to miss them. I wish I had a better answer five years later. Our enemies still don’t like us and that won’t change. In fact, this is a war that our children — and our grandchildren — will probably have to wage as well. For their sakes, we must never try to rationalize the hatred directed against us.

www.omegaletter.com

We set out yesterday on the resumption of our road trip, headed for Illinois. This time, we were as ready as we could be.

I have three separate ways to connect to the internet. At a campsite, I can usually get wireless internet, so Mike rigged up a ‘repeater’ of sorts to ensure a usable signal. If there is no wireless, I have my Cingular aircard as backup.

If not, I have my Directway Satellite dish, which sets up in less than fifteen minutes and I am good to go. Plus, my Dish network satellite dish helps keep up to date with what is happening.

I was so proud — I thought of EVERYTHING. So when we pulled in to an RV camp just outside Sturgis, MI, the only amenities I was really concerned with were septic and water.

I never banked on the trees. Never even considered it. The trees were so thick I couldn’t get a signal from the campsite’s wireless. They were so thick I couldn’t get a signal on my Directway dish.

My last backup is my Cingular Aircard. Two bars. Enough to log onto Yahoo Messenger, but not enough to be able to open a web page. I couldn’t even watch the news to keep up with events in the Middle East. Sigh.

So, this morning, we headed to a roadside rest area where I could get a Cingular signal and fired up the generator.

And we learned a new lesson. Never underestimate the enemy’s capacity for evil. In his hands, even the trees can be a weapon against the Kingdom.

Assessment:

One of the principle objections offered by Bible skeptics is that if there were a loving and all-powerful God, then, why is the world such an evil place?

There is no doubt that evil exists. In fact, evil is the default state of humanity. (Babies have to be taught not to bite, after all.) Did God create evil?

God is both loving and all-powerful. Despite this, He seems unwilling or incapable of preventing the vast amount of evil and suffering in this world.

The skeptic argues that either God is not loving or all powerful, or that He does not exist at all, because if He DID exist, then does He allow so much evil to exist?

The simple fact is, the universe is created in a balance. In order for there to be darkness, there must first be light. Darkness is a measure of the absence of light. Without the prior existence of light, darkness could not exist.

In order for there to be cold, there must first be heat. Cold is a measure of the absence of heat. Without heat, cold could not exist. Evil is a measure of the absence of good. Without good, evil could not exist.

Evil is not a creation of God, since it cannot exist outside of the creation of good. But it does exist, because good exists.

Think of it like a battery. It takes both the positive and negative poles to create power. Good would have no power to effect change without evil, just as evil has no existence without good.

How could one choose good if there were no evil against which to measure it? In His creation, God never pronounced the universe ‘perfect’ — He found some of His creation to be ‘good’ some of it to be ‘very good’ and even some of it that He pronounced, ‘not good’.

“The LORD God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.” (Genesis 2:18)

Both the Bible and science tell us this present universe was designed to be temporary. The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics proves there is not enough matter in the universe to cause to contract.

That means the universe will continue to expand indefinitely and all the stars will eventually burn out and life would not be possible for the entire rest of the history of the universe.

The Bible says the universe was designed to be temporary, and it will eventually be replaced by a perfect universe that will be permanent. Why would God create a temporary universe instead of creating a perfect, permanent one in the first place?

God created the universe as it exists for the express purpose of allowing free will spiritual beings the opportunity to choose to have fellowship with Him, or to reject Him. Those who choose to have fellowship with Him will do so in some future, perfect creation.

And if His purpose is to have free-will fellowship in some future creation, then there must also exist some means by which these spiritual beings can make a choice whether or not to enter into this relationship with Him. “…I will not again curse the ground any more for man’s sake; for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth.” (Genesis 8:21)

The Bible tells us that humanity is desperately wicked and sinful (Romans 3:10-18,23). God allows human beings to commit sin because if He were to prevent it, the human race would not truly be free.

The Apostle Paul outlines God’s fourteen-point indictment against the human race;

1. There is none righteous, no, not one.
2. There is none that understandeth,
3. there is none that seeketh after God.
4. They are all gone out of the way,
5. they are together become unprofitable;
6. there is none that doeth good, no, not one.
7. Their throat is an open sepulchre;
8. with their tongues they have used deceit;
9. the poison of asps is under their lips:
10. Whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness:
11. Their feet are swift to shed blood:
12. Destruction and misery are in their ways:
13. And the way of peace have they not known:
14. There is no fear of God before their eyes. (Romans 3:10-18)

It takes an incredible capacity for self-deception for one not to see themselves mirrored in that list. Think back to before you were saved. That is the condition of every lost person you meet. Paul goes on to point out that ” all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God,” (3:23) but that there is an offer extended to us to be “justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.” (3:24)

“Where is boasting then? It is excluded. By what law? of works? Nay: but by the law of faith. Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law.” (3:27-28)

So God allows evil to exist in order to allow free will to exist. The Scriptures tell us that God is the Creator and the source of all good, and it reveals that, during this present dispensation, Satan is the god of this world and the source of all evil.

“In whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them.” (2nd Corinthians 4:4). Much of the suffering that exists in this world is a direct result of evil choices made by free-will human beings that impact others. Natural disasters — hurricanes, volcanoes, etc., are part of the cycle of power required by this imperfect universe in order for it to exist in balance.

In the new creation, there will be some limits on our free will, since the new creation will not contain evil. We exist in this life to give us a chance to agree to give up some of that free will in the next. That is what it means to turn one’s life and will over to Jesus Christ. It is a choice to surrender our will to God.

“In this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that your faith–of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire–may be proved genuine and may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.” (1 Peter 1:6-7)

Those who refuse the opportunity in this life will not be forced to in the next life, but will instead exist separately from the new creation, and apart from God. The place set aside for those who reject God is the place originally prepared for the devil and his angels. (Matthew 25:41).

Bad things happen in this universe, because that is how it is designed. No human being has in himself ever been righteous. Even Adam was not righteous: he was innocent–not knowing good and evil.

Ultimately, there is not an answer to these questions that we can fully comprehend. We, as finite human beings, can never fully understand an infinite God (Romans 11:33-34). Sometimes we think we understand why God is doing something, only to find out later that it was for a different purpose than we originally thought. We look at things from an earthly perspective.

God looks at things from an eternal perspective; “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, So are My ways higher than your ways, And My thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:9).

It is impossible for us finite human beings to understand the ways of an infinite God (Romans 11:33-35). Second, we must realize that God is not responsible for the wicked acts of evil men.

God had to allow the possibility of evil for us to have a true choice of whether to worship God or not. If we never had to suffer and experience evil, would we know how wonderful heaven is?

We don’t know everything, but we can be confident of knowing this:

“And we know that ALL THINGS WORK TOGETHER FOR GOOD to them that love God, to them who are the called according to His purpose.” (Romans 8:28)

Even the existence of evil trees.

By Charles Krauthammer
TIME

Israel Invades Gaza. That is in response to an attack from Gaza that killed two Israelis and wounded another, who was kidnapped and brought back to Gaza…which, in turn, was in response to Israel’s targeted killing of terrorist leaders in Gaza…which, in turn, was in response to the indiscriminate shelling of Israeli towns by rockets launched from Gaza.

Of all the conflicts in the world, the one that seems the most tediously and hopelessly endless is the Arab-Israeli dispute, which has been going on in much the same way, it seems, for 60 years. Just about every story you’ll see will characterize Israel’s invasion of Gaza as a continuation of the cycle of violence.

Cycles are circular. They have no end. They have no beginning. That is why, as tempting as that figure of speech is to use, in this case it is false. It is as false as calling American attacks on Taliban remnants in Afghanistan part of a cycle of violence between the U.S. and al-Qaeda or, as Osama bin Laden would have it, between Islam and the Crusaders going back to 1099. Every party has its grievances—even Hitler had his list when he invaded Poland in 1939—but every conflict has its origin.

What is so remarkable about the current wave of violence in Gaza is that the event at the origin of the “cycle” is not at all historical, but very contemporary. The event is not buried in the mists of history. It occurred less than one year ago. Before the eyes of the whole world, Israel left Gaza. Every Jew, every soldier, every military installation, every remnant of Israeli occupation was uprooted and taken away.

How do the Palestinians respond? What have they done with Gaza, the first Palestinian territory in history to be independent, something neither the Ottomans nor the British nor the Egyptians nor the Jordanians, all of whom ruled Palestinians before the Israelis, ever permitted? On the very day of Israel’s final pullout, the Palestinians began firing rockets out of Gaza into Israeli towns on the other side of the border. And remember: those are attacks not on settlers but on civilians in Israel proper, the pre-1967 Israel that the international community recognizes as legitimately part of sovereign Israel, a member state of the U.N. A thousand rockets have fallen since.

For what possible reason? Before the withdrawal, attacks across the border could have been rationalized with the usual Palestinian mantra of occupation, settlements and so on. But what can one say after the withdrawal?

The logic for those continued attacks is to be found in the so-called phase plan adopted in 1974 by the Palestine National Council in Cairo. Realizing that they would never be able to destroy Israel in one fell swoop, the Palestinians adopted a graduated plan to wipe out Israel. First, accept any territory given to them in any part of historic Palestine. Then, use that sanctuary to wage war until Israel is destroyed.

So in 2005 the Palestinians are given Gaza, free of any Jews. Do they begin building the state they say they want, constructing schools and roads and hospitals? No. They launch rockets at civilians and dig a 300-yard tunnel under the border to attack Israeli soldiers and bring back a hostage.

And this time the terrorism is carried out not by some shadowy group that the Palestinian leader can disavow, however disingenuously. This is Hamas in action—the group that was recently elected to lead the Palestinians. At least there is now truth in advertising: a Palestinian government openly committed to terrorism and to the destruction of a member state of the U.N. openly uses terrorism to carry on its war.

That is no cycle. That is an arrow. That is action with a purpose. The action began 59 years ago when the U.N. voted to solve the Palestine conundrum then ruled by Britain by creating a Jewish state and a Palestinian state side by side. The Jews accepted the compromise; the Palestinians rejected it and joined five outside Arab countries in a war to destroy the Jewish state and take all the territory for themselves.

They failed, and Israel survived. That remains, in the Palestinian view, Israel’s original sin, the foundational crime for the cycle: Israel’s survival. That’s the reason for the rockets, for the tunneling, for the kidnapping—and for Israel’s current response.

If that history is too ancient, consider the history of the past 12 months. Gaza is free of occupation, yet Gaza wages war. Why? Because this war is not about occupation, but about Israel’s very existence. The so-called cycle will continue until the arrow is abandoned and the Palestinians accept a compromise—or until the arrow finds its mark and Israel dies.

By Diana West
www.townhall.com

I was supposed to go to New York City this week, and found myself making travel arrangements on 7/11, the latest blood-red letter day of jihadist infamy. That was when bombers struck in Bombay, killing more than 200 and wounding more than 700 rush-hour commuters just trying to get home for dinner. I decided to fly.

But was that the best (read: safest) way to go? The plot to blow up Manhattan’s Holland Tunnel had this same week been “disrupted,” as they say, so maybe driving a car before another plot was cooked up was the better bet. But since not even the Department of Homeland Security could “disrupt” the heavy traffic on the New Jersey Turnpike, I still decided to fly.

Then again, aviation news was hardly confidence-building. The Houston Chronicle reported that a man with “a Middle Eastern name” and, as one airport screener put it, “all the components” of a bomb except for the explosives (a 9-volt battery taped to an alarm clock, a copy of the Koran, and “gutted out” shoes) was somehow cleared to fly the friendly skies by a local policeman. Which sounds quite nuts. And while the cop involved has been transferred to a desk job, that’s no relief.

That’s because this is just life as we know it, and, worse, life as we expect to know it in America, land of the free and stomping ground of the Islamic terrorist. Frankly, I hardly recognize the old place. The “home of the brave” becomes something else again when “brave” necessarily constitutes booking that domestic flight, taking that commuter train and sitting like ducks wondering whether we’ll reach our destination in one piece — unlike hundreds of innocents in Bombay. An Indian railway laborer made the carnage vivid to the Washington Post: “We collected scattered limbs with our own hands and put them in bundles and sent them to hospital.”

Noting the ensuing security upsurge in American cities, Islamic expert Robert Spencer wrote the following at his must-read Web site, JihadWatch.org:

“This is the effect of terror, and this is just what the terrorists want that effect to be. It ties up their enemies’ time and money, and it strikes fear in their hearts, in accordance with the Qur’an: ‘Against them make ready your strength to the utmost of your power, including steeds of war, to strike terror into (the hearts of) the enemies, of Allah and your enemies, and others besides, whom ye may not know, but whom Allah doth know. Whatever ye shall spend in the cause of Allah, shall be repaid unto you, and ye shall not be treated unjustly (8:60).’”

Spencer continued: “Of course, from the infidels’ standpoint all anti-terror measures must be undertaken. But they should be accompanied by a strength of will that realizes that it is precisely fear and the loss of the will to resist that the jihadists are ultimately hoping to bring about.”

He’s right. The will to resist is indeed the target of jihadists from India to Israel, from New York City to London. But, as Spencer would undoubtedly agree, security measures alone — walking through metal detectors (in our socks), submitting our belongings to random searches — don’t constitute policy. They don’t solve the problem of global jihad: the war of terrorism. At best, security measures thwart acts of terrorism — and thank goodness — but only for another day, another trip, another short hop home.

Besides the will to resist, then, we need the knowledge to resist — the knowledge that there is in the religion of Islam itself the historical, inexorable and driving force behind what the entire non-Muslim world is now experiencing as jihad terror. Whether most Muslims wouldn’t hurt a fly is an increasingly irrelevant footnote to the hostile aggression of other Muslims who, in a very short time, have actually transformed civilization as we used to know it.

If the will to resist allows us to manage the threat of violence, the will to connect the dots would compel us to eliminate it. How? By carefully examining and, I would hope, reconsidering and reversing, through foreign, domestic and immigration initiatives, what should now be seen, gimlet-eyed, as the Islamization of the non-Islamic world. Such an assessment, however, is all too vulnerable to catcall-attacks of “bigotry,” even “Nazism” — a deceptively inverted assault given the doctrinal bigotry and similarities to Nazism historically promulgated by the Islamic creed.

But it’s something to think about this summer — on a vacation trip.

By Mona Charen
www.townhall.com

Israel is currently fighting a two-front war after both Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon attacked across international frontiers. We await denunciations of these acts of aggression from the United Nations Security Council, the European Union or human rights organizations. Denunciations of Israel, of course, are swift. The U.S. vetoed a proposed Security Council resolution condemning Israel. An angry e-mailer writes to me demanding to know how Israel can justify attacking the Beirut airport. And as if taking orders directly from Tehran, Amnesty International condemned Israel for striking at Lebanon. Amnesty also called upon Hezbollah to treat the two IDF soldiers it kidnapped humanely — but amazingly did not call upon Hezbollah to release them. The Washington Post, hoping to provide context for this crisis, provides a chart in the July 13 edition labeled “Events that led to the military escalation in the Gaza Strip and southern Lebanon.” Under “Gaza,” the Post starts with the swearing in of the Hamas government on March 29. Fair enough. But the next item is “June 9: Explosion kills seven members of a Gaza family. Witnesses blame Israeli artillery, but Israel denies it.” Missing is any reference to the non-stop shelling of Israel from the Gaza strip that began in 2005 and has not let up since. Nearly 3,000 rockets have been fired from Gaza into Israel.

And why? If you believe the conventional wisdom about the conflict, then getting Israeli “occupying” forces out of Gaza (and the West Bank) was exactly what the Palestinians most fervently wished to achieve. The occupation, they ceaselessly wailed, was what kept them from a decent life, from economic advancement, from dignity and from peace. They could not be expected, advised Hanan Ashrawi and a host of other spokesmen, to cease their terror against Israel so long as the occupation continued. When Israel, for its own reasons, elected to accommodate them and withdrew from Gaza (even uprooting several thousand Israeli settlers in the process), the Palestinian moment should have dawned. Instead of starting to build their “secular democratic state,” the Palestinians immediately began attacking Israel across the border. Strange behavior for people whose supposed goal was an independent state living side by side with Israel. But not so strange if the Palestinians’ goal is actually to eliminate the Jewish state — as the Hamas movement, winner of the last election, is pledged to do. (Which is why many hardheaded Israelis believe withdrawal from Gaza was a mistake. The Palestinians interpreted it as a sign of weakness.)

Anyone who has watched what the Palestinians have become over the past quarter-century could not be deluded into believing that their goal was peace. Under the thugocracy of Yasser Arafat, and aided by the Islamic radicals, the Palestinians (and Arabs generally) have been steeped in the most bitter hatred it is possible for one people to feel for another. No crime is so monstrous or incredible that it has not been attributed to Jews and Israelis, no motive more base and no power more exaggerated. The Washington Post quotes a Lebanese butcher on the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers: “As soon as I heard the news I was overjoyed. It was like Italy winning the World Cup.” A poll by the Jerusalem Media and Communication Center found that 77 percent of Palestinians agree. Sixty-seven percent support further abductions.

Another piece of conventional wisdom that cannot stand up to the weight of recent events is the notion that Sunnis and Shiites will never cooperate. While it is true that a low-grade civil war is now underway between the two groups in Baghdad, the Shiites in Lebanon (who serve Iran) seem to be having no difficulty working with the Sunnis in Gaza. In fact, as Michael Ledeen reports in National Review Online (where, by the way, you can also find my new blog at monacharen.nationalreview.com), the mullahs in Iran have quite openly supported the Baathist “insurgents” in Iraq. There are rumors that Shiite Iran is harboring Sunni Osama bin Laden. What could draw these traditional foes into one another’s arms? Only a common enemy.