Levitt Letter Extra News

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.