CAFI Newsletter #61

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* CHRISTIAN ACTION FOR ISRAEL NEWSLETTER  #61 *
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"On your walls, O Jerusalem, I have appointed watchmen"
Isaiah 62:6
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OUR NEW DOMAIN: http://christianactionforisrael.org
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WE WISH EVERYONE A SAFE AND HAPPY HOLIDAY SEASON
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GREAT NEW BOOK !  "WHY I AM A ZIONIST"....
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Wednesday, December 19, 2001

IN THIS ISSUE:

  1.    ONLY IN THEIR DREAMS:
        Why Is The "Arab Street" Silent?
        Because A Radical Muslim Fantasy Has Met Reality
  2.    WHO NEEDS ARAFAT?
  3.    ISRAEL MAY BE WINNING
  4.    SHED NO TEARS FOR ARAFAT

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     1.    ONLY IN THEIR DREAMS
 
Why Is The "arab Street" Silent?
Because A Radical Muslim Fantasy Has Met Reality

By Charles Krauthammer - Time Magazine - December 24, 2001

The West has not fought a serious religious war in 350 years.
America is too young to have fought any. Our first reaction,
therefore, to the declaration of holy war made upon us on
Sept. 11 was to be appalled, impressed and intimidated.
Appalled by the primitivism, impressed by the implacability, 
intimidated by the fanaticism. 

Intimidation was pervasive during the initial hand-wringing
period. What have we done to inspire such rage? What can we
do? Sure, we can strike back, but will that not just make the
enemy even more angry and determined and fanatical? How can
you defeat an enemy who thinks he's on a mission from God? 

How? A hundred days and one war later, we know the answer:
B-52s, for starters. 

We were from the beginning a little too impressed. There
were endless warnings that making war on a Muslim nation
would succeed only in recruiting more enraged volunteers
for bin Laden, with a flood of fierce mujahedin going to
Afghanistan to confront the infidel. Western experts
warned that the seething "Arab street" would rise up
against us. 

Look around. The Arab street is deathly quiet. The mobs,
exultant on Sept. 11 and braying for American blood, have
gone home. There are no recruits headed to Afghanistan
to fight the infidel. The old recruits, battered and
beaten and terrified, are desperately trying to sneak
their way out of Afghanistan. 

The reason is simple. We won. Crushingly. Astonishingly.
Destroying a regime 7,000 miles away, landlocked and
almost inaccessible, in nine weeks. 

The logic of victory often eludes the secular West. We
have a hard time figuring out an enemy who speaks in
religious terms. He seems indestructible. Cut him down,
and 10 more will rise in his place. How can you destroy an 
idea? 

This gave rise to the initial soul searching, the
magazine covers plaintively asking WHY DO THEY HATE US?
The feeling that we might be responsible for the hatred
directed against us suggested that we should perhaps
seek to assuage and placate. But there is no assuaging
those who see your very existence as a denial of the
faith and an affront to God. There is no placating those
who offer you the choice of conversion or death. 

There is only war and victory. 

Mullah Omar and bin Laden are animated by a vision.
They really do believe--or perhaps did believe--that their
destiny was to unite all the Muslim lands from the
Pyrenees to the Philippines and re-establish the original
caliphate of a millennium ago. Omar took the sacred robe,
attributed to Muhammad and locked away for more than 60
years, and triumphantly donned it in public as if to
declare his succession to the Prophet's earthly rule. 
(Osama harbored similar fantasies about himself,
although he fed Omar's, as a form of flattery and
enticement.) 

Such visions are not new. Omar's and Osama's are just
as expansive, just as eschatological, and yet no more
crazy than Hitler's dream of the Thousand-Year Reich or
Napoleon's of dominion over all Europe. The Taliban and
al-Qaeda, like Nazi Germany and revolutionary France,
represent not just political parties or power seekers;
they also represent movements. And a movement carries
with it an idea, an ideology, a vision for the future. 

That is where the mad dreamers are vulnerable: the
dream can be defeated by reality. What was left of Nazi
ideology with Hitler buried in the rubble of Berlin?
What was left of Bonapartism with Napoleon rotting in
St. Helena? 
What was left of Fascism, an idea that swept Europe and
entranced a generation, with Mussolini's body hanging
upside down, strung up by partisans in 1945? 

What is left of the great caliphate today? It is a ruin.
Caliph Omar is in hiding; Caliph Osama, on the run. 

This is not to say that Islamic fundamentalism is dead.
But it has suffered a grievous blow. Its great appeal
was not just its revival of a glorious past but also the
promise that it was the wave of the future, the
inexorable tide that would sweep through not just
Arabia but all Islam--and one day the world. 

That is why Afghanistan is such a turning point. It
marks the first great reversal of fortune for radical
Islam. For two decades it tasted one victory after another:
the Beirut bombings of 1983 that chased America out of 
Lebanon; "Black Hawk Down" that chased America out of
Somalia; the first Afghan war that chased the Soviet
Union out of Afghanistan--and led to the collapse of a
superpower, no less. These were heady victories, as were
the wounds inflicted with impunity on the other
superpower: the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center,
the 1998 destruction of two U.S. embassies in Africa, the
2000 attack on the U.S.S. Cole. The limp and feckless
American reaction to these acts of war--a token cruise
missile here, a showy indictment there, empty threats
everywhere--only reinforced the radical Islamic
conviction that America was a paper tiger, fat and
decadent, leader of a civilization grown weak and
cowardly and ripe for defeat. 

For the fundamentalist, success has deep religious
significance. The logic of the holy warrior is this:

    My God is great and omnipotent.
    I am a warrior for God.
    Therefore victory is mine. 

What then happens to the syllogism if he is defeated?
To understand, we must enter the mind of primitive
fundamentalism. Or, shall we say, re-enter. Our Western
biblical texts speak of a time 3,000 years ago when
victory in battle was seen as the victory not only of
one people over another but also of one god over another.
Triumph over the "hosts of Egypt" was of theological 
importance: it was living proof of the living God--and
the powerlessness and thus the falsity of the defeated god.
 
The secular West no longer thinks in those terms. But
radical Islam does. Which is why the Osama tape, reveling
in the success of Sept. 11, is such an orgy of religious
triumphalism: so many dead, so much fame, so much joy, so 
many new recruits--God is great.

By the same token, with the total collapse of the Taliban,
everything has changed. Omar has lost his robe. The Arab
street is silent. The joy is gone. And recruitment?
The Pakistani mullahs who after Sept. 11 had urged
hapless young men to join the Taliban in fighting
America and now have to answer to bereaved parents are
facing ostracism and disgrace. Al-Qaeda agents roaming 
the madrasahs of Pakistan and the poorer neighborhoods
of the Arab world will have a much harder sell. The
syllogism of invincibility that sustained Islamic
fanaticism is shattered.

We have just witnessed something new in the modern world:
the rollback of Islamic fundamentalism. We have just
witnessed the first overthrow of a radical Islamic
regime, indeed, the destruction of radical Islam's home
base. Yesterday the base was Afghanistan. Today it is a
few caves and a few hidden cells throughout the world.
Al-Qaeda controls no state, no sovereign territory.
It is an outlaw on the run.

Rollback is, of course, a cold war term. For decades our
approach to Islamic terrorism was like our approach to
communism: containment. Do not invade its territory,
but keep it, as Clinton liked to say of Saddam,
"in a box." We tried containing al-Qaeda with a few
pinprick bombings and an attack on a pharmaceutical
factory in Sudan. These were nothing but an evasion, a
looking the other way. Sept. 11 proved the folly of that
approach. President Bush therefore announced a radically
new doctrine. We would no longer contain. We would
attack, advance and destroy any government harboring
terrorists. Afghanistan is now the signal example. Just
as the Reagan doctrine reversed containment and marked
the beginning of the end of the Soviet empire, the Bush
doctrine marks the beginning of the rollback of the
Islamic terror empire.

Of course, the turning of the tide is not the end of
the war. This is the invasion of Normandy; we must
still enter Berlin. The terrorists still have part of
their infrastructure. They still have their sleeper
cells. They can still, if they acquire weapons of mass
destruction, inflict unimaginable damage and death.
Which is why eradicating the other centers of terrorism
is so urgent.

We can now, however, carry on with a confidence we
did not have before Afghanistan. Confidence that even
religious fanaticism can be defeated, that despite its
bravado, it carries no mandate from heaven. The
psychological effect of our stunning victory in
Afghanistan is already evident. We see the beginning
of self-reflection in the Arab press, asking what Arab
jihadists are doing exporting their problems to places
like Afghanistan and the West; wondering why the Arab
world uniquely has not developed a single real
democracy; and asking, most fundamentally, how a
great religion like Islam could have harbored a
malignant strain that would rejoice in the death of 
3,000 innocents. It is the kind of questioning that
Europeans engaged in after World War II (asking how
Fascism and Nazism could have been bred in the bosom
of European Christianity) but that was sadly lacking
in the Islamic world.

Until now.

It is beginning now not because our propaganda is good.
Not because al-Jazeera changed its anti-American tune.
Not because a wave of remorse spontaneously erupted in
places like Saudi Arabia. But because, with our B-52s,
our special forces, our smart bombs, our daisy cutters
--our power and our will--we scattered the enemy.

What the secular West fails to understand is that in
fighting religious fanaticism the issue--for the fanatic
--is not grievance but ascendancy. What must be decided
is not who is right and wrong--one can never appease the 
grievances of the religious fanatic--but whose God is
greater. After Afghanistan there can be no doubt.

In the land of jihad, the fall of the Taliban and the
flight of al-Qaeda are testimony to the god that failed.
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     2.     WHO NEEDS ARAFAT?

The world could hardly be worse without the PLO chairman.

BY CAROLINE B. GLICK - Wall Street Journal  -  December 17, 2001

TEL AVIV--Last week, in the wake of yet another massacre
of Israeli civilians by Palestinian terrorists, the Israeli
security cabinet announced it was severing relations with
PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat. Although it has been obvious
for some time that Mr. Arafat is an obstacle, not a means,
to peace in the Middle East, most policy makers have been
loath to voice this simple truth. The main concern is that
while Mr. Arafat is clearly a source of instability, his
replacement could be even worse. Many argue that the
Palestinian Islamic terrorist group Hamas, which overtly
rejects Israel's right to exist, is the most likely successor
to Mr. Arafat's leadership.

Given the Palestinian Authority's public complacency and
private cooperation with Hamas in its attacks against Israel,
a growing number of Israelis now greet the possibility of a
Hamas takeover with the unblinking response of "so what?"
As retired Israeli general and terrorism expert Meir Dagan
explained to me some months ago: "In a way it would be
better if the Hamas takes over. Then there would be no
ambiguity. Today, Arafat conducts a terrorist war against us
and still enjoys international legitimacy as a peace partner.
If the Hamas takes over, our goal will be clear--to defeat
them. No one will argue that we have to negotiate with
these people."

Yet while the prospect of a Hamas-led regime may have the
positive feature of clarity, it is also highly unlikely.
Although Palestinian support for Hamas has risen over the past
15 months, this public backing is due mainly to increased hatred
for Israel rather than a swelling of support for Hamas's
political or ideological agenda. A source from Israeli military
intelligence explains the seeming contradiction: "Hamas is
now supported by 30% of Palestinians in contrast to 9% of
Palestinians who declared support for Hamas before the
outbreak of violence in September 2000. However, it is very
unlikely that in the event of Arafat's removal, this support
will be translated into political backing of a Hamas regime.
Palestinians are far from interested in establishing an
Islamic state."

If not Hamas, then who can replace the chairman? Mr.
Arafat, who has personally symbolized Palestinian nationalist
aspirations for over a generation, has no single replacement.
When Mr. Arafat goes, he--like Stalin--will be replaced by a
junta. Israeli experts concur that the most likely successor
regime will be a quadripartite coalition comprised of two
political leaders and two military commanders who together
possess the necessary resources to assume the helm.

The two political leaders, Mahmud Abbas, Mr. Arafat's No. 2
in the PLO, and Ahmed Queria, the speaker of the Palestinian
Legislative Council, have risen to international prominence
in their roles as lead negotiators with Israel over the past
eight years. Mr. Abbas (a.k.a Abu Mazzan) is viewed as a
statesman by Palestinians and Westerners alike. Last
summer Mr. Abbas ran into trouble with Mr. Arafat when the
Palestinian media reported that during meetings in
Washington with Secretary of State Colin Powell and
National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice he discussed
prospects for a successor regime to Mr. Arafat. After a few
months in Mr. Arafat's doghouse, senior Palestinians
prevailed upon their chief to bring his deputy back into the
leadership fold. While acceptable politically to the
Palestinians, Mr. Abbas lacks Mr. Arafat's charisma, and
commands no military forces of his own.

Mr. Queria, who goes by the nom de guerre Abu Ala, rose to
international prominence as the chief Palestinian negotiator
with Israel--a position he has held off and on since 1993.
In this post, he cultivated good relations with the State
Department and the European Union and built up the
international bona fides to consolidate his position next to
Mr. Abbas. More important for his future in a post-Arafat
coalition is Mr. Queria's economic power. He has controlled
and managed the PLO's finances for the past 20 years and
has the economic muscle to ensure his place at the table.

The military commanders who will stand beside Messrs.
Abbas and Queria are Jibril Rajoub and Mohamed Dahlan--the
heads of the Palestinian preventive security forces in the
West Bank and Gaza Strip. While Mr. Arafat has 13 separate
security forces, the preventive security forces in both areas
are the undisputed masters of their realms. Whereas all the
other militias are comprised of officers and troops who came
into the region with Mr. Arafat in 1994, the preventive
security forces consist chiefly of locals. This distinction
is crucial, for the main bone of contention between the
Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza and Mr. Arafat's PA
has been the feeling among the majority of Palestinians that
they replaced one foreign occupier--Israel--with another
foreign occupier--Mr. Arafat's forces and cadres from
abroad. Mr. Rajoub and Mr. Dahlan's men--the best trained
and most disciplined forces in the PA--are the only ones
considered to be "of the people."

Both Mr. Rajoub and Mr. Dahlan are charismatic local
commanders who joined Mr. Arafat in Tunis after Israel
deported them in 1988 for their leadership roles in the
Palestinian uprising. Both have cultivated relations with
the U.S., the EU and the Israeli military, and neither has
assumed a direct role in the attacks against Israel over
the past 15 months. Mr. Rajoub has prohibited his men from
participating in terrorism and Mr. Dahlan has charged his
deputy, Rashid Abu-Shabah, with taking command of the
terrorist attacks his forces carry out in order to
maintain a semblance of plausible deniability before
the Israeli and U.S. governments.

These four men--and not Hamas--are the likely face of the
Palestinian leadership in a post-Arafat era. Will they have
more of an interest in ending the violence than Mr. Arafat?

The sense among the experts is that the four will be
motivated to end the violence against Israel. One
well-placed Israeli military source explains: "These four
are going to need quiet from Israel and the United States
to consolidate their power. To achieve this quiet they
will have to put an end to the fighting."

Boaz Ganor, director of the International Policy Institute for
Counter-Terrorism in Israel, believes that even if the four
are unable to end the violence, the situation under their
leadership will be no worse than the current one under Mr.
Arafat. In his view, "Even if Arafat is assassinated, the
violence will not worsen. Today the Palestinians are hitting
Israel with everything they have. Arafat's departure will not
impact their capabilities so even if their motivation to attack
Israel rises, their ability to do so will remain constant."

Although Mr. Arafat's removal will not be a panacea to the
region's woes, and while the unabated Palestinian terrorist
attacks of the past 15 months make it difficult to look to the
future with optimism, a future without Mr. Arafat will
scarcely be worse that the present with him. And, with the
proper management, it could be far better.

Ms. Glick, chief diplomatic commentator for Makor Rishon
newspaper in Israel, served as assistant foreign policy
adviser to Prime Minister Netanyahu in 1997-98 and was a
member of the Israeli negotiating team with the Palestinians
from 1994-96.
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     3.    ISRAEL MAY BE WINNING

By DANIEL PIPES - New York Post - December 17, 2001


December 17, 2001 -- SECRETARY of State Colin L.
Powell recently observed that the Palestinians "need to
understand that [terrorism] leads nowhere," and on this basis
he urged them to stop their violence against Israelis.

Good policy advice, but does the Palestinian use of violence
truly lead nowhere?

The violence, after all, has a clear and ambitious strategic
purpose, as Hassan Ayoub, director of the Palestine
Liberation Organization's executive committee office in
Nablus, explained a few months ago: "Now, it's a
finger-biting game between the Israelis and the Palestinians.
The first one who says ouch is the one who loses. And
nobody's going to say ouch no matter how bad it hurts." In
other words, a war of wills is underway.

The Palestinian Authority (PA), vastly inferior to Israel in
the military realm, hopes to make Israel "say ouch" by
deploying terrorism against its civilians. Because the PA
itself cannot sponsor terror, it delegates this task to Hamas
and Islamic Jihad. "[Yasser] Arafat uses Hamas to bleed
Israel, to wear it down," correctly observes Ephraim Inbar of
Bar-Ilan University. If the PA succeeds in bleeding Israel
enough, it will extract larger concessions from it.

Terrorism, in short, is integral to the PA's negotiating. "The
Palestinian leadership uses terrorism to 'accelerate' the Oslo
process," writes the Boston Globe's Jeff Jacoby, thereby
rendering Israelis "so desperate and demoralized that they
will make even deeper concessions, surrender even more
land, and struggle even harder to make peace with their
enemies."

Specifically, the PA seeks a total Israeli withdrawal from the
West Bank and Gaza, Palestinian control over the Temple
Mount in Jerusalem, and massive numbers of Palestinians
permitted to live in Israel. It wants, to be blunt, a start to the
dismantling of the Jewish state.

Arafat's speech yesterday, in which he both condemned
violence against Israel and demanded a "right of return" for
millions of Palestinians to Israeli territory, broke no new
ground but merely reiterated some tired rhetoric of his. The
U.S. government properly responded by demanding not
words but "concrete action."

Israel has a counterstrategy, one increasingly evident since
Ariel Sharon became prime minister in early 2001: It is to
show Palestinians the futility of their dream to destroy Israel
by squeezing them through the loss of mobility, a steep
decline in living standards, and a collective malaise.

"Look," Israel is in effect saying, "this is getting you
nowhere. Give up your dream of destruction. Make a deal
with us."

Who is winning?

Through the '90s, Israeli confusion and illusion permitted the
Palestinians to get the upper hand. But since Sharon came to
office in March 2001, Israelis have found their old spirit, their
old unity and their old purpose.

The paralyzing divisions of the '90s have nearly disappeared,
as have the self-hating "post-Zionism" themes (which
ridiculed Israeli patriotism) and the defeatism (which
prompted a unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon).

The shift is no less dramatic on the Palestinian side. The
militant Islamic suicide bombings may suggest robust
determination, but they mask widespread despair and
pessimism. How else to explain the sudden offer (and
embarrassed retraction) last week of a temporary truce with
Israel by the military wings of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and two
military groups connected to Arafat?

Note too that Arafat recently appointed Sari Nusseibeh, a
moderate Palestinian who accepts Israel's right to exist, as
his representative in Jerusalem.

Palestinians fully know how much they have sacrificed over
the past year - the lives of their children, their personal
well-being - and how little they have accomplished. Such
failure makes it hard for them to sustain the political will to
destroy Israel.

Should Yasser Arafat exit the political scene, that goal will
become even more remote. The Palestinian Authority could
well split in two, for it consists of two geographically
separate regions (the West Bank and Gaza), each dominated
by a strongman (respectively, Jibril Rajoub and Mohammed
Dahlan).

If these toughs emerge as rulers of their areas, as seems
likely, the Palestinian national movement will be fractured as
never before, and the battle against Zionism will become yet
more difficult.

For these reasons, a rapid decline of Palestinian will appears
likely, as has happened several times before (in 1939, 1949,
1967, 1991) - though this one could well be more severe.

There is good news here: If Israelis can sustain their recent
sense of common purpose and resolve, Palestinians may give
up - perhaps permanently - on their goal of destroying Israel.

And should that happen, an end to the century-long
Palestinian-Israeli conflict could finally be in sight.

Daniel Pipes (www.DanielPipes.org) is director of the
Philadelphia-based Middle East Forum.
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     4.    SHED NO TEARS FOR ARAFAT

Wahington Times Editorial  -  12/17/2001

     In late February 1973, eight terrorists affiliated with
Yasser Arafat's Black September group which six months earlier
had massacred Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics) seized
the Saudi Arabian embassy in Khartoum, taking three diplomats
 - including two Americans - hostage. During the siege,
Western intelligence sources intercepted communications from
Black September's radio command center in Beirut to the
terrorists holding the diplomats hostage at the Saudi embassy.
Mr. Arafat and his deputy, Abu Iyad, could be heard talking
to the hostage-takers. Then, on March 2, either Mr. Arafat or
Mr. Iyad, using the code words "Cold River," gave the order
to kill the three diplomats. Shortly afterward, the trio,
among them U.S. Ambassador to the Sudan Cleo Noel and deputy
counselor George Curtis Moore, were executed. In a 1973
article entitled "Arafat Implicated In Envoys' Deaths," the
Washington Post's David Ottaway reported that it was
"not clear" whether Mr. Arafat's voice "was identified as
the sender of the Cold River message or was only heard later
congratulating the guerrillas" who had cold-bloodedly
murdered the diplomats.

     Any careful look at the historical record shows that
such thuggery and wanton brutality has been par for the
course for Mr. Arafat and the other terrorist groups which
comprise his Palestine Liberation organization (PLO).

The plane and bus hijackings; the massacres of
schoolchildren, the killing of tourists in Israel throughout
the 1970s and 1980s are well-known. In Lebanon, during the
1970s, the PLO "governed" large areas of the country; after
the 1982 Israeli invasion, many Lebanese - Christian and
Muslim alike - told harrowing tales of rape, mutilation and
random brutality at the hands of Mr. Arafat's men.

     Despite this record, Israel, with the backing of the
United States, decided to roll the dice and reach a peace
agreement with Mr. Arafat, who gained territory, diplomatic
recognition, and the opportunity to create a state for his
people, so as he acted to prevent terrorism. Last July,
Israel offered him such a state, but Mr. Arafat killed the
deal. Two months later, he allowed Palestinian terrorists
to begin a vicious war of terror. That war, punctuated by
suicide bombings of discotheques and pizzerias, actually
escalated after the Bush administration sought to woo
Mr. Arafat with a state called "Palestine," and sent U.S.
envoy Anthony Zinni to the region in an effort to achieve
a ceasefire in order to bring that about. Gen. Zinni has
been called home for "consultations," his mission a
failure. And Mr. Arafat, whose role in those brutal 1973
murders has been overlooked by U.S. policymakers in the
hope that he might transform himself into a peacemaker,
bears all of the blame.

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