
Originally Posted by
hampshirebrit
You just made a hell of a reach there, and I am going to take issue with it, not, I might add, for the first time.
He said Israel.
He did not say Jews.
Let's not get the one confused with the other, like we so often do on CU.
He has repeatedly stated that Jews in America are disloyal to the United States, that those of us who do not share his view of politics are dishonest and corrupt. This is not simply a hatred of Israel, but a slander against Jews.
He is an antisemite, whether I say it or not, so I might as well say it.
Gator is also woefully ignorant about a number of subjects, but history, and especially Middle Eastern history, is a particular blind spot for him, but sadly, he is not the only one here who is looking at a snapshot of the Middle East and projecting it back over centuries. First, he assumes that Moslems do not seek global conquest. This is patently false. Their doctrine demands universal submission to the will of Allah as defined in the Koran. This is not simply proselytizing, but engaging in coercive, violent conquest. The attacks on non-Moslems who oppose their agendas, the murders of Theo Van Gogh and Pym Fortuin in Holland, the fatwas against cartoonists and writers who speak of them with anything less than reverent awe, these should be proof enough, but if not, then certainly, the writings of the radicals themselves, from the Moslem Brotherhood to Ayatollah Khomeini, which routinely speak of the violent subjugation of non-Moslems, especially Christians and Jews, should be obvious proof. To pretend otherwise is to deny the obvious, but Gator is good at that.
His second claim is that we are hated for our support of Israel. He cannot, however, explain Arab hatred of Israel in 1948, when combined Arab armies, including those from nations that had no border with Israel or reason for direct conflict, sought to "drive the Jews into the sea." He also will not address the fact that the refugees from 1948 were kept in camps, not by the Israelis, but by their Arab brethren, who refused to assimilate them, even as they expelled an equal number of Jews from their countries. He also is unaware of the broad scope of Islamic conflicts with the US, which go back to Barbary Pirate War, and the jihadist mindset that made that conflict inevitable. But, equally important, he is completely unaware of the writings of the Islamists that predate both the establishment of Israel and the US entry into Middle Eastern politics, all of which cite the US as the greatest threat to Islam in the world, not because of our policies towards a nation that did not as yet exist, but because of the Islamists' shock and outrage at what they considered our immorality by the standards of their creed. Sayyid Qutb, one of the seminal Islamist authors and the driving force behind the Moslem Brotherhood, considered us primitive and "shocking" and wrote of his brief time in the US in the late 1940s, with disgust at our materialism, individual freedom, economic system, restrictions on divorce, enthusiasm for sports and "animal-like" mixing of the sexes (which went on even in churches). One quote sums him up:
"the American girl is well acquainted with her body's seductive capacity. She knows it lies in the face, and in expressive eyes, and thirsty lips. She knows seductiveness lies in the round breasts, the full buttocks, and in the shapely thighs, sleek legs — and she shows all this and does not hide it."
These are the same strains that run through all Islamist doctrine, and no matter what we do, we cannot eliminate this aspect of our image from the world. Our movies, TV shows, music and other pop cultural exports would still outrage the Islamists, and unlike our military, there is no way to prevent the movement of our culture. This conflict, which began for us at the shores of Tripoli (but began for the rest of the world far earlier than that), will not end with the nuclear destruction of Tel Aviv by Iran, or the sack of Jerusalem, because Israel isn't a cause of the conflict, it's a symptom. It is a clash of cultures, between a culture based on the enlightenment ideals of the equality of individuals before the law, the rights to govern oneself, to speak freely, own property and mind one's own business, against a culture of medievel misogyny, repression, tribal conflict and squalor. If Tel Aviv had never existed, if no Jew had survived the gas chambers to make it to Israel, if no American weapon had ever been sent to the Middle East, we would still be hated by the Islamists, just as we were hated by the Soviets, the Nazis and every other nation that sought to bind its people through ignorance, hatred and fear, and we would continue to have to fight to survive in the world, because freedom is an affront to tyranny, and the Islam of the radicals is no less a tyranny than those other nations, and we will always have to defend against it, even if it is halfway around the world.
Gator ignores these inconvenient facts because they take away the rationale for his abject, obsessive hatred of Israel. The antiwar left echos this because they, like the communists, fascists and Islamists, loathe our freedoms and seek to subjugate their neighbors. The misguided Libertarians who seek isolation from the rest of the world cannot isolate the world from us, and so long as we are the richest, most powerful nation in the world, we will attract the fear, envy and hatred of the states that cannot do what we have done, and they will scapegoat us for their failures. We will be the object of their envious hatred so long as we live in skyscrapers and they live in caves. That is the most basic theme of Ayn Rand's Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and if Libertarians cannot grasp that, then they are truly missing the point of one of their greatest influences. As for those in Europe who seek to humble us, theirs is the saddest plight. Declining in every way, they seek to regain their former glory, not through achievement or noble action, but through the frustration of the achievements of others. A few generations from now, when their children are paying the Dhimmi tax and bowing and scraping in the gutters before the Moslem majority, they will curse their parents with every lash on their backs.
Understand this, because I'm tired of trying to make this point to people on a conservative forum, people who ought to get this. I expect liberals not to grasp the basic facts of the world, but not my fellow conservatives. The world will not go away because we turn away from it. It will not suddenly decide that we are wonderful, lovely people if we withdraw to our borders and hide. The haters, the malcontents, the fanatics, the nationalists and the thugs will sense, not our kindness or wish to be loved, but our weakness and fear, and they will pursue us, not to the ends of the Earth, but to the centers of our cities, to wreak their terrible vengeance upon us for having shown them a future that they could not make for themselves.
That is the lesson of 9/11.
Gator has forgotten it, if he ever knew it.
I haven't.
And I won't.
"Tabasco Sauce Is in a Battle For...
Today, 11:32 AM in The CU Weather Channel