If a war begins in the neighborhood of the Persian Gulf, it will likely have less to do with a slugging match between Israel and Iran, than a simmering Sunni-Shiite war that is about to flare up into regional violence through a combination of factors dating back decades and recent events in the region.

The rise of a fanatically violent Shiite Islamist state has done more to destabilize the region than anything else. As much as Sunni Arabs prattle on about Zionist conspiracies, a few million Jews sandwiched in a narrow strip of land against the Mediterranean are no threat to them. But a rival version of Islam that is spearhead by a non-Arab ethnic group and placed at the service of a powerful military machine and an oil economy is what keeps them up at night.

The fall of Saddam put Iraq up for grabs and raised the prospect of a Shiite superstate with a vast military and massive oil reserves. It also tipped Syria and its leftover Baath Party run by a variant Shiite sect directly into Tehran’s paws. Add nuclear weapons to the Iran-Iraq-Syria trinity and you are looking at the worst nightmare of every Sunni Arab prince living in polished oil mansions near what he still insists on calling the Arabian Gulf.

A Shiite superstate will checkmate the Sunni oil monarchies and leave them no choice but to beg America to garrison them with so many troops, air bases and nuclear missiles that they might as well be the 51′st through 59th states. Using foreign soldiers to protect themselves isn’t all that objectionable to the fat lazy oil monarchies who already use armies of foreigners to do everything for them. But the American troops who saved the Saudis and Kuwaitis from Saddam also gave Bin Laden a pretext for turning the conflict on its axis.

The Gulf Sunni Arab princelings know that a massive infusion of American troops will bring out more Bin Ladens, and even the American military hierarchy which knows to salaam to the princes will lose patience fast when the Khobar Towers bombing repeats itself enough times. Americans fighting their own people will quickly turn their countries into another Afghanistan. On top of that the Americans won’t stay there forever.

The Gulfies could develop competent armies, but no Muslim state trusts its own military. If all those billions and billions in state of the art American military equipment were put into the hands of competent generals, instead of the cousins and nephews of the royal family, then very shortly the generals would be running the country. And even if they could trust the generals, the locals have no reliable military tradition except as caravan raiders and have gotten a little too used to the good life to fight for any other reason than an outburst of Koranic fanaticism by the third son of the family.

The Persians have a long proud military tradition. The Egyptians and the Syrians picked up something from their European colonizers. But the Gulfies are not good for much except beating their Filipino maids and getting high on hashish and blowing themselves up to get to paradise. The Iranian military even in its current state would clean their clocks faster than you could say, Alakazam and they know it.

What the Gulfies lack in military skills, they more than make up for in underhanded cunning. If they can’t import an infidel army and they can’t build their own army, then they will follow the honorable tradition of finding a counterbalance to the enemy. The Gulfies have been nurturing the Muslim Brotherhood and funding Al-Jazeera. Combine the two with an American administration eager to win over the Muslim world by reforming American foreign policy and the Gulfies got their own Arab Spring.

The real purpose of the Arab Spring was to create a Sunni Islamist superstate or regional alliance to counter the threat of a Shiite Islamist superstate. With the Muslim Brotherhood sweeping across North Africa all the way to Egypt, the harvest includes semi-secular states with competent armies and if Syria can be tipped into that camp, then Iran will lose its puppet and the Sunni superstate will have a military tipped with top of the line American and Russian equipment, funded by Gulfie oil money and backed by the lunatic fanaticism of Islamist fighters.

With America in decline, the Gulfies touched off the Arab Spring to create Janissary armies, but this time composed of devout Muslims, to keep the Shiites at bay. Iran pushed back contesting Saudi influenced territory in Bahrain and the Emir of Qatar is demanding that his slaves in Washington get cracking and “liberate” Syria for membership in the Sunni Caliphate.

That just leaves one wild card. Not Libya, which has been swung into the Sunni Islamist camp the hard way with NATO jets and Libyan Islamic Fighting Group terrorists. Not Turkey, which has repressed the last of its secular military, and is now pushing for Sunni regime change in Syria. The regional wild card is the only non-Muslim state in the area. Israel.

The theological relationship of Sunni and Shiite Islamists to Israel is murderous. The ascendance of Mohammed and the triumph of his Caliph successors was supposed to put an end to an independent Jewish existence. The triumph of Islam was directly measured through the subjugation of Christians and Jews. As the more apocalyptic of the duo, the Shiites would like to wipe Israel out to showcase their own private little armageddon. Turning the Jewish state into dust, or at least its inhabitants, would help lock in their case to being the rightful successors of their genocidal prophet who had purged the Jews from his part of the desert.

The Sunnis tend to be more patient. They want Israel gone, but they also recognize it as a valuable pawn in their own games. Rather than being a disruptive influence on the region, like Iran, it’s a unifying force that gives Muslims a common enemy and a common aspiration. Israel is a theological enemy, but useful in practice. And whatever happens they cannot allow the Shiites to wipe it out. Like comic book supervillains, they have to be the one to kill the superhero or their existence is meaningless.

Whoever is blowing up Iranian nuclear scientists and facilities, it isn’t likely to be roving teams of Mossad agents, most likely it’s Iran’s own internal divisions being exploited by some combination of Western intelligence, Israeli intelligence and the intermediaries between the local Iranian opponents of the regime carrying out the attacks and foreign intelligence agencies who are almost certainly Iran’s own neighbors.

There are two reasons why Israel demolishes Arab homes: response to illegal construction and non-lethal counter-terrorism measures.

Illegal construction

Many NGOs condemn Israeli demolition of Arab homes as illegal collective punishment or random acts of harassment.  The credibility of these accusations, and of the accusers themselves, is destroyed when one notices that home demolitions take place throughout the world, yet the accusers ignore all but Israel’s.

The one-sided nature of NGO condemnations has been analyzed by Dr. Justus Reid Weiner.  Weiner documents numerous countries where home demolitions are carried out:

USA: Eminent domain and illegal squatting are standard reasons for municipal demolition.

USA in Iraq: The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that the US army destroyed at least a dozen homes belonging to family members of guerrilla suspects in and around Tikrit, as a counter-terrorism tactic.  These actions were approved by the commander of the Fourth Infantry Division and considered “…within the rules of war” by the overall commander for U.S. forces in Iraq.

Lebanon:  Army troops in Beirut demolished illegal houses built without permits, and used rifle fire to disperse residents.

China, Thailand and India offer many examples of squatters, including some who claim legal ownership with deeds and property tax receipts, driven by force from homes.

Kosovo: UN used armed forces to carry out demolition orders against squatters.

Nigeria: Thousands were rendered homeless as government police destroyed homes built illegally on government land.

Egypt: The al-Ahram newspaper reported (March 3, 2004) that 8000 residents were rendered homeless in one village as almost 1500 homes were demolished.  These were acknowledged to be the homes of legal residents, but their village was on a site scheduled for development to attract tourism.  MEMRI  gives additional examples of demolitions rendering thousands homeless, even as residents claim to have proof of ownership.

Brazil: The federal government has been waging a long war of home demolition against the “favelas”  (slums) section of Rio de Janeiro; but according to some these” favelas” are not slums but simply low-income neighborhoods whose residents are property owners with legal possession or renters with proof of rent payment.

Palestinian Authority:   Even the Palestinian Authority (PA) has demolished houses of its Arab residents which the PA claims were constructed illegally.  PA leader Sari Nusseibeh validated this accusation with a statement that the “gangs that build illegally on land that does not belong to them should be thrown into jail.”

It is important to note that many NGOs routinely accept as proof the anecdotal accounts of unspecified and unidentified complaints, with no name of village, no location specificity, and no identity of which authority controls the area.  Such complaints can be easily fabricated and cannot be checked for accuracy.   Thus is becomes likely that many complaints about home destruction in the West Bank are fiction, or at least unrelated to Israel because the homes in question were demolished not by Israel but by the PA.

And some of our mainstream media outlets participate in this disingenuous journalism, even when contradicted by known facts.  A typical example is the New York Times article of July 9, 2005 covering the controversial demolition of Arab homes in the Silwan neighborhood of Jerusalem.  As CAMERA demonstrates, unsubstantiated Arab claims of discrimination against Palestinians in issuing building permits, and Israeli attempts to cut the West Bank in half by extending the borders of Jerusalem, were reported as fact, even as both Israeli and PA spokespersons cite statistics to show that these claims are false. Chief Palestinian demographer, Khalil Tufakji, admitted in a CNN interview (September 19, 1998), “We can build inside Jerusalem, legal, illegal — rebuild a house, whatever, we can do. Maybe we lose ten houses, but in the end we build 40 more …” Tufakji’s statement is confirmed by an Israeli report readily available to the Times’ journalist, and by the research of Justus Reid Weiner noted above (and in his book noted below).

According to a 2006 study, since 1997 Jerusalem Arabs build in excess of 10,000 illegal homes a year in the Jerusalem area and only about 100 (one percent) have been demolished by Israeli authorities. The frenetic pace of illegal construction in Jerusalem is documented in Justus Weiner’s comprehensive study: Illegal Construction in Jerusalem: A Variation on an Alarming Global Phenomenon. Weiner demonstrates that some NGOs simply lie about the realities of Israeli actions against Arab construction.  There is the wide-spread accusation that Arab Jerusalemites have no choice but to build their homes illegally since the municipality systematically rejects their applications for building permits. But the Jerusalem municipality has authorized more than 36,000 permits for new housing units in the Arab sector, more than enough to meet the needs of Arab residents through legal construction until 2020.

Is the US State Department capable of getting it right when addressing deprivation of human rights endured by Jewish people?  Its conduct with regard to the Mount of Olives cemetery in Jerusalem gives serious pause.

On the slopes of the Mount of Olives (Hebrew: Har Hazeitim), in eastern Jerusalem, lies a 2,500 year-old Jewish cemetery, bearing a legacy of enormous import and sanctity.  Among those buried in its 150,000 Jewish graves are prophets, Zionist leaders, rabbis, writers, and an Israeli prime minister.

From 1948, when eastern Jerusalem was captured by Jordan, until its liberation by Israel in 1967, no Jews were permitted at the site; horrendous damage was done to the cemetery during those years. Although restoration has been taking place since 1967, until recently action to protect the site had been insufficient. That is now changing as the Israeli government has become more vigorously involved and the International Committee for the Preservation of Har HaZeitim has been established.

Yet vandalism still regularly occurs at the cemetery. Arabs drop cinderblocks from the top of the Mount down the hillside, in a frequently successful effort to crack headstones.  Additionally, mourners and those visiting graves of loved ones are often harassed by Arabs throwing stones and require an armed Israeli security escort. Not infrequently, those mourners and visitors are American citizens.

Enter Jeff Daube, Director of the Israel Office of the Zionist Organization of America, and a leading member of the International Committee.  Alarmed by what he had learned about the situation, he wrote a letter on November 10, 2010, to the U.S. General Counsel and Chief of Mission in Jerusalem, Daniel Rubinstein.

Observing that as, “the consulate’s good offices are meant to represent the U.S. in Jerusalem…it appears the Mt. of Olives falls within your diplo­matic purview.”  Daube  requested, on behalf of “outraged U.S. and Israeli citizens,” that the Consul General “issue a condemnation of this ongoing sacrilege and violence,” and call upon local Arab leaders and the PA to issue condemnations of the acts of desecration and harassment.

On November 12, 2010, Daube was invited to a meeting with Jonathan Cullen, Political Officer, and Matthew Welsh, Officer of Religious Affairs, at the Consulate.  After the situation was discussed, it was agreed that these officers would visit the site with Daube on January 5, 2011.  But when the consulate officers subsequently learned that they were to be accompanied by Israeli security personnel, they explained to Daube that regulations forbid consulate personnel from participating in any event involving Israel-funded security.  This is to avoid implicit U.S. recognition of Israeli sovereignty over eastern Jerusalem.  As Daube declined to be responsible for escorting American officials on the site without security protection, there the issue rested.

This spring, Daube, who lives in Israel, visited Washington DC.  Twice – on May 10 and June 1 – he met at State with John Buzbee, Director of the Bureau of Near East Affairs/Israel-Palestinian Affairs.  At the first meeting, with regard to the Mount of Olives, Daube made three requests:

• That the State Department issue a condemnation of the violence and grave desecrations.
• That the U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem prevail upon the PA to release a condemnation in Arabic.
• That the problem be addressed in the State Department’s annual Report on International Religious Freedom.

During the second meeting, Buzbee reported with satisfaction that the draft of the report on religious freedom was on his desk and, indeed, the problem on the Mount was included.  In mid-November, Secretary Clinton held a press conference announcing the release of the report for 2010.  On checking, Daube learned that the relevant text in that report reads:

The desecration of Muslim and Jewish cemeteries in Jerusalem continued throughout the reporting period. Jewish tombstones on the Mount of Olives cemetery were vandalized, and the Jerusalem Municipality demolished tombstones in the Muslim Mamilla cemetery it deemed were constructed illegally. 

The State Department has a solid reputation for adopting a stance of moral equivalency  regarding Israeli-Palestinian issues:  When releasing a statement critical of Arabs, its officials behave as if duty-bound to find something equally critical to say about Israelis.  While allegedly this is done to avoid the semblance of a pro-Israel tilt, this policy actually generates an anti-Israel bias because Israeli and Arab behavior are simply not equivalent.

This is stunningly obvious with regard to this particular report. Those who drafted it, while seeking that ubiquitous equivalence, have outrageously misrepresented the situation:

Earlier this year, the Israel Land Authority discovered that the northern branch of the Islamic Movement had been planting fake tombstones in the ancient Mamilla Cemetery as part of a “land war.” Official inspectors at the site found tombstones that bore no evidence of graves beneath. After extensive documentation had been gathered, the Authority declared that they were dealing with “…fraud on a massive scale. Five hundred tombstones…were placed in the graveyard…”

Working with antiquities officials to insure no actual graves were disturbed, the Authority removed the fake headstones.  It is a distorted description of this action, without proper context, that found its way into the State Department report.

Neither Secretary of State Clinton nor other officials within the State Department have issued public condemnation of the deprivation of religious freedom endured by Jews on the Mount of Olives.  The guess would be  that – while this issue merits public condemnation – Secretary Clinton is inhibited by her concern that Arab sensibilities not be offended.

Arlene Kushner, an American-Israel author, writer and blogger, has dealt extensively with Israeli-Palestinian issues over the years, via major reports, blogs and articles.  Her material can be accessed via: www.arlenefromisrael.info.

The cornerstone argument in the Arab narrative against Israel is that the Zionists in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries came to the Land of Israel and stole Arab land.  This is a very simple assertion, easy to visualize, seemingly logical and amenable to a brief presentation: after all, Zionists did come from Europe to what was then Palestine, and the Arabs were already living there.  So obviously when the Jews came they took Arab land.

Although there exists voluminous evidence to the contrary in Arab and Turkish and British sources indicating the exact opposite, it is difficult to present this contrary evidence and explain its importance in as brief and simple a manner as is done with the Arab assertion.  There are too many variables: Arab demographics, Jewish demographics, Zionist agrarian reclamation technology, land purchases, crown land vs. privately owned land, absentee landlords, etc.  This imbalance puts the advocate on behalf of Zionism and Israel at a disadvantage, even though the evidence supporting the Israeli narrative and contradicting the Arab narrative is vast and thoroughly vetted.  For an excellent compilation and analysis of this evidence, see Kenneth Stein, The Land Question in Palestine, 1917-1939 (University of North Carolina Press, 1984, reviewed here and here).

However, there is one testimony from an unimpeachable source stating that the Jews stole no land, but rather bought land in vast quantities from willing sellers who were the legal owners of the land that was sold.  This unimpeachable source is so unarguably innocent of any pro-Israel or pro-Jewish or pro-Zionist sentiment that there can be no rational question regarding the veracity of his testimony.  That source is the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, the Hajj Mohammed Effendi Amin el-Husseini (1895 to 1974).

El-Husseini was a key figure in the creation of the concept of Palestinian nationalism and the most high-profile leader of violent and incendiary opposition to Zionism from the 1920’s onward, until the creation of the State of Israel rendered his leadership irrelevant.  He used his powerful political and religious position as the Grand Mufti (supreme religious leader) of Jerusalem to promote Arab nationalism, incite violence against the British, and preach Jew-hatred and the annihilation of the Jews of British Mandatory Palestine.  He was an ally of Hitler before and during World War II, recruited Muslim legions in Bosnia to serve on the eastern front in Hitler’s Weirmacht, and developed full-blown plans for concentration camps in Palestine in imitation of the German “final solution.”   During the 1948 Israel-Arab war, he represented the Arab Higher Committee and rejected the UN partition plan of November 29, 1947 (for a brief biography of el-Husseini and a list of book-length biographies see here).

As the highest official representative of the Arabs of British Mandatory Palestine, el-Husseini was interviewed by the Palestine Royal Commission led by Earl William Robert Wellesley Peel, hence known as the Peel Commission.

The Peel Commission was a Royal Commission of inquiry sent to British Mandatory Palestine in November of 1936 for the purpose of examining and reporting on the causes of the Arab-Jewish violence in Palestine and suggesting possible resolutions.  After months of research and interviews of major Zionist and Arab leaders, the Commission published its report in July of 1937.  The report recommended a partition plan for separate Arab and Jewish states; but this plan was never implemented, although the Zionists accepted it, due to vociferous Arab opposition.

The Peel Commission report had some very salutary things to say about the Zionists and their impact on the land and on Arab society and economy. One of the most important for debunking Arab anti-Israel accusations is:

“The Arab population shows a remarkable increase since 1920, and it has had some share in the increased prosperity of Palestine. Many Arab landowners have benefited from the sale of land and the profitable investment of the purchase money. The fellaheen (Arab peasants) are better off on the whole than they were in 1920. This Arab progress has been partly due to the import of Jewish capital into Palestine and other factors associated with the growth of the (Jewish) National Home. In particular, the Arabs have benefited from social services which could not have been provided on the existing scale without the revenue obtained from the Jews…Much of the land (being farmed by the Jews) now carrying orange groves was sand dunes or swamp and uncultivated when it was purchased…There was at the time of the earlier sales little evidence that the owners possessed either the resources or training needed to develop the land.” The land shortage decried by the Arabs “…was due less to the amount of land acquired by Jews than to the increase in the Arab population.” (Chapter V in the report).

El-Husseini’s interview on January 12, 1937 was preserved in the Commission’s notes and referenced, although not published, in the full report.  It has been summarized by a number of scholars, including Kenneth Stein, The Land Question in Palestine 1917-1939 (Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2009) and Howard M. Sachar, A History of Israel from the Rise of Zionism to our Time (Alfred A. Knopf, 1976); and a detailed analysis with quotations from the interview can be found in Aaron Kleiman’s The Palestine  Royal Commission, 1937 (Garland Publications, 1987, pp. 298ff.).

The selections from the interview presented below can be found on line here and here.  Sir Laurie Hammond, a member of the Peel Commission, interviewed the Mufti about his insistence to the Commission that Zionists were stealing Arab land and driving peasants into homelessness.  He spoke through an interpreter.

SIR L. HAMMOND: Would you give me the figures again for the land. I want to know how much land was held by the Jews before the Occupation.

MUFTI: At the time of the Occupation the Jews held about 100,000 dunams.

SIR L. HAMMOND: What year?

MUFTI: At the date of the British Occupation.

SIR L. HAMMOND: And now they hold how much?

MUFTI: About 1,500,000 dunams: 1,200,000 dunams already registered in the name of the Jewish holders, but there are 300,000 dunams which are the subject of written agreements, and which have not yet been registered in the Land Registry. That does not, of course, include the land which was assigned, about 100,000 dunams.

SIR L. HAMMOND: What 100,000 dunams was assigned?  Is that not included in, the 1,200,000 dunams? The point is this. He says that in 1920 at the time of the Occupation, the Jews only held 100,000 dunams, is that so? I asked the figures from the Land Registry, how much land the Jews owned at the time of the Occupation. Would he be surprised to hear that the figure is not 100,000 but 650,000 dunams?

In 2008, during a presentation at a panel discussion on the Middle East conflict at Santa Clara University (Santa Clara, CA), a young Arab-American lady claiming to be a “Palestinian refugee” posed to the present writer the following question:

“Why can any ‘Moishe Pipik’ from Brooklyn go to live in Israel, but I, a child of Palestinian parents living in the USA, cannot go back to my ancestral homeland, Palestine, where our families lived since time immemorial?”

The response to that question may be useful to readers who find themselves confronted with similar questions by friends, relatives, colleagues, or others.

The first thing to note is that “Palestinians” have not been living in Palestine (now Israel) from time immemorial.  Turkish and British records are clear that Palestine was flooded with Arab immigrants from the late 1850’s onward due to the salutary effects of British colonial and Zionist developments from the mid-19^th century onward. Groundbreaking work on the Arab historical demography of Palestine during the second half of the 19^th and the first half of the 20^th centuries has been done by Professor Justin McCarthy in his book The Population of Palestine: Population History and Statistics of the Late Ottoman Period and the Mandate (Institute for Palestine Studies Series), summarized here. McCarthy, not a Jew nor an Israeli nor a Zionist, writing for a Palestinian institute, demonstrates that the Arab population of Palestine almost quadrupled from c. 1855 to 1947.  Only a tiny minority of Arabs can claim ancestral attachment to this territory, and even those claims are based solely on anecdotal accounts for which there is no empirical evidence.

Then one must recall that the Arab side started the war, and lost the war. Israel accepted the UN partition plan in 1947. The Arab states launched a war. When an aggressor loses a war because the victim country successfully repulses the aggression, and in doing so captures some of the aggressor’s land, the disposition of that captured territory, and its inhabitants, must await a peace treaty between the belligerents. Refugees from the aggressor country have recourse to repatriation only in the context of a peace treaty.  Most Arab countries have refused to make peace.  It was Arab aggression that started the war.  Had there been no war there would have been no refugees, and there would have been a state for the Palestinians since 1947.

Moreover, a careful analysis of the evidence from Arab sources indicates that the Arab side encouraged, and in some cases even forced c. 90% of the refugees to flee.  Therefore the Arab leadership bears the onus of culpability for creating the problem, and thus the Arab side, and not Israel, bears responsibility for solving the problem.  Because Israel was not threatening that 90% who fled, there is no legal claim for refugee status. Refugee status accrues to those who flee due to persecution or danger. Just as that 170,000 stayed and encountered no danger, so too could many hundreds of thousands more have stayed.

It was not Israel, but Arab countries’ refusal to respond to Israel’s call for peaceful negotiations that made it impossible for refugees to be repatriated.  At the Rhodes Armistice talks in 1949, Israel offered reparations, resettlement assistance, and repatriation, but only in the context of peace treaties.  The Arab leaders refused all talk of peace.  Had there been peace, there could have been repatriation, and perhaps even the creation of a Palestinian state after the war. It was the Arab side that slammed the door on that option.

To the onus of culpability for creating and maintaining the refugee problem at the onset one must add the calumny of Arab states’ exacerbating it for decades thereafter.  Except for Jordan, Arab host countries denied citizenship to the refugees, locked them in barbed-wire camps, kept armed guards to prevent their leaving, and legislated laws against integration of refugees in to their host country. Lebanese law, for example, lists more than 70 professions in which the Arab refugees were prohibited from engaging.  It is illegal for a Palestinian refugee to buy land in Lebanon. There is ample evidence from Arab sources that the Syrian government transported fleeing refugees, at gunpoint, in cattle cars to far-flung borders in 1949,  in order to keep them away from Palestine, to thus prevent their repatriation, and to eternalize the “refugee problem.”

But Arab guilt in stymieing any solution does not stop there. At the Lausanne conference of 1949, Israel offered unconditionally and unilaterally to repatriate 100,000 Arab refugees even without any peace accords.  The Arab leaders refused.

Israeli offers of repatriation and reparation continued until June, 1967.  The Arab side refused all offers.  Not Israel, but the Arab refusal to countenance any possibility of peace treaties offered by Israel condemned the refugees to penury and homelessness.

Once I get home, I will be more happy to give you a firsthand account of what I have seen over here. For example, the US rebuilding effort had an Iraqi contractor who was hired to build a school. It was later found out that he blew the school up shortly after its completion and immediately submitted a bid for a rebuild contract. Al-Qaeda was blamed for the bombing.

There are several Iraqi contractors who have received advances for rebuilding contracts (in the millions!) and then vanished to Luxembourg or the US, never to be seen again! Might I add that at BIAP (Baghdad In'tl), non-locals are held on the tarmac while Arabs board the plane. They also charge "us" 15 dollars to leave the airport, but you can clearly see Iraqis going straight to security and bypassing the payment counter. Racism at its best!

At the cost of how many billions of U.S. taxpayer money?

I recently received an email accusing me of hating Arabs and my father. This email is typical of Arab media accusations of my views regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict. Since most Arabs have no chance to read my book, Now They Call Me Infidel, Why I Renounced Jihad for America, Israel and the War on Terror, which explains in detail my position, I will answer the email in this article. First, below is the translation of the Arabic language email which I received without a signature:

Salam to you,

With all of our pride in your father we pray that Allah will bless him with entering paradise, which is the wish of every person after this short prideful meaningless life. I want to ask you, has your father become your enemy after his death? We in the city of Gaza take pride in your father and I live on a street by the name of Shahid Moustafa Hafez which also has a school by the name of Shahid Moustafa Hafez. We never forgot his sacrifice, so how could you become an enemy to the tortured Palestinian people who are still suffering at the hands of Arab Zionists? I ask Allah to give you health and strength.

Awaiting your response and thank you in advance.

Here is my response:

Dear Gaza resident,

Your email touched me as sincere even though your accusations are wrong. I am not the enemy of Arabs and I assure you that I love my original culture and people. What makes me different is that I do not only love Arabs, but I also love the Jewish people. I am speaking my conscience.  I respect their right to live in peace in their tiny homeland, Israel. I understand how that could be puzzling and unbelievable to many Arabs, to love both Jews and Arabs.

We Arabs have suffered from an unnatural and consistent indoctrination into Islamic supremacy and Jew hatred for over 1400 years. Thus it has become unfathomable to the Arab mind to comprehend loving both Arabs and Jews and wishing both well. Our culture has deprived us for many centuries from loving all of humanity as equals, through intense religious indoctrination resulting in self-imposed isolation and non-integration with other cultures. This isolation and jihad against non-Muslims has become increasingly difficult to maintain. Muslims everywhere are trying desperately to save face, reform Islam’s image and deny the undeniable. But they also want to have their cake and eat it too. While they are telling the world Islam is a religion of peace, they still want to continue with the jihad against non-Muslim countries. While one leader says, let’s kill all the Jews and take over Rome, another says to Western media that Islam is a religion of peace and we are deeply offended by the anti-Islam rhetoric. To play this sick game, Muslim culture must live a dysfunctional double life where everyone is deceived, including Muslims.

Thus to do the kind of jihad that Bin Laden, Ahmadinejad, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, Assad, Nasser, Saudi jihadists etc, do and which is dictated by Sharia, Muslims find it hard to be honest. Thus, Muslims must claim victimhood in order to justify jihad. The entire Muslim world is using your people, the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza, to justify their jihad against not only Israel, but also all non-Muslim countries. That includes Iran, which supports Hamas and Hezbollah.

Your people in Gaza should have realized this game a long time ago, but you refuse to see and be open about who is your true oppressor. Arab and Muslim media is using and abusing your people in order to justify their Islamic jihad around the world. That is why they never want to resolve your problem and want you to suffer and live in constant terror against Israel.

Under Islamic law, non-Muslim countries are never equal to Muslim countries and actually their sovereignty as a non-Muslim nation must always be challenged by Islamic jihad. Islamic law codified jihad as a permanent war with non-Muslims to establish the religion. Muslims thus have to use Taquiyya, lies, to legitimize their aggression on Israel and the West. That is why Muslim countries can never abandon the constant hate propaganda, lies and misinformation about Israel and the West. If that ends, their jihad ends. The UN must be constantly bombarded by complaints from Arab countries against Israel. The Arab street must be constantly bombarded with ridiculous accusations and Zionist conspiracies. Lately on Syrian TV a Syrian intellectual accused Israel of stealing human organs in Haiti while they were helping them after the earthquake. This is not something new; it started in the 7^th century, when the prophet Mohammed accused the Jews of treason to justify killing and expelling them and taking over their wealth. To explain this away, he stated that Jews are worthy of this treatment since they are the descendants of apes pigs and enemies of Allah. Muslims still use the same dynamic and the world still falls for it every time.

The Arab mind was trained to never venture outside of the box of Islamic superiority, and that prevented us from treating the rest of humanity as equals. It is alien to Muslim preachers today to preach love to all of humanity and wishing non-Muslims the same human rights as Muslims. I have never heard that from a Muslim preacher. Only after 9/11 and in the West today, do we see some Muslim preachers trying to preach some Western values and engage in interfaith dialogue, in order to rehabilitate the image of Islam in the West and attract more converts.

I often get mail from secular Muslims who ask me: I can understand that you chose to leave Islam, but how can you support the Jews? I get mail like this because, in the Muslim mindset, loving, accepting and feeling good about Jews or Christians and thinking of them as equals, is unthinkable and an act of treason to Islam itself and even worse. It is as though the whole religion of Islam is dedicated to hating and killing Jews.

After centuries of this kind of education, the Muslim world produced a dysfunctional society, unable to relate to the rest of the world. While wanting to convince the world they are a religion of peace, do not be afraid of Islam, they are still hell-bent on conquering the world for Islam. That is Islam’s dilemma today.

What I, and a few others, are trying to do is to bring the truth to both Muslims and non-Muslims to finally face this sick game. We want to encourage Arabs to look at Jews and others as human beings and not as enemies to conquer. What kind of God will tell his followers to kill more than half of humanity if they don’t submit to Islam? The Muslim world today is a disaster waiting to happen. Ahmadinejad, who is not an Arab, wants to continue the Islamic jihad against Jews by destroying Israel. I have news to especially the Left in Europe and America: Islamic jihad will not end with Israel; you will be next.

To my email writer: in your letter to me, I have noticed that your outlook on life is pessimistic describing it as short and meaningless pride. Your views are prevalent in Muslim culture and I have heard it thousands of times when I lived in the Middle East. I remember even when we laughed and giggled as young girls, we were immediately silenced as being improper and that Allah somehow does not like us to laughing for no reason or in public. Even a heartfelt laugh to a Muslim was not going to get you friends, but critics. Your message to me and to Muslims is that life on earth will not get us happiness and the only escape from such misery is the everlasting happiness in the pleasures of Allah’s paradise after dying in jihad. But why take the Jews with us? They want to live and enjoy life and to make the earth, right here, a better place.

Our rejection of life is not a coincidence: since jihad does not value life, then it must value death. The first casualty of the jihad principle is peace and that is why I never learned peace as a value in Gaza. I have never heard a peaceful song in Arabic. To think of peace with the Jews is equal to treason to Islam. Rejection of peace has detrimental consequences to the healthy functioning of the Arab personality, family, society and the whole region. It is not a coincidence that Saudis reject under the law any celebration of Valentine’s Day, reject celebrating love between a man and a woman, teaching peace and compassion to their children towards the others. Just look at our Islamic law books and see the most cruel and unusual punishments ever created in any culture on earth. Only a culture that demands war and terror can promote such cruelty.

As to your question about hating my father, again I want to assure you that I adore and respect my father more than all of the people of Gaza. Actually I love him and wish him heaven not because he killed Jews, but because he was a good human being who was respected by many including the Israeli soldiers who killed him. He was known even to Israel as a cut above his peers and had integrity and honor.  My father was the victim of the blood-thirsty culture of death all around him. He is one of the many thousands and even millions of victims of the jihad ideology, practiced over the last 1400 years.

Dear Gaza resident, yes, I cannot blame the Jewish people, or the government of Israel, for what you call the ‘misery’ of the Palestinians. I can only blame Arab and Islamic culture which used and abused you and which you allowed. I believe that this is an Arab self-inflicted crisis that has nothing to do with Israel.

Arab education has never told us the truth about the Israeli people and the story from their side and what Jerusalem means to them. We were told that Jerusalem was a Muslim city simply because Mohammed dreamt one night that he went to the farthest mosque but he never mentioned Jerusalem. The Koran never mentioned Jerusalem, which is mentioned hundreds of times in the Bible as the heart and soul of the Jewish people. We as Muslims never respected other religions holy cites and always claimed them to Islam; even Spain and India are being claimed as Muslim land. It was the tradition of Muslim conquerors to convert churches and temples to mosques and that is exactly what happened to the Jewish Temple Mount when 100 years after the prophet Mohammed died, Muslim conquerors built the mosque right on top of it. Just imagine if Jews or Christians had built a temple on top of the Kaaba in Mecca. This is how Islam has treated the Jews. It is time for Muslims to seek redemption and forgiveness and to extend the hand of reconciliation and peace to the Jewish people.

Nonie Darwish

Author: Cruel and Usual Punishment; the terrifying global implications of Islamic law.

CAIRO -- The self-described leader of an al-Qaida front group has called for continued jihad against Iraq's American "occupiers" after the March 7 election that he claims was boycotted by most Sunni Arabs.

In a 24-minute audio tape posted Tuesday on militant Web sites, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi said the parliamentary election and its results meant nothing for the mujahideen, or holy fighters, and that the next government would be no different from the previous one....

Free Speech Death Watch Alert: "Benny Morris talk stirs uproar at Cambridge," by Jonny Paul in the Jerusalem Post, February 7 (thanks to all who sent this in):

LONDON - The Israel Society at Cambridge University has succumbed to pressure and canceled a talk by Ben-Gurion University of the Negev historian Benny Morris after protesters accused him of "Islamophobia" and "racism."

Morris was scheduled to speak to students at the university on Thursday, but following a campaign led by anti-Israel activist Ben White the Israel Society canceled the talk. Instead Morris was invited to speak at an event hosted by the university's Department of Political and International Studies.

White, who graduated from the university in 2005 and authored the book Israeli Apartheid: A Beginners Guide, set up a protest page on Facebook in which he claimed that "on different occasions, Morris has expressed Islamophobic and racist sentiments towards Arabs and Muslims."

He added: "We find it offensive and appalling that an official student society would want to invite such an individual."

Following the Facebook protest, a letter was sent to the student union by the university's Islamic Society, other students and two staff members from the English Department asking it to take a stand and show it is serious "in opposing bigotry and Islamophobia." The 15 signatories said Morris's views were "abhorrent and offensive.

"The issue is hate speech, and the impact of a visit by this individual on the campus' atmosphere for the student body's minority groups... His visit is insulting, threatening to Arab and Muslim students in particular and also goes against the spirit of the student union's stated anti-Islamophobia policy," the letter read.

Last year, Cambridge's Palestine Society hosted Abd al-Bari Atwan, editor-in-chief of the London-based Al-Quds Al-Arabi newspaper. In 2008, Atwan said the terrorist attack on Jerusalem's Mercaz Harav yeshiva, in which eight students were killed and 15 were wounded, was "justified" as the school was responsible for "hatching Israeli extremists and fundamentalists." [...]

Jake Witzenfeld, president of Cambridge University's Israel Society, canceled the Morris talk, apologizing for any "unintended offense."

"I decided to cancel for fear of the Israel Society being portrayed as a mouthpiece of Islamophobia," he said. "We understand that whilst Professor Benny Morris' contribution to history is highly respectable and significant, his personal views are, regrettably, deeply offensive to many."...

A Muslim group accused of publishing anti-Semitic material congratulated the Islamic Society for the cancelation [sic] of Morris's talk.

"Muslim Public Affairs Committee congratulated Cambridge's Islam Society on the success of their campaign and lobbying to stop the Islamophobe Benny Morris giving a speech at their university... A simple Facebook group and a well written letter is all that it takes to defend your religion," the group said.

The 2006 All-Party Parliamentary Report into Anti-Semitism alleged that the anti-Israel Muslim Public Affairs Committee has used material from Holocaust denial and neo-Nazi publications, uses the word "Zionist" as a replacement for "Jew" and engages in the spread of conspiracy theories about Jews. In 2006, it was discovered that MPAC founder Asghar Bukhari make a donation to convicted Holocaust denier David Irving....

[Editor's note: The article below is a rebuttal to Joe Kaufman's Frontpage article “The Terror and Crime of the American Task Force on Palestine,” which ran on January 29, 2010.]

“The Terror and Crime of the American Task Force on Palestine” posted by Joe Kaufman on January 29 was very wide of the mark.  Kaufman takes to task various government officials for participation in ATFP’s annual banquet.  I regretted having to turn down an invitation to that self-same affair because I was out of town.

Why my regret?  Because the ATFP is a breath of fresh air in the Arab-American community.  I think it is exactly what I and others in the pro-Israel community have been hoping for: an Arab or Palestinian advocacy group that offers no apologias for terrorists and genuinely wants to meet us half-way.

Kaufman makes much of the name Rashid Khalidi, and I share Kaufman’s distaste for the man.  But Khalidi’s name cannot be found on the ATFP web site.  (Whether he was involved in the past I do not know.)  I do know Ziad Asali, the president, and Hussein Ibish and Gheith al-Omari, the two staff members of ATFP.  I have had long conversations with each.  More important, I have been on Arabic satellite network talk shows multiple times with each of them—so I have heard what they had to say to Arab audiences.  They were always unequivocal about a two-state solution, and always with rhetorical “body language” that made it abundantly clear that they respected Israel’s right to exist and its legitimate security concerns.

Of course, various Arabs and other Palestinians over the years have mouthed the word “peace” quite disingenuously, most importantly and famously, Yassir Arafat.  Some Arab-American and Muslim-American groups have decried terrorism but defined the term or hedged it about in such ways as to fill me with skepticism about what they really meant.  (Just as the Organization of the Islamic Conference always resorts to a juvenile game of semantics, saying that it opposes “terrorism” but that, of course, blowing up babies and moms in pizzerias is not terrorism if done in the name of “resistance to occupation.”)

This disgusting double-talk is not what ATFP does.  When they say they oppose terrorism, when they say they want peace, they really mean it, which is apparent if you talk to them long and hard.  Of course, they are not Zionists.  They are a Palestinian group.  They are not on our side, but they sincerely want to make peace with us. If only there were more of their kind!  I wish we could help them, but of the embrace from our side would likely not help them build support in their community.  We can, however, do the minimum which is not to attack them falsely.

In 1918, T. E. Lawrence set down some advice for his fellow British military men (and civilians) on Understanding and Dealing with the Bedu for "beginners in the Arab armies." Given that Lawrence had been working with the Sharifian forces for less than two years, his assumption that he was now in a position to lecture "beginners in the Arab armies" may strike some as comical. Lawrence, with ostentatious modesty, called his homiletic collection "Twenty-Seven Articles," for reasons that will appear, once you have read the piece, arithmetically obvious.

Here is that piece. Immediately after each part I have a commentary on what is said, and then, after the last of the "twenty-seven articles," discussion of what, after all, the whole thing is about, and how useful it is, and what other kind of information might have been more relevant and more useful to the American soldiers and Marines in Iraq.

Lawrence begins:

The following notes have been expressed in commandment form for greater clarity and to save words. They are, however, only my personal conclusions, arrived at gradually while I worked in the Hejaz and now put on paper as stalking horses for beginners in the Arab armies. They are meant to apply only to Bedu; townspeople or Syrians require totally different treatment. They are of course not suitable to any other person's need, or applicable unchanged in any particular situation. Handling Hejaz Arabs is an art, not a science, with exceptions and no obvious rules. At the same time we have a great chance there; the Sherif [in this case, the tribal chief of the family who had been the Guardians of the Two Noble Sanctuaries] trusts us, and has given us the position (towards his Government) which the Germans wanted to win in Turkey. [What government is that? The only "government" the Sherifians, in 1918, on the run from the Al-Saud coming from Nejd--who within two years would win their final battle with the Shammar tribe -- could look forward to possessing was whatever they persuaded the British to give them.] If we are tactful, we can at once retain his goodwill and carry out our job, but to succeed we have got to put into it all the interest and skill we possess.

1. Go easy for the first few weeks. A bad start is difficult to atone for, and the Arabs form their judgments on externals that we ignore. When you have reached the inner circle in a tribe, you can do as you please with yourself and them.

Comment: Polonius-like. "Go easy for the first few weeks." Wait until you have "reached the inner circle" - apparently T. E. Lawrence thought that he had "reached the inner circle" of the Sharifian forces, but had he? Where is the evidence that the Arabs were used by T. E. Lawrence? Does not all the evidence suggest, instead, that he had to keep plying them with gold sovereigns ("the cavalry of St. George"), and supplying them with weaponry, and they would then do pretty much as they liked? And what they liked were wild-and-woolly raids on the Hejaz Railway, but without much staying power, without any strategic thought, without any significant military impact.

This attitude, one which takes for granted that it would be possible for Infidel British to "retain his goodwill" if only we "put into it all the interest and skill we possess" misreads, or overlooks, the estranging fact of Islam. It would have been better for Lawrence to explain Arab behavior in other terms, terms that begin with the unshakable fact of Islam, and what it must mean for any Infidels, who should never confuse temporary inveiglements and overlapping interests with the possibility of any real alliance.

2. Learn all you can about your Ashraf and Bedu. Get to know their families, clans and tribes, friends and enemies, wells, hills and roads. Do all this by listening and by indirect inquiry. Do not ask questions. Get to speak their dialect of Arabic, not yours. Until you can understand their allusions, avoid getting deep into conversation or you will drop bricks. Be a little stiff at first.

Comment: This "learn all you can...about the Bedu" reminds me of a course at Harvard Business School called "Decision Theory," the first class of which a friend invited me to attend. The very energetic instructor spent the class using a lot of completely irrelevant calculus on the blackboard of the lecture hall, designed no doubt to impress the students, but the contents of his class that day could be summed up this way: "If you have to decide between A and B, learn all you can about A. Then learn all you can about B. Then decide."

Here we have Lawrence telling those who will be working with the Bedu to learn all they can about them, their "families, clans, tribes, friends and enemies, wells, hills and roads." Learn their dialect of Arabic -- instead of what? A dialect they don't understand, a dialect that does not allow you to communicate with them or to understand what they are saying? Who would ever have thought otherwise? Wait until you understand their "allusions." Note that most of the "allusions" by the Bedu or the urban Arabs consist of references to the life of Muhammad, especially battles between the early Muslims (Muhammad and his Companions) and those who resisted them, and to passages in the Qur'an or stories in the Hadith. So the advice might have been put thus: Learn as much as you can about the Qur'an and Hadith, and about the life of Muhammad, for he is for Muslims the Model and Exemplar, the Perfect Man. Familiarize yourself with the most important Qur'anic passages, the most quoted Hadith, the most significant events in the life of Muhammad. You will be appalled by Muhammad, but you should hide your reaction; remember these are primitive people in thrall to a Total Belief-System, and it is so much a part of them that they cannot begin to recognize their thralldom.

3. In matters of business deal only with the commander of the army, column, or party in which you serve. Never give orders to anyone at all, and reserve your directions or advice for the C.O., however great the temptation (for efficiency's sake) of dealing with his underlings. Your place is advisory, and your advice is due to the commander alone. Let him see that this is your conception of your duty, and that his is to be the sole executive of your joint plans.

Comment: This might be phrased more directly thus: The Arabs are used to submitting to absolute authority, and those holding authority, whatever that authority is, are used to receiving unquestioning obedience. Make sure you, especially as an Infidel, exhibit deference to that highest-ranking Arab, never telling but always advising, and do not directly communicate with those under him; he must be the conduit.

4. Win and keep the confidence of your leader. Strengthen his prestige at your expense before others when you can. Never refuse or quash schemes he may put forward; but ensure that they are put forward in the first instance privately to you. Always approve them, and after praise modify them insensibly, causing the suggestions to come from him, until they are in accord with your own opinion. When you attain this point, hold him to it, keep a tight grip of his ideas, and push them forward as firmly as possibly, but secretly, so that to one but himself (and he not too clearly) is aware of your pressure.

Comment: More Polonius, merely an extension of #3. Arab leaders do not accept direct criticism. Treat them like children, flatter them, never contradict or criticize them or their schemes. And if you need to modify those schemes, pretend those modifications were part of his original idea all along. Islam is based on submission to authority, and as Muslims are used to being told they must never question authority, make sure you do nothing to call it, however obliquely, into even the slightest question. He cannot lose face. Those under him must not question him themselves, nor be witness to Infidels daring to question him.

5. Remain in touch with your leader as constantly and unobtrusively as you can. Live with him, that at meal times and at audiences you may be naturally with him in his tent. Formal visits to give advice are not so good as the constant dropping of ideas in casual talk. When stranger sheikhs come in for the first time to swear allegiance and offer service, clear out of the tent. If their first impression is of foreigners in the confidence of the Sherif, it will do the Arab cause much harm.

Comment: spend as much time with him as possible, but don't flatter yourself that you have actually become his confidant or that you, in turn, should ever fully trust him. He will do exactly as he wishes to further his own interests, and if temporarily his interests and your interests, in his view, coincide, then you may win his collaboration. But he does not trust you, and if you trust him you have not sunk below the surface of Arab and Muslim life.

Don't let other sheikhs think for one minute that you, a non-Muslim, could have managed to be taken into the confidence of the Sherif; that would cause his stature, his hold over his men, to diminish. No Muslim should be seen entering into a relationship of real intimacy and trust with an Infidel, for to do so would contradict the spirit and letter of Islam, and would alarm. However, seeing one's Sheikh inveigle non-Muslims for his own, Muslim, purposes will not arouse criticism from his men, but admiration.

6. Be shy of too close relations with the subordinates of the expedition. Continual intercourse with them will make it impossible for you to avoid going behind or beyond the instructions that the Arab C.O. has given them on your advice, and in so disclosing the weakness of his position you altogether destroy your own.

Comment: part of #5. Authority is based on unquestioning submission; don't come between the Arab C.O. and any of the men from whom he expects such submission. You weaken him, and he will never forgive you for this, and may become your enemy.

7. Treat the sub-chiefs of your force quite easily and lightly. In this way you hold yourself above their level. Treat the leader, if a Sherif, with respect. He will return your manner and you and he will then be alike, and above the rest. Precedence is a serious matter among the Arabs, and you must attain it.

Comment: forget the rules of Western man, and adopt the ways of Muslim man. Do not show interest in their views, or even their wellbeing. Save all of that for the Sherif. You must be like him: "above the rest." That is the rule in Islam, for all the prating about the "naturalness" and "justice" of Islamic social relations: a hierarchy, with differences between ruler and ruled, in any context, far wider than anywhere in the West.

8. Your ideal position is when you are present and not noticed. Do not be too intimate, too prominent, or too earnest. Avoid being identified too long or too often with any tribal sheikh, even if C.O. of the expedition. To do your work you must be above jealousies, and you lose prestige if you are associated with a tribe or clan, and its inevitable feuds. Sherifs are above all blood-feuds and local rivalries, and form the only principle of unity among the Arabs. Let your name therefore be coupled always with a Sherif's, and share his attitude towards the tribes.

When the moment comes for action put yourself publicly under his orders. The Bedu will then follow suit.

Comment: You must lose your own identity in that of the Sherif. You must be self-effacing. He is the center of attention at all times. Do not take any position on your own, even if you know it to make sense or that it would promote British interests; always submit to, and mimic his views.

9. Magnify and develop the growing conception of the Sherifs as the natural aristocracy of the Arabs. Intertribal jealousies make it impossible for any sheikh to attain a commanding position, and the only hope of union in nomad Arabs is that the Ashraf be universally acknowledged as the ruling class. Sherifs are half-townsmen, half-nomad, in manner and life, and have the instinct of command. Mere merit and money would be insufficient to obtain such recognition; but the Arab reverence for pedigree and the Prophet gives hope for the ultimate success of the Ashraf.

Comment: extension of 6, 7, 8. Arab tribes are always at one another's throats. Lawrence refers to the "Ashraf" - that is the Arab plural for "sharif," and here there is some confusion. The word "sherif" can apply to members of the descendants of the Prophet, and Lawrence's particular "Sherif" was from the very family that had been entrusted with the task of serving as the Guardians of the Two Holy Sanctuaries (Mecca and Medina). But the word "sharif" can also mean, loosely, a tribal chief or emir. So what, after all, does the advice come down to? That the ruling class, or those with an immediate claim to being the rulers, are those with the "pedigree" of such descent.

Think for a minute of how airily Lawrence notes that "the Arab reverence for pedigree and the Prophet gives hope for the ultimate success of the Ashraf" - while "mere merit and money would be insufficient to obtain such recognition." So "merit" - the ideal basis for leadership, anywhere - is with a phrase dismissed. And "money" was the entire basis of Lawrence's relationship with the "Sharifian forces" - the money given to them to buy or rather rent loyalty, and the money given to them to buy guns when the guns were not given outright.

And should not Lawrence have taken the occasion to explain that if "pedigree" counts, it is only "pedigree" in relation to Islam, to Muhammad? No other "pedigree" really matters. And should he not have explained why there is no equality, no nascent democracy, among the Arabs? (By the way, elsewhere Lawrence does contradict himself, and describes something akin to the democracy of the desert, when what he is really describing is a state of anarchy, of each tribe against each tribe, with lives of permanent razzias and warfare.)

He might have put it this way:

"Remember: there is no democracy or natural equality among the Arabs. Individuals do not matter, but are submissive to the Ruler as they are submissive, in their faith, to the not-to-be-questioned authority of Allah. The ruler is an absolute despot, and what justifies his rule is his status as a Muslim. Descendants of Muhammad, real or imaginary, have pride of place: because Muhammad is the most important human who ever lived, the Model of Conduct, the Perfect Man (al-insan al-kamil). Where in the advanced West we at least try to consider individual merit, the Arabs consider the family pedigree, and the surest claim to rule is that of descent from Muhammad. This is not limited to the Arabs of Arabia. The rulers of Morocco claim, too, to be a Sherifian house. The relationship to the Muhammad trumps everything else."

10. Call your Sherif 'Sidi' in public and in private. Call other people by their ordinary names, without title. In intimate conversation call a Sheikh 'Abu Annad', 'Akhu Alia' or some similar by-name.

Comment: extension of 6,7, 8, 9. Show obeisance in public to the Sherif, and in private, make use of one of the other names by which he is known. Study the Arab system of naming, that is, Kunya. Try to master some of it. Individualism as we understand it has no place in Islam. Everyone is connected, in this most collectivist of faiths. You may be connected to a place: the town from which you are born, Al-Baghdadi, Al-Tikiri, or country with which you or some ancestors were associated: Al-Misri, Al-Ajami. You may be known by an honorific connecting you to your son, or to your father, or to an event, or to a cause: Abu Jihad, Abu Ammar, and so on. The elaborate Kunya system of naming suppresses the individual, treats him as part of a continuum: the son of, the father of, or of the greater collective, and perhaps that system deserved from Lawrence a word or two of analysis, which he failed to provide.

11. The foreigner and Christian is not a popular person in Arabia. However friendly and informal the treatment of yourself may be, remember always that your foundations are very sandy ones. Wave a Sherif in front of you like a banner and hide your own mind and person. If you succeed, you will have hundreds of miles of country and thousands of men under your orders, and for this it is worth bartering the outward show.

Comment: Surely this is the most important point, wrongly stated by Lawrence. To state that "the foreigner and Christian is not a popular person in Arabia" is misleading; it would be like writing, in 1918, that "Germans are not popular in England." It does not convey the fact that no Muslims can possibly be expected to be anything but the most temporary of allies with Infidels, whom they deeply mistrust, and any British officer who was to believe that some local gunga-din, "his friendship forged in war," really meant him well and could be trusted, was a fool. Dozens of American and other Infidel soldiers have been killed by Muslims whom they were training, or with whom they went on missions, precisely because the American commanders believed that such a phrase as "the foreigner and Christian is not a popular person in Arabia" was enough of a warning about inculcated Muslim hostility toward all Infidels. It was not in Lawrence's day; it is not now. Lawrence kept fooling himself about the Sherifians: they wanted money, weapons, and after the Turks were defeated, they wanted countries for themselves. And they got those countries, even had those countries specially created for them: Iraq was created out of three former Ottoman vilayets (Basra, Baghdad, Mosul); Jordan, that is, the Emirate of Transjordan, was created out of Eastern Palestine, territory intended by the League of Nations to be included in, and covered by the provisions of, the Mandate for Palestine. Instead, when Faisal was put on the throne of Iraq by the British, his older brother Abdullah clamored for a country he could call his own, and the result was that Emirate of Transjordan that, in 1946, became the Kingdom of Jordan.

Some may think that Lawrence's next item adequately conveys the meretriciousness and disguised but deep and permanent hostility of the Arabs to Infidels: "However friendly and informal the treatment of yourself may be, remember always that your foundations are very sandy ones. Wave a Sherif in front of you like a banner and hide your own mind and person. If you succeed, you will have hundreds of miles of country and thousands of men under your orders, and for this it is worth bartering the outward show." I don't think it does. And as for the last bit of advice - "Wave a Sherif in front of you like a banner and hide your own mind and person. If you succeed, you will have hundreds of miles of country and thousands of men under your orders, and for this it is worth bartering the outward show" - it has no relevance, if the military men in question don't happen to have within reach a "Sharif" - one of the Ashraf - that is, a member of the family that was entrusted with the guardianship of the Two Holy Sanctuaries of Mecca and Medina. As general advice, it is irrelevant; it is worthless.

12. Cling tight to your sense of humour. You will need it every day. A dry irony is the most useful type, and repartee of a personal and not too broad character will double your influence with the chiefs. Reproof, if wrapped up in some smiling form, will carry further and last longer than the most violent speech. The power of mimicry or parody is valuable, but use it sparingly, for wit is more dignified than humour. Do not cause a laugh at a Sherif except among Sherifs.

Comment: Perfectly Polonius. Not less, but not more. Keep your sense of humor, a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down, don't be too sarcastic with the natives, and don't make fun of whoever is the local chief. No Infidel should dare to criticize or mock a Muslim, unless given an explicit sign by someone of high rank that it is permissible, but only very gently and circumspectly, to do so. And no sally ever can be directed at something to do with someone's observance of Islam, but only at some personal foible.

13. Never lay hands on an Arab; you degrade yourself. You may think the resultant obvious increase of outward respect a gain to you, but what you have really done is to build a wall between you and their inner selves. It is difficult to keep quiet when everything is being done wrong, but the less you lose your temper the greater your advantage. Also then you will not go mad yourself.

Comment: The notion that if you "lay hands on an Arab" that it is this that "build[s] a wall between you and their inner selves" is misleading. There is already an "inner wall" that long ago was built by Islam to prevent you, the Infidel, from understanding, or gaining entry even to the antechamber, of their inner selves. You must tell yourself, remind yourself, at every step: I don't really know what that man is thinking. I don't really know what he thinks of me, or what, if he could do anything, he would do to me. If you take any other attitude, you are risking your life and that of your men.

14. While very difficult to drive, the Bedu are easy to lead, if you have the patience to bear with them. The less apparent your interferences the more your influence. They are willing to follow your advice and do what you wish, but they do not mean you or anyone else to be aware of that. It is only after the end of all annoyances that you find at bottom their real fund of goodwill.

Comment: The Bedu will not take obvious direction from a non-Muslim, but will do so if they can save face by merely "taking advice" that will, in their eyes, contribute to their own wellbeing and promotion of their interests. They have no larger goal than more power and more loot and greater aggrandizement, and they will not suffer any command from any Infidel. Only commands that are packaged as something else -- as advice, given hesitantly -- are likely to work. And that is because a gulf separates Muslim from Infidel, not to be permanently bridged. But where interests happen to coincide, a perilously swaying footbridge may be constructed, requiring a temporary suspension of belief by the Muslim in the perfidy of the Infidel, in order not to collapse into the waiting abyss below.

15. Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not to win it for them. Actually, also, under the very odd conditions of Arabia, your practical work will not be as good as, perhaps, you think it is.

Comment: Polonius-level, and inaccurate to boot. "It is their war" - the war against the Turks was fought by the Allies, and the major victories in the theatre of war with which Lawrence was familiar were made entirely by the British and Australian troops, with intelligence provided by the Palestinian Jews of the Nili Group. Then there is the vagueness of "the very odd conditions of Arabia" - which are what? The sand? The camels? The minds of Muslim men? He should spell out those "odd conditions." To me the oddest condition, and the one that explains why "your practical work will not be as good as, perhaps, you think it is" is that you will delude yourself into thinking you have had a greater effect on the Muslims and their attitudes that you really have had, but you will realize, after the fact - Lawrence himself, in his last years, expressed in his Letters, obliquely, his own great disappointment in the Arabs - that so much of it was wasted effort. I am sure that in 2-3 years all those involved in the Iraq venture, including General Petraeus and his colonels, will come to realize how misguided it was, and what a fantastic squandering of resources - men, money, materiel, attention - it represented. These resources are misdirected when the war of self-defense against the Jihad requires other, more effective, far less costly methods. But the main theatre of war will then be recognized, by more in the American military, as not being in Iraq, nor Afghanistan, nor Pakistan, but rather within the countries of Western Europe.

16. If you can, without being too lavish, forestall presents to yourself. A well-placed gift is often most effective in winning over a suspicious sheikh. Never receive a present without giving a liberal return, but you may delay this return (while letting its ultimate certainty be known) if you require a particular service from the giver. Do not let them ask you for things, since their greed will then make them look upon you only as a cow to milk.

Comment: There's a whole lot of gift-giving among the Arabs, as a way of currying favor. So do it yourself - bribe and ply them with things. But the idea that you will be "winning over a suspicious sheikh" is wrong. You won't have won him over. You will have temporarily rented, just possibly, and to what extent you will not be able to gauge, his services or his temporary collaboration.

That's it.

One point Lawrence makes is one that should be put up in CAPS all over Congress, the Executive Office Building, and the Pentagon too: "Do not let them ask you for things, since their greed will then make them look upon you only as a cow to milk." But that's exactly what has happened in Iraq, in Pakistan, in Afghanistan, and now in Yemen. It doesn't have to be this or that individual; it is the "Pakistani military," say, or "the Iraqi government." They are out to get absolutely as much as they can, and the favorite phrase uttered by various Arabs has been - listen closely - the "Marshall Plan." That is, they have the gall to pretend, or to try to make us pretend, that they, Muslims and Arabs, are as much a part of our civilization as were the war-ravaged countries of Western Europe. But the economic paralysis in Muslim lands is not the result of war, but of their own inshallah-fatalism and hatred of bid'a, innovation. The fact that not even the U.A.E., Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, any of the fabulously rich, grotesquely rich, recipients of the more than twelve trillion dollars that have gone to the Muslim members of OPEC since 1973 alone, has managed to get off total reliance on oil, to create the semblance of a real economy, is telling. But while it is telling, those who have been both making and executing American policy appear not to have been listening or grasping this, and so they keep coming back to more American aid, failing to recognize that Islam will always prevent the kind of economic development that we think we are encouraging, and for which we have been shelling out so much.

17. Wear an Arab headcloth when with a tribe. Bedu have a malignant prejudice against the hat, and believe that our persistence in wearing it (due probably to British obstinacy of dictation) is founded on some immoral or irreligious principle. A thick headcloth forms a good protection against the sun, and if you wear a hat your best Arab friends will be ashamed of you in public.

Comment: What Lawrence describes as a "malignant prejudice against the hat" has to do with the hat being associated with non-Muslims, with Christians, with the West. When Ataturk passed the Hat Act, banning the fez and requiring the wearing of Western-style hats and caps, he was delivering a blow against Islam. This is not understood in the West, but the Hat Act was part of his systematic campaign to constrain the power of Islam (in the absence of the ability to take Islam straight on, which would have been impossible, even for Ataturk). The fez allowed one to bow during those canonical prayers, and easily; the Western hat or cap had to be removed for prayer. It's one more thing to put in a pile, along with shoes, at the entry to a mosque, and then to try to retrieve successfully.

18. Disguise is not advisable. Except in special areas, let it be clearly known that you are a British officer and a Christian. At the same time, if you can wear Arab kit when with the tribes, you will acquire their trust and intimacy to a degree impossible in uniform. It is, however, dangerous and difficult. They make no special allowances for you when you dress like them. Breaches of etiquette not charged against a foreigner are not condoned to you in Arab clothes. You will be like an actor in a foreign theatre, playing a part day and night for months, without rest, and for an anxious stake. Complete success, which is when the Arabs forget your strangeness and speak naturally before you, counting you as one of themselves, is perhaps only attainable in character: while half-success (all that most of us will strive for; the other costs too much) is easier to win in British things, and you yourself will last longer, physically and mentally, in the comfort that they mean. Also then the Turks will not hang you, when you are caught.

Comment: Why is "disguise not advisable"? Because you are already, as "a British officer and a Christian," a figure of suspicion. Don't try to hide it - as if such were possible. (Charles Foucault traveled in Morocco disguised as a rabbi, it's true, but few would have had Foucault's abilities.) On the other hand, wearing "Arab kit," Lawrence thinks, may make "the Arabs forget your strangeness and speak naturally before you, counting you as one of themselves." If he allowed himself to believe that, he really was deluded. The point about the Turks not hanging you, however, is a good one - but irrelevant to what American soldiers need to learn, preferably before they go to Iraq.

19. If you wear Arab things, wear the best. Clothes are significant among the tribes, and you must wear the appropriate, and appear at ease in them. Dress like a Sherif, if they agree to it.

Comment: Polonius on Madison Avenue: look sharp and feel sharp. A Men's Warehouse Ad. Who could disagree? Are there others who don't care if you make an impression with your dress? Not likely, not back in 1918.

20. If you wear Arab things at all, go the whole way. Leave your English friends and customs on the coast, and fall back on Arab habits entirely. It is possible, starting thus level with them, for the European to beat the Arabs at their own game, for we have stronger motives for our action, and put more heart into it than they. If you can surpass them, you have taken an immense stride toward complete success, but the strain of living and thinking in a foreign and half-understood language, the savage food, strange clothes, and stranger ways, with the complete loss of privacy and quiet, and the impossibility of ever relaxing your watchful imitation of the others for months on end, provide such an added stress to the ordinary difficulties of dealing with the Bedu, the climate, and the Turks, that this road should not be chosen without serious thought.

Comment: An extension of the previous three. Fit in with the Arabs, accustom yourself to the savage food" and "strange clothes," endure "the complete loss of privacy and quiet," accept "the impossibility of ever relaxing your watchful imitation." In other words, if you can do the impossible, that only....well, that I, Lawrence of Arabia, have managed to do, then do it. On second thought, don't even bother. No one else could do what I have done.

21. Religious discussions will be frequent. Say what you like about your own side, and avoid criticism of theirs, unless you know that the point is external, when you may score heavily by proving it so. With the Bedu, Islam is so all-pervading an element that there is little religiosity, little fervour, and no regard for externals. Do not think from their conduct that they are careless. Their conviction of the truth of their faith, and its share in every act and thought and principle of their daily life is so intimate and intense as to be unconscious, unless roused by opposition. Their religion is as much a part of nature to them as is sleep or food.

Comment: Surely this should not be placed so far down, as #21, almost an afterthought, long after the sartorial advice and that about being careful how you treat your particular sharif. "Religious discussions will be frequent"? What does this tell us? How "frequent" are "religious discussions" in the military of non-Muslims? Good to know that among the Bedu "Islam is so all-pervading an element" that there need not be fervor - in other words, they take the centrality and rightness of Islam to be so obvious, that they need not think about it. Good for Lawrence to note that their faith, and "its share in ever act and thought and principle of their daily life is so intimate and intense as to be unconscious...[that] their religion is as much a part of nature to them as is sleep or food" - this is surely the most important remark in the entire piece. But Lawrence does not explain what has to be made explicit: that Islam is based not only on the rituals of worship, that is, the Five Pillars, but also rests on a division of all of humanity between Muslim and non-Muslim, and inculcates the idea that between the two a state of permanent hostility, of permanent war, but not always open warfare, must exist. Had he said this, he might have usefully warned against any great expectations or hopes, sensibly dashing them. But he did not. And those who take Lawrence as a guide, if they fail to note just what Islam inculcates at this point - this faith that is "in every act and thought and principle of their daily life" - are misleading others.

But could they? Could the Fort Leavenworth colonels, could General Petraeus, really enlighten their troops about what Islam teaches, what the texts and tenets tell us, what attitudes and atmospherics naturally arise among Muslims? I don't think they could. Because if they were to fully grasp what this meant, they would lose belief in the mission, and as good soldiers, they are willing, apparently, to ignore those parts of reality that get in the way of, that might cause them abandon hope for, the mission with which they have been entrusted.

But what about those under them, what about the lieutenants and captains and privates who have experienced training, going out on missions with, trusting, Muslim Iraqis, both Arabs and Kurds? When, for example, those soldiers notice how much more trustworthy are the Kurds than the Arabs, what are they to make of it? Are they to be told, truthfully, that this is not only a result of American protection for Kurds from 1991 to 2003, by providing air cover from attacks by the Arabs, but that the non-Arab ethnic identity of Kurds does not reinforce, but works against, the power and hold of Islam, and that this is a lesson likely to be useful in other, though not in all, Muslim countries? For example, in Afghanistan that might be true, but less so in Pakistan, a state founded of, by, and for Muslims, while Afghanistan was a state whose various peoples were, over time, Islamized, and where, until recently, because of the level of life, the full message of Islam had not quite, in its full and consequently most dangerous form, been disseminated.

22. Do not try to trade on what you know of fighting. The Hejaz confounds ordinary tactics. Learn the Bedu principles of war as thoroughly and as quickly as you can, for till you know them your advice will be no good to the Sherif. Unnumbered generations of tribal raids have taught them more about some parts of the business than we will ever know. In familiar conditions they fight well, but strange events cause panic. Keep your unit small. Their raiding parties are usually from one hundred to two hundred men, and if you take a crowd they only get confused. Also their sheikhs, while admirable company commanders, are too 'set' to learn to handle the equivalents of battalions or regiments. Don't attempt unusual things, unless they appeal to the sporting instinct Bedu have so strongly, unless success is obvious. If the objective is a good one (booty) they will attack like fiends, they are splendid scouts, their mobility gives you the advantage that will win this local war, they make proper use of their knowledge of the country (don't take tribesmen to places they do not know), and the gazelle-hunters, who form a proportion of the better men, are great shots at visible targets. A sheikh from one tribe cannot give orders to men from another; a Sherif is necessary to command a mixed tribal force. If there is plunder in prospect, and the odds are at all equal, you will win. Do not waste Bedu attacking trenches (they will not stand casualties) or in trying to defend a position, for they cannot sit still without slacking. The more unorthodox and Arab your proceedings, the more likely you are to have the Turks cold, for they lack initiative and expect you to. Don't play for safety.

Comment: Here there is oblique recognition of what we all know now to be true: the Sharifian forces never at any time included more than a few hundred warriors, on camel or horse, and the Bedu cannot be trained to Western standards of organization; neither they nor their sheikhs can "learn to handle the equivalent of battalions or regiments." The Bedu, according to Lawrence, are used to raiding - they lived by raiding, in fact - but they won't try something "unusual" by way of tactics or target unless their "sporting instinct" dictates otherwise (fine fellows, those Bedu, practically ready for the cricket ground at Lord's, with their upper-class "sporting instinct"). But Lawrence does mention that they have a higher goal - for them a most important goal - "if the objective is a good one (booty) they will attack like fiends." In other words, they are out, like the earliest Muslims, for loot, and that, not some higher ideal, is what moves them. "They will not stand casualties" - in other words, they are easily turned back, apparently, and they lack patience - "they cannot sit still without slacking." Note how here Lawrence has brought in the Turks, no longer giving advice on the Arabs, instructing his readers that those "lack initiative and expect you to." That's the kind of remark that led to the British disaster at Gallipoli.

23. The open reason that Bedu give you for action or inaction may be true, but always there will be better reasons left for you to divine. You must find these inner reasons (they will be denied, but are none the less in operation) before shaping your arguments for one course or other. Allusion is more effective than logical exposition: they dislike concise expression. Their minds work just as ours do, but on different premises. There is nothing unreasonable, incomprehensible, or inscrutable in the Arab. Experience of them, and knowledge of their prejudices will enable you to foresee their attitude and possible course of action in nearly every case.

Comment: The gist here is that the Arabs, or rather the subset known as the Bedu (that is, the nomadic tribes of the desert), will never level with you, and it is up to you to discover the secret wellsprings of their actions or inactions. Lawrence says: "they dislike concise expression." Translated: they are florid in their interminable speeches, and you can never get them to get to the bottom of something, or to express themselves clearly. "Their minds work just as ours do" -- do they? Are the powers of logic, is the familiarity with free and skeptical inquiry, just as advanced among Muslim Bedu as among the representatives of the most advanced societies, those of the West?

24. Do not mix Bedu and Syrians, or trained men and tribesmen. You will get work out of neither, for they hate each other. I have never seen a successful combined operation, but many failures. In particular, ex-officers of the Turkish army, however Arab in feelings and blood and language, are hopeless with Bedu. They are narrow minded in tactics, unable to adjust themselves to irregular warfare, clumsy in Arab etiquette, swollen-headed to the extent of being incapable of politeness to a tribesman for more than a few minutes, impatient, and, usually, helpless without their troops on the road and in action. Your orders (if you were unwise enough to give any) would be more readily obeyed by Beduins than those of any Mohammedan Syrian officer. Arab townsmen and Arab tribesmen regard each other mutually as poor relations, and poor relations are much more objectionable than poor strangers.

Comment: Town and Country do not mix well or play with others: "they hate each other." No such thing as a "successful combined operation." And if you have been in the Turkish army, even if Arab by ethnicity and identification and language, you will "be helpless with the Bedu." Then there is a sentence which I assume refers to the urban Arabs, the "Syrians" as Lawrence calls them: "[T]hey are narrow indeed in tactics, unable to adjust themselves to irregular warfare, clumsy in Arab etiquette, swollen-headed to the extent of being incapable of politeness to a tribesman for more than a few minutes, impatient, and, usually, helpless without their troops on the road and in action." Now who are these "Syrians"? He means the northern Arabs, the Arabs of Syria, Lebanon, of what became Mandatory Palestine, the Arabs who stand in contradistinction to the true, pure Arabs of the Arabian desert. Incidentally, this distinction is to be found today, and one can find, at www.MEMRITV.org, for example, contempt expressed by those "Syrians" - that is, the Arabs of the north, the Arabs who live in towns and are not nomadic, the Arabs who regard with contempt for the "desert Arabs" of Arabia who are not, so the northern ones insist, "civilized," not part of the "civilization" that such words as "Umayyad" (Syria) and "Abbasid" (Iraq) and "Fatimid" (Egypt) evoke. And even more maddening today, for the "sophisticated" (a relative term) Arabs of Damascus, Baghdad, Cairo, and other northern centers, is that those desert Arabs, those primitives, are the ones who have all the money, and that maddens further, especially when they arrive in Cairo or Beirut or Damascus where rich Muslim Arab boys just want to have fun, and are not shy about treating the locals with contempt.

But surely there is something here that needs to be brought up to date, made relevant to the situation in Iraq - for which General Petraeus and his colonels were attempting to prepare themselves and others. The divisions in Iraq that count are not so much between the desert tribes and the urban population of Baghdad, or Basra or Mosul (still quite tribal, with a veneer of urban civilization that, now that the Jews are no longer in Baghdad, and now that the Christians are being harried out of Basra, Baghdad, and Mosul, becomes more translucent every day), but between Sunnis and Shi'a, or Arabs and Kurds, or Muslims and Christians, Muslims and Yazidis, Muslims and Mandeans and every other teeny-tiny remnant of an ancient sect, surviving where it can only because the Muslims have not until now turned their attention to making their lives even more insecure and deeply unpleasant than they have been.

25. In spite of ordinary Arab example, avoid too free talk about women. It is as difficult a subject as religion, and their standards are so unlike our own that a remark, harmless in English, may appear as unrestrained to them, as some of their statements would look to us, if translated literally.

Comment: Here Lawrence alludes to the position of women, the mistreatment of women, but as he was not much interested in women, he did not give it emphasis. But surely the reduction of women to breeding chattel is something that most strikes Americans and other Infidels in Iraq (or in any Muslim society). Of what use is this comment? He should have spelled out what he meant by "their standards are so unlike our own" - and he should have set out chapter and verse as to the treatment of, view of, women in Islam. He missed an important chance. And for anyone in the American military, perhaps especially now that women serve as combat soldiers, pilots, medics, as well as in Civil Affairs (to win hearts, win minds), it would have been good to fully prepare them for the mistreatment of Muslim women, so that they might not accept that mistreatment as merely different (Lawrence: "standards so unlike our own"). To avoid discussing the inferior position of women is dangerous and cruel. But of course to do this requires a willingness to tell unpleasant truths, instead of pleasant untruths, about Islam.

26. Be as careful of your servants as of yourself. If you want a sophisticated one you will probably have to take an Egyptian, or a Sudani, and unless you are very lucky he will undo on trek much of the good you so laboriously effect. Arabs will cook rice and make coffee for you, and leave you if required to do unmanly work like cleaning boots or washing. They are only really possible if you are in Arab kit. A slave brought up in the Hejaz is the best servant, but there are rules against British subjects owning them, so they have to be lent to you. In any case, take with you an Ageyli or two when you go up country. They are the most efficient couriers in Arabia, and understand camels.

Comment: Ah, the servant problem. Well, the "servant problem" in Iraq was solved soon enough, in the Green Zone, where the big shots found that the easiest thing to do was to take over the staffs - largely Christian - of maids and chauffeurs and cleaners and cooks and tasters - whom Saddam Hussein had employed. Why did he employ them? Well, because he knew they were not, could never be, a threat - given that Christians in a Muslim society were constantly on edge about their own security. He knew they would not dare to be in a political plot against him, whereas Shi'a Arabs, or Kurds (mostly Sunni), or even Sunni Arabs, from a different group or tribe or family, might well plot and work to eliminate him. Here is where explaining to the troops this appropriation of the same class of servants (drivers, cooks, etc.) from among the Christians might have helped. And some worry over the use, in some places, of Muslims might have been warranted. A friend of mine who served at FOB Danger in Tikrit tells of how he had to watch, with his gun at the ready, even the Kurdish gardeners tending the trees and bushes and grass that Saddam Hussein had had planted round his palace. But the need for such watchfulness came with experience, and was not part of the training received back at Fort Jackson, or Fort Bragg, or Fort Somewhere. But it should have been.

27. The beginning and ending of the secret of handling Arabs is unremitting study of them. Keep always on your guard; never say an unnecessary thing: watch yourself and your companions all the time: hear all that passes, search out what is going on beneath the surface, read their characters, discover their tastes and their weaknesses and keep everything you find out to yourself. Bury yourself in Arab circles, have no interests and no ideas except the work in hand, so that your brain is saturated with one thing only, and you realize your part deeply enough to avoid the little slips that would counteract the painful work of weeks. Your success will be proportioned to the amount of mental effort you devote to it.

Comment: More Polonius. Both obvious, and true. The alpha and omega of "handling Arabs" is the "unremitting study of them." And Lawrence, in the 27th of his 27 apercus (neither brilliant nor, often, particularly useful), offers do's and don'ts that at least contain a warning that suggests how not-to-be-trusted are the Muslim Arabs: "keep always on your guard," "never say an unnecessary thing," "watch yourself and your companions all the time," "hear all that passes," "search out what is going on beneath the surface."

Unremarkable, but apparently the kind of thing that some will need to have spelled out. But what Lawrence does not say is also, or even more, important. What explains this need to be on one's guard? Why must a British officer who is working with the Arabs against the Turks, helping to "liberate" them, and giving them money, supplying them weapons, perhaps giving them logistical support or even rudimentary training, have nonetheless to be constantly on guard? Why must one watch always what one says, what one does, why must one "search out what is going on beneath the surface"? He doesn't explain that Muslim Arab society is one of constant meretriciousness and deception, deception of Infidels, but also deception of fellow Muslims who are of a different group, tribe, family. It is the picture of a world in which homo homini lupus, despite all the talk about the unity of the Umma (a unity that expresses itself in solidarity against Infidels, but not in any other kind of solidarity). The rule is not pleasant, but it is a true one. I have heard, from Christians who grew up in Syria, about the astonishing mistrust of Muslims for one another, of how a Muslim man will not trust even his brother to be alone with his wife. "War is deception," Muhammad famously said, but in Islam, it is not only war, but life itself, quotidian existence, that is full of constantly shifting alliances and perceived interests, and always, shifting sands of deception of every kind.

That can be related to Islam, to the aggression and violence that it instills, so that even if, in the case of the texts, the aggression and violence are directed at non-Muslims. It can be related to the attitudes to which Islam naturally gives rise in its adherents, the atmospherics of Islamic societies, with their ill-concealed hysteria, the voices of daily life raised to a constant feverish pitch. (Sometimes it seems, in an Arab country, even within families, as if everyone is always yelling at the top of his lungs.)

So what does "Twenty-Seven Articles" by Lawrence, written in 1918 when he had less than two years of experience with those Sherifian forces about which he has now become such a self-proclaimed expert (it was just a few years before that he was a low-level assistant working as an archeologist under D. Hogarth at the Ashmolean), really offer? Keep in mind not the myth of Lawrence, but the reality: that the Arab troops of the Sherifian forces were not "100,000" as, at one point, in a display of that "vivid oriental imagination" we used to unembarrassedly hear about, the Sherif Husain claimed to have, but rather well under a thousand troops, and never more than a few hundred in any one operation. They did not conquer Damascus or any major city (unless Aqaba, then a sleepy tiny port, counts). Nor did they conquer Medina, the southern terminus of the Hejaz Railway. Nor did they do much against the Turks that would have ordinarily put the British in their debt. But the British arabophile officials in the Foreign Office would accept the Lawrentian myth, so that they could accuse themselves of having "betrayed the Arabs." And having made that accusation, they tried to "make it up" to the Arabs by being beastly to those "East European Jews" whom they found so demanding, so brash, so unwilling to treat them in the oily manner that the Arabs had perfected. Besides, unlike the Arabs, the Jews did not provide any of that local color that went over so well among the middle-class officials and military men who, in the Near East as in India, liked a good parade, liked natives who acted like natives. There wasn't much of that in Mandatory Palestine, but a few of the rich landed families, the Nashashibis, the Husseinis, the Khalidis, could put on a show - nothing like what India offered, but still...

So even though General Allenby and others on the spot knew that the Sherifian revolt was not of great military value, and even though it was Allenby who caused Lawrence's hasty decampment back to Blighty, the Lawrence myth took off.

Let's sum up what we think we - you and I - have learned from this portentous document that could easily be reduced to three or four paragraphs: Don't mock the Arab chieftain, don't contradict him, make him think your suggestions are his own. Don't be over-familiar with his men; they are his, and consequently your, inferiors. Do wear "Arab kit," but also make clear you are an English officer. Try, if you can, to endure their food, to endure their ways of living; try to fit in, but don't try so hard as to make them think you have forgotten who you are. Be careful on the subjects of religion and women. Realize that religion permeates the lives of the Bedu, to such an extent that they take it as a fact of nature, a given. Be careful discussing women; they have very different attitudes. Be careful with this, be careful with that. Understand that they do not like to take casualties, can easily be discouraged, have no taste for organization at a higher level, prefer small raiding parties, and are most enthusiastic about fighting when there is the promise of booty. Try to win their trust, but realize that even if you do everything you can to win their trust, they will still be untrustworthy themselves, and you must be constantly on your guard.

There's more to summarize, but at this point it's more of the same. You can look above to read Lawrence's original and the "Comment" put after each of the "articles," for yourself.

And you will immediately note the absence of the word "Islam" and, instead, and only a few times, oblique references to it, when the word "religion" is used. Repeatedly one wants to have Lawrence to connect the most important thing in any true Muslim Believer's life - the fact of Islam - to these attitudes. He tells us to be careful about discussing religion, but doesn't spell out exactly why a British officer should be so careful. He tells us that the Arabs have a very different view of women, but doesn't tell us why, what it is in the texts of Islam that might explain that "very different view." He tells us that the Arabs respect pedigree - a connection to the family of the Prophet -- in their rulers more than money or merit, but not why. He lived in the period, thank god, when there was none of that treacly and false stuff about the "three abrahamic religions" or "the three great monotheistic faiths" - these phrases would not have occurred to him, or to anyone in that period. But he still, if unconsciously, is running interference for Islam. He tells the British officers that as "British and Infidels" they will not be liked. But why? Why won't they be liked? Tell us more, tell us exactly why. And is it true that if we follow all the commandments about deportment we will actually become friends with the Arabs, trusted friends? Is that conceivable? Is that possible? Could they, would they, be friendly to us, if not our friends, if we did not ply them with weapons and money? That is, is their "friendship" with Infidels even possible without their getting a quid pro quo, cash on the barrel, and a lot more besides? The answer is no, and it was Lawrence's responsibility to explain why, but he didn't. Perhaps he had been among Muslims, people who are taught not to question authority but to acquire and maintain a habit of mental submission, and he, Lawrence, was influenced by this view, did not feel a need to explain further than he did (which was not much) the nature of the Arab minds and hearts that the British officers who read his text would be expected to have to understand. How is it possible, even today, that the American troops are not given, as part of Basic Training, a real course in Islam, not a fake course, not one limited to the Five Pillars of individual worship, and not one sanitized so much that it might have been produced by the O.I.C., or CAIR?

Mostly what we have here is a pseudo-authoritative collection of the obvious, or here and there the not-so-obvious, by one who was a naïf, for all of his experience, neither the first nor the last Westerner to come to Araby, and to be entranced by the Romance of the Timeless Desert, the Arabs Under A Starry and Infinite Sky, the Leathery-Faced Bedu With His Hawk, and his Hawk-Eyed Piercing Stare, The Kind Of Warrior Who Will Never Let You Down (but don't ever let down your guard with him, not even for second).

Those who went out to Iraq, on repeated tours, and learned the hard way about the Arabs and Muslims, and in learning it, became - inexorably - disenchanted with the task they were assigned, are seldom heard from. Some are still in the military, and not about to cause a stir by denouncing the whole strategy as one of waste and misdirection of resources that fails to take into account the need to divide and demoralize the enemy camp, the Camp of Islam. For no one dares, whose career depends on not offending his bosses in Washington, in the Pentagon or the Executive Branch, to openly tell a few home truths about Islam, and about the pre-existing fissures in Iraq that cannot be healed, and why the attempt to heal them should never have been made. No, they can't do it. But you and I can, and eventually, when what was predicted here would happen in Iraq does happen, we can then, perhaps, obtain a hearing.

Those who were involved in either the formulation of military strategy, or in the execution of such strategy, in Iraq, deserved to be told far more, these last few years, about what Islam inculcates. And how useful are the distinctions Lawrence made to Iraq today? Take, for example, something he mentions early on, his taxonomy of the Arabs that divides them between the urban "Syrians" (impliedly of the north) and the desert Arabs (impliedly closer to the Jazirat al-Arab, the Arabian Peninsula). How useful is this urban-dweller-vs.-desert-tribal-Arab to the situation in Iraq? Well, let's see. Would a Sunni Arab living near Fallujah have more usefully in common with a Shi'a Arab living in similar tribal circumstances, in southern Iraq, or more in common with an urban dweller, a Sunni Arab living in Baghdad? Would a Kurdish tribesman in the north have more in common with a Kurd whose family had lived for generations in Baghdad (there were some), or with a Sunni tribesman, living in a small village in Diyala Province, or Anbar? We know the answer, and we know that the "Syrian-Bedu" distinction is not useful for Iraq. But it retains its usefulness in another way, as a shorthand description of the split between those Arabs of Syria, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, who think of themselves as the "civilized ones," as compared to the maddeningly rich, but comparatively "primitive," Arabs of the Gulf and the Peninsula. The resentments felt by those in the north lead them to console themselves for their relative poverty compared to the oil-rich "desert Arabs," and also for their backwardness vis-à-vis the Infidel West, by mentally returning to a fabled past of exaggerated glory ("we were the founders of civilization" and other claims of that type) that continues to nourish their imaginations and to protect them from any too-painful recognition of their own dismal reality.

The greatest of Lawrence's lapses is his failure to discuss, and in detail, Islam. There were others, at the time, who did. In the Dutch East Indies, the Dutch government in Batavia was greatly helped by the advice given by the scholar C. Snouck Hurgronje, certainly one of the two or three greatest Western scholars of Islam. Lawrence was not a scholar of Islam, not ever, and he simply picked attitudes up, but one doubts that he ever subjected Islam to systematic study.

In extenuation, consider the period. For Lawrence was not someone who had to worry about the responsibilities of rule. He was there for two heady years of fighting, exciting for him, a mild-mannered archaeologist, and no doubt in those days he still had faith in "the Arabs" - a faith that students of the late Lawrence suggest in his last years he lost. He didn't think too much about Islam, just as someone in ARAMCO, going out to Saudi Arabia in, say, the 1940s, wouldn't have given it much thought because Muslims worldwide were weak, had little money, had not yet been admitted by the millions into the advanced countries of Europe. That is, they had not yet been admitted into what used to be known, and was thought of still by Muslims, as the lands of Western Christendom, the enemy's territory. Western Christendom had not yet yielded, but for some amazing reasons was allowing deep behind its own defensive lines those who, being Muslims, could not possibly wish those countries, as Infidel nation-states that still have not submitted to Islam, well.

Why should an ARAMCO geologist or executive, have been thinking about Islam in 1940, or 1950, or even 1960? And why should T. E. Lawrence have thought about it, when the Arabs themselves were a comical fighting force? His description of them does not depict them as capable of military organization, beyond a few hundred men. Perhaps they were able to harry here and there some Turks, but were not even capable of taking the Turkish garrison, or of cutting off from all re-supplies, in Medina, a garrison that held out until the war was over.

So Lawrence's failure to treat what we now know to be the central fact of Muslim life, Muslim attitudes, Muslim ways of thought, Muslim views of the universe, is understandable.

But what is not understandable is that his "Twenty-Seven Articles" should apparently be held by some even now in such high regard, when Lawrence, in leaving out Islam, left out what makes Muslims, above all in the Arab lands, tick. There ethnic identity and faith are mutually reinforcing, unlike the case among many non-Arab Muslims, such as Kurds or Berbers or Iranians, whose pre-Islamic past helps that identity to dilute, or weaken, or offer an alternative, to the sole identity offered by Islam.

American officers and men who read, or who are given to read by their superiors, "Twenty-Seven Articles," will remain in many important ways unprepared for, and then surprised by, and then deeply disappointed in, their experience in Iraq.

Another article needs to be written, perhaps even called "Twenty-Seven Articles," that could be most useful if given to, digested by, officers and men going off to Iraq, to Afghanistan, to Pakistan, possibly to Yemen or Somalia or, for that matter, in a decade to Paris or London or Rome or Berlin, in the never-ending and never-to-end war of self-defense against the worldwide Jihad that cannot have an end, but can be reduced to manageable proportions. But the Pentagon, and the civilians in our government, are afraid of daring to discuss Islam openly, and afraid even of being caught discussing Islam, qua Islam, surreptitiously. And with so many Muslims allowed to wander the corridors of power, even in the Pentagon, they are right to worry. It is an absurd situation. And it is not only worry about "what the Muslims will think" and the unseemly and unnecessary need to keep being solicitous of Muslim sensibilities that prevents the production, by the government, of such an article.

So why don't you and I produce it here, ourselves? I'll offer, as Part IV of this series on Arabia Petraea, a version, a rough draft, of information about Iraq that might reasonably have been imparted to the departing troops, to make their own lives easier, and their disappoints in the mission less dramatic. And then others -- you, for example -- can in the thread following make suggestions as to additions and emendations. We don't have to worry. We don't have to be inhibited. We're not the White House. We're not the bigshots at the Pentagon. We're free to tell the truth.

Of course he would say that. Muslims are deeply worried that as people all over the Western world who find themselves on the receiving end of Muslim violence, aggression, and also non-violent but equally dangerous and sinister forms of Jihad, learn about the texts and tenets of Islam, they will, insensibly, come to re-think their view of the war being made by the Arabs and Muslims against Israel, the Lesser Jihad against Israel.

And as those people begin to grasp the nature of Islam, they will inexorably come to understand several other things as well.

To wit:

They will come to understand that as far as Muslims are concerned, the war against Israel is a Jihad, and the existence of the Infidel nation-state of Israel, on land once controlled by Muslims, must not and cannot, be tolerated in the long run.

They will come to understand that the war against the Infidel nation-state of Israel cannot be lessened, much less brought to an end, by Israel's further surrender of territory, and shrinkage into the "lines of Auschwitz" (as Abba Evan described them).

They will come to understand that any further reductions in Israel's tiny size -- a place scarcely to be made out on a world map -- will merely increase the belief, among Arabs and Muslims, that they can go in for the kill, and will increase the likelihood of open warfare.

They will come to understand that Israel, so reduced, may be able to hold on, just, but whether it does or not, the triumphalism that will be felt by the Arabs and
Muslims can only increase to the extent that Israel approaches its final demise. And that triumphalism will in turn naturally whet Arab and Muslim appetites elsewhere, but above all elsewhere, in Spain and the countries of Western Europe.

It is this line of thinking, this understanding of Islam as explaining the Arab and Muslim war against Israel, that the keenest Arabs and Muslims worry about. They don't want Westerners to catch on to this. They hate it, for example, when Hamas and Fatah are described as the Fast Jihadists and the Slow Jihadists, differing only in matters of tactics and timing. They worry about the Western world coming to its senses too soon, and too comprehensively, about Islam and the Jihad that is currently being waged on so many fronts against the West.

That is what lies behind the nonsense and lies of the Mufti of Syria, which he delivered to an audience of visiting Infidels -- a delegation of "American academics." He is betting that those Infidels will not do any study of their own, but will instead be charmed by the deep sincerity of his gaze, and those stirring words -- he wouldn't fool us, would he? - that allow one to think that he would stand stoutly to protect Jews, or at least Judaism, and Christians, or at least Christianity.

Essentially Sheikh Ahmad Hassoun, Mufti of Syria, was giving an intelligence test. He despises those American academics, and thinks they are too stupid to find out for themselves what the texts, tenets, attitudes, and atmospherics of Islam really are. He expects them to remain ignorant of 1400 years of history of Muslim conquest, and of the subjugation of non-Muslims, and of the treatment of those who, as Christians and Jews, were allowed to live (compare what happened to 60-70 million Hindus) but only under conditions of deliberate, systematic degradation, humiliation and, above all, permanent physical insecurity, sometimes greater and sometimes lesser, depending on the ruler.

He thinks they will be, and remain, gullible.

I think that some, or perhaps many of them, will at this point prove him wrong, and pass that intelligence test, and slough off his lies, and be even more wary than they were before.

I hope my faith in the good sense and intelligence of those American academics proves correct, and that the contempt secretly shown them by the Mufti of Syria turns out to be ill-founded.

We'll see.

As a place, it has no claim on our attention. Voltaire once described French Canada as "quelques arpents de neige." Dubai, like the rest of the Emirates, like Saudi Arabia, could with more justice be dismissed, as "quelques arpents de sable." It also happens to be in a place, on the globe, convenient for airplanes travelling from Europe to Asia to set down, and perch, and rest and refuel, during their transcontinental trips. Other than that, Dubai has no significance.

But it became, over the past decade, a symbol of the rich Arab states, that is, those states that have acquired great wealth not from any entrepreneurial flair, or hard work, but rather from the fact of an accident of geology: they are the beneficiaries of the sale of oil (and in some cases natural gas). That oil and gas was discovered by, lifted by, transported by, distributed by, non-Muslims who have done everything, including writing those checks to those who happen to possess those oil and gas reserves. Those owners have received, as a consequence, more than twelve trillion dollars since 1973 alone. Dubai became a symbol. The ruler of Dubai, the people of Dubai, the investors in Dubai, the breathless commentators on the Wonder That Is Dubai, saw it as a symbol of all that was impressive, all that was so wonderful, all that bespoke of a Bright Future For The Gulf.

Others, however - you and I, for example - may choose to see things differently. We may look at those "arpents de sable," those acres of sand, and see Dubai, or Project Dubai, or Work-Site Dubai, as a symbol of something else. Yes, Dubai does indeed represent what the Arabs think of when they think of civilization. It's what impresses them, what they think makes them just as advanced as we are, the inhabitants of Rome or Paris or London or New York. They show the world, they think, that with their cloud-capped Burj Tower, they are as great, no greater, than those who put up skyscrapers in the West, or for that matter, in the East. The luxury of their hotels, each trying to be more absurdly expensive than the next, catering to every idiotic whim and whimsy, are part of that "civilization of luxury" that the rich Arabs, with their retrofitted and specially-made private 747s, and their planeloads of food flown in daily from Hediard and Fauchon, and their planeloads (or in the case of the Arabs waiting off the coast in their yachts, boatloads) of Western paid ladies to service their every need, think of as "civilization" itself.

They come to the West, which they regard not as a source or model of culture - how could the Western world, the world of Infidels, have anything of intellectual or spiritual value to offer them, Muslims, the "best of peoples"? What the West has to offer are luxury goods, and luxury hotels, and call girls, and gambling of every kind (even if the gambling violates Islam) and wheeling-dealing with the particularly unappetizing kind of Western investment advisers, and estate agents, and lawyers, who flock to such a clientele, and cater to their o'erweening ways, and never display a hint of the contempt that some of them surely must feel.

They live on their yachts, off Marbella - and have boatloads of Western women rowed out to them or they live in Marbella, or on the Riviera, in grand villas. And what goes on behind the high walls of those villas cannot be - or rather can be - imagined. They take over whole floors or wings of hotels. In Monte Carlo, in the summer, visiting Saudis bring with them their own gold fittings for all the bathrooms and have them put in, so that they can enjoy having their water come to them out of gold faucets and spouts - apparently, it's much better that way.

But what the rich Arabs do not do, nor the poor ones, for that matter, is take any interest in things other than what makes the very rich all over the world kin, or at least concolorous. The luxury goods, the expensive hotels and restaurants, the very best bespoke clothes made with the very best materials - all this makes the rich Saudis, Kuwaitis, Emiratis, tutti quanti, feel that they are part of the Western rich, that they are not different from the Western rich, that they are even better than the Western rich, because they do not have to make an effort to be in the same seeming league as the Western rich. But the Western rich are not to be confused with the West, and for the most part -- there are always remarkable exceptions - they do not represent what is best about the West. Rather, they are made possible by the current fashion in economic theory that, one assumes, will soon pass (for the enemies of the very rich are not the poor, but the rich, and while society can - and should - have the rich, the very rich are a different matter).

The very rich Arabs, who travel back and forth from their own miserable, if very rich, lands, to Europe and North America, take no interest in the culture of the West. In the West, Arabs and other Muslims almost never take an interest in the civilization of the people among whom they have, in some cases, come to live, and whose lands they use as a combination fun-fair and brothel. They do not visit the historic sites of Infidels. They do not visit the Louvre, the Prado, the Alte Pinakothek, the National Gallery, the Rijksmuseum. Oh, there are some semi-enlightened Gulf Arabs who think it would be a good idea to rent a little branch of the Louvre (but imagine the headache of trying to choose art work that would meet with the approval of Islam - mostly abstract paintings, or landscapes, will have to do - and certainly no sculpture or depictions of living creatures).

And a few, too, think that the way they can best "educate" their young is to buy or rent a branch of a Western (usually American) university. But they think of what they need to learn from the West as science, or rather, not even science but mere technology, as everyone from Mahathir Mohamad (former head of Malaysia, and former head, as well, of the O.I.C.) to the Muslim Indian propagandist Zahir Naik ("Dr." Zahir Naik) has stated. Naik said that "what we Muslims can take from the West is science, technology" - meaning above all, he made clear, and as is well understood, weapons technology. It is not the structure of DNA, nor little RNA, nor the genome project, nor fractals, nor a Unified Field Theory, nor String Theory, nor anything else that may be waxing hot or running cold in Western universities and research institutes, that interest Muslims. They want to know how to become just as powerful, military, as the Infidel West. That's what they have in mind, when they talk about "science" at all.

Let's return to the hot sands of Dubai. Remember the Burj Tower, that was talked about so breathlessly. It was to have been a Great Achievement in the History of Mankind. Then Dubai's economy collapsed, and with it a view of Dubai, and then, when the topless tower was finally unveiled, in a land now littered with idle cranes and half-completed buildings, it did not make much of an impression. A story, here and there, but only for a day, and then it was on to the next thing. And that was the great tower, the great emblem, of Dubai as a World Economic Power.

But suppose there had been no economic collapse. Suppose the Tower did not have to be named, as it did have to be named, after the ruling family of Abu Dhabi, who lent the money that got Abu Dhabi out of its last crisis, but may not be lending more for the next one. What did that Dubai tower mean? What does it tell us about the state of the Arabs and Muslims, in building a grand new civilization based on the fabulous sums they have taken in?

Consider who built the tower. The architect was German - or was he Austrian? The main contractor was, as so often in the Arab oil states, South Korean. The ordinary workmen were ill treated, essentially working under the conditions of slaves. Their wretched treatment, the miserable sums they receive from rapacious and cruel employers, who so often withhold sums or find ways to cheat those at that level, who cannot fight back and are hopelessly dependent, has been written about before. See, for example, the article by Johann Hari in "The Independent." The squalidness of the vulgar luxury, of which the Dubai authorities (and no doubt other Gulf Arabs) are so inordinately proud, is comical, an offense against good taste every which way one looks. That hasn't kept the kind of press that covers the Arab states from descending upon Dubai at intervals. These people are a little like the bought-and-paid-for movie reviewer who, after his latest junket, gives a glowing review to some obvious Hollywood trash. They ooh and ahh over Dubai's great achievements, which achievements consist entirely in the ability to take money and to put it into skyscrapers, which are supposed to then earn great respect.

Dubai represents what the oil-rich Arabs think of as Civilizational Achievement. It shows what the Arabs are capable of, given all the money in the world. It shows us what they think is a fitting object of their money. And it is fascinating, because we seldom see the fabulous palaces of the Saudi rich, and only occasionally is someone invited, say, to someone's home to enjoy some sheikh's playroom, which among other things might be equipped with a lifesize 747 cockpit, on which one can train as a pilot, or at least simulate what a pilot does. Oh, everyone in the Gulf Arab states has his toys. Dubai stands not only for Dubai, but for the other Gulf Arab states. And it stands for Saudi Arabia itself, where the Al-Saud have tried, and failed, to create self-sustaining agriculture, and now talk about, and plan for, Economic Cities that will supposedly allow Saudi Arabia to develop what, after decades of fabulous oil wealth, it has completely failed to develop: a modern economy, based on something other than oil. Now the Saudis want to create just one university, where they might, they think, offer a real education. They have made that university the richest university in the world, and offer scholarships to lure Western students. But the effort will fail, for the spirit of free inquiry, not to mention the ability for male and female students to mingle freely without armed guards around (already many warnings have been issued about this mingling-of-the-sexes policy), is not there, and the faculty members from the West are not top-of-the-line, but the kind of people who come for the money. It's the best the Saudis (or the other Arabs) can do, as they are always trying to lure Westerners to teach, always hoping that somehow they can acquire something a little more lasting for their oil-based nations.

Dubai doesn't even try. It is full of gold shops, and succursales of every Western store specializing in luxury goods. Shopping is all you can do -- shopping of every kind, and there is not even a pretense that something else might be important. It's possibly the most boring place on earth. The Burj Tower, the touts claim, is "90% full." Don't believe a word of it. But if you care to believe a word of it, if you care to believe that it is 90% full, or even 100% full, so what? Why should we be impressed? There is more culture, more of interest, in a tiny town in Umbria, than in all of Dubai, all of the Gulf Arab states, all of the Arabian Peninsula. They have no idea what the Western world is, and they don't care. They don't care about art, science, literature (save for what Adonis, the Syrian poet, describes as the uninterrupted propagandistic trash that constitutes "Arab literature" today). They have their Burj Tower, with its mosque on the topmost floor - the Furthest Mosque, al-masjid al-aksa, if ever there was one. They have luxury hotels. They have their valet parking, and their car dealerships, and their jewelry shops, and their gold, gold, gold.

There are, apparently, people, primitivized people, who are deeply impressed by such things. They go to visit, or to shop, on Rodeo Drive. But Rodeo Drive, thank god, is not all there is in the United States, or in the Western world. But in Dubai, that is all there is. Dubai is simply Rodeo Drive, on stilts. That's the Arab Renaissance, that's the Arab Awakening. Money, and the spending of money, and nothing else.

For Dubai is Muslim, and Muslims have nothing to learn from the West of an intellectual or spiritual nature. All they need to take from the West is military technology. And all they need to do, to prove just how great they are, is to build higher skyscrapers, and more luxurious hotel suites, and they will have passed and surpassed us, as the Communists, in a different context, always said they would. Let them pass, and surpass us, in their skyscrapers and their luxury hotels.

Who cares?

We have other resources, the kind they would never recognize, or ever understand.

AFP - Pakistan commandos raided a private hospital before dawn in a Taliban stronghold near the Afghan border Thursday, killing four foreign militants and a woman, officials said.

Troops laid siege to the private clinic in Wana, the main town of South Waziristan, at 2:00am (2100 GMT) sparking gun battles until around 7:00am (0200 GMT), local administration and intelligence officials said.

A security official said the raid followed a tip off that wounded militants were brought to the hospital from Sherwangi, a Taliban-dominated area where Pakistan has been pressing a major offensive.

"Commandos and security forces raided the hospital. Militants fired on the troops and in the gunfight, which lasted more than four hours, four militants and a woman were killed, while 22 others were arrested," said the official.

"One soldier was also injured. The three dead militants appear to be Arabs and one of Sudanese origin," the official added.

The identity of the woman was not initially clear, the official said.

An intelligence official and a local administrator confirmed the raid and deaths of four foreign militants, but said their identities were not immediately clear. The intelligence official said 27 suspects were arrested.

South Waziristan is part of Pakistan's semi-autonomous tribal belt on the Afghan border that Washington has branded the most dangerous region in the world and a chief sanctuary of Al-Qaeda plotting attacks on the West.

The effect of such an act would be spectacular. Black African Christians all over the Continent, now reeling from the effects of Saudi and Libyan money, would be heartened. (One small example of the effects of that money: Khaddafy was allowed to buy sound systems for all the mosques in Lome, in Togo, by buying off the ruler of Togo with a Lamborghini and other expensive trifles. The azan is now heard everywhere in Lome, and more mosques are going up, and the Christian Togolese are full of justified anxiety.)

The U.N., controlled by the Arabs, could not come out clearly against this move, for the world's newspapers would be full of pictures of grateful black Africans surrounding their saviors from the Arab Muslims - those American soldiers. The E.U. would, for once, have to remain silent. And the Arab League? Ah, how could the Arab League convince the world that the Arabs of Khartoum had a divine right to the oil of the south, and to rule over Black Africans forever? It would be a drawing of a line to the Arabs, who see the Sudan as merely an agricultural colony for themselves, and as a stepping-stone for Egypt to impose its will, and to Islamize from within, the country just to the Sudan's south, for more than 1400 years the famously Christian kingdom of Ethiopia. In the wars over water to come, Egypt sees itself as owning the Nile, and wants to threaten Ethiopia, to prevent it from diverting any of the Nile's headwaters - as Ethiopia has every right to do. And part of that long-term strategy, about which the American government appears to know nothing, is to make sure that the Sudan, all of the Sudan, is thoroughly Islamized and arabized, with the blacks reduced to a state of complete penury and hopeless dependence. The American military could, if the American government would give the word, with no trouble at all wipe out the Sudanese airforce, and take - possibly from aircraft carriers or from bases in Ethiopia - both the southern Sudan and Darfur, and do so very carefully, as a "humanitarian" mission alone. It's an important thing to consider.

And what else? Well, where's the propaganda war? It doesn't appear to exist. The Arabic-language radio stations set up by the Bush Administration were, trustingly, and idiotically, put into the hands of Muslim Arabs. They should have been put into the hands of non-Muslim native speakers of Arabic, perhaps advised as well by apostates from Islam, who would know what kind of programming would be most unsettling in its effect. Just look at what Father Boutros, the Copt, on his own, manages to do. During the Cold War very intelligent refugees from Communist countries, some of them former Communists, worked at Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe. We did not then turn those radio stations over to "moderate" Communists, "Communists we could trust." The same should apply now.

And then, radio and television should beam in programs where, for example, Wafa Sultan might have her own program. She might invite guests to discuss, among other topics, how Islam is a vehicle for Arab supremacism (such a program should be beamed, in English, right into Pakistan, right into Bangladesh). Or another topic might be "Islam and Economic Development," where many things might be pointed out that, because they are true, so obviously true, would be hard to discredit. Imagine a program, for example, in which speakers discussed the failure of Muslim states, including those oil states that have received more than twelve trillion dollars since 1973 alone, to create modern economies.

Imagine the effect on listeners if they heard people trained in economics describe those failures, describe that continued reliance on armies of foreign wage-slaves, and on how everything the Saudis had tried - that great and expensive experiment in agriculture, those "Economic Cities," even that King Abdullah University - have failed, or will fail, and everyone in the Middle East knows it. They know that the only wealth that Muslim states have is either that from oil and gas, which no one did anything to merit. For no work and no entrepreneurial flair was necessary to receive such wealth, or it comes from Infidels who have poured tens of billions, so foolishly, into the oil-poor Muslim states, instead of telling those states to ask their Muslim brothers, their fabulously rich fellow members of the Umma, to take care of them.

And imagine if it were repeatedly pointed out that all Muslim states have failed, save those - such as Turkey, Tunisia, Kazakhstan - where Islam has been, over many decades, systematically constrained. And suppose further, and most important of all, if such radio and television programs explored honestly the teachings of Islam, in the Qur'an and, especially, in the Sunnah - which reflects the manners and customs of 7th century Arabs but, in Islam, is to be faithfully followed by all Muslims, including the 80% of the world's Muslims who are not Arabs, and who are living today, and not in the seventh century.

The Arab leaders said the same thing. And those Arab leaders, at the time, did not have the enormous oil wealth that the member-states of OPEC really began to acquire only in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Then they enjoyed a really fantastic jump in oil revenues, and thus an equally fantastic increase in perceived power and real ability to buy all kinds of influence along with other, more tangible goods and services, only when OPEC quadrupled the price of oil in the fall of 1973.

And beginning with their defeat in the Six-Day War, the Arabs realized that they would not be able to defeat Israel militarily, at least not yet, not under the new conditions, and with Israel now in possession of "the West Bank" and Gaza and all of the Sinai (some 95% of the territory Israel won by force of arms in that war). They would have to formulate a new strategy to force Israel to disgorge what it had won, to make Israel appear not to be what in fact it still was, a tiny state subject to this unending Arab and Muslim hostility, that no concessions by Israel would ever truly assuage (at least not for the Muslims who took Islam seriously, and that meant, at least, all of the Arab Muslims). So they did several things. They decided on a campaign of diplomatic and economic warfare, accompanied by terrorist acts within Israel and against Israelis overseas, and on a campaign to weaken Israel and to force its former friends to sever ties, or at least to cease being friendly toward Israel, and ready to misunderstand its plight, and the real nature of the war -- the Jihad -- being waged against it.

The first to be won over, largely by bribery of African rulers, were the black African states that had enjoyed good relations with Israel and had benefited greatly from Israel's extensive, and intelligent, aid program in Black Africa, which encouraged the development of small-scale agriculture. All of these countries, or almost all, within a year or two after the Six-Day War, had been persuaded by Arab money and the promise -- never fulfilled -- of more money to come if they did what the Arabs wanted, cut off diplomatic relations with the Jewish state.

In Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, there was no need to change tactics. The Communists were anti-Zionist and the policy of the Soviet government was almost forthrightly antisemitic, though all the best people in Russia -- think of Sakharov -- deplored such a policy, and the most advanced non-Jewish Russians took, as if reflexively, Israel's side.

In the countries of Western Europe, the Arabs played on the exaggerated guilt over colonialism. They pretended that the Jews, who had bought land and revived the ancient Jewish commonwealth in the tiny territory that for thousands of years had been associated, by Jews and by many others, with the Jewish nation, were in fact "colonialists" who had come to "colonize." Strange colonists, these, who drained the Huleh marshes, made the desert famously bloom, and did all the work -- the Arabs, in fact, flocked into what in the West was known as "Palestine" in numbers greater than the Jews from 1920 to 1940, and even before, from the turn of the century to 1920, because the Zionist settlers created economic opportunities that, until they arrived, had simply not existed.

All this, however, was forgotten -- not at once, but slowly, as the Arabs kept talking about a newly invented "Palestinian people." Within a decade or two, by dint of constant repetition, this people came to be accepted as real, and not a propagandistic fiction, created -- along with supposedly "Palestinian" folktales and folksongs (in reality, all of them simply standard Arab folktales and folksongs) -- for the sole purpose of disguising the war, the Jihad against Israel. The shock troops of that war were those local Arabs who were now so absurdly called "Palestinians." Arab Muslims led the campaign. Many non-Arab Muslims have naturally joined in. The less they have anything other than Islam, any other identity, to fall back on -- such as the Pakistanis (as compared to Berbers and Kurds and even Iranians before the Islamic Republic of Iran came along to prove itself even more Islamic than the Arabs) - the more this campaign turned out to be a success.

Pim Fortuyn had great sympathy for Israel. He noted in his book "Israel: 50 Years, and Then?" that an intelligent understanding of Israel's situation and of its real history, was fading from European consciousnesses. Now we hear, and not only on the BBC, and read, and not only in The Guardian, that juridically ridiculous phrase, "occupied Arab lands," or "occupied West Bank," for territories which were assigned to Mandatory Palestine by the League of Nations for the sole purpose of creating, from that particular Mandatory territory, the Jewish National Home.

Things became very bleak for Israel in Western Europe. But now things are changing, and they are not changing because of anything the Israelis have done. They remain as inept as ever in the proper presentation of their own history, their own claims, their own rights, their own case. No, what has changed is that, over the last thirty years, the political and media elites of the countries of Western Europe allowed into their midst, into the midst of their countries, and their by-now long-suffering peoples, far too many, even millions, of Muslims. The behavior of those Muslims makes clear that behind that behavior is something else, a Total Belief-System, that is not susceptible of change, and that rests on the idea, inculcated by Qur'an, Hadith, and Sira, that between Believer and Unbeliever, Muslim and Infidel, a state of permanent war, though not always of open warfare, must and does exist. And the texts of Islam, the tenets of Islam, are coming into view -- slowly but surely. The behavior of Muslims themselves is by now obviously more threatening and intransigent than the behavior of any of the other many immigrant groups that have arrived in Western Europe.

They are most threatening, it seems, in those very countries, Denmark and the Netherlands, which have elevated Tolerance practically to the level of state religions. And since it is not the Chinese, not the Hindus, not the sub-Saharan but Christian black Africans, not the Filipinos or the South Americans, but always and everywhere the Muslims who are the cause of such trouble and anxiety, and since they are the cause of such trouble and anxiety for non-Muslims not in one, or two, or five countries of Western Europe, but absolutely everywhere that they go, that they live, in numbers large enough -- 2 or 5 will apparently do -- it has become clear that there is Something About Islam. It is that very Something that many inhabitants of Western Europe can no longer pretend does not exist. They are now determined to find out just exactly what that Something is.

As soon as the peoples of Western Europe come to realize what Islam is all about -- and they are being forced to realize, for the Muslims in their midst are doing the forcing -- they will, slowly, come to understand not the non-existent "plight" of the non-existent "Palestinian people." They will change, and change in favor of Israel. They will come to realize that, as they become aware of what is truly happening in their own countries. Those countries are now faced from within with what is a quite-unnecessary danger, that of Muslim populations that cannot, save at the edges, among the least-Muslim of Muslims, integrate, and that believe they have not only have a right but a duty to remove all obstacles to the spread, and then the dominance, of Islam. That goal will be, is being, pursued by all means. Those means include, in addition to terrorism and its ever-present threat, such means as the Money Weapon, campaigns of Da'wa, and demographic conquest (discussed openly among Muslims, and sometimes even, as by Boumediene at the U.N. in 1974, and Qaddafy a few years ago, Arab or other Muslim rulers). That goal requires the slow or rapid undoing of the political and legal institutions of Infidel nation-states, the undoing of social arrangements and understandings, the undoing of the very freedoms, and solicitousness for the individual, that characterize advanced Western democracies, and are regarded as the accomplishment of many centuries of thought.

And as they begin to better comprehend Islam, those Europeans will, necessarily, begin to realize as well that the war against Israel has no end and is unsusceptible of a "solution." For the Arab and Muslim claim, or the Arab Muslim claim, is not to be met, nor assuaged, by any reduction in Israel's size. Already absurdly tiny, Israel is now, in its current borders (including the "West Bank," which is the name the Jordanians gave to those parts of Judea and Samaria, part of the Mandate for Palestine that was always intended to be included in the tiny territory allocated for the Jewish National Home by the League of Nations), existing in a state of permanent peril that no other state must endure. For any of those other states to lecture or hector Israel on why it should surrender more territory, is both cruel and absurd. Once Islam is grasped, both that cruelty, and that absurdity, of such pressures and demands on Israel, will be clear.

The confused and ineffectual Obama Administration has no idea how to deal with Islam, and is very likely going to stick with the folly in Afghanistan because it did not prepare the proper framework. The Cairo speech and what it signified for now still makes it impossible for the Obama Administration to see things aright, to recognize and act on the recognition that Islam is the problem. The American government must stop squandering men, money, materiel, morale, and attention (needed for many other things) on hopeless efforts to make Muslim societies happier or more prosperous and Muslim states more unified, but instead welcome every fissure, ethnic, sectarian, and economic, pre-existing within the Camp of Islam.

Many who never knew, or forgot, the real story of the wars or War being made on Israel. We now understand it well enough to describe that war, accurately, as a Jihad against Israel. This Jihad began against the Jews even before the existence of the State, during the Mandatory period, when it was clear that the Jews would not behave as submissive dhimmis. This Jihad has been pursued steadily ever since, by the Muslim Arabs, against the Infidel nation-state of Israel, by open warfare, by terrorism, by economic boycotts, by diplomatic pressure, by every means. This Jihad will never come to an end, but it can be held intelligently in check if Israel remains overwhelmingly stronger militarily, and if in addition the Arabs and other Muslims are convinced that Israel is overwhelmingly stronger. And Israel, if pushed back still further, as dhimmis, if cruelly pressured to give up control of the "West Bank" to which it has a legal, moral, and historic claim, will be far weaker and will be perceived as much much weaker by its enemies. They will not for one minute be assuaged, but will merely have their appetites for Jihad whetted -- and not only for Jihad against Israel, but against all Infidels, including most importantly those in Western Europe.

Despite the BBC and The Guardian and Agence France-Presse and Der Spiegel and so on, the peoples of Western Europe will come to understand Islam. They will come to realize that the narrative, the cunning re-packaging of the unappeasable murderous hostility to Israel as merely a fight for "national liberation" for the "Palestinians," is false. This "tiny people" was invented precisely after the Six-Day War, by Arab propagandists and their able, and well paid, Western advisers and collaborators. By now such words as "occupied" have worked their daily poison. But despite all this, relief is on the way. The cavalry is coming, and the cavalry is being summoned because of the aggressive and violent behavior of Muslims worldwide. That cavalry is nothing more, and nothing less, than an awakening to the texts, the tenets, the attitudes, the atmospherics, of Islam -- and, inexorably, to the real nature of the conflict between Arab and Jew, which is merely a local case of the permanent Jihad against all Infidels, everywhere, who oppose the dominance, over themselves, of Islam.

As an oleh chadash (new immigrant) that came to land of the Jewish people not due to persecution or suffering but because of deep-rooted beliefs in Zionism, like many I have a big problem with all the latest discussions over Gilad Shalit.

As an oleh chadash that has recently received a profile score of 97 to serve my mandatory army service in a combat unit, and as an oleh chadash that for the past year has lived in the Gaza border city of Sderot I have an enormous problem with the latest discussions over Gilad Shalit.

I do not hold some seat in the government with some fancy title but I know what is going on now is wrong and it pains me to watch it happen.

Why is the discussion during the past week about how many terrorists we are going to give Hamas, Fatah, and the PA as a whole for Gilad’s return? Why isn’t the discussion about how we are going to make Hamas pay a huge price for the kidnapping of Gilad or about a plan to retrieve him?

Because we simply have entered into the Arabs’ shuk of hostage negotiating they have already declared a victory that will only empower them to kidnap more soldiers. It is laughable if one believes that they care if they get back 400, 1000, 980 or even 5 of their terrorists because they are in no way lacking numbers, and moreover as they use their own sons and daughters as human shields they clearly don’t value the lives of those they are receiving.

After a 21 day operation inside the Gaza Strip and we didn’t see Gilad back home, and now with our government, providing our enemies with the future opportunities to kidnap more of our sons and brothers- what am I supposed to think as someone soon entering the Israeli Defense Forces for ideological reasons when I know that my homeland won’t rescue me and will minimally take over 3 years to trade me only at the cost of future capture of others like me?

As someone living in Sderot since Operation Cast Lead it is hard to believe that this cowardly surrender to our enemies will bring anything but more missiles to more cities in Israel. It is awing to me when even the Defense Minister Ehud Barak has accepted the reality of rockets in our lives when last week in Sderot he described the situation as quiet. Friday before Shabbat we surpassed a count of 280 qassams, mortars and grads fired since Operation Cast Lead- apparently an acceptable amount to our elected leaders.

So what am I supposed to think as someone who lives in Sderot for the same ideological reasons that I have come to my homeland and will serve in our army, when I know our government is giving our enemies the opportunity to fire more missiles at me and others like me?

Can we really not get Gilad back with our infamous intelligence sources, stealth, and military training? Or has our government already sacrificed him and others to be so that they can get political points with all the world on-lookers and as a result maybe Bibi can also get a handout Nobel Peace Prize?

While all of this is happening and is considered a movement toward a greater peace deal, are we really supposed to believe it is all because of that scary hot-topic term “settlements.” Sderot, Ashkelon, and Beersheva are all targets of missile attacks that are not considered “settlements” by our administration or the Obama led American administration. Gilad Shalit was born in Nahariya and grew up in Mitzpe Hila, both of which are not “settlements.” So how can disallowing the growth of the Jewish nation or what George Mitchell and Barack Obama deem illegal settlement building really help bring Gilad home, stop the future capture of Israelis, and stop missiles from being fired at Israelis?

I do not intend to be facetious in writing all these questions but I am truly asking. As an oleh chadash soon entering the IDF and living in Sderot, what I am observing baffles me and leaves me with a load of questions.

Jacob Shrybman is a writer for the Sderot Media Center.

]]> http://frontpagemag.com/2009/12/01/the-deal-for-gilad-shalit-by-jacob-shrybman/feed/ 9 http://www.jihadwatch.org/2009/11/hizballah-blames-us-for-all-terrorism.html http://www.jihadwatch.org/2009/11/hizballah-blames-us-for-all-terrorism.html#comments Tue, 01 Dec 2009 01:47:45 +0000 Robert Classic and typical jihadist evasion and displacement of responsibility. It's more disturbing that Barack Obama seems to agree, at least from the looks of his Cairo speech -- in which the only causes for tension between the West and the Islamic world that he mentioned were the fault of the West.

"Hezbollah blames U.S. for all terrorism," from CNN, November 30 (thanks to Bill):

Beirut, Lebanon (CNN) -- Hezbollah's chief on Monday announced the group's new "manifesto," which calls on all countries to "liberate Jerusalem" and declares the United States a threat to the world.

"American terrorism is the source of every terrorism in the world," Hassan Nasrallah said in a televised speech from an undisclosed location.

It was his first address since a unity government formed in Lebanon this month, ending a crisis that had left the country with no government since June's parliamentary elections.

Hezbollah, a political party in Lebanon, is listed as a terrorist organization by the United States and Israel. Nasrallah does not appear in public amid concerns for his safety.

"We invite and call on all Arabs and Muslims and all countries keen on peace and stability in the world to intensify efforts and resources to liberate Jerusalem from Zionist occupation and to maintain its true identity and its Islamic and Christian sanctities," Nasrallah said....