When Chamberlain and Daladier betrayed, or rather sacrificed, Czechoslovakia, they did so because they wanted to believe that Hitler would be satisfied with the Sudetenland. They had no proof, but merely the will to believe, and they were not going to let tiny Czechoslovakia stand in the way. They were not going to let Masaryk and Benes (two Western statesmen running a state that was the most advanced in all of Central or Eastern Europe) stand in the way -- by prating about how they, but not England and not France, understood what Hitler was really up to, and that they depended for the defense of Czechoslovakia from invasion on possession of the Sudetenland.
For the Sudetenland, you see, ran all along the northern and western border of Czechoslovakia, and it bristled, along the Vistula, with all of the Czech defenses. Without control of the Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia would be impossible to defend. But Chamberlain and Daladier chose to believe that the Czech fears were baseless -- though everything Hitler had written since 1923, and everything he had done since coming to power in 1933, suggested that the Czechs were right.
Why did Chamberlain, why did Daladier, betray the Czechs, and buy nothing at all, but merely swell Hitler's certainty that he could go from triumph to triumph, that the West was weak, and would not put up resistance, for it was willing to sacrifice, as it did, the Czechs? Was it because they were pro-Nazi? Or antisemites who relished the idea of Hitler taking over Europe? Not at all. They were simply unprepared, intellectually and morally. They did not take the measure of Hitler. After September 1, 1939, it was easy for anyone to take the measure of Adolf Hitler. But before then, among the influential and the well-connected, there were few. We tend to think of one man, a man steeped in history, a man who had been in power, and then out of power, long enough to have the leisure to add to his knowledge of men and events, far from the hectic vacancy of life as led by those in high office. That man was Winston Churchill.
There are those, and they are many, who bristle at the comparison with Munich of the throwing-Israel-to-the-wolves strategy of forcing it back into the "lines of Auschwitz," as Abba Eban once called them. They don’t like the comparison between Munich and forcing Israel back to the lines that represent not internationally-recognized borders, but only the armistice lines of 1949, that is, what the army of Jordan, with the help of the British (who trained and armed the Arab Legion under John Glubb, Glubb Pasha), had managed to seize and hold onto in that war. We are asked to ignore the Arab Muslim war on the Jews, both on those who had never left (as in Hebron, which for thousands of years had been continuously settled by Jews, until in the 1929 massacre all were driven out or killed), and on those who bought land and settled, and again made fruitful the land that had fallen into "ruin and desolation" -- as every single Western traveler, from Volney and Lamartine, to Melville and Mark Twain and Laurence Oliphant, had noted when, during the late 18th and especially in the 19th century, they began to make the Holy Land a point of pilgrimage to supplement their own Grand Tours.
Most of the territory intended by the League of Nations for the Jewish National Home, the part that constituted Palestine on the eastern side of the River Jordan was, by the British, was made part of the Emirate of Transjordan. The Palestine Mandate's provisions -- such as that to "encourage close Jewish settlement on the land" -- were held not to apply to Eastern Palestine, which would now be administratively part of Jordan. But neither the League of Nations, nor its successor, the United Nations (which was formally obligated to recognize, and honor, the Mandates System as established by the League of Nations), could undo the Mandate and its provisions. Had the Jewish forces, in 1949, managed to wrest by force of arms the territory that the Jordanians had seized, territory that formed part of the Mandate for Palestine, that would or should have been the end of the matter as far as the non-Muslim world was concerned. The Jews were entitled to their small sliver, that is, Western Palestine, and the Arabs had vast territories that added up to a land area much more than a thousand times larger than what the Jews received. The Jews were entitled to resurrect their state -- as they did with so much work and so much brilliance and so much tear-stained tenderness, that surely the late Indro Montanelli, that most famous of Italian journalists, was right to say that "the best thing -- perhaps the only certain good thing -- to come out of the twentieth century was the rebirth of the State of Israel."
Now the chamberlains and daladiers of our time do not know what to do in Iraq, or what to do in Pakistan, or what to do in Afghanistan. They continue to be constantly surprised, because they fail, they keep failing, to sit down and study, and re-study, until they have thoroughly assimilated, the texts, and tenets, and attitudes, and atmospherics, of Islam, and then to supplement that with an understanding of the history of Muslim conquests of vast non-Muslim lands, over 1350 years, and of attempts to conquer still more that were successfully fended off. Nor do they know anything about the treatment, over those 1350 years, of many different groups of those conquered -- Christians, and Jews, and Zoroastrians in the Middle East and North Africa, and then as well Hindus and Buddhists and Jains and other Christians (Nestorians), in Asia, especially in the subcontinent and in the East Indies. If you do not know any of this, if you remain willfully unacquainted with what Islam inculcates, if you don't know what the "jizyah" is, or what the word "Jihad" means, and the centrality of that duty to engage in a "struggle" to push back the borders of Dar al-Islam at the expense of Dar al-Harb, until all obstacles everywhere to the spread of Islam are removed, and Islam dominates, and Muslims rule, everywhere, if you do not even know the full meaning of the word "dhimmi" -- well, how can you possibly figure out how best to handle the Camp of Islam? How can you figure out how to meet this threat if you force or allow yourself to believe that Islam is not the problem, but only those "extremists"?
That was the method of the Bush Administration, with its colossal squandering of men, money, materiel, morale, and of time, precious time. And now it is the method of the Obama Administration, with the same squandering, but in theatres slightly to the east, in Afghanistan and Pakistan (with Iraq still being in the mix). Meanwhile, the Jihad goes on unabated, with greater force, in the historic heart of the West, that is, the countries of Western Europe. There they do not resort to terrorism, or even to qitaal (conventional combat), but rather to such instruments of Jihad as the Money Weapon, campaigns of Da'wa, and demographic conquest. These, above all demographic conquest, have proven to be the most effective weapons in spreading Islam and demoralizing the host Infidels, as they scramble, so many of them, to appease the Muslims now living in the Infidel nation-states of Western Europe, that is, deep behind what those same Muslims are taught to regard as enemy lines.
And in all this continued confusion, there is the inevitable squandering of resources that comes if you fail to grasp the ideology of Islam, fail to learn the history of Islamic conquest, fail to take seriously the threat because you are yourself, or you continue to surround yourself with, people who are Yesterday's Men. Such men are incapable of grasping the source, or magnitude, of the threat to the West, to the entire Infidel world, of those who are in the grip of Islam, inculcated with its beliefs, and likely, even if they offer a "moderate" outward aspect, to prove when the time comes that they cannot escape from being in thrall to Islam, and will choose loyalty to the Umma, loyalty to fellow Muslims, loyalty to Islam itself (for in Islam, it is Islam itself that is the object of worship), over any loyalty to the Infidel nation-state, its legal and political institutions (which, not being part of Islam, are to be taken advantage of when that is useful, but not to be endorsed, not to be protected).
In such a situation, it is no wonder that everyone has agreed that the moral, historic, and legal claims of the Jews to hold onto what they now possess must be disregarded. Israel should not be asked to give up the tiny bit of strategic depth that the "West Bank" provides: Israel, in its pre-1967 armistice lines, was eight miles wide at the wasp-waist that extends from Qalqilya to the sea. Israel should not be asked to give up control of the invasion routes through the Jordan Valley. Israel should not be asked to allow a state full of Muslim Arabs determined, as they have made abundantly clear, to pocket whatever they can, and then to go on from there to work, now filled with a sense of triumphalism, to destroy what would remain of an Israel that would be not hellishly difficult to defend, as it is now, but almost impossibly difficult to defend. And it would be almost impossibly difficult to defend if a “Palestinian” Arab state were established. For such a state would undoubtedly be one bending its energies to the fulfillment of the Arab Muslim dream. That dream would now much closer to being achieved: the dream of demoralizing the Jews through the continuation, by all possible means -- economic, diplomatic, propagandistic, demographic -- of the war to eliminate the hideous affront to Islam, and to Arabdom, that is constituted by the re-establishment of a Jewish state on land once possessed by Muslim Arabs. They possessed it many hundreds of years ago, before the British, and before the Turks. Therefore, that land, like the rest of the world, must belong ultimately to Islam. But because it once was under Muslim control, it stands even higher on the To-Do List of Islam.
Of course the American Joint Chiefs knew, back in 1967, that it would be folly for the Israelis to give up control of the “West Bank.” In that year they commissioned a study to be done by American military experts, who concluded as much. And no American general would disagree today if he were sincere with himself and unaffected either by indifference or even hostility to Israel. (Anti-Semitism affects anywhere between 10 and 20% of the population, and it is a most peculiar pathological condition, one that prevented so many in Western ruling circles from recognizing early on the threat of Hitler). Such a general, if he were to exercise his imaginative faculty, and to think of himself not as an American but as an Israeli military man, would have to concede without qualification that the “West Bank” simply had to remain under permanent Israeli control.
And it certainly could not be handed over to the Slow Jihadists of Fatah, however seemingly plausible Mahmoud “No-One-Here-But-Us-Accountants” Abbas may be. We are to forget his Holocaust-minimizing thesis in Moscow, we are forget his decades as a loyal henchman to Yasir Arafat, we are to overlook the fact that his two sons have been awarded fat contracts paid for by the Americans. We are to forget, or to overlook, so much, including the Der-Stuermer-like campaign against “the Jews” that Mahmoud Abbas does not attempt to stop, but encourages, all over the “Palestininian” television and radio and press. We are to forget, or to overlook, everything about Abbas when he says “we choose peace as a strategic option.” This is a clear allusion, for those who understand, to the exact same kind of temporary peace that Muhammad signed with the Meccans in 628 A.D. at Hudaibiyya. We are to overlook, or forget, that Islam remains Islam, and the fact that Abbas wants to establish a “Palestinian” Arab state from which to continue to conduct the fight to eliminate the Infidel nation-state of Israel. Ah, that we must not discuss, that we must be prepared to pooh-pooh. That would throw a spanner into the complacent works of all the peace-processing brigade, and would force the Americans to think afresh, to see things anew, and to come up with different strategies not only as regards Israel, but in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, with Iran and Saudi Arabia, and with those pushing Islam and Arab power directly southward from the Sudan, deeper and deeper into those parts of sub-Saharan Africa either where Islam has been of a an easygoing, syncretistic variety, or where local Christians have, until now, been able to hold their own.
No, they just don’t want to do it. The Bush Administration, for all of that tough-guy pose, refused to be intelligently ruthless when it came to identifying, and then exploiting, the pre-existing fissures in the Islamic world -- the fissures between Sunni and Shi’a Muslim, or between Arab and non-Arab Muslim. In Iraq, that meant the Kurds attempting to resist the re-imposition of the Arab yoke. There is also the fissure between the rich Muslims (the Arabs of the Gulf, in the main) and the poor Muslims who have been allowed to expect very large, and apparently unending support from Infidels -- who actually work for a living -- rather than from the thinly populated, fabulously rich Arab sheikdoms, both the tiny ones, and Mr. Big, Saudi Arabia.
No, throwing Israel to the wolves makes perfect sense -- if you are a Western political leader or policy-maker who simply has refused to learn anything significant about the ideology of Islam beyond the comforting banalities that so mislead. You want to believe that there is no real, long-term, unmollified enmity that Islam inculcates toward all Infidels. You want to believe that the problem is not Islam itself, but only those you call -- but can never adequately define -- as “extremists.” You want to curry favor, that is, to appease, those whom you have taken to calling, but never really bothered to adequately define, those you call the “moderate Muslims.”
But if you understood Islam, you would realize that all of the agreements made between the Arabs and Israel are, on the Arab side, broken not because this or that particular Arab leader -- Nasser, say, or Mubarak, or any other ruler or state -- was simply untrustworthy, but because, as the scholar Majid Khadduri sets out so forthrightly in his War and Peace in the Law of Islam, all agreements made with Infidels by Muslims are to be broken when necessary. No Infidel state or people can forever be treated as immune to the demands made by Islam. No Muslims can declare, if they are true to Islam, that anywhere in the world can remain under Infidel power. That goes against the will of Allah, expressed in the Qur’an, a will properly glossed by the Sunnah (that is, the Hadith and the Sira as the written record of what constitutes the Sunnah).
And aside from the legal, historic, and moral case for Israel, any gains by the Camp of Islam will whet, not sate, Muslim Arab appetites. Pushing back Israel to the 1949 Armistice Lines would be to apply a different rule to Israel than has ever been applied to a state that came into possession of territory in a war of self-defense. Since that territory was, and remains, a part of the territory allocated to Israel under the terms of the Mandate for Palestine, it is absurd to suggest that because the Jordanian army took control in 1949, that right extinguishes the Israeli claim, or -- if we are relying on force of arms to establish a claim -- that Jordan's taking part in the war declared by five (or was it seven?) Arab states against the nascent Jewish state of Israel, in an attempt to snuff out its young life, extinguishes the Israeli claim. Israel has a right to this territory based on the Mandate for Palestine, that is, this claim does not depend at all on having retaken, by force of arms, that part of Judea and Samaria that had, back in 1949, been seized by the Jordanians.
The U.N. is now controlled by an Islamintern of Muslim diplomats and staff members that relentlessly, in every international forum, in every U.N. Council, pursue a campaign to delegitimize Israel and leave it not merely naked to its enemies, but naked and bound, ready for slaughter, just like the 600-900 bound prisoners of the Banu Qurayza, a Jewish tribe, whom Muhammad watched being slaughtered, one by one by one.
Thanks Jihad Watch
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