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| Israel-Palestine-Jordan |
| Symposium: The Fall of Palestine |
| 2006-03-25 |
| Interesting read, but long, need p.49. Hamas’ recent stunning victory in the Palestinian parliamentary elections has forced the international community to face a precarious challenge. As the U.S. and Israel regroup to to deal with unapologetic Islamo-Fascists running Palestinian office, several pertinent questions beg analysis: (1) Why did the Palestinians utilize a democratic experiment to elect Islamo-Fascists? (2) Why are Israeli leftists using the occasion to paint the new rulers of Palestinians as forces of social justice? To discuss these and other questions relating to Hamas’ takeover of the Palestinian Authority, we have assembled a distinguished panel. Our guests today: Kenneth Levin, a clinical instructor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, a Princeton-trained historian, and a commentator on Israeli politics. He is the author of the new book The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People Under Siege. He also was interviewed by FP about it, and I posted the link a while back, search for it in the archive or go to Frontpagemag's ones, it's interesting. David Keyes, who assisted a former Israeli ambassador to the U.N. and specialized on terrorism at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. He recently returned from the Middle East where he co-authored academic papers with the former U.N. ambassador and the former head of Israeli military intelligence research and assessment. His latest paper, entitled “Al-Qaeda Infiltration of Gaza: A Post-Disengagement Assessment” was published by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. and David Gutmann, Emeritus professor of Psychology and Behavioral Sciences at North-Western university Medical School, in Chicago. As a clinician, he has practiced and taught intensive psychotherapy. As a researcher, he has conducted psychological studies of the Galilean and the Golan Heights Druse, as well as the Bedouin of the Negev and Sinai deserts. FP: David Keyes, Kenneth Levin and David Gutmann, welcome to Frontpage Symposium. David Gutmann, let’s begin with you. In July 2000 in the Camp David talks, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered the Palestinians 95% of their negotiating demands, their own sovereign state in Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip, more than 90 percent of the West Bank, and a capital in Jerusalem. Barak offered the Palestinians sovereignty over all Arab-populated parts of East Jerusalem, over all of the Old City except the Jewish Quarter, and over the Temple Mount, with Jewish sovereignty only over the Western Wall below the Mount. The Palestinians had a chance to enter a new era of peace, with their own state, on incredibly generous terms. They chose death. Yasser Arafat rewarded the Israelis for their offer by spawning another onslaught of gruesome terror – the al-Aqsa Intifada. Instead of choosing peace and their own state, the Palestinians decided it was a better idea to strap bombs onto their children and to send them into Israeli buses, cafés and teenage discos to blow themselves up alongside innocent Jews. On the pretence of the importance of killing Jews, the Palestinians began to kill themselves – along with Jews – in mass numbers. The choice had been made for self-annihilation over creation. Palestinian kids detonated themselves into smithereens while their parents cheered on in ecstasy from the sidelines, proud that their children had become “shahids” (martyrs). Then, as this madness ensued, we did all could to engender a democratic experiment among the Palestinians, hoping that democracy would free them from their addiction to mass death and suicide. They finally got a democratic process. They took it and elected Islamo-Fascists. Let me ask you a two-fold question now: (1) What pathologies spawn a death cult like this? (2) Many on the Israeli Left have taken the occasion of the Hamas victory to paint Hamas -- which has vowed to exterminate Jews -- as some kind of social justice party that is concerned with peace and the common welfare. This is just as obscene as the psychology of Hamas itself. What gives here? Gutmann: In voting for Hamas, did the Palestinians opt for warand death, or for war and victory? I contend that they always opt for victory, but because their grandiosity leads to overconfidence and under-preparation, they end up with defeat. In '47 an d '48 the Palestinian leadership chose war instead of the state that the UN offered them in a partitioned Palestine. It was the wrong choice: it led to defeat and to the loss of the lands designated for their state. Nevertheless, their motives in going to war were murderous, not self-destructive: they had every reason to believe that they would win a war of extermination against a relative handful of under-armed Jews - the same "Children of Death" who had gone unresistingly to the gas chambers. And the Palestinians came pretty close to realizing this Holocaustic vision: a large proportion of Israel's precious younger generation had to die in order to stop them. Again, the Palestinians had good reason to be optimistic in the second round of their war against the Jews, when Arafat led them into the Al Aqsa Intifada. Then, Israeli society was split between rather ineffectual Hawks and Peace-At-Any-Price-Niks, and Israel's borders were terribly porous to suicide bombers who struck almost every day. Meanwhile, the Jewish state was condemned - also on a daily basis - by the UN, the Brits and the Europeans. Worst of all, the IDF had recently and for the first time run away from an enemy force: it had bugged out of Southern Lebanon with Hezbollah right behind it, leaving weapons, intact military installations and unprotected Christian allies in its wake. Given this background, the Barak/Clinton offer of East Jerusalem and almost all of the West Bank was not welcomed by Arafat as a token of Israeli generosity, but as evidence of terminal Israeli weakness: "The Jews are beaten, they are suing for peace. If Hezbollah could chase them out of Lebanon, then Allah willing my Fatah boys can chase them from all of Palestine." It took the election of Sharon, Operation Defensive Shield, the PLO's crushing defeat at Jenin, and Arafat's house arrest in Ramallah to temporarily correct this grandiose, essentially paranoid delusion. But only for a short while: Islamic dreams of slaughtering a cowardly, effeminate enemy can be temporarily refuted by reality, but they die hard. They flourish again when, in Arab eyes, the enemy reveals some shameful weakness. Churchill once said, "The Hun is either at your feet or at your throat." Similarly with the Arabs; and I suggest that their oscillations between quiescence and ferocity are driven by the Shame/Honor dynamic that is central to Arab psyche and Arab society. Shame and loss of honor, while toxic to the Arab, cannot be metabolized within the Arab self. Instead, the stigma must be ejected, spat out from the self, and downloaded onto lesser beings: women, defeated enemy, infidels and especially Jews. Once the weakness that originated in the Arab is discovered in the Other, then - symbolically or literally - he must be killed. The shamed enemy has come to represent some hated part of the Arab's persona, and Killing him is a substitute for suicide, for the killing of the self. This is the psychodrama that Zionist Jews and Arabs have been playing out in Palestine for almost a hundred years. Most recently, having crushed the Second Intifada, Sharon trades Gaza, which is a liability, for the strategic West Bank settlements around Jerusalem that he intends to keep. These would be guarded behind the Security Wall - the barrier that will, in the absence of a negotiating partner, unilaterally define Israel's final boundaries. Sharon has drawn back the better to advance; but - particularly now that Sharon is comatose - Hamas spins Sharon's calculated disengagement into a great victory for their own gunmen: "the Jews are running away from us. This is only the beginning: we will make them drown in the sea." In it's turn, the Palestinian street sees in Hamas, the "liberators" of Gaza, the agents of final victory over Israel, and votes them into power. As in 1947 and 2001, the Palestinians smell blood in the water, indulge their triumphalist fantasies, and again choose the fever-dream of total victory over peace and statehood. They are by now so seriously addicted to Judeo-cidal Dreams that, like true junkies, they will pay almost anything - statehood, peace, the future of their children, life under Sharia law - in order to feed their habit. And in this hectic scenario, Hamas is the more reliable pusher. Again, the fantasied goals are murderous, destructive towards others; it is the Palestinian willingness to pay an exorbitant price for them that is self-destructive. Not all Palestinians share this genocidal syndrome. Some no doubt voted against Fatah's corruption, while others elected for Hamas' Welfare State (Hitler's wartime charity, Winter Hilfe, comes to mind). But for Hamas' True Believers, why is the addiction to blood-drenched fantasy so powerful? Why this overwhelming desire to see the Jews blown to pieces, terrified, and running? Again, we must refer to the dynamics of shame: I saw the Palestinians abandon their villages in 1947 without a fight, even before we of the Israeli Hagana had enough guns or men to make them run. Their resulting shame was compounded by their Arab "brothers" in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and egypt, who contemptuously shoved the dishonoured Palestinians into squalid camps. There, refugee kids grew up hearing taunts like these: "You Palestinian whores who sold your land to the Jews, and then ran away! To repeat, Shame/Honor societies cannot manage shame except by inflicting it back on the enemy who shamed them. Until that happens, the timeless sense of humiliation festers in the soul, and breeds Psychosis: Arab leaders still bristle at the word "Crusade," and demand the return of Seville and Andaluz (Andalusia), since 1490 the "occupied territories" of Spain. So of course the Palestinians will always sabotage - as they did in 1947, 2000 and now in 2006 – a negotiated peace with Israel. For the Palestinians, the only acceptable negotiating partners are Jews who mirror the Palestinians of '47 and '48 : defeated Jews, SHAMED Jews whose terrified mobs run like lemmings to the sea. Good faith negotiations with a still powerful, still undefeated Israel means living forever with the shame of NAQBA , and giving up the wet-dream of a total, redemptive victory. Thus far, the Palestinian addiction to such orgiastic visions has proven too strong to be broken. In some ways Israeli and American-Jewish peaceniks are even more pathological than the Palestinians: it is the former who exhibit motivated rather than incidental self-destructiveness. If the Palestinians constitute a typical Shame/Honor culture, then by contrast, Jews - especially Peaceniks - constitute a Guilt culture. The Arabs worry about what has been done to them by way of insults and humiliations; the Jews worry about has been done to others by them, or in their name. History is a tale of blood, and statehood shoved the Jews back into history, into the middle of the battle, where the choices were to fight or die. The Israelis proved to be successful warriors, but many Jews - Israelis as well as Americans - have sickened of the killing, and are fashioning a separate peace. They have reached the point where they plead the enemy's cause against their own people, and ultimately against their own children. Currently, they are starting to spin HAMAS as the wardens of a benign welfare state – Mother Teresa with a suicide belt. The Palestinians won't be Shame-free until they have defeated the Jews; the Peacenik Jews won't be guilt-free until they have helped them do it. Keyes: Hamas’ victory in the Palestinian election shatters the myth that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is driven by “a small group of fanatics on both sides.” It has reaffirmed the existence of profound radicalism among the general Palestinian community. The fact that a mass-murdering terrorist group was permitted to run in the first place was a disgrace to democracy. Just as Nazis cannot run in German elections and al-Qaeda is not allowed to run in elections anywhere, so it should have been with Hamas. In any case, the election was primarily a choice between two terrorist organizations—Fatah and Hamas. Hamas has killed about 600 Israelis, executed nearly half of the suicide-bombings from 2000-2005, colluded with al-Qaeda, and encouraged the defeat of America in Iraq. Hamas couldn’t be less of a legitimate “resistance” group if it tried; a mere two percent of its attacks have been aimed at military targets. For these reasons and many more, Hamas—like al-Qaeda—must be utterly liquidated. So why did the Palestinians elect this wretched organization? To be sure, in part it was a rejection of the systemic cronyism and dysfunction of Fatah. But Hamas’ main goals since its founding have been the destruction of Israel in its entirety and the implementation of strict Islamic law. Through hardly conducted in an environment of true tolerance or freedom, a majority of Palestinians have expressed solidarity with these goals through the ballot box. At the very least, it can be said that Hamas’ genocidal aims did not perturb the Palestinians enough to actually sway their vote. Indeed, it is the Palestinian people who bear the responsibility for this latest calamity. Even if the average German citizen’s primary goal in the 1930s was not the eradication of the Jews, they clearly did not mind electing someone whose chief aim was exactly that. Hamas’ influence can be blamed in part on the nearly two decades of dictatorship and oppression under Arafat. Tyranny augments fundamentalism as subjugated populations seek an escape from daily suffering and repression. Totalitarianism and the absence of basic human freedoms are the well-spring of extremism and terror. The rampant hate-speech spewed from Palestinian media and mosques have also have also fostered radicalism. Palestinian children are told daily by their leaders, teachers, preachers, and in some cases even families, that martyrdom and suicide are heroic acts rewarded by eternal bliss. The amazing thing is not that so many Palestinians have chosen to strap bombs to their chest to kill Jews, but that more have not. From children’s suicide-camps in Gaza to an-Najah University’s glorified re-creation of a suicide bombing at an Israeli pizza parlor, generations of Palestinians have been indoctrinated into a cult of death. As for any Israeli delusions of working with Hamas or moderating them, it can only be said that we have been here before. So much of what is being said about Hamas today is exactly what was said of the PLO two decades ago. Arafat was brought back from Tunis and needed only to sign a piece of paper renouncing terror. He uttered a handful of hollow platitudes denouncing violence in English and the world went forth appeasing this murderous tyrant. He became a frequent and honored guest at the White House. Rabin even said that Arafat could fight terrorism with greater efficiency because he was not accountable to human rights organizations. This was the warped mindset that led to the disaster of Oslo. Meanwhile, Arafat never gave up his dream of destroying Israel and certainly never stopped funding suicide-bombers. Emboldened by Israel’s recent unilateral disengagement, Hamas promises to be even worse than Arafat. The fact that Hamas provides social services to Palestinians should be about as relevant as if al-Qaeda handed out blankets to poor Afghanis after 9/11. But most Israelis are tired of fighting and will do nearly anything to end the conflict. Israelis are a peace-seeking people who have been besieged by implacable enemies for so long that they simply want it to end. Some on the Israeli left have craved peace so badly that they have become delusional in the process; they are willing to sign a deal with whoever has paper. But overall, Israel has shown incredible tenacity in the face of seemingly endless terror. Nevertheless, perhaps fatigue is taking a toll. Consider the following two statements by leaders in a time of war: Winston Churchill in 1940: "We shall not flag nor fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France and on the seas and oceans; we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air. We shall defend our island whatever the cost may be; we shall fight on beaches, landing grounds, in fields, in streets and on the hills. We shall never surrender…” Ehud Olmert in 2005: "We are tired of fighting, we are tired of being courageous, we are tired of winning, we are tired of defeating our enemies, we want that we will be able to live in an entirely different environment of relations with our enemies." That about says it all. Levin: I agree with David Gutmann that the Palestinians' pursuit of their terror war against Israel, and election of Hamas, are less suicidal than genocidal. I also agree with his comments on the psychodynamics underlying the Palestinians', and broader Arab world's, genocidal agenda, except that I would emphasize the role of Arab leaders in cultivating and channeling individuals' psychodynamic predilections into murderous hatred toward perceived external enemies, most notable Jews. On the recent Palestinian election, there has been much debate as to whether votes for Hamas were votes against PA/PLO corruption or for Hamas's exterminationist platform. But the distinction is based on a false premise in that - as David Keyes notes - the PA/PLO likewise promoted an exterminationist platform, using its media, mosques and schools over the past decade to further indoctrinate Palestinians into embracing Jew-hatred and believing in the illegitimacy of Israel, the necessity of its annihilation, and its ripeness for destruction. As to Israelis, and western Jews, who ignore the other side's explicit agenda and replace it with fantasies of what they want the other side's agenda to be, fantasies that the Palestinians are simply asking for redress of supposed Israeli misbehavior and that sufficient concessions will end the conflict, they are the truly suicidal party, willing to risk their own lives and those of their children, their co-religionists and their countrymen for the sake of promoting their delusions. The chief voice in this camp, Yossi Beilin, said explicitly that he was not willing to live in a world in which existential problems - such as Palestinian hostility - cannot be solved, and he chose to solve it not by confronting the enemy but by prettifying him, risking the very survival of his nation for the sake of his fantasies. As I argue in my book, The Oslo Syndrome, embracing the perspectives of one's enemies is a common phenomenon within chronically besieged populations, whether minorities marginalized, denigrated and attacked by the surrounding society or small nations under chronic siege by their neighbors. It has been a recurrent theme in Jewish Diaspora history as well as in Israel. A major counterweight to the psychological corrosiveness of besiegement must be leaders who convey to the community its true choices and bolster its will to resist. The Israeli-Arab conflict is ultimately a test of wills in that Israel has and will retain the military capacity to defend itself - despite its small population, its lack of strategic depth, and the rabidness of its enemies. It is self-delusion and loss of heart to defend itself that is likely to remain its greatest threat. From this perspective, the 2005 statement by Ehud Olmert, cited by David Keyes, about Israelis being "tired of fighting" is an enormous dereliction of responsibility that, unless vigorously retracted, renders him unfit to lead the nation. The Israeli people's response to the terror war launched against them in September, 2000, demonstrated that it was the Oslo era leadership, not the people, that had psychologically capitulated and was no longer willing to fight those determined to destroy Israel. The nation deserves leaders capable of reinforcing the nation's will, as Churchill did for England, not undermining it. Gutmann: At the outset of this symposium, Jamie asked us to comment on the Palestinian's "death wish." But Dr. Levin, David Keyes and myself hold that the Palestinians have a death wish towards others, and that the truly suicidal version of Thanatos is lodged not in them, but in the Jewish Doves of Israel and the States. The Palestinians have no compunctions about killing: for them the act and its attendant fantasies have become eroticized - hence, addictive. They want to kill Jews so badly that they are willing to kill themselves in order to get at us. Mr. Keyes and I agree that The Palestinians resemble the Germans under Hitler: convinced by him of their victimization at the hands of inferior enemies who did not beat them fairly on the battlefield, the Germans poured their resulting "Victim's Rage" into various genocidal enterprises, including the Holocaust. Sharing similar delusions, the Palestinians turn their own version of Victim Rage against the Jew. And as Mr. Keyes points out, too many Jews have become counterplayers in this psychodrama - enablers of the Arab psychosis. Guilty by nature, convinced of their own sins against the victimized multitude of third-world innocents, the Jewish Doves make the gestures of surrender. Turning the bared throat towards the knife they invite the Palestinians to punish them and their guilty nation for their sins. I grew up among Jews like these, and agree with Dr. Levin that they are the truly "suicidal" party. While I'm surprised to see them proliferate in Israel, I can understand them. What I don't understand is the passive response of so many European Christians, citizens of advanced Democracies, to the increasingly arrogant, murderous challenge that they face from the Eurabian Jihadists. Like their grandfathers who appeased Hitler, the European Doves find all kinds of reasons to spin and minimize the Jihadist fury that now openly mocks and threatens their comfortable lifeways. The appeaser's whimper, "Just give Herr Hitler the Sudetenland, and that will be the end of his territorial demands" is echoed today, vis-a-vis Hamas: "Make those Jews give Hamas title to Jerusalem, allow the return of the 'Refugees', and the Palestinians will be happy democrats, participants in the comity of nations..". In the Christian case, I don't believe that "Jewish" guilt is the driving motive behind their covert surrender. Instead, I sense a kind of narcissistic passivity, which is much less treatable. Post-war affluence sponsored the "Me" generations – the narcissistic personality of our times, which is founded in the demand for personal gratification. The individual demands for sexual conquest and material acquisition are idealized, and the capacity to revere entities beyond the self - family, nation, heritage, great causes and inspiring leaders - is blunted. In effect, the Jihadists reverse this syndrome. Despite their psychopathology (or perhaps, because of it) they are quite ready, even eager, to lay down their lives for nation, heritage, religion and charismatic leaders. They are like the Japanese Kamikazes, the suicide pilots who almost destroyed our Pacific fleet at the end of WWII. Confronted by God-obsessed Islam, the self-obsessed Europeans are finding all kinds of excuses to ignore and avoid the challenge. That kind of magical thinking did not work against Hitler and Tojo, and it won't work now. We face a long struggle. As Dr. Levin reminds us, in the absence of "Churchillian" leaders, it is one that we may not win. Keyes: Dr. Levin is absolutely correct to highlight Yossi Beilin as a symbol of the deep denial of reality that permeates many on the Israeli left. For Beilin, it seems, no moral red lines exist, whatsoever. No person—no matter how evil or corrupt—is beyond empowering or negotiating with. This is the only possible explanation as to how he could have openly called for releasing arch-terrorist Marwan Barghouti from prison in order to lead the Palestinian people. There is an Arabic proverb which states “Stupidity is a disease without a medicine,” and I think such words apply here. The warped mentality that allows someone to advocate freeing and empowering a convicted murderer and terrorist mastermind, is in large part why peace eludes us today. It will take sharp moral clarity and Herculean will to defeat global irredentism and jihad; those who ascribe to Beilin’s word-view, and learned not a whit from the mistakes of Oslo, certainly do not help in this fight. Dr. Gutmann also raises important points regarding European appeasement. Undoubtedly, this is not a new story as Europe has historically done more than its fair share of appeasing the most brutal leaders known to man. In the modern sense, this means sending weapons and aid to the worst regimes on Earth. Take one look at the oil contracts and weapons deals that many European countries had with Saddam up until his final moments as President of Iraq. Add money skimmed from the UN Oil-For-Food program and it instantly becomes clear why certain nations were so adamantly opposed regime change in Iraq. European oil money funding mass-murder in Iraq—that was the real “blood for oil,” not America’s campaign of liberation against a fascistic tyrant. Russia and China, incidentally, are often even worse in the appeasement department than their European counter-parts. Russia, for example, sends the government of Sudan, in the midst of their campaign of genocide in Darfur, the vast majority of its weapons. From oil contracts in Iran to unceasing appeasement of Hamas, much of Europe and certainly Russia and China, actively subjugate democracy and aid the forces of tyranny and terror. If there was any doubt as to who is an appeaser of terror, simply observe who invites Hamas into their capitals. One by one, seemingly giddy at the prospect of defending yet another murderous terrorist group, Iran, Jordan, Russia, Turkey, and even South Africa, are granting Hamas political legitimacy and a platform from which to spew hateful rhetoric. At a time when this unrepentant terrorist organization needs to be totally isolated and indeed destroyed, certain countries are welcoming their leaders with open arms. Some even speak of sending financial aid to the government of Hamas-stan. The lesson radical movements throughout the world are learning is that if you kill enough civilians (especially Jews) then you too can be invited as an honored guest to Ankara, Moscow and a host of other metropolitan capitals. Who knows, you might even be funded by the European Union! If radical jihad and terrorism are to be quashed, then precisely the opposite message must be sent. Terror—no matter what the grievance—must never extract political concession. Levin: None of the genocidal forces that have created havoc in the Middle East and beyond in recent decades, not Saddam's regime in Iraq, or the Iranian mullahs, or the Sudanese leadership, or Arafat's PLO or the Palestinians' Islamist alternatives, would have attained their capacity for mayhem had they not enjoyed the support of Western, most notably European, powers. The Europeans have indulged them first and foremost because to do so has been very lucrative. Profit consistently outweighed any potential concern for these forces' victims, such as Iraq's Kurds or Sudan's blacks, and it appears that for many Europeans the murderous Palestinian assault on the Jews of Israel was not even a weak counterweight to the profit motive that drives indulgence of all things Arab but was rather an additional incentive to business as usual. Europe's cynicism has been reinforced by the narcissism described by Dr. Gutmann, a narcissism characterized by a focus on personal gratification and a perception of little beyond the personal as meaningful. This indifference to the world beyond one's self is distinct from the self-involvement found among the acolytes of the Israeli Left. In Israel, such narcissism is largely a cultivated stance with a long pedigree in the history of Jews seeking to detach themselves from a besieged Jewry. A common response among such souls has long been to ostentatiously declare themselves free of any identity beyond their individuality and so properly exempt from being the object of popular negative attitudes toward Jews. The narcissism rampant in Europe evolved in the context of an American security umbrella under which for half a century nothing significant was asked or expected of western Europe. A consequence of both the cynicism and the narcissism is that Europe has been prepared to see large numbers of people murdered elsewhere without feeling any need to rethink or refashion its policies. The question is how much mayhem will it require at home before there is an effective shift in policies. It is likely that the body count will have to be high and both the terror assault and the backlash will turn ugly at best before Europe fully sheds its torpor and fashions an effective response. If one looks for Churchillian leadership, it is hard to find in Europe today even the remnants of a cultural milieu that could produce a Churchill. Given the realities of contemporary Europe, almost the entire burden for fighting the Islamofascist onslaught will continue to fall - as is all too obvious - on America. In view of the popularity of the politics of self-delusion even in America, it is yet to be seen how steadfast even the American effort will be; or, more precisely, how much will be lost before that steadfastness firmly asserts itself. FP: David Keyes, Kenneth Levin and David Gutmann, thank you for joining Frontpage Symposium. |
| Posted by:anonymous5089 |
| #4 Not after the war is over, they won't. |
| Posted by: Nimble Spemble 2006-03-25 14:58 |
| #3 My basic point is that they are resentful, but not personally motivated enough to go all the way. I think it's more likely that thanks to the European welfare state, Muslims will become the majority via peaceful means, by replacing themselves in the way that native Europeans will not. |
| Posted by: Zhang Fei 2006-03-25 14:53 |
| #2 Article: In effect, the Jihadists reverse this syndrome. Despite their psychopathology (or perhaps, because of it) they are quite ready, even eager, to lay down their lives for nation, heritage, religion and charismatic leaders. They are like the Japanese Kamikazes, the suicide pilots who almost destroyed our Pacific fleet at the end of WWII. I don't buy this premise. There is nothing preventing Muslim terrorists from carrying out suicide bombings in the West as they are doing in Iraq. Israel's Arab Muslim population is substantial, and yet few bombings have come from that direction. If we assume that they are willing to do anything (from a moral standpoint) to further their goals, this inaction tells me that they are not, in fact, willing to *personally* sacrifice everything for nation, heritage, religion and charismatic leaders. I mean that they might say these things, but they don't mean what they say. |
| Posted by: Zhang Fei 2006-03-25 14:51 |
| #1 And as Mr. Keyes points out, too many Jews have become counterplayers in this psychodrama - enablers of the Arab psychosis. Guilty by nature, convinced of their own sins against the victimized multitude of third-world innocents, the Jewish Doves make the gestures of surrender. Turning the bared throat towards the knife they invite the Palestinians to punish them and their guilty nation for their sins. Not just jews, but the whole West, led by the sucidalists. |
| Posted by: anonymous5089 2006-03-25 14:20 |