Muslim & Jewish Conflict

On Saturday, December 27, 2008, the Israeli Air Force (IAF) carried out a massive air strike on Hamas targets throughout the Gaza Strip in retaliation for the terrorist group’s continued rocket fire on Israeli civilians. The attack, dubbed “Cast Lead” was directed at Hamas security installations, training camp, weapons manufacturing plants, and other Hamas military facilities. Sources from both sides of the conflict admit that there was not a single Hamas facility that did not suffer major damage. A report by Israel National News said that experts called it “the most lethal single day of bombing in the region in at least 41 years.” The casualty count is 282 dead (including several top Hamas commanders) and 330 wounded, but that should rise as more bodies are recovered from the rubble. Even Arab sources are admitting that Israel managed to keep the casualties almost entirely to Hamas fighters. All Israeli planes and pilots returned home unharmed.

In 2005, Israel unilaterally evacuated the Gaza Strip after 38 year there with to give the Palestinian Arabs a chance to run their own area. Jewish groups purchased the hot houses previously used by evacuating Israelis to successfully grow vegetables in the arid Gaza soil; and they donated the hot houses to the Palestinians. It was hoped that the agricultural bounty provided by the hot houses, along with the extensive Gazan employment in Israel would be the basis for a successful Gaza economy. Almost immediately, however, the plans started to unfurl. Video footage showed Arabs triumphantly desecrating evacuated synagogues and destroying infrastructure left for them by the evacuating Israelis. The hot houses were destroy or misused by Arabs and never produced the product that had produced earlier. Moreover, in January 2006, Hamas won an electoral victory in Gaza and in June 2007, ousted all Fatah forces in a military takeover. Soon after that, Hamas turned Gaza into a base for terrorist attacks on Israel, forcing the latter to close the crossings that brought both terrorists and workers into Israel. Since 2005, Palestinian Arabs have fired over 6,000 missiles onto Israeli civilians, according to Israeli and Arab sources.

Israeli defensive efforts put an end to Hamas’ suicide bombers and terror attacks on the Jewish state and so Hamas and its surrogates began firing rockets and missiles indiscriminately into Israeli civilian areas located in the Negev region in Israel’s south. After the Hamas-Hezbollah War in the summer of 2006, the Israel and Hamas agreed to a truce. Every Hamas truce—or hudna–is temporary and engaged in only until the terror group believes it might have the strength to fight Israel. That war was started by an unprovoked raid by Hamas into Israeli territory and its kidnapping of Israeli, Gilad Shalit. Hamas has refused to allow the Red Cross or other international bodies see Shalit, and his fate remains unclear to this day. Despite the hudna, there were regular rocket attacks on Israeli civilians by Hamas until Israeli efforts forced a temporary halt. But on December 19, Hamas unilaterally voided continuation of the truce and resumed regular rocket attacks on Israeli civilians. In the week that followed, the terror group launched over 200 rockets onto Israeli civilian areas. Ultimately, that is what forced Israel’s hand.

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Tags: conflict, israel, middle-east, palestine, war

Indian Muslims Burning Indian Flag

Albert Einstein once said “The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it.” What happened in Mumbai in the closing days of November 2008 was evil. The terrorists who planned and financed it were evil. The terrorists who carried it out were evil. And the terrorists who provided tactical and other support were evil. That should surprise no one. People long have known the depths of depravity to which radical Islam is capable of sinking. Have they not given us ample evidence?

 Just since the September 11, 2001 bombings that killed over 3000 Americans, radical Islamists have carried out over 11,000 terror attacks worldwide. While they were not the first to use suicide bombers or hijack airplanes, Islamists carried both to new heights as their principle weapons of terror. They have blown up schools and students, driven busses into crowds of people, set off terror bombs on public transportation and elsewhere in dozens of countries throughout Asia and Europe. Their leaders openly call for genocide against Jews and Hindus, and their followers are trying to carry out those calls. Wherever they have had the power to do so, they deliberately destroy religious shrines and houses of worship and brag about it as step in destroying other faiths or variants of Islam. And then they have the gall to claim that these things were done because they were angry at some perceived offense, frustrated at their current living conditions, or defending their own warped conception of human rights. So, while terrible, are the events that unfolded in ten locations across Mumbai anything new or surprising? Did the terrorists do anything they have not promised us they would do?

The tragedy is that these events could have been prevented. Radical Islam has been warning the rest of us that it means to re-make our planet in its own image and kill anybody that threatens to stand in its way. Its practitioners have vowed repeatedly to destroy India as an abomination against Islam; yet its leaders act as if they were only kidding. Despite the country experiencing almost non-stop Islamist attacks, the ruling Congress Party maintains a strict policy of non-confrontation with home-grown Muslims who support the radical organizations. It recently showed far more zeal in prosecuting an alleged “Hindu terrorist” after a bomb went off in a predominantly Muslim town. The accused Hindu priest was interrogated several times, despite the fact that her only tie to the bombing was a car used in the attack, which 38 year-old Sadhwi Pragya Singh Thakur had sold years before. In a policy of appeasement similar to Britain’s (which was also a target in the Mumbai attacks), that same government deliberately refrains from identifying terrorists as Muslim.

Indian Hindus often complain that the government is not carrying out its mandate of secularism but practices a “pseudo-secularism” that bends over backwards to favor minorities even if it means heaping disabilities on Hinduism or Hindus. Its recently-passed budget contained millions in subsidies for Muslims to go on the Hajj to Mecca and pilgrimages to Jerusalem; but not a penny for the numerous but uncounted Hindu refugees from Islamist ethnic cleansing in Bangladesh. Other groups are agitating because the government took possession of Hindu temples but refuses to maintain them.

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Tags: india, Islam, israel, mumbai, muslim, terrorism

 

Dr. Richard Benkin

On November 1, 2008, I delivered the Arvind Ghosh Memorial Lecture to the Human Empowerment Convention in suburban Chicago. The address was interrupted more than a half dozen times with applause and received a standing ovation at its conclusion. The following are excerpts from that address.

“Some years back, my mother, wife, and daughter were sitting in a Jerusalem restaurant enjoying a meal. Not many weeks later, a Palestinian terrorist entered the restaurant and blew himself up, [and] I realized that had my mother, my wife, and my daughter been there that day, the murderers would have considered their deaths something glorious…. Anyone who could glory in the deaths of my mother, my wife, and my daughter is an enemy so vile that…there can be no quarter, no negotiation, no compromise; and in the fight against it there can be no rest….

“Why is there any question about the need to fight them unrelentingly and to destroy them utterly….Our enemy’s expressed goals are to destroy our faiths, our values, our ways of life….Fuzzy thinking about this can destroy us, and…no matter [who] tries to convince us otherwise, [we] must remain focused on what we have to do to defeat them….This enemy has a name, and we need to use it: radical Islam. Not terrorism, which is only a tactic; or unspecified radicals, militants, or whatever politically correct word is in fashion but Islamist radicals….If we are engaged in a war on ‘terror,’ we are [merely] reacting to a tactic [and] not engaged in a comprehensive effort to defeat the terrorists and those who send them. If our enemies are merely “the extremists,” we have [abandoned] the search for any ideology…that unites those extremists and motivates them. [That] dilutes our struggle, weakens us, and strengthens our enemies…radical Islamists.

“An alliance of Israel, India, and the United States…can [easily] dispose of the terrorists and the national leaders that support them…Look at what each nation has done by itself. Ever since its 1948 birth, Israel has been bedeviled by nation-states and terrorist groups determined to destroy it. It is the only nation on earth that has never known a day of peace….Invaded by multiple Arab militaries in 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973…Israel beat them all back so thoroughly, that they had to change tactics and send terror proxies to do their work…. But the terrorists have failed, too. Suicide bombings [and rocket strikes from Gaza] have been virtually eliminated….In a 2007 conversation with an Israeli insider, I noted how the number of terror attacks dropped significantly, even though the terrorists keep trying….‘Let me tell you a secret,’ he whispered, smiling. ‘We stop most of them in their beds.’ Israel has survived; more than that, it has thrived to become one of the world’s technological giants….

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Tags: Bangladesh, Hinduism, india, israel, Politics