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Jewish World Review August 15, 2005 / 10 Av, 5765 Making sense of crazy reality By Diana West
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
It would be nice to go fishing.
It would be nice to worry about John Roberts.
It would be really nice to think Karl Rove was worth worrying about.
But something wholly distracting is going on. Must be that war on
whatever it is, and its very real casualties.
Barbecues smoke, kids come home from summer camp and ballplayers get
busted for steroids. Life goes on.
But does it really? I wondered this recently, as my laptop was
profiled (or not) in an examination at an airport security
checkpoint. Watching the guard wave a practically magic wand over
every angle and face of the thing, it struck me that here we are,
Americans in high summer, at the dawnish of the 21st century. We may
be citizens of a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the
proposition that all men are created equal, but our liberty has
shrunk under measures we take to ward off Islamic terror attacks,
and our dedication to equality looks tatty as we go about making the
world safe for ... sharia.
It sounds crazy, but this is reality. Today promises to
be a great day for sharia, or Islamic law. It marks the end of the
constitutional wrangling in Iraq and the beginning of the Israeli
withdrawal from Gaza and parts of the West Bank. Both events —
fought for, facilitated, even micromanaged by the U.S. of A. —
should expand the domain of Islamic law, which codifies female
inferiority and religious inequality. I don't know a better way to
quantify the two events. By day's end, Iraq, if it settles as
expected on a draft constitution based in sharia, and Gaza, as a new
sector of the already sharia-vested Palestinian Authority, will have
joined the community of nations at odds with the Free World.
That sounds crazy, too. But no more so than the thought of American
troops fighting off Iranian-supported death squads to shore up a
government led by a possible Iranian agent — Ibrahim Jaafari, the
Iraqi prime minister and leader of the Tehran-allied Dawa faction.
It sounds fantastic, but the notion comes from the serious-minded JWR columnist
Caroline Glick of The Jerusalem Post, who recently wrote: "Both U.S.
and Iraqi officials — Shi'ite and Sunni — have since the
inauguration of the Iraqi Governing Council in the summer of 2003
stated repeatedly and matter-of-factly that he (Mr. Jaafari) is an
Iranian agent." Mr. Jaafari spent years under Iranian protection
during Saddam's regime; he also just concluded a three-day visit to
Tehran where he sealed oil, military and tourism deals. I don't
recall hearing any word on ending Iran's recognized sponsorship of
terror and unrest in Iraq.
More craziness: The spectacle of an American Secretary of State,
Condoleeza Rice, propping up the Holocaust-denying Palestinian
Authority leader, Mahmoud Abbas, in the strategic dismemberment of
Israel wrought by the mystifying old general Ariel Sharon. The
Israeli move includes not only the destruction or dismantling of 25
Israeli settlements and the relocation of 9,000 Israelis, but also
the disinterment and reburial of 48 Israeli graves. Horrific, yes,
but not crazy. The threat of Muslim desecration of Jewish graves in
the Gush Katif Cemetery is too real for Israel to allow the dead to
remain where they rest. In 1948, Muslim armies captured the Mount of
Olives cemetery in Jerusalem and turned tens of thousands of Jewish
tombstones into construction material for roads, buildings, even
latrines.
Six of the 48 Gush Katif graves belong to residents murdered by
Muslim terrorists. Five of them may well belong to members of the
Hatuel family — a mother and four daughters — who were shot to
death last May at close range by Palestinian terrorists. They had
been driving to a rally against the withdrawal, their car bumper
sticker reading "Uprooting the Settlements, Victory for Terror."
Not surprisingly, Abu Samhadaneh is wanted by Israel. But he's also
wanted by the Palestinian Authority, he says — to become a senior
official in its Military Intelligence Force.
There may be a peculiarly Middle Eastern logic to all this, but it's
not one we seem able to understand.
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JWR contributor Diana West is a columnist and editorial writer for the Washington Times. Comment by clicking here. © 2005, Diana West |
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