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The words of radical Islam speak for themselves
“You will find that the Jews were behind all the civil strife in this world. The Jews are behind the suffering of the nations.”
When and where did that venom come from?

This last May — and out of the hateful mouth of a prominent Palestinian cleric, Sheik Ibrahim Mudeiris. He was broadcast on a Palestinian Authority station. The televised Sheik finished with an even more frightening thought: “The day will come when everything will be relieved of the Jews — even the stones and trees which were harmed by them
The stones and trees will want the Muslims to finish off every Jew.”

Nothing could be clearer than that promise of another holocaust — and promised explicitly on state-run Palestinian television, a public megaphone of the Palestinian Authority, itself the beneficiary of past and apparently promised future American financial aid. Still, don’t hold your breath that the passive/aggressive sheik is about to lead a pan-Islamic army a few miles across the border to “finish off every Jew,” since he might then end up like Sheik Ahmed Yassin, whose threats of death earned him instead an early paradise.

Throughout this war we have an understandable, if ethnocentric, habit of ignoring what our enemies actually say. Instead we chatter on, don’t listen, and in self-absorbed fashion impart our own motives for their hatred. We live on the principles of the Enlightenment and so worship our god Reason, thus assuming that even our adversaries accept such rational protocols as their own. So they talk on and on of beheading, suicide bombing, another holocaust, and blowing thousands of us up, while we snooze, now and again waking in the midst of a war to regurgitate Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, flushed Korans, the abusive Patriot Act, and the latest quip of Donald Rumsfeld.

But again keep quiet, and listen to radical Islam. Take the August 4 declaration of al Qaeda’s second in command, Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri. He promises even “more destruction” for London, and tells us precisely why. Many in the West assume that those mass murders were payback for the United Kingdom’s presence in Iraq, even though its troops are mostly confined to non-Wahhabi areas in the south. But no, the Dr. instead lists a number of grievances beyond Iraq that justify his terrorist cadres murdering innocents. One complaint, for example, is “Stopping the robbing of our oil and resources.”

Examine that gripe carefully. Oil is now at record highs. I just filled up with regular gas at $2.89 on a California interstate. It costs the Middle East about $3-4 a barrel to pump petroleum that was discovered, developed, and marketed for the Gulf autocracies through hated Western expertise — and is now selling at over $60. Despite Zawahiri’s rants, billions of poor the world over are being price gauged to enrich a Muslim world flush with petrodollars. And some of those obscene profits have ended up in coffers of Zawahiri himself. Indeed, his al Qaeda blackmailers depend on recycled petrodollars from Gulf State sheikdoms. Nothing either he or bin Laden has ever done themselves warrants the type of cash that flowed into al Qaeda’s banks — a con operation that extorted oil dollars from autocratic price gougers who in turn got their revenues largely from inventive and productive Indians, Chinese, and Westerners.

Zawahiri next went on to cite, “Stopping your support for the corrupt and corrupting leaders.” Did the terrorist Dr. read the text of Condoleezza Rice’s June 20 address in Cairo? There she rightly repudiated past American realpolitik that blinked at Arab dictatorships, and then prodded Arab governments to democratize? Or maybe it was precisely that fresh support for democracy that grieves Zawahiri?

For clarification of al Qaeda’s ideas about democracy, we can turn to Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, the spiritual leader of the terrorists in Iraq. He recently warned that, “We have declared a fierce war on this evil principle of democracy and those who follow this wrong ideology.” That pathological hatred of democracy was also amplified in the latest al Qaeda video of August 10: “Democracy, human rights, and freedom are all but hollow illusions, with which they tranquilize inhabitants.” Western critics of America’s attempt to introduce democratic reconstruction in Iraq should ask why al Qaeda is so furious at the effort. The answer is clear: Radical Islam can no longer blame the United States for propping up dictators, but instead is terrified that there is a third choice — the people’s freedom — between creepy strongmen and even creepier pre-modern theocrats...

Yet there is one and only one legitimate objection of the crackpot radical Islamists that rings true: We in the West don’t listen to them when they promise us our deaths. We should. They are yelling as loud as they can to tell us something that we don’t really want to hear.

— Victor Davis Hanson is a military historian and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His website is victorhanson.com.
Posted by: Fred 2005-08-12
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=126582