Which is more damaging to the reputation of Islam's prophet: the above illustration, or terrorism, murder, hate, misogyny, and intolerance in his name?

Editor’s note: Raymond Ibrahim provided the translation and introduction to the article below, originally published by the Stonegate Institute. 

The following op-ed, written by Ahmed El Aswany, appeared in the popular news website El Bashayer, December 22, 2011, following several lawsuits against Egypt’s Christians, most notably billionaire Naguib Sawiris, who allegedly “defamed Islam” by posting on his twitter account an illustration of Mickey Mouse with a beard and Minnie Mouse veiled, accompanied by the comment “Mickey and Minnie after” [the Islamist takeover]. Hard-hitting and self-critical, the op-ed deals with an important question: exactly who is it that defames Islam and its prophet Muhammad?  Many in the Muslim world insist it is the West, specifically non-Muslims—whether through cartoons, books, or simply free speech.  However, as El Aswany boldly argues, no one defames Islam as much as “we Muslims, for imposing a terroristic, hypocritical, and life-hating model of Islam that feeds on killing others in the name of jihad and fighting freedom of expression…”  

I do not believe that cartoons, books, or movies can defame any religion or affect the faith of its adherents and true believers.

Those who defame the Prophet are they who slaughter and bomb innocent people all over the world—in New York, Madrid, London, Bali, Riyadh, Cairo, Kabul and Baghdad—while citing the name of Allah and his Prophet and under the banner of Islamic jihad. Ongoing demonstrations follow in support of their acts, while Internet sites sing praises of the “knight” Osama bin Laden, the “hero of the two raids on New York and Washington [i.e., the strikes of 9/11].”

Those who defame the Prophet include men like [Yusif] Qaradawi [the Muslim Brotherhood’s spiritual leader], who incite killing Jewish babies in their mothers’ wombs (his lecture at the Egyptian Journalists Syndicate in 1996), and who incite and support suicide bombings and declared jihad in Iraq, in the name of religion and the Prophet, leading to the killing of innocent people.

Those who defame the Prophet are they who demand the world to enact resolutions against the “defamation of religion,” while they practice this defamation in every prayer in their mosques, schools, and satellite stations—especially against Christians and Jews, whom they curse in every prayer. (After the Islamic Human Rights Commission of the United Nations motioned this resolution against “Defamation of Religion,” according to the Saudi internet site ArabiaNet, the Saudi Shura [Consultative] Council opposed the resolution—because defaming other religions is a rite and part of the rituals of Islam.)

If you were to suggest in a public forum that just possibly Israel’s failure to reach a peace agreement with a terrorist organization run by kleptomaniacs and homicidal maniacs, which still continues to applaud the murder of Israeli children, might possibly be due to the terrorists and not because of Israel, then according to the consensus of the left, you are an Israel Firster.

The paradigm of the Israel Firster only works if you assume that the America First position is to support Islamic terrorists. Even if we were to dismiss the threat of Islamic terrorism to the United States then a position sympathetic to the territorial claims of Islamic terrorists in Israel would still not be the America First position. It would be the Muslims First position.

The left, which deploys names like Israel Firsters, is certainly not calling for neutrality in the conflict, rather it would like us to side with the Muslim Brotherhood and the assorted Islamic terrorists scattered throughout the region. Arguably the United States has been doing this for some time already.

Obama stuck his finger in Prime Minister Netanyahu’s chest, but bowed to the Saudi King. When he visited Turkey, he made no mention of the Turkish settlements in occupied Cyprus, but when Biden visited Israel, he threw a fit over a partial approval for a few houses in Jerusalem. The United States doesn’t fund many terrorist groups, but the bulk of the funding that it allots to terrorists goes to terrorists operating in Israel and killing Israelis.

Last week the State Department put out a list of designated terrorist organization. That list includes the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. The Brigade has not only committed numerous atrocities against Israelis, it at one point threatened to launch terrorist attacks against America. The Brigade is the military arm of the Fatah group which controls the Palestinian Authority. The Authority is the beneficiary of an average of 600 million dollars a year in direct assistance, and indirectly through the UNRWA which has already received an initial 55 million dollars from the United States in 2012.

Terrorists who murder Israelis don’t just indirectly benefit from American aid; that money is going to pay the salaries of convicted terrorists in Israeli prisons. Some of those terrorists received training and weapons from the United States. I would like to be able to say that this sort of thing is one of the innovations of the Hussein administration, but it’s an an artifact of two previous administrations.

This is usually how countries treat other countries that they are at war with. In this case it is an artifact, not of an Israel Firster policy, but of a Muslim Firster policy. There is no interpretation of Israel Firster that accommodates the United States arming and funding terrorists. But there is an extensive global policy of rewarding and appeasing Muslims.

Opponents of Israel often complain that they are being “silenced” in some intangible ways, but the United States government has certainly never criminalized criticism of Israel. However, it continues to conduct discussions with the OIC, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, on ways to suppress and censor criticism of Islam. Nor has the Secretary of State suggested that critics of Israel should be subject to “peer pressure and shaming,” which she has for critics of Islam.

American soldiers have been dying incessantly to protect Muslims for decades now. They died in Somalia to protect aid to Somali Muslims. They died in the Gulf War to liberate Kuwait and protect the Muslim holy sites of Mecca and Medina from Saddam Hussein. They died over Yugoslavia to build a state for the Muslim terrorists of the KLA. Thousands of American soldiers have died to protect Muslims from other Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In the last year alone, the United States has helped overthrow secular governments to make way for Muslim ones. When the Libyan ruler refused to resign, Obama sent in NATO jets to bomb his forces into submission so that the Al Qaeda- and Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Libyan Islamic Fighting Group could take power.

While the United States abandoned Iranian students protesting against an Islamist regime, it overthrew governments in Egypt and Tunisia to make way for Islamist takeovers. The Saudis got to use tanks in Bahrain, but Gaddafi was hunted down and killed for a genocide that never happened.

What do you call all that but a Muslim Firster foreign policy?

In “The Audacity of Hope,” a book title taken from a sermon of his vilely anti-Semitic former black Muslim mentor, Obama wrote, “I will stand with the Muslims.” And he has done it.

Obama has stood with the Muslims in Cote d’Ivorie, where armed force was used to illegally seat a Muslim ruler against the ruling of the country’s supreme court. He has stood with the Muslims in Kenya, where his cousin and his Muslim backers forcibly wrote Sharia Law into the Constitution. He has stood with the genocidal Muslims in Indonesia, not the Christian Papuans whose land is occupied and whose representatives are persecuted.

Most of FrontPage Magazine’s readers already know that U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta yelled at the wrong guy in early December, 2011, when he scolded Netanyahu with his misplaced adjuration: “just get to the damn table.”  But it will still be useful to take a quick look at the many times that Israeli leaders have invited Arab leaders to that “damn table” and have been rebuffed, in word and in deed, by Arab leaders.

For a summary of the 31 times since 1937 that Arab leaders have not only refused Israeli offers of peace, but have responded with war, terrorist attacks, and threats of genocide and annihilation, see two earlier articles by the present writer, here and here.

Over the past few years, there has emerged a new and different pattern that, while obvious and transparent, has not made much of an impression on Secretary Panetta or other of the USA’s or EU’s spokespersons.

This new pattern is:  PA President Mahmoud Abbas creates pre-conditions for negotiations that he knows Israel cannot accept.  Then he refuses to join in negotiations that are open-ended and without pre-conditions.  Then he blames Israel for its refusal to agree to his unacceptable pre-conditions.  Then Western leaders and journalists blame Israel for the “log jam” in negotiations.

In June 2009¹, shortly after he formed his coalition government, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called publicly for direct negotiations toward a two-state solution.  A PA spokesperson, speaking on behalf of President Abbas, declared the PA’s refusal to respond to Netanyahu’s invitation.

In November, 2009, Israel implemented its 10-month “settlement” construction freeze as a compromise response to US President Obama’s demands and called upon Abbas to join him “in meaningful peace negotiations…that will finally end the conflict.”  Abbas again rejected Netanyahu’s invitation, first insisting that he would wait until the construction freeze was over before he would consider joining Netanyahu in negotiations; but then, when the 10-month freeze drew to an end, he threatening that he would not meet with Netanyahu unless the Israeli prime minister continue the freeze and extend it to include East Jerusalem, which had been excluded from the original freeze agreement.

In February 2011, Netanyahu again called for a resumption of negotiations, and made some goodwill gestures to enhance the Palestinian economy.  Not only did Abbas rebuff these gestures, but he announced his intention to side-step negotiations with Israel and take his case for Palestinian statehood to the UN despite President Obama’s objections.

In May 2011, Netanyahu again offered to restart negotiations for a two-state solution and promised significant territorial concessions.  Abbas ignored Netanyahu, President Obama, and even the loss of $200 million in American aid; and instead he wrote his infamous op-ed essay in the New York Times in which he promised that even when “Palestine” becomes the 194^th state in the UN, the conflict would not be over. The new state of “Palestine,” once it became the 194^th member of the UN’s family of nations, would pursue political avenues of redress against Israel at the UN, the International Court of Justice and other human rights milieus.

In September 2011, at his speech before the UN General Assembly, Netanyahu renewed his invitation to Abbas.  Abbas refused the offer and instead pressed on with his ultimately unsuccessful attempt at UN recognition of a Palestinian state.

Even Netanyahu’s “economic peace” plan of September 2009, that would have helped return the West Bank to the economic prosperity that it enjoyed during most of the pre-Oslo era from 1967 to 2004, was summarily dismissed by Abbas because it demanded that the PA put a stop to terror attacks emanating from the West Bank.  Abbas rejected it, saying that: “We refuse to be security agents for Israel.”  In other words, the PA prefers to tolerate, and therefore encourage, terror attacks against Israel rather than engage in cooperation with Israel that will economically benefit the Arabs of the West Bank.

The Obama administration is redefining the War on Terrorism as a war on Al-Qaeda, with Vice President Biden going so far as to say that the “Taliban, per se, is not our enemy.” In June, Afghan President Hamid Karzai confirmed that the U.S. was negotiating with the Taliban, and talks have reportedly gone on since at least November 2010. Now, President Obama is even thinking about releasing five high-level Taliban leaders to Qatar from Guantanamo Bay, despite their direct ties with Al-Qaeda and the military’s warnings that they are likely to rejoin the violent jihad.

Marc Thiessen reviewed the biographies of the five Taliban leaders that the U.S. may set free. Mullah Mohammed Fazl was the chief of staff of the Taliban army and worked with Osama Bin Laden’s 055 Brigade. Abdul Haq Wasiq, the Taliban’s deputy intelligence minister, built alliances with terrorist groups and arranged for Al-Qaeda to train Taliban fighters. The governor of Herat Province, Mullah Khairullah Khairkhwa, was “directly associated” with Bin Laden, supervising an Al-Qaeda training camp and took part in Taliban dealings with Iran to jointly kill U.S. soldiers.

Mullah Norullah Noori, a former Taliban commander, was involved with senior members of Al-Qaeda and fought alongside the terrorist group. The Joint Task Force-Guantanamo describes him as a Taliban “hardliner.” Muhammad Nabi, a fundraiser for the Taliban, was part of an Al-Qaeda cell. The reason these five leaders are held is because the military believes they will go right back to what they were doing before their imprisonment. Yet, the Obama administration believes that releasing them will improve the chances that the negotiations with the Taliban will be successful.

There have been around six meetings between the U.S. and Taliban representatives in Germany and Doha, Qatar. Among those participating are Mullah Omar’s secretary and Ibrahim Haqqani, the brother of the leader of the Al-Qaeda-tied Haqqani Network. The U.S. was encouraged by the Taliban’s agreement to open up a political office in Qatar, where Sheikh Yousef al-Qaradawi is acting as a “mediator.” Qaradawi is a terrorism-supporting, anti-Semitic cleric and leading member of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The world’s largest drug field was formerly in the Bekaa Valley where the land is warm and moist. Reflecting the poor state of agriculture in the Muslim world, some of the most arable land in Lebanon where the Romans raised acres of wheat was turned over to cannabis and opium production. In the ’90s the situation was so bad that 80 percent of the world’s cannabis came out of the valley. The valley helped finance the PLO, Hezbollah and the Syrian army which invaded Lebanon partly to get in on the drug trade.

The Clinton Administration cut deals with the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Syrian occupation of Lebanon to try and cut down on production. Officially production went down, unofficially the party never really stopped.

With the Syrians gone and the PLO living off American foreign aid on the West Bank of Israel, the lucrative Lebanese drug trade is in the hands of the Shiite Islamists of Hezbollah. Drugs have turned the Party of Allah into a global narcoterrorist ring with tentacles in Latin America and ties to Marxist narcoterrorists there and up to America and out across Europe and Asia.

There is no contradiction between the Islamic identity of Hezbollah and its drug trade financed wealth. The Mumbai terrorists of the Army of the Righteous, who during their killing spree murdered a rabbi and his pregnant wife, snorted cocaine. The Beslan terrorists of the Islamic Brigade of Martyrs who murdered hundreds of children were running on heroin. Forensic tests conducted on the bodies of suicide bombers have found that they were routinely given heroin before being sent off on their missions. And if we had been able to run forensic tests on the Al-Qaeda terrorists who carried out September 11 there would probably be a miniature pharmacy in their bodies.

The intimate connection between drugs and Islam began with the prohibition of alcohol. The ban on wine and other spirits made the need for alternatives more urgent. Coffee was the safer alternative to alcohol, and the Middle Eastern obsession with it reflected the outlawing of wine and beer. Religiously coffee was also useful as a stimulant and came in handy in some Muslim rites. But there were more efficacious stimulants that could do more than coffee and those were equally popular.

While there were at times attempts to similarly prohibit drugs, they never achieved the same status as the ban on liquor. Hashish in particular had useful religious and military effects. The right drugs could give the devout the illusion of a mystical experience, allow them to stay up all night memorizing verses from the Koran or make it easier for them to kill and for Muslim leaders to control their private armies.

The Order of Assassins, whose name “Hashishin” derives from the substance they were addicted to, consisted of young men given the drug and told that their visions were a foretaste of paradise. While the Hashishin achieved legendary status the same pattern has become commonplace among Muslim terrorist groups who ply their followers with drugs to addict them and direct them along the path of Islamic terror as the road to the paradise of the powder and the needle.

Culturally the use of drugs is far more widely accepted in the Muslim world than alcohol is. The Ayatollah Khomeini even ruled that, “Wine and all other intoxicating beverages are impure, but opium and hashish are not.” In some countries drug use is so widespread that it has practically become a national identity. That is the case with Qat in Yemen, a plant-based amphetamine whose use is so widespread that its cultivation consumes nearly half the country’s water supply.

According to Western counter-terrorism officials, al-Qaeda terrorists have established a 200-strong fighting force near the Egyptian border in eastern Libya. The creation of the al-Qaeda unit comes at the same time as the Libyan interim government is threatened by a growing internecine conflict among Libya’s myriad group of armed rebel militias.

The al-Qaeda terrorists, who had arrived in Libya in early 2011 at the time Muammar Gadhafi’s regime was rapidly ceding ground to Libyan rebels, were reportedly sent to Libya on personal orders from al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri.

The jihadists are purportedly led by a veteran al-Qaeda fighter known simply as “AA,” a terrorist insurgent who began his terror career fighting Soviet forces in Afghanistan before coming to Britain to recruit Muslims for al-Qaeda.

In 2005 “AA” had been detained by British authorities as a suspect in the July 2005 London subway bombing that killed 52 people and wounded more than 700, although he was never charged in that attack. By 2009 “AA” had left Britain to fight coalition forces on the Afghan-Pakistan border.

The efforts by al-Qaeda operatives to recruit Libyans to the jihadist cause were most recently seen in a December 2011 video the terror group posted on jihadist websites that exhorted Libyans to either “choose a secular regime that pleases the greedy crocodiles of the West…or you take a strong position and establish the religion of Allah.”

Of course, al-Qaeda doesn’t require many jihadist pep talks to convince Libyans to flock to its Islamist banner given that eastern Libya — which was described by the US State Department in 2008 as a “wellspring of Libyan foreign fighters” — has produced and exported a significant crop of al-Qaeda fighters over the years.

Most of these insurgents have been members of the al-Qaeda affiliate, Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG). Founded in 1995 to wage jihad against the regime of then Libyan leader Muammar Gadhafi, the LIFG officially joined Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network in 2007.

Not too surprisingly then, many Libyans with al-Qaeda ties continue to pepper the leading ranks of Libya’s interim government, the ruling National Transitional Council (NTC). The most notable al-Qaeda alum serving in the NTC is Abd al-Hakim Belhadj, head of the powerful Tripoli Military Council and former emir of the LIFG.

In addition to having to deal with al-Qaeda in Libya, Libya is also plagued by North Africa’s other al-Qaeda terror group, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), which has used the chaos in Libya to acquire some of the Gadhafi regime’s most powerful and deadly weapons.

Their success in this endeavor has prompted one AQIM leader to boast that AQIM had been “one of the main beneficiaries of the revolutions in the Arab world. As for our benefiting from the [Libyan] weapons, this is a natural thing in these kinds of circumstances.”

While al-Qaeda may have been one of the main recipients of the Libyan uprising to oust Muammar Gadhafi, it is difficult for the NTC to currently make the same claim, given that in addition to battling an al-Qaeda resurgence, it is battling territorial tribal and militia infighting that further continues to destabilize Libya.

Earlier this week, the FBI announced the arrest of Sami Osmakac, a 25-year-old Muslim man from the former Yugoslavia. In the process, the agency thwarted what might have been a horrific terror spree targeting populous civilian and commercial areas in Tampa, Florida.

According to the FBI’s criminal complaint, Osmakac, a naturalized American citizen, had been planning a massive terror attack targeting everything from businesses to nightclubs and bridges with the aim of killing and injuring as many people as possible. As part of the attack, he intended to set off a weapon of mass destruction planted in a parked car, then capping off the attack by detonating a suicide belt. Instead, Osmakac’s plans were foiled by a masterful FBI sting operation. Undercover agents tracked the would-be terrorist for months, monitoring his every move and even supplying him with the (secretly non-functional) weapons that he had planned to use before moving in this week to make a decisive arrest.

But what should be an open-and-shut counter-terror success is now being called into question by groups like the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and further obfuscated by academic apologists for Islamic radicalism. No sooner was Osmakac in handcuffs than CAIR spokesman Hassan Shibly suggested that the FBI was more culpable in the case than the jihadist in their custody. “The weapons and explosives were provided by the government. Was he just a troubled individual, or did he pose a real threat?” asked Shibly, before expressing his “concern about a perception of entrapment.”

A closer look at the facts of the case shows this perception to be wholly unfounded. While it’s true that the FBI provided the weapons, the fact remains that it was Osmakac, an al-Qaeda-sympathizer, who had sought them out. Moreover, according to an FBI affidavit, the undercover FBI agent who sold Osmakac his non-working arms had repeatedly tried to convince him to give up his plans and seek a normal life. In one recorded conversation, the agent urged Osmakac to consider getting married and having a family rather than going ahead with his plan. That is the opposite of entrapment. In the event, Osmakac refused, insisting that he would be rewarded by Allah in paradise for carrying out his attack. Given his intention of doing just that, it’s to the FBI’s great credit that the agency made sure Osmakac never had access to anything but defective arms.

Osmakac’s clearly expressed conviction that Allah required him to commit terrorism points up another emerging and equally misguided assessment of the case – namely, that religion had nothing to do with Osmakac’s motives. “I don’t think his Islamic religion has anything to do with what’s going on,” claimed Dr. Barbara DeGeorge, identified by local Florida media as an  “Islamic studies expert,” following the arrest. Even the FBI made a concession to political correctness, with the head of the agency’s Tampa Bay division assuring the press that Osmakac’s case “is not about the Muslim religion.”

Editor’s note: Below is the latest profile of Frontpage’s new series, “Voices of Palestine,” which will illuminate the core beliefs, in their own words, of leading figures in the Palestinian death cult. Click the following to view the profiles of Ahmad Bahr, Mahmoud al-Zahar, Ibrahim Mudayris, Yasser Ghalban, Haj Amin al-Husseini, Wafa al-Bis, Mahmoud Abbas, Ahlam Tamimi, Yassir Arafat (Part I and Part II), Abdallah Jarbu, Sheik Ismail Aal Radhwan, Abdel Aziz Rantisi, Yunis Al-Astal, Fathi Hamad, Khaled Mash’al and Ismail Haniya.

Abbas Zaki, former PLO envoy to Lebanon and current member of Fatah’s Central Committee, has spent his entire political career championing the PLO’s efforts to destroy the Jewish state of Israel.

Moreover, Zaki has not confined his animus to Israel alone, but has directed it also at the United States, a country which he considers “to be an enemy because its only strategic alliance is with Israel.”

Zaki (born Sharif Ali Misheal in Hebron in 1943) began his career in 1962 when he joined Fatah, the largest political faction within the Palestinian Liberation Organization. In 1982 Zaki was named by Yasir Arafat as the PLO’s envoy to Yemen, a position he held until he was expelled from that country in 1986.

From there Zaki spent the next three years at the PLO’s Tunisian headquarters, where he was an assistant to Mahmoud Abbas, then head of the PLO’s department of national affairs and now president of the Palestinian Authority (PA). By 1989 Zaki joined the Fatah Central Committee, the highest decision-making body of the PLO.

Following the assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafic Hariri in 2005, Zaki was named the PLO representative to Lebanon, a post he held until he was forced to resign by PA President Mahmoud Abbas in 2009. He is now a central committee member of Fatah, the leading member party of the PLO and the PA.

Zaki has used his varied political roles to promote, among other things, the PLO policy of negotiating while engaging in terrorism; support of suicide bombing attacks on Israeli civilians; and repeated rejections of Palestinian independence based on a two-state solution.

For example, in November 2008 Zaki said the PLO views Israel as “an enemy country, which owes us certain things. The heroic Vietnamese used to negotiate with the French, while they were slaughtering them.”

Dr. Ahmed Tibi, MD, an Arab member of the Israeli Knesset and former advisor to PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, recently wrote an op-ed in the Richmond Times-Dispatch attacking US House Majority Leader Eric Cantor for having declared that “If the Palestinians want to live in peace in a state of their own, they must demonstrate that they are worthy of a state.” In and of itself hardly a remarkable position considering the history of organized Palestinian Arab terrorism that has gone on unabated since the founding of the PLO in 1964 and before. Yet Dr. Tibi then infers that Mr. Cantor therefore “holds all Palestinians responsible for the violence of a few.”

This interesting assumption made by Dr. Tibi is that Palestinian Arab violence and support of said violence is the handiwork of a “few,” a small minority. To determine whether this is true, two basic issues have to be clarified. One, whether or not said violence is the result of only “a few” who implicitly carry out their violent work against the wishes of the Palestinian Arab leadership and without popular support from the Palestinian Arab population. And two, what is considered to be moderate and non-violent means in the view of Dr. Tibi.

Let’s first take a glance at Dr. Tibi’s own behavior. As noted above, he served as an advisor to PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, a man he first met in 1984 in Tunis to where Arafat had fled after being ignominiously chased out of Beirut by the Israelis in 1982. Arafat, head of Fatah and subsequently the entire PLO, was responsible for airplane hijackings, indiscriminate murder of civilian targets, including the September 1972 kidnapping and murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic games, the 1973 abduction and murder of Western diplomats in Khartoum, Sudan, – where Arafat himself personally gave the order to kill US Ambassador Cleo Noel and two other diplomats. And after Arafat signed the 1993 Oslo Accords and supposedly changed his ways, he and the Palestinian Authority pursued a campaign of massive incitement in the official PA media and school textbooks, and supported ongoing terrorist activities, including suicide bombings, and in its first 5 years more Israeli civilians were murdered by Palestinian Arab terror attacks than in the previous 15 years.  To avoid the guilt by association card, let us examine Dr. Tibi’s own “moderate and non-violent” approach.

Dr. Tibi writes in his op-ed: “I, too, reject the Palestinian violence Cantor mentioned that is directed at Israeli civilians, but unlike Cantor I believe in strengthening nonviolent efforts to overcome Israeli domination.” But does he really believe in “strengthening nonviolent efforts”?

According to a report in the Haaretz daily newspaper, on August 16, 2000, during the Jewish Fast Day of Tisha B’Av (9^th day of the Hebrew month of Av) when Jews mourn the destruction of both the First and Second Jewish Temples in Jerusalem, Dr. Tibi, already a Member of Knesset, led a large Arab crowd chanting, “with blood and fire we will liberate Palestine,” while physically blocking an annual police-approved pilgrimage of the Jewish Temple Mount Faithful group to enter the Temple Mount. One wonders what part of “with blood and fire” is “strengthening nonviolent efforts”?

As far as the alluded lack of popular support for violence, a March 2008 report by the Palestinian Center for Policy & Survey Research (PSR) noted that 67% of the Palestinian Arab population supported armed attacks against Israeli civilians inside pre-1967 Israel, and not merely Israeli military targets or “settlers,” with only 31% opposed. So much for Dr. Tibi’s “few.”

Dr. Tibi also takes former House Speaker Newt Gingrich to task because Mr. Gingrich “recently claimed that we Palestinians are an ‘invented people.’ And what, pray tell, are the Americans? Gingrich’s people are every bit as invented, perhaps more, as they come from every corner of the globe.”

The comparison Dr. Tibi wishes to convey is that if the “Palestinians” are an “invented people,” well so are the Americans. And if the Americans are an “invented people” too, then at the very least, the “Palestinians” are no less entitled to a state than are the citizens of the United States of America (AKA “Gingrich’s people” by Dr. Tibi). Clever, but the comparison doesn’t quite work.

It is true that the United States is a country comprised of a “melting pot” of citizens who arrived from many other countries around the world. Not only do Americans not deny this (as Dr. Tibi and friends do regarding the invented Palestinians), it is considered an issue of accomplishment and pride among Americans. Further, it is a matter of record that since the formal and recognized establishment of the United States of America in 1781 following the end the American Revolutionary War, the overwhelming percentage of the current American population arrived in the 150 or so years after that time. And in line with the Emma Lazarus sonnet engraved on a plaque on the Statue of Liberty that declares: “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” Americans are proud of their humble antecedents. But all these people came to a functioning and internationally recognized country.

The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Center for Near Eastern Studies hosted a roundtable discussion last month titled, “After a Decade of the ‘War on Terror’: The Middle East, Human Rights and American Muslims.” Sponsored by the UCLA School of Law Critical Race Studies Program, the event featured UCLA law professor Asli Bali, University of California, Santa Barbara sociology professor Lisa Hajjar, and American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Southern California attorney Ahilan Arulanantham. The audience of approximately twenty people was comprised mostly of law and graduate students, along with a few members of the community.

According to the introduction, the speakers were to “examine this decade on the war on terror in the broader context of the international community,” but the two-hour event quickly descended into a forum for America-bashing. All three speakers called the existence of Islamic terrorism into question and, what’s worse, behaved as if the attacks of September 11, 2001 never occurred.

Bali of UCLA Law began by framing the discussion around how “the war on terror has affected the international law community and American Muslims.” She argued that the “war on terror has created a political entrepreneurial class that has benefited from the war” and called the Patriot Act a “violation of the Fourth Amendment” that has played out “quite viciously on the global stage.”  The U.S., Bali maintained, has been allotted extraordinary executive license and now has the “power to detain anyone, even U.S. citizens.”

Presenting U.N. Resolution 1373—a counter-terrorism measure passed unanimously on September 28, 2001 to restrict the movement, organization, and fundraising activities of terrorist groups—as evidence of America’s overarching power, Bali concluded that this “is a case in point of how the U.S. has sculpted and shifted the global community to do what they want.” With no evidence, she then asserted that the American “and the Israeli government benefit economically from the resolution.” In sum, Bali whitewashed the events of 9/11, bashed the U.S., and ignored countries that harbor Islamic terrorists.

ACLU attorney Ahilan Arulanantham followed and called America’s detention program abroad into question. Urging the U.S. to have “some sort of accountability for abusing and torturing humans,” Arulanantham limned a portrait of America as a dictatorial state that “secretly detains people abroad.” Building on Bali’s insinuation that the U.S. conducts secret and illegal missions worldwide, he called upon the audience to “look into worldwide cases of people being secretly detained and tortured, some of whom are U.S. citizens.” Labeling the U.S. “a surveillance industrial complex,” Arulanantham advised audience members to obtain a “freedom of information act form in order to acquire information from the government about what is happening on your own campus.” Arulanatham’s paranoid assertion that the U.S. government, with the assistance of local FBI cells, is secretly “monitoring the lives of students on college campuses” illustrated the level of fear mongering at this event.

The Pakistani military is accusing the U.S. of purposely killing its 24 soldiers on Saturday and Pakistani-American relations are, again, at a new low. It may be only a matter of time before Pakistani cooperation on counter-terrorism dwindles from little to nothing but the U.S. shouldn’t be blamed. The NATO airstrike, even if it was a case of misidentification, happened because Pakistan’s border posts allow terrorists to fire across the border.

The details of what happened on November 26 are sketchy, but it is known that U.S. and Afghan forces were attacked. Most reports say the attackers were the Taliban, while another says they belonged to a Salafi militia. The U.S. says it called the Pakistani military, which said it had no soldiers in the area. An airstrike was called in, which the Pakistanis say took place 300 yards inside their country and lasted for over an hour. It is suspected that NATO may have fallen for a Taliban ruse, and accidentally bombed a border post thinking it was a terrorist camp.

One account says that the Pakistani soldiers at the border post shot at a U.S. helicopter pursuing the terrorists, resulting in return fire, though the Pakistanis claim they did not fire first. It is unknown if the border post personnel tried to down the helicopter or if responsibility lies with terrorists sheltered in or near the base. Either way, Pakistan would be to blame for the incident.

Anti-American protests erupted in Pakistan and an effigy of President Obama was set on fire. Prime Minister Gilani said Pakistan’s relationship with the U.S. is no longer “business as usual.” The Pakistanis immediately shut off the supply route to Afghanistan. The trucks are now lined up at the border, vulnerable to attack. The Pakistanis are boycotting an international conference to discuss Afghanistan and is ordering the U.S. to evacuate the Shamsi Air Base, where drones take off from, within two weeks.

Clashes along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, including ones involving American forces, are more common than is recognized publicly. For example, on May 14, 2007, Pakistani soldiers and ISI intelligence operatives carried out a carefully laid-out ambush of American forces, killing one soldier. The incident was covered-up to prevent putting stress on the relationship between the two countries.

In May, shortly after the killing of Osama Bin Laden, Pakistani forces fired upon a U.S. Apache helicopter. Two Pakistani soldiers were wounded in the clash. The Pakistanis claimed the aircraft ventured into their airspace, which the U.S. denied. Since then, there has been an enormous increase in the amount of cross-border rocket fire. One Afghan province on the border suffered at least 55 attacks by the end of last month, whereas last year there were only two over the same period. There were at least 102 attacks across the border since May, when there were just 13 last year. U.S. forces are not allowed to fire back into Pakistan.

Editor’s note: Below is the latest profile of Frontpage’s new series, “Voices of Palestine,” which will illuminate the core beliefs, in their own words, of leading figures in the Palestinian death cult. The profile of terrorist godfather Yasser Arafat is so extensive, it will be presented in two parts. For Part II, click here. Click the following to view the profiles of Ahmad Bahr, Mahmoud al-Zahar, Ibrahim Mudayris, Yasser Ghalban, Haj Amin al-Husseini, Wafa al-Bis, Mahmoud Abbas and Ahlam Tamimi.

Yasser Arafat is the founding father of Palestinian nationalism. He is also the godfather of 20th century terrorism. The nationalist movement that he created ab ovo remains unique in history as the only one throughout the entire world whose defining paradigm is terrorism, and whose raison d’etre is the destruction of a sovereign state and the decimation of its Jewish population. Even after its leader’s death, still loyal to his legacy, the Palestinian Authority remains focused on the destruction of Israel rather than on a healthy nationalism and the building of an economically viable, Palestinian state.

Arafat not only legitimized, but actually romanticized the murder of innocent civilians, turning terrorism into a populist revolutionary tool. He put airplane hijacking on the political map. He legitimized terrorism, beginning with the moment that he was welcomed to the UN General Assembly on November 13, 1974, kaffiyah on his head and side-arm at his waist, and got a standing ovation from the delegates present. When the Nobel committee awarded him its Peace Prize in 1995, he fulfilled the Orwellian fantasy of reality turned upside down, and truth turned inside out. Evil had become good, wrong had become right, and a mass murderer drenched in the blood of thousands had become a national hero to millions.

Arafat was a protégé of the Communist bloc and succeeded in making his cause a cause of the international left that survived the collapse of the Communist system. The alliance between radical Islam and the secular left that ripened during the post-9/11 war on terror was forged in the battles that Arafat waged.

Arafat resuscitated Jew-hatred and made it the official policy of the UN when the Arab bloc leveraged the passage of a UN resolution equating Zionism with racism in 1975. By relentlessly portraying Israel as evil, Arafat revived the heinous stereotype of the malignant Jew to international respectability, eclipsing the effects of the horror of Nazism and proving correct Josef Goebbels’ lesson to Hitler that if you repeat the same lie often enough, people will believe it.

Arafat is responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinians and 95,000 Lebanese Arabs who were killed by his minions during his twelve-year reign of terror in that country. Nearly 500,000 Lebanese were made homeless in the same period. Arafat is also responsible for  ruin and poverty that pervades the West Bank. From 1967-1994, under Israeli rule, the economy of the West Bank Palestinians prospered. GDP grew at an average rate of 13 percent per year, tourism sky-rocketed, seven universities were created, infant mortality plummeted, life expectancy increased, and the well-being of the Palestinian Arabs improved substantially by World Bank measures. At one point almost 300,000 Palestinians were working in the Israeli economy, with earnings well above their counterparts in neighboring Arab states. Spurred by this prosperity, the Arab population of the West Bank and Gaza Strip soared from about 950,000 in 1967 to over 3,000,000 in 1994.

But after the Oslo Accords transferred authority in the West Bank to Arafat in July 1994, the decline of its economy followed swiftly. Arafat plunged the West Bank and Gaza into a ten-year reign of terror, poverty, hunger, and malnutrition. After Oslo, billions of dollars in international aid flowed into the PA, from the EU, the US, and Arab countries. Yet the Palestinian people saw almost nothing of this bounty. Rather than using that aid to build his state, with schools, hospitals, roads, and social services, Arafat created a massive kleptocracy of cronies and loyalists who siphoned off vast fortunes to personal accounts in Switzerland and elsewhere. The rest he squandered on his terror war against Israel.

Although hundreds of tons of humanitarian supplies entered the West Bank and Gaza regularly, almost none reached Palestinians, because Arafat created a monopoly on the transfer of food to Arab cities in the West Bank with supplies going only to designated PA officials who then sold them to favored merchants. Thus Arafat and his cronies grew rich by intensifying food shortages at the expense of his own starving people.

Instead of building his state and using its assets for the benefit of his people, Arafat created a terrorist army, waged a terror war, and brought the Palestinians nothing but death, destruction, poverty, humiliation and grief.

As head of the Palestinian Authority, he transformed the schools of the West Bank and Gaza into centers of Jew-hatred. After Hitler, Arafat is the first national leader in history to set up a school system whose purpose was to teach the nation’s children to hate another ethnic group and to instill in them the ambition to murder as many as they could.

Arafat maintained a state of permanent warfare in the Middle East, rejecting one peace proposal after another, culminating in his refusal of the Clinton-Barak offer in 2000 which would have given Palestinians a state on 97 percent of the territory they had asked for. Throughout his career, Arafat’s greed, his hunger for power, and his compulsion to push the Jews into the sea subordinated all other considerations. No matter how many died, no matter how much suffering he caused, no matter how catastrophic his one-man rule, he stubbornly pursued his destructive course to the end.

Early Years

The moment and place of Arafat’s birth are uncertain and still debated. His birth certificate and documents from Cairo University indicate that he was born in Cairo, Egypt, on August 4th or 24th, 1929. His name was Mohammed Abd el-Rahman Abd el-Raouf Arafat el-Qudua el-Husseini, the 7th or the 4th child of a middle-class merchant.  But he and many supporters insist that he was born in Jerusalem, British Mandatory Palestine; and that his detractors forged the documentation of his Cairene origins.[1]

His childhood was difficult and unhappy. His mother died when he was only four.  He did not get along with his father or his step-mother and was sent from his home in Cairo to relatives in Palestine at an early age. He claims to have worked for the infamous Hajj Amin el-Husseini during the 1948 war, leading troops into battle (although he was only 18) and even destroying an Israeli tank in an act of great personal bravery. Historians point out that Israel had no tanks in 1948, so this account of derring-do is obviously fictional. But apparently his involvement in that war was active enough for him to witness the atrocities that the Egyptians committed against the Arabs of southern Palestine. His authorized biography[2] includes his eye-witness account of how the Egyptian army drove Palestinians in the south from their homes and forced them at gun-point into what he describes as ‘concentration camps’ in the Gaza Strip. No doubt inadvertently, his biography tells the world that the Egyptians, and not the Jews, were responsible for at least 40 percent of the Palestinian refugees.

After the war he returned to Egypt and studied engineering at King Fu’ad University in Cairo, but did not complete his degree. There he rose quickly to leadership in the Union of Palestinian Students, even though his Egyptian accent was so thick that many Palestinian students refused to believe that he could be trusted as a proponent of the Palestinian cause.[3]

How he came to adopt the Palestinian cause as his life’s mission is not clear.  His early but short-lived membership in el-Akhwan el-Muslemeen (the Moslem Brotherhood) may have impelled him in that direction, since the Brotherhood – mentor to Osama bin Laden and forerunner of al-Qaeda — sought to create a renaissance of the “pure” Moslem culture of the Caliphate, by waging guerrilla warfare against errant or secular Moslem states, and against Israel and the West. In his own words, he claimed to be a “man of destiny,” and was moved even in his twenties, to fulfill that destiny at great personal sacrifice. He postponed marriage until his 60’s, maintained on the surface an austere, almost ascetic, lifestyle, and projected his self-made image to the world: the freedom fighter who would do anything for his cause.

Guerrilla Leader

In 1957 he went to Kuwait where he got a job with the Ministry of Public Works.  He claims to have started his own engineering company at that time, and amassed great wealth which he spent on the creation and development of his organization dedicated to the liberation of “Palestine.” However, there is no record to authenticate his claims. He petitioned the Emir of Kuwait who gave him $13,000,000, which he used to publish his movement’s newspaper, Falastinunu (Our Palestine), create and staff an office, and develop a para-military training program for his followers.  In Falastinunu he promulgated the ideology of Palestinian redemption by violent means. There too he laid the groundwork for what would later become the Palestinian revisionist faux-history with its claims of a Palestinian antiquity in the Holy Land, the late-comer Zionist invasion and attempted genocide of the indigenous “native Palestinians,” and the concept of the Palestinians as a separate and defined national group.

On October 10, 1959, while still in Kuwait, he officially founded his terror organization, called “Haraqat at-Tahrir al-Watani al-Falastini” (the Organization for the Liberation of the Palestinian Nation).  He used its reverse acronym, FaTaH, to generate the name el-Fatah (the break-through, the victory) by which his group would become known world-wide (interestingly, the acronym HaTaF has a negative implication in Arabic, meaning sudden or unexpected death).

Since the Arab states had failed to eradicate Israel in traditional warfare, he chose terrorism as his tactic of choice. After several years of recruitment and training, el-Fatah was ready. Along with his followers, he relocated to Lebanon, and on January 1, 1965, he launched his first attack from across the Lebanese border: the destruction of some equipment in an Israeli pumping station, with a hand-made bomb. Laughably ineffective, it became in the eyes of the Arabs a major victory, simply because this short, chubby, scruffy looking unkempt young man had the courage to strike at Israel. Spin and hype in a receptive Arab press turned what was little more than vandalism into a military assault, catapulting Arafat into the same league as Izz-ad-Din el-Qassam and other Arab terrorists of the previous era. Suddenly he was a hero to rank-and-file Arabs, but an embarrassment to the Arab leaders whose military efforts against Israel had failed.

From his new position of popularity he sought and obtained the support of the Syrian dictatorship (although he was imprisoned briefly in Syria due to some internecine rivalries). Within a few years, with a growing number of ‘victories’ to burnish his reputation, he became a serious threat to established Arab leaders, and especially the Egyptian dictator Gamal Abd el-Nasser.

Nasser recognized the potential popularity and power of a terrorist guerrilla force that could strike at Israel with relative impunity and then fade away into the obscuring fog of statelessness. However militarily ineffectual those strikes might be, the mere fact that some Arab leader was killing Jews in Israel generated popularity and support in the Arab world.  Under the tutelage of the Soviet dictatorship, Nasser founded the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in May, 1964, with Ahmed Shuqeiri at its head. Nasser’s goal was to have the PLO displace el-Fatah in the Arab popular mind as the new strike-force against the “Zionist enemy”.

The Six Day War between Israel and the Arab dictatorships changed things dramatically. Again the massive Arab armies, thoroughly outfitted with the best equipment that Communist Russia could provide, were humiliated by tiny Israel’s pre-emptive strike. Shuqeiri was indecisive, but Arafat seized the opportunity and forged an alliance with Nasser. From September to December, 1967, Nasser supported Arafat in his attempt to infiltrate the West Bank and to develop a grass-roots foundation for a major terror war against Israel. These efforts were unsuccessful because local West Bank Palestinians cooperated with Israel and aided them in their pursuit of him and his el-Fatah operatives.

Ironically, Arafat described this era in his authorized biography as a time of his greatest diplomacy. When word of Israel’s peace offers reached him, he and his adjutants understood at once that if there were peace between Israel and Jordan, there would be no hope for a Palestinian state. So he set off on a grueling shuttle-stop tour of major Arab countries, preaching the need to reject unconditionally any peace agreement with the Jewish State. Arafat claims credit for the results of the Khartoum Conference in which all the Arab dictators and the PLO unanimously voted to reject Israel’s offer to return much of the land it had occupied as a result of the war in exchange for peace. With this admission, Arafat inadvertently takes the responsibility for Israel’s prolonged sovereignty over the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Had he not intervened, Israel could have made peace with Jordan, and the West Bank would have reverted to Jordanian sovereignty in 1967.

Perhaps because of this, his efforts found no support among the Arabs of the West Bank. So he established a base for his fledgling terror army in the city of Salt which is in southwestern Jordan. From there he executed some raids across the Jordan River and began to establish clandestine contacts with Palestinian officers in the Jordan Legion, almost half of whose officers were Palestinians.

Arafat’s fortunes began to look up after the Israeli army under the direction of Moshe Dayan launched a limited invasion of Jordan in March, 1968. The invasion was a response to Arafat’s raids and its objective was the village of Karama, near the Jordan River, where most of Arafat’s men were encamped. The raid took a terrible toll of terrorist fighters.  When Jordanian artillery forces, under the command of Palestinians, unexpectedly opened fire on the Israeli force, the Israeli force retreated, not wishing to escalate the raid into a confrontation with Jordan.

Now Arafat’s brilliance as a propagandist came to the fore. Organizing his defeated force into a cavalcade, he marched into Salt with guns firing in the air, to cheers of victory and success, as though he had forced the Israeli retreat. He played upon the fact that Karama means “dignity” in Palestinian Arabic, and claimed that he had liberated Palestinian Karama in liberating Jordanian Karama, and at last had restored the dignity of the Arab people by smashing the Israeli force and driving it, fleeing in shame and disarray, across the Jordan. It was pure fiction, but the Arabs believed it. Soon money and recruits were pouring in, and he was able to reconstitute and equip his el-Fatah force into a formidable terror army.

With the West Bank and Gaza Strip now under Israeli control, Arafat needed to make some hasty changes in the PLO covenant. Since the PLO’s original 1964 Covenant explicitly recognized Judea, Samaria, and the eastern portion of Jerusalem, and Gaza as belonging to Jordan and Egypt, the only homeland it sought to liberate was the State of Israel. However, when Jordan and Egypt lost control of the West Bank and Gaza because of their defeat in the Six Day War, Arafat had the PLO revise the Covenant on July 17, 1968, to change its operative language and assert a claim of sovereignty over the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Leveraging his Karama “victory” and his newly won prominence, he displaced Shuqeiri as head of the PLO in February of 1969. While the PLO and el-Fatah remained distinct entities, they were unified beneath the umbrella of Arafat’s leadership. Nasser was not happy; but Shuqeiri was no match for Arafat, and after the failure of several assassination attempts (which may have been initiated by Nasser), Arafat emerged as the unchallenged leader of the Arab terrorist war against Israel.

At this point Soviet involvement became critical. Probably under Russian tutelage, Arafat signed the “Cairo Agreement” (November 3, 1969), which allowed him, with overt Egyptian and Syrian backing and covert Russian support, to move a large part of his terror army into south Lebanon. There his forces set up centers of operation and prepared for terror attacks against Israel’s northern border, while Arafat and the rest of his forces remained in Jordan.[4]

Black September

The three years of Arafat’s sojourn in Jordan were not without internal problems.  El-Fatah terrorists routinely clashed with Jordanian soldiers (more than 900 armed encounters between 1967 and 1970). Arafat’s men used cookie-cutter Mafia tactics to smuggle cigarettes, drugs, and alcohol, extort money from local Jordanians, set up road blocks to exact tolls, and kidnap notables for ransom to finance “the revolution.” When Jordanian forces tried to keep order, el-Fatah and the PLO shot them.

The moral and intellectual corruption of American universities has recently manifested itself in the California State University system, the largest in the country. A group of faculty and administrators has sent a letter to Chancellor Charles Reed asking that he not approve the reinstatement of the Israel Study Abroad Program, which was suspended apparently for budgetary reasons. Behind the various pretexts justifying this request, however, lies the usual leftist hatred of Israel based on false history and moral idiocy.

The pretexts are transparently specious. The argument about budget constraints is made on a regular basis about everything the university does, and usually reflects professional or ideological preferences rather than principle. If the issue were a study abroad program at Arab American University in Jenin, which the letter writers recommend the CSU should create, money would not be a problem. Nor is the evocation of the State Department Travel Warning any more legitimate. In fact, if you read the actual warning, you’ll see that it is generated not by Israel’s malevolence, but by the threat of terrorist attacks by Palestinians: “Israeli authorities remain concerned about the continuing threat of terrorist attacks. U.S. citizens are cautioned that a greater danger may exist around restaurants, businesses, and other places associated with U.S. interests and/or located near U.S. official buildings, such as the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv and the U.S. Consulate General in Jerusalem. U.S. citizens are also urged to exercise a high degree of caution and to use common sense when patronizing restaurants, nightclubs, cafes, malls, places of worship, and theaters, especially during peak hours. Large crowds and public gatherings have been targeted by terrorists in the past and should be avoided to the extent practicable.” Moreover, if State Department travel warnings are grounds for eliminating a study-abroad program, shouldn’t the Cal State system suspend all programs in Mexico, where according to the State Department, “the security situation poses serious risks for U.S. citizens”?

The mention of Americans killed or injured in Israel is equally dishonest. Emily Henochowicz lost an eye to an Israeli tear-gas canister, but as the letter admits, she was involved in a violent protest against Israel. Charges that callous Israeli soldiers deliberately targeted her have been refuted by a video that shows her being struck by a ricocheting tear-gas canister. Even worse is the reference to Furkan Dogan, the Turkish-American killed when members of a Turkish hardcore Islamist outfit attacked Israeli commandos during an attempt to run the Israeli blockade of terrorist-run Gaza in an act of provocation. Of course, if an American student anywhere in the world involves himself in a violent protest against the host country, he runs the risk of injury. That’s why guests in another country should stay out of local politics they usually don’t understand. To suggest, as the letter does, that this risk exists only in Israel is dishonest. The fact is, the danger to Americans in Israel does not arise from Israeli security forces, but from the indiscriminate slaughter perpetrated by Palestinian terrorist attacks like the Hebrew University massacre in July 2002, which killed four American students.

Once upon a time when newspaper and magazine offices were torched for offending a powerful group, the rest of the press would rally behind them. But when Charlie Hedbo, a French satirical magazine decided to put out an issue dedicated to Islam with a cover of Mohammed declaring, “100 lashes if you don’t die laughing,” and received a very special burning “Letter to the Editor” from the country’s “Religion of Peace,” the American press lined up behind the firebombers.

Christopher Dickey, the Paris Bureau editor at Newsweek suggested that the far right was probably behind it because it had the most to gain from the attack. Dickey was unable to accuse Hedbo, a left-wing magazine, of being a member of the far-right, so he did the next best thing by diverting attention from the perpetrators and transforming Muslims into the victims of a far-right conspiracy.

Newsweek’s response showed that the second most pernicious thing about the Islamophobia myth is that even when Muslims are the perpetrators, they are still the victims. Moments after an attack takes place, the press rushes out editions worrying that the murder or attempted murder of innocent people by Muslims will cause Islamophobia.

Whether it’s the mass murder of 3,000 people or another in a long series of assaults on freedom of speech in Europe, the villains are always critics of Islam and the victims are always Muslims.

However Dickey was a moderate compared to Time’s Paris Bureau chief, Bruce Crumley, who charged that Charlie Hedbo was a victim of its own “obnoxious Islamophobia” and accused it of wanting to be burned down. Crumley’s article tossed aside freedom of speech in the name of France’s five million Muslims who feel stigmatized by Islamophobia.

Islamophobia is one charge that the editors of Charlie Hedbo are immune from. If they had been afraid of Islam, the way that Time and Newsweek editors are, they would have never run an issue dedicated to mocking Islam. But then Crumley isn’t really saying that Islamophobia is a bad thing. The thrust of his reasoning is that it’s a good thing. It’s good to be afraid of Islamic violence because it makes us more sensitive to Muslim concerns.

If the French had taken a few lessons from CNN and Comedy Central and American newspapers who didn’t dare print the Mohammed cartoons, if they had accepted the “Gift of Fear” that is Islamophobia, they would be a more peaceful and tolerant society.

Crumley’s piece demonstrated that the most pernicious thing about the Islamophobia myth is that once it is used to legitimize Muslim grievances, it is then used to legitimize the violent Muslim response to those grievances. Once you accept that Islamophobia is a serious problem, you have taken the first step to justifying violence as a response to that problem.

That is how it began in Israel, once the narrative of Muslim suffering under the “occupation” was accepted; Muslim terrorism became legitimized as a resistance to the occupation. Once you accept that Muslims in France have been marginalized by an Islamophobic society, then criticizing their religion marginalizes them further and justifies their violent response.

The charge of Islamophobia turns Charlie Hedbo into the new Israel, occupying Muslim sensitivities with tanks made of cartoons and barbed wire fences made of words. Once the occupation is defined, then resistance is justified– and the charge of Islamophobia becomes a license to kill.

Even organizations dedicated to freedom of the press make their ritual obeisances to the Islamophobia myth.

By now, Israel, at the urging and bullying of the world, has tried pretty much every conceivable idea and option for achieving tranquility and reconciliation with the Hamas, except for one.  Israel removed its army and civilian population from the Gaza Strip.  In what amounted to the first ethnic self-cleansing in history, Israel evicted the entire Jewish presence in Gaza.  The entire area was turned over to the Palestinians, lock, stock, barrel, and Jew-free.

The result is of course known.  The Hamas immediately converted all of Gaza into a large rocket launch pad and a base for initiating terrorist attacks against Israel.  It kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit and held him incommunicado, refusing medical treatment to him, even though his arm was filled with shrapnel.  Israel in response provided free electricity and water to the Gazans and sent civilian supplies into Gaza.  Israel never made any serious efforts to stop the massive tunnel smuggling into Gaza from Egypt, even when it was clear that the main item being smuggled was weapons.  These smuggled weapons include bomb materials and sophisticated rockets that can now reach Tel Aviv.  Israel responded to the endless rocket attacks against its own civilians by turning the other cheek.  Only after 8000 rocket strikes did it launch the half-hearted symbolic retaliation in the “Cast Lead” campaign, withdrawing quickly after it was launched.

There is only one strategy for dealing with the Hamas that Israel has never attempted.  That untried strategy is victory.  Israel has never seriously attempted to achieve peace and tranquility with the Gaza Palestinians by means of victory.  This is somewhat strange, since it is hard to think of any other war that did not end in peace only after victory.  Instead, the world keeps demanding that Israel respond to Hamas provocation with an endless series of one-sided “goodwill measures.”  Never mind that the only invariable effect of such Israeli “goodwill measures” has been to trigger more Hamas terrorism.  The only “peace settlement” the Hamas is interested in is one in which Israelis volunteer to allow themselves to be placed in Hamas-run extermination camps for Jews.

Victory in the case of the war with the Gaza terrorists would mean annihilating the Hamas.  Interestingly, there is an increasing chorus of voices inside Israel now calling for peace through victory.  One of these is General Dan Halutz, the controversial erstwhile chief of staff of the Israeli army.  A few days ago a Hamas rocket was fired into Israel and struck a school building.  In response, Halutz called for a “mortal blow” to be dealt to the Hamas’ civilian and “military” leadership.  Then, in a radio interview, Halutz said, “We must bring back our deterrence vis-à-vis Gaza. It has not existed for even one moment since Operation Cast Lead and to this day.”  He has been joined by other Israeli leaders.  The finance minister, Yuval Steinitz (who is a philosophy professor at my own university when he is not busy in public life), recently called on Israel to topple the Hamas “regime” in Gaza if the terror continues.

The terrorist aggression by the Hamas has been carried on nonstop ever since it seized power in Gaza.  Most acts of Hamas barbarism do not even get reported in the world media, for which dogs biting and shooting rockets at postmen are passé.  Hamas rockets land in Israeli civilian areas almost every day.  Hamas leaders continue to call openly for Israel’s obliteration and for the annihilation of Jews.  All this is surprising only for those who have no understanding of what the Hamas really is.   Anyone who has read the brochure on the Hamas being distributed by the David Horowitz Freedom Center will know otherwise.

It has become vogue in many circles to represent Middle East savagery as part of some sort of “War of Civilizations.” It is not. In fact, the Middle East is simply a war by barbarism against all civilization. It is also considered chic to represent the Middle East conflict as a “cycle of violence,” and as something fundamentally symmetrical between Arab terrorists and Israeli soldiers.  It is not.

The story that has made headlines in recent days deals with the various weapons being shot from Gaza into the south of Israel.  As this is written, over 40 projectiles have been launched: Grad Katyusha rockets, Kassam rockets, and mortars, much of this arsenal supplied by Iran. The Grads – which are both the most accurate and have the greatest range – are the most deadly.

Israel has responded, but in a severely limited fashion (which some refer to as “tit-for-tat”). Air Force planes take off over Gaza, hit a launching site, or a smuggling tunnel, or a group of terrorists planning a launch, and return.

Since Saturday, one Israeli man has been killed by a rocket, and four others have been injured.  Damage has been done to buildings, and cars have been gutted.  Children within range of the rockets (some 40 kilometers of the border with Gaza) are being kept home from school, and the populace of southern Israel lives with fear.

Scant attention is paid to the fact that some individuals end up going to the hospital because of anxiety attacks, but high anxiety – perhaps better called  panic – is both psychologically and physically debilitating.  Additionally, as it is important for them to try to stay close to shelters, residents of places such as Ashdod, Beersheva and Ashkelon have limited opportunities for moving about.

Bottom line: Citizens of Israel should not have to live this way. Israelis in growing numbers are of the opinion that it’s time to launch a second operation such as Cast Lead.  That brief war, involving both air and ground operations in Gaza, took place during the first weeks of 2009 and dealt Hamas a significant but not fatal blow.

In many quarters, it is felt that the Israel government is not doing its best to protect its citizens or to ensure deterrence. As a matter of full disclosure, this writer confesses readily enough to a visceral longing to see appropriate heads in Gaza blown off.  It’s difficult to witness what’s happening, especially when one must struggle with the impression that Israeli action is insufficient.

But decisions cannot be based on a visceral desire to do damage, however valid that desire may be.  Before a conclusion is reached regarding what should be done now, the broader context must be considered – both in terms of history and the complexity of current prevailing factors.  The Middle East is rife with shifting inter-Arab/Muslim rivalries, hatreds, and alliances of convenience. Israel, the only non-Arab/Muslim state in the region, is often caught in regional crossfire and must maneuver accordingly for its best interests.

As we consider reports of the situation, what stands out is that the rockets are being launched by Islamic Jihad; Hamas, which runs Gaza, is sitting on the sidelines – neither actively participating nor attempting to control Islamic Jihad.  This is a new situation.

What is not well known is that Islamic Jihad has links with Fatah.  Quite simply, Hamas and Fatah are rivals, while Fatah and Islamic Jihad function, at least covertly, as allies.  (There are reports within the last few days of Fatah people joining the Islamic Jihad forces.)

A look backwards explains this situation:  During the time of the Iranian Revolution, Yasser Arafat – functioning as head of both the PLO and Fatah, which were essentially one and the same then – provided assistance to the revolutionary forces via both training and weaponry.  When the Shah fell, Arafat emerged as one of the first supporters of the new radical Islamic Iranian regime; he entered Tehran jubilant.

The Ayatollah Khomeini, who had sparked that revolution from outside of Iran, was so pleased with Arafat that he gave to the PLO as its headquarters the building that had housed the Israeli mission to Iran during the time of the Shah. A special bond then evolved between Arafat and Khomeini.  It was a honeymoon of short duration, as a displeased Arab world (reflecting Sunni-Shia tensions) delivered Arafat a message: Us or Iran.

Ten years later, there is still much we don’t know about 9/11. There is shocking evidence that Iran and Hezbollah had a role, and the FBI is still looking for three Qataris who escaped the country. Questions remain surrounding a likely Iraqi intelligence operative and a Saudi family who fled the country shortly before the attacks.

Speculation about Iranian and Hezbollah responsibility for 9/11 began to heat up after the 9/11 Commission Report was released in 2004. According to the report, 8 to 10 of the hijackers transited Iran between October 2000 and February 2001 and the Iranian border guards did not stamp their passports. Senior Hezbollah operatives, including the late Imad Mughniyah, were on some of the flights taken by the hijackers during this preparatory stage for the attacks.

Iran and Hezbollah are being sued by a team of eight law firms for their involvement in the attacks. Much of the case rests upon the sworn testimonies of two intelligence defectors. The first is a former Iranian intelligence officer named Abdolghassem Mesbahi who defected in 1996 and whose information proved Iran’s role in a 1994 bombing in Argentina. He says he had first-hand knowledge of a plan drafted by the regime to use proxies to crash hijacked airliners into targets in the U.S., including the World Trade Center and Pentagon. According to Mesbahi, Iran bought a flight simulator for Boeing 757s, 767s and 777s about 18 months before 9/11, even though it owns no such aircraft.

The second eyewitness is an intelligence defector named Hamid Reza Zakeri, who claims to have worked for a top-secret intelligence office set up under Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei’s authority. He says that he was in charge of security arrangements for meetings between top Al-Qaeda and Iranian officials in the months leading up to 9/11, including Ayman al-Zawahiri. He defected in the summer of 2001 and brought with him alleged intelligence documents that discuss an upcoming joint attack on the U.S. by Iran and Al-Qaeda.

Former Florida Senator Bob Graham, a co-chairman of the 9/11 Commission, is making accusations of a cover-up regarding the involvement of certain Saudis in the attacks. It has been revealed that a Saudi family in Sarasota, FL, made a speedy getaway only two weeks before the 9/11 attacks, leaving behind their belongings and a stocked refrigerator. A follow-up investigation by the FBI found that the Saudis at the home, Abdulazzi and Anoud al-Hiijjii, had been in communication with three of the hijackers who lived nearby, including Mohammed Atta. The FBI also connected them to at least 11 other suspected terrorists. They fled the U.S. for Riyadh, where Aboud al-Hiijjii’s father, Essam Ghazzawi, lives. Both Ghazzawi and Abdulazzi’s names were known to the FBI before the attacks for their possible involvement in terrorism financing. The FBI says the case is closed and the couple was exonerated.

Senator Graham says that his commission was never informed of the finding by the FBI. He says that the FBI also did not tell the 9/11 Commission about how an employee of a Saudi government contractor, Omar al-Bayoumi, sponsored the stay of two of the hijackers in the U.S. He moved to San Diego shortly after two of the hijackers arrived. He received a raise and then paid for their apartment, introduced them to other Saudis and even set up their flight lessons. Al-Bayoumi reportedly sponsored them partly from an account connected to the wife of the Saudi ambassador to the U.S.

If you were told that the NYPD wasn’t investigating a known Muslim Brotherhood front, you’d probably be outraged. Instead, the NYPD has done just that with the Muslim Students Association, and it is again facing fierce criticism for doing its job.

It has been revealed that the NYPD used informants to infiltrate specific Muslim Students Association branches in New York whose members had suspected ties to terrorism and extremism. Public events organized by MSA chapters were secretly attended and websites and chat rooms were monitored. Seven MSA chapters were labeled as “MSAs of concern,” specifically six branches of the City University of New York and St. John’s University in Queens. The six CUNY MSAs that were listed were at Brooklyn College, Baruch College, City College, Hunter College, La Guardia Community College and Queens College.

The Muslim Students Association was directly founded by the Muslim Brotherhood in 1963 at the University of Illinois. The three main founders were Hisham al-Talib, Ahmad Totonji and Jamal Barzinji. All three have had senior roles in organizations investigated for possible involvement in terrorism. In 2003, Special Agent David Kane’s sworn testimony said Barzinji is “not only closely associated with PIJ [Palestinian Islamic Jihad]…but also with Hamas.”

Today, the MSA has over 150 chapters directly affiliated with it in the U.S. and Canada. The Investigative Project on Terrorism says, “Through conferences and events, publications, websites and other activities, MSA has disseminated and promoted militant Islamic ideologies on college and university campuses throughout North America.” A 2007 NYPD document identified the MSA as an “incubator” of radicalism.

There’s an extensive list of MSA leaders engaging in terrorism and chapters promoting extremism. Abdurahman Alamoudi, a Brotherhood member convicted for his ties to Al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups, used to be the national president of MSA. Anwar al-Awlaki was the president of the Colorado State University chapter. Omar Hammami, now with the Al-Qaeda affiliate in Somalia named al-Shabaab, was the president of the University of South Alabama’s chapter. A University of Idaho chapter leader, Sami Omar al-Hussayen, was arrested in 2003 on suspicion of fundraising for terrorists. The president of MSA’s Washington D.C. council was convicted for trying to join the Taliban. And the list goes on and on.

The NYPD investigation into the seven MSA chapters is being portrayed an abuse of student’s rights rooted in anti-Muslim discrimination. The Brooklyn College Faculty Council passed a resolution condemning the NYPD’s actions and 43 law professors at CUNY put out a joint statement saying that the rights of students may have been violated. One English professor at Brooklyn College, Moustafa Bayoumi, accused the government of systematically persecuting innocent Muslims for their faith.

Editor’s note: Today, Frontpage presents our “Gilad Shalit edition,” which gives a platform to the different perspectives on this most difficult issue. While the article below supports the deal that freed Shalit, Steven Plaut’s piece in today’s issue, The “Prisoner Exchange” Absurdity, opposes it. Jacob Laksin’s Faces of Terror profiles the terrorists who were released for Shalit.

On Monday and Tuesday in Israel all you had to do to experience depths and peaks of emotion was watch TV.

On Monday, there were pictures of Abed el-Aziz Salha, the Palestinian who joyously held up his bloody hands during the lynch in 2000 of two Israeli soldiers in Ramallah. And of Amana Muna, the Palestinian woman who in 2001 used online impersonation and promises of romance to lure a 16-year-old Israeli boy into a fatal hail of bullets, also near Ramallah.

And of Abed al-Hadi Ganaim, the Palestinian who in 1989 forced an Israeli bus off a cliff, killing 16. And numerous others of that ilk—all of them, to the severe mortification of many relatives of victims, who appealed in vain to the Supreme Court, set to be released the next day to win Gilad Shalit’s freedom.

And on Tuesday, footage of transcendent power and beauty as Shalit—the soldier kidnapped by Hamas in June 2006—went from the depths of hell in Gaza, a solitary confinement in which his only “human” contact was his Hamas captors, to a brief sojourn in Egypt and then home to Israel. And this during Sukkot, an eight-day holiday that commemorates the Israelites’ long trek from Egypt to the Promised Land.

An enthralled Israeli public first saw Shalit whisked along by a burly, armed contingent of Hamas men and Egyptians, and then—gaunt, shy, and dazed—“interviewed” by a pertinacious Egyptian woman whose sensitivity to his condition was such that she tried to wring pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli propaganda out of him. But from there Shalit left the zone of darkness and cruelty and emerged into light and kindness—first checked by the chief army doctor at a border crossing, then flown to the Tel Nof air force base to be received by the prime minister, the defense minister, the chief of staff, and his father in a scene redolent of the Bible’s most heart-wrenching reunions.

And then, in a gorgeous sunset over the Galilee, his air convoy bringing him to his home village of Mitzpe Hila while an ecstatic crowd waving Israeli flags and singing “Am Yisrael Chai” (The People Israel Lives) awaited him. And a glimpse of the overwhelmed Shalit stepping out of a van and giving the crowd a single shy wave before finally being taken into the quietude of his home.

It is not often that I disagree with my good friend David Hornik, but – alas – this is one such time.  I have a very different take on the “prisoner exchange” deal just carried out between Israel and the Hamas terrorists, indeed one quite the opposite of what Hornik writes in his Frontpage Magazine piece “Freeing Gilad Shalit,” followed, by “Defending the Gilad Shalit Deal.”

Hornik essentially claims that the deal was justified because only small numbers of Palestinian murderers released by Israel in the past reverted to terrorism and murdered Jews.  He claims, much like the Israeli Prime Minister, that there was simply no viable alternative and leaving Shalit to his fate was just not an option.  Hornik does not believe the release of the terrorists creates an unreasonable security threat to Israel.  In part, this is because some of the worst terrorists will be deported to areas outside Israeli territorial control.  Steven M. Goldberg, writing in FPM, among others, disagrees.

So do I.

The issue is not simply the security risks from setting more than a thousand mass murderers back on the street.  I do not buy the “statistical trend” argument that since terrorist murders in Israel have been relatively low in recent years, the trend can just be extrapolated.  I think this smacks of “September 10, 2011” thinking.  In other words, looking at recent numbers as indicative of trends does not save us from the possibility of imminent quantum leaps of danger.  But even if Hornik is correct and the released murderers do not revert to terrorism, the “exchange” that released them was still insane.  It was a cynical slap in the face to the victims of those terrorists.  And it was a symbolic acquiescence by Israel to the terrorist point of view that has always insisted, much like the German Nazis, that murdering Jews is legitimate because Jewish life just “does not count,” because Jews are sub-human.  Those terrorists should have remained in prison (or been executed) and not traded for Shalit.

Khaled Mashal, chairman of the Hamas Political Bureau in Damascus, Syria, also seems to disagree with Hornik. He proclaimed, “Those released will return to armed struggle.  It is a great national achievement.”

I think that the best definition of leadership is where a political leader is willing to resist populist pressure to do “popular” things whenever those “popular” things are harmful.  A real leader is someone capable of resisting the temptation to act as demagogue and play to the crowd.

In the massive release of mass murderers for Shalit, Bibi Netanyahu has revealed himself to be the very opposite of a leader.  The release of the Palestinian mass murderers is popular in Israel at the moment, according to public opinion surveys.  Netanyahu has a long track record of doing whatever the caprices of the public happen to favor at the moment.  So I suppose in some ways it was not surprising that he agreed to this atrocity.  A man who does not have the backbone to stare down and dismiss summer Woodstock-on-the-Yarkon “social justice” protesters (the cousins of the Wall Street Occupiers) cannot be expected to resist the passionate Israeli public’s desire to see Gilad Shalit released.

The release of the murderers is fleetingly popular in Israel this week.  Negotiating with Palestinians is also generally popular in Israel.  So are price controls on housing and raising the minimum wage.  So is (depending on wording of question) creating a Palestinian state.  Being a leader means refusing to create disasters just because the public this week happens to feel that it is a nice idea to create them.

There was a general and deeply-felt desire for Shalit’s release among all Israelis.  The media have kept the plight of his family in the headlines for five years.  Shalit was in captivity for longer than the U.S. soldiers who survived the Bataan death march in the Philippines or the British troops captured in Hong Kong and Singapore.

But it is now clear that the main effect of the organizations in Israel drumming up support for “Let’s Get Shalit Released,” and “We Demand Shalit’s Freedom,” was to increase the number of murderers released in the exchange, from a couple of hundred to over a thousand.  It was obvious all along that the protests “on behalf of Gilad” had no effect whatsoever on Hamas other than persuading it to hold out longer for greater levels of appeasement.  The protests simply weakened the resolve of the already weak Israeli political leadership to resist the extortion.