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Jewish World Review December 26, 2008 / 29 Kislev, 5769 Iran and Hamas do Christmas By Caroline B. Glick
On Tuesday Hamas legislators marked the Christmas season by passing a Sharia
criminal code for the Palestinian Authority. Among other things, the code
legalizes crucifixion.
Hamas's endorsement of nailing enemies of Islam to crosses came at the same
time as it renewed its jihad. Here too, Hamas wanted to make sure that
Christians didn't neglected as its fighters launched missiles at Jewish day
care centers and schools. So on Wednesday Hamas lobbed a mortar at Erez
crossing point into Israel just as a group of Gazan Christians were standing
on line waiting to travel to Bethlehem for Christmas.
While Hamas joyously renewed its jihad against Jews and Christians, its
overlords in Iran also basked in jihadist triumphalism. The source of Iran's
sense of ascendancy this week was Britain's state-owned Channel 4 network's
decision to request that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad give a
special Christmas Day address to the British people. Ahmadinejad's speech
was supposed to be a response to Queen Elizabeth II's traditional Christmas
Day address to her subjects. That is, Channel 4 presented his message as a
reasonable counterpoint to the Christmas greetings of the head of the Church
of England.
Channel 4 justified its move by proclaiming that it was providing a public
service. As a Channel 4 spokesman told the Jerusalem Post, "We're offering
[Ahmadinejad] the chance to speak for himself, which people in the West
don't often get the chance to see."
While that sounds reasonable, the fact is that Westerners see Ahmadinejad
speaking for himself all the time. They saw him at the UN two years in a row
as he called for the countries of the world to submit to Islam; claimed that
Iran's nuclear weapons program is divinely inspired; and castigated Jews as
subhuman menaces to humanity.
They saw him gather leading anti-Semites from all over the world at his
Holocaust denial conference.
They heard him speak in his own words when he called for Israel to be "wiped
off the map."
And of course, over the years Ahmadinejad has often communicated directly to
the British people. For instance, in 2007 he received unlimited airtime on
British television as he paraded kidnapped British sailors and marines in
front of television cameras; forced them to make videotaped "confessions" of
their "crime" of entering Iranian territorial waters; and compelled them to
grovel at his knee and thank him for "forgiving" them.
The British people listened to Ahmadinejad as he condemned Britain as a
warmongering nation after its leaders had surrendered Basra to Iranian
proxies. They heard him -- speaking in his own voice -- when he announced
that in a gesture of Islamic mercy, he was freeing their humiliated sailors
and marines in honor of Muhammad's birthday and Easter and then called on
all Britons to convert to Islam.
Yet as far as Channel 4 is concerned, Ahmadinejad is still an unknown
quantity for most Britons. So they asked him to address the British on
Christmas. And not surprisingly, in his address, he attacked their way of
life and co-opted their Jewish savior Jesus, saying, "If Christ was on earth
today undoubtedly he would stand with the people in opposition to bullying,
ill-tempered and expansionist powers."
He then reiterated his call for non-Muslims to convert to Islam saying, "The
solution to today's problems can be found in a return to the call of the
divine prophets."
The fact of the matter is that Channel 4 is right. There is a great deal of
ignorance in the West about what the likes of Ahmadinejad and his colleagues
in Iran, Syria, Hizbullah and Hamas stand for. But this isn't their fault.
They tell us every day that they seek the destruction of the Jews and the
domination of the West in the name of Islam. And every day they take actions
that they believe advance their goals.
The reason that the West remains ignorant of the views and goals of the
likes of Hamas and Iran is not that the latter have hidden their views and
goals. It is because the leading political leaders and foreign policy
practitioners in the West refuse to listen to them and deny the significance
of their actions.
As far as the West's leaders are concerned, Iran and its allies are
unimportant. They are not actors, but objects. As far as the West's leading
foreign policy "experts" and decision makers are concerned, the only true
actors on the global stage are Western powers. They alone have the power to
shape reality and the world. Oddly enough, this dominant political
philosophy, which is based on denying the existence of non-Western actors on
the world stage, is referred to as political "realism."
The "realist" view was given clear expression this week by one of the
"realist" clique's most prominent members. In an op-ed published Tuesday in
Canada's *Globe and Mail* entitled, "We must talk Iran out of the bomb,"
Richard Haas, the President of the Council on Foreign Relations argued that
given the dangers of a nuclear-armed Iran and the dangers of a US or Israeli
strike against Iran's nuclear installations, the incoming Obama
administration must hold direct negotiations with the mullahs in order to
convince them to end their nuclear weapons program.
In making this argument, Haas ignores the fact that this has been the Bush
administration's policy for the past five years. He also ignores the fact
that President George W. Bush adopted this policy at the urging of Haas's
"realist" colleagues and at the urging of Haas himself.
Moreover, Haas bizarrely contends that in negotiating with the mullahs, the
Obama administration should offer Iran the same package of economic and
political payoffs that the Bush administration and the EU have been
offering, and Teheran has been rejecting since 2003.
Even more disturbingly, Haas ignores the fact that Teheran made its greatest
leaps forward in its uranium enrichment capabilities while it was engaged in
these talks with the West.
So in making his recommendation to the Obama administration -- which has
already announced its intention to negotiate with the mullahs -- Haas has
chosen to ignore Iran's statements, its actions, and known facts about the
West's inability to steer it from its course of war by showering it with
pay-offs.
Haas and his colleagues in the US, Europe and on the Israeli Left are
similarly unwilling to pay attention to Hamas. In an article in the current
edition of *Foreign Affairs*, Haas and his colleague Martin Indyk from the
Brookings Institute call on the Obama administration to either ignore Hamas,
or if it abides by a ceasefire with Israel, they suggest that the Obama
administration should support a joint Hamas-Fatah government and "authorize
low-level contact between US officials and Hamas." The fact that Hamas
itself is wholly dedicated to Israel's destruction and Islamic global
domination is irrelevant.
Similarly, Haas and Indyk assume that Syria can be appeased into abandoning
its support for Hizbullah and Hamas, and its strategic alliance with Iran.
Syrian President Bashar Assad's views of how his interests are best served
are unimportant. Both Assad's statements of eternal friendship with Iran and
his active involvement in Iran's war effort against the US and its allies in
Israel, Iraq and Lebanon are meaningless. The "realists" know what he really
wants.
Muslims aren't the only ones whose views and actions are dismissed as
irrelevant by these foreign policy wise men. The "realists" ignore just
about every non-Western actor. Take Iran's principal Asian ally North Korea
for example.
This week North Korea's official news agency threatened to destroy South
Korea in a "sea of fire," and "reduce everything treacherous and
anti-reunification to debris and build an independent, reunified country on
it," if any country dares to attack its nuclear installations.
North Korea made its threat two weeks after Kim Jung Il's regime disengaged
from its fraudulent disarmament talks with the Bush administration. Those
talks -- the brainchild of foreign policy "realists" Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice and Assistant Secretary Christopher Hill -- were based on
the "realist" belief that the US can appease North Korea into giving up its
nuclear arsenal. (That would be the same nuclear arsenal that the North
Koreans built while engaged in fraudulent disarmament talks with the Clinton
administration.)
After Pyongyang agreed in February 2007 to eventually come clean on its
plutonium installations (but not its uranium enrichment programs), and to
account for its nuclear arsenal, (but not for its proliferation activities),
Rice convinced President George W. Bush to remove North Korea from the State
Department's list of state sponsors of terror and to end its subjection to
the US's Trading with the Enemy Act this past October. And then, after
securing those massive US concessions, on December 11 Pyongyang renounced
its previous commitments, walked away from the table and now threatens to
destroy South Korea if anyone takes any action against it.
North Korea's behavior is of no interest to the "realists" however. As far
as they are concerned, the US has no option other than to continue the
failed appeasement policy that has enabled North Korea to develop and
proliferate nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles. As the Council on
Foreign Relations Gary Samore said, "I think we're sort of condemned to that
process because we don't really have any alternative."
Samore and his colleagues believe there are no other options because all
other options involve placing responsibility for contending with North Korea
on non-Western powers like China, South Korea and Japan. More radically, it
involves holding North Korea itself accountable for its actions and making
it pay a price for its poor behavior.
As the "realists" claim that the US has no option other than their failed
appeasement policies, back in the real world, this week military officials
from the US's Pacific Command warned that North Korea may supply Iran with
intercontinental ballistic missiles. These warnings are credible given that
North Korea has been the primary supplier of ballistic missiles and missile
technology to Iran and Syria and has played a major role in both countries'
nuclear weapons programs.
Defending Channel 4's invitation to Ahmadinejad, Dorothy Byrne, the
network's head of news and current affairs, said, "As the leader of one of
the most powerful states in the Middle East President Ahmadinejad's views
are enormously influential. As we approach a critical time in international
relations, we are offering our viewers an insight into an alternative world
view."
When you think about it, broadcasting Ahmadinejad really would have been a
public service if Byrne or any of the delusional "realists" calling the
shots were remotely interested in listening to what he has to say. But they
aren't. So far from a public service for Britain, it was a service for those
who, unbeknownst to most Britons, are dedicated to destroying their country.
JWR contributor Caroline B. Glick is the senior Middle East Fellow at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, DC and the deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post. Comment by clicking here.
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