CAFI Newsletter #76
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Thu, 28 Mar 2002 19:59:20 -0500
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* CHRISTIAN ACTION FOR ISRAEL NEWSLETTER #76 *
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"ON YOUR WALLS, O JERUSALEM, I HAVE APPOINTED WATCHMEN"
Isaiah 62:6
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WE WISH ALL OUR FRIENDS A SAFE AND JOYOUS
PASSOVER AND EASTER
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For Latest News, including arch-terrorist Arafat's latest
call for a "cease-fire" to avoid retaliation;
http://christianactionforisrael.org/latest.html
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Thursday, March 28, 2002
IN THIS ISSUE:
1. 'THEY RISE UP ...'
2. THE SURVIVAL OF ARAFAT
3. AS IF...
4. CHRISTIANS, JEWS AND WOTAN
5. QUOTES TO NOTE
6. HIGHLIGHT ARTICLES
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1. 'THEY RISE UP ...'
John Podhoretz New York Post March 28, 2002
-- THE blood flowed in the land of Israel
yesterday - in the midst of the same religious ceremony
Jesus Christ was celebrating as he took his Last Supper
1,969 years ago, in the midst of the same ritual during which
Jews mourn the slavery of their ancestors in Egypt and
commemorate the miracle of their liberation.
By attacking a Passover Seder being held at a hotel in
Netanya yesterday, the evil suicide bombers have now taken
the new Palestinian war against Israel to a far more ominous
level.
Horrible as the suicide bombings have been, none of them
struck at the very core of what it means to be a Jew. This
one did. This one does.
Even for secular Jews, even for those Jews who are inclined
to blame the policies of the government of Israel for the
violence rained upon the heads of their co-religionists, the
meaning of it is inescapable.
"In every generation, they rise up against us to destroy us."
These exact words have been spoken on Passover from
medieval times until today, by Jews all over the world.
As Jews gathered in a hotel ballroom in the year 2002 to
speak them, they were blown to bits by people who justify
their own killings with the citation of a medieval Muslim text
that reads in part: "You will fight the Jews and will prevail
over them, so that a rock will say, 'O Muslim! There is a
Jew behind me, kill him!' "
There are other ways to "fight the Jews and prevail over
them" that are less obviously awful but no less meaningful.
One of them is the vaunted Saudi "peace plan" unveiled at
the ludicrous Arab League Summit in Lebanon - so ludicrous
that 10 of the 22 leaders of Arab states did not attend - to
which the United States was so insistent Yasser Arafat be
allowed to go.
The "details" of the plan were finally announced yesterday.
Israel must give up all lands won in the 1967 war, including
East Jerusalem. At least that's what the English translation
says. In Arabic, Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia referred to
"al-Quds al-Sharif." Al-Quds al-Sharif means "Jerusalem,"
period.
Thus, it may well be that the Saudis are telling the Arab
world their peace plan requires Israel to withdraw from
West, North and South Jerusalem as well, all of which have
been part of Israel since 1947.
Oh, and that's not all. Israel must also guarantee Arab
refugees the "right of return." That means Arabs and
descendants of Arabs who fled Israel in 1948 would be
restored and made whole.
Not only will that never, ever, ever, ever happen - as it
would mean the destruction of the Jewishness of the Jewish
state - but it fails to mention any kind of "right of return" for
the 3 million Jews kicked out of Arab and Muslim lands
between 1948 and 1967.
Gee, that's fair.
But yes, if Israel does all these things, then Arab countries
will establish "normal relations" with it - whatever that
means.
This is the pernicious "fantasy" of peace foisted upon
Thomas Friedman of The New York Times by Prince
Abdullah - a fantasy that has clouded the vision of the Bush
administration. White House spokesman Claire Buchan
actually welcomed the plan of Prince Abdullah: "The
president commends [Prince Abdullah's] leadership and he
urges other leaders to build on the Crown Prince's ideas to
address the cause of peace."
Leadership? This is what Arab countries have always said
they would accept - a diplomatic negotiation leading to
Israel's destruction. But since Israel will not consent to its
own destruction, Abdullah and Co. are happy to sponsor and
abet the killing of innocents.
The United States has decided to make a show of trying to
make peace when one of the parties wants only blood. The
blood it wants is Jewish blood. In the three weeks since
Anthony Zinni returned to Israel to arrange a cease-fire,
there have been hundreds of Jewish casualties in the streets
of Israel.
The best advice that could be given to Gen. Zinni is best
expressed in the words of Oliver Cromwell, who told the
Long Parliament back in the 17th Century: "Depart, I say,
and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!"
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2. THE SURVIVAL OF ARAFAT
He lives to fight another day.
by Tom Rose
JERUSALEM
VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY'S surprise offer to meet
with Yasser Arafat on condition that Arafat "showed a
100 percent effort" to stop terror was the biggest news
story of March 19. But just 12 hours later, a suicide
bombing ripped apart an Israeli bus, murdering seven
civilians and wounding dozens. Israeli foreign minister
Shimon Peres attempted to put the attack in perspective,
explaining, "It takes time for the word to get out."
Cheney's offer to Arafat had already made headlines in
Jakarta but apparently hadn't had time to make it
to Jenin.
Sending a deputy out to explain away yet another
suicide bombing in downtown Jerusalem the next day, Peres
begged livid Israelis to see that the best they could
hope for was a "non-hermetic" cease-fire. In essence,
Peres was saying, terrorism can never really be beaten,
so Israelis are just going to have to lower their
expectations and accept terrorism as a fact of life.
Tel Aviv was the final stop of Cheney's seven-day,
eleven-nation Middle East tour. Although the vice
president's first words upon landing in Israel
reiterated America's commitment to the security of the
Jewish state, the working message of his visit was that
the Bush administration's patience with the government
of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had run out.
On each and every prior stop of his tour, Cheney had
been hounded about U.S. support for Israel. In Kuwait,
he'd found himself publicly accused of neglecting the
Palestinian people--by the same emir who 10 years ago
expelled the 300,000 Palestinians then living in the
emirate. In Cairo, he'd been "educated" about Arab
public opinion and the limits it places on Arab leaders
by the unelected president of Egypt. In Saudi Arabia,
he'd been greeted with a front page article in the
official daily Al-Riyadh "revealing" that to be considered
kosher, the traditional pastry for the Jewish festival
of Purim must be made with the blood of Muslim
adolescents.
But even before Cheney had left Washington, the Bush
administration had decided its only choice was to
reengage with Arafat. Following the capture in early
January of a ship loaded with arms and explosives
bound from Iran for the Palestinian Authority,
Washington had stepped back, leaving Sharon free to
tackle terrorism as he saw fit. But Sharon, more
concerned about his own political survival than
replacing Arafat, had failed to act decisively.
Cheney, meanwhile, had seen firsthand the dismal
level of Israel's leadership. In January, Defense
Minister Benjamin "Fuad" Ben-Eliezer, fresh from
surviving a hotly disputed Labor party leadership
race by dint of a court-ordered recount, had popped
in for his first official White House visit. The
not-ready-for-prime-time Ben-Eliezer, emerging from
his meeting with Cheney, had boasted to waiting
Israeli journalists, "Dick hates Arafat more than we
do," then had proceeded to quote "Dick" as saying,
"You can hang that son-of-bitch for all I care."
Israeli officials, horrified that Ben-Eliezer would
repeat a private conversation (assuming that Cheney
had even said any such thing), spent the next few days
apologizing for the faux pas.
IN EARLY MARCH, Sharon responded to a deadly wave
of terrorist attacks that killed 55 Israelis by
proclaiming to his cabinet that the only way to
defeat Palestinian terror was to "kill enough of
them that they come begging for mercy." But while
Sharon was talking like Slobodan Milosevic, he was
acting like Jimmy Carter. The very next day, Sharon
announced that he was dropping his U.S.-supported
demand for seven days of quiet before agreeing to
political negotiations with the Palestinians and
releasing Arafat from his three-month house arrest.
The decision to confine Arafat to his Ramallah
compound had reportedly been made by Sharon himself.
Yet the prime minister, who continually reassured the
world that Israel had no intention to undermine
Arafat, delivered the Palestinian leader all the
benefits of martyrdom without any of the costs.
Sharon's unwillingness to sweep away Arafat and his
regime condemns Israelis and Palestinians to continued
bloodshed and Sharon to imminent political defeat. Ever
since he was unfairly attacked for not having "prevented"
the massacre of hundreds of Palestinian refugees by
Christian Phalangist militias at the Lebanese camps of
Sabra and Shatila back in 1982, Sharon has desperately
sought vindication. But by resolving never again to
"lead Israel into war," Sharon only immunizes his
enemies while exposing Israelis to ever greater risks
at ever higher costs.
Between Shimon Peres with his defining terrorism down,
Fuad Ben-Eliezer with his juvenile irresponsibility,
and Ariel Sharon with his incomprehensible bungling,
the trio currently leading Israel display a marked
resemblance to Larry, Curly, and Moe.
Yet if Israel's missteps go a long way toward
explaining the recent change in American policy,
Washington's new policy is nonetheless flawed. The Arab
world is terrified not of the regional instability that
might ensue if American efforts to depose Saddam Hussein
fail, but of the regional instability that might ensue
if those efforts succeed. To Arab leaders, "regional
stability" means safety for their own regimes, all of
which are undemocratic. If America does manage to help
free Iraq from decades of ruthless tyranny and assist
that country toward a more open future, the
"regional instability" that might result could be the
best thing that ever happened to the Middle East.
Washington's mistake in facilitating Israel's
capitulation to terror is that it corrodes America's own
resolve to fight and win the war on terrorism. President
Bush's magnificent March 11 statement that "There can be
no safe haven for those who target the innocent for murder"
was greatly undermined when just three days later he
criticized Israel's efforts to deny safe haven to those
who murder innocent Israelis. By even implicitly
equating Israel's targeting of terrorists with the
terrorists' targeting of innocents, the Bush
administration has unwittingly weakened its own moral
case for war.
Tom Rose is publisher of the Jerusalem Post.
Copyright 2001, News Corporation, Weekly Standard
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3. AS IF...
President Bush criticized Israeli raids in Palestinian
areas because he said they don't "contribute to conditions
for peace." Secretary Powell was harsher. "If you
declare war on the Palestinians and think you can solve
the problem by seeing how many Palestinians can be
killed... I don't know [whether] that leads us anywhere."
VP Cheney arrived in Israel saying, "I will be talking
to Prime Minister Sharon about steps Israel can take
to eliminate devastating hardships experienced by
innocent men, women and children." Their comments
share a structural problem as well as a political one.
All place upon Israel the burden of doing things
differently.
Israel should create "conditions for peace." As if
Israel hadn't offered 95 percent of the land to the
Palestinians for an independent state. As if Israel
hadn't agreed to Palestinian political rights in part of
Jerusalem, Israel's capital city. As if Israel hadn't
offered to address the issue of refugees, including
compensation. As if the Palestinians hadn't stormed
out of Camp David without so much as a counter offer,
and as if the Palestinians hadn't unleashed on Israel
the war they had been planning for months.
Israel should refrain from attacking Palestinian
terrorist strongholds. As if the Palestinian war from
9/29/00 to 3/16/02 hadn't resulted in 351 Israelis
killed and 3,201 injured in a total of 11,998 attacks
(not including firebombs or rocks) according to the
IDF website. As if the dead didn't include little boys
bludgeoned to death in a cave; an infant killed in
her father's arms by a sniper; young soldiers lynched
and brutalized; a Rabbi trying to save Torah scrolls;
children and adults in pizza parlors, cafes, discos
and outside synagogues; students waiting for a school
bus; and just last week, a high school girl killed on
the street of her hometown. As if the Palestinians
weren't targeting the innocent and hoping to pull
Israeli retaliation down on their own people in order
that Israel is condemned - the way Secretary Powell
condemned it, as a matter of fact.
Israel should make conditions easier for Palestinian
"civilians." As if the Palestinians had a natural
right to cross into Israel for jobs while they
announce themselves at war (Americans don't want
Mexicans crossing into the US for jobs and they're
our friends). As if the Palestinians weren't
smuggling weapons and suicide bombers through
checkpoints amid the "civilians." As if the
Palestinians weren't using ambulances to carry
weapons (and that female bomber who was blown up in
her Palestinian Red Crescent uniform). As if
Palestinians walking through a checkpoint hadn't
killed seven soldiers, three of them in their bunks,
because Palestinians on foot aren't checked as
a "courtesy."
The Administration should tell the Palestinians to
create "conditions for peace." The Palestinians can
stop venerating, inciting and paying for violence.
The Palestinians can stop abusing their own people by
putting their fighters in civilian neighborhoods to
draw Israeli retaliatory fire. The Palestinians can
recognize the legitimacy of the State of Israel as
required by UN Resolution 242.
The Palestinians can join civilized society.
AS IF...
JINSA.ORG
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4. CHRISTIANS, JEWS AND WOTAN
What we still need to learn from Nazism.
BY ROBERT L. BARTLEY Wall Street Journal March 25, 2002
Holy Week is by no means all sweetness and light. This
Friday Christians mark the crucifixion, a terrible event
redeemed by the resurrection three days later. The Jews
gather on Thursday for Passover, celebrating the Exodus
from slavery as the angel of death skipped Jewish homes
during Egypt's tenth plague, the killing of the firstborn.
So perhaps it's not an inappropriate time to discuss
another terrible topic, the Holocaust, and in particular
the divisive issue of Christian culpability in the Nazi
genocide of the Jews. It is not the purpose here to
dismiss the long history of anti-Semitism in Christian
lands. By now most Christians agree this was a sin, and
its legacy surely played an important role in laying a
groundwork for the Nazis and in muting opposition to
the "final solution."
It is the purpose, however, to stress one point that
seldom receives due emphasis. To wit, the Nazi leaders
and ideologues were not Christians. They were pagan,
some quite explicitly. For the rest, the ancient myths
celebrated in Wagner became a pillar of their doctrine
of Teutonic racial superiority.
Nazism was itself a "political religion," Cardiff
University historian Michael Burleigh stresses in his
magisterial "The Third Reich: A New History." It sought
to displace the traditional church and command spiritual
authority as well as temporal. Its special animus toward
Jews was not religious but racial, and it "had one foot
in the dark irrationalist world of Teutonic myth, where
heroic doom was regarded positively, and where the stakes
were all or nothing--national and racial redemption
or perdition."
The Nazi attack on Christianity was widely understood at
the end of World War II. William Shirer's "The Rise and
Fall of the Third Reich" recounts the Nazi plan for the
Christian churches: It included an intention to
"exterminate irrevocably . . . the strange and foreign
Christian faiths imported into Germany in the ill-omened
year 800." Current denominations would be replaced by
the National Church. Its altars would have only a copy of
"Mein Kampf," with a sword to the left. The Christian
Cross would be removed, replaced "by the only
unconquerable symbol, the swastika."
The Nazi's aggressive paganism is far less understood
today. At one presidential prayer breakfast, Bill Clinton
offered the opinion that "Adolf Hitler preached a
perverted form of Christianity." I remember a night with
my own rabbi on matters Jewish, Seth Lipsky, then editor
of the Forward and now embarked on the audacious
enterprise of launching a new daily newspaper in New York.
When I read Shirer's description, he exclaimed,
"You'd better get that scoop in the newspaper."
Too, the Nuremberg Project of the Rutgers Journal of
Law and Opinion made some headlines by publishing a 1945
document prepared by William Donovan's Office of Strategic
Services, "The Nazi Master Plan: the Persecution of the
Christian Churches." (You can find it here.) Papers such
as the Philadelphia Inquirer and New York Times thought
it news that the Nazis had sought to suppress Christianity.
Among scholars, by contrast, the pagan roots are not
controversial. In 1998, the Vatican issued a seminal
statement, "We Remember: Reflections on the Shoah."
It asserted, "The Shoah was the work of a thoroughly
modern neo-pagan regime. Its anti-Semitism had its
roots outside of Christianity and, in pursuing its aims,
it did not hesitate to oppose the Church and persecute
her members also." The World Jewish Congress response
affirmed this assertion, "It is true that the National
Socialist regime adopted a pagan ideology which rejected
the Church."
In the WJC response this is a passing comment amid
complaints that the Vatican had not adequately addressed
its statement's next sentence: "But it may be asked
whether the Nazi persecution of the Jews was not made
easier by the anti-Jewish prejudices imbedded in some
Christian minds and hearts. Did anti-Jewish sentiment
among Christians make them less sensitive, or even
indifferent, to the persecutions . . . ?"
Reading these two documents, I come away with the
impression that the WJC complaints score points on the
margin; the Vatican did not need to say that "many"
Christians offered help to Jews, for example. But as a
whole the Vatican statement is forthcoming, and surely
the church is entitled to cite some of the sermons and
statements responding to Nazism by condemning racism
and affirming the church teaching of the unity of the
human race.
I came to an interest in this issue via a circuitous
route. Dow Jones & Co. is controlled by a family we call
the Bancrofts, and one of its most interesting members
was Mary Bancroft, who recorded her wartime adventures in
a book, "Autobiography of a Spy." She spent the war in
Switzerland as assistant to and mistress of OSS chief
Allen Dulles. ("We can let the work cover the romance
—and the romance cover the work," he told her.) She was
also a patient of psychoanalytic pioneer Carl Gustav
Jung, who published a 1936 article on the Nazis entitled
"Wotan."
Jung believed in a collective unconscious, citing the
similar symbols and motifs in mythologies around the
world and their appearance in dreams. This position
was instrumental in his split with Sigmund Freud.
In the Nazis Jung saw an upwelling of the German
collective unconscious, the resurgence of pagan gods.
He saw the advent of the Nazis as powerful evidence
on his side of the dispute with Freud. Because of
this, his biographer Frank McLynn held, "Jung
sometimes wrote about the upsurge of Wotan from the
unconscious in triumphalist terms." This, along with
cranky right-wing aristocratic views, left him with
the image of a Nazi sympathizer.
One does not have to accept Jung's psychological
apparatus, let alone his political views, to recognize
that the Nazis represented something inescapably
primitive at work in the heart of Europe. The
Cambodian killing fields and Rwandan genocide show
that the beast is still at large elsewhere in the
world, and on the fringes of Europe "ethnic cleansing"
has reappeared. Unarguably the Jewish Holocaust
remains uniquely horrible, but if we fail to
understand its pagan roots, we may miss what it
teaches about the nature of us all.
Mr. Bartley is editor of The Wall Street Journal.
His column appears Mondays in the Journal and on
OpinionJournal.com.
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5. QUOTES TO NOTE
"We told him that we were from TIPH, and he
didn't care, he kepton shooting toward us."
Capt. Huseyin Ozaslan, a Turkish member of TIPH
(the Temporary International Presence in Hebron),
describing to Israel Radio how the TIPH car in which
he was traveling was approached by an assailant wearing a
Palestinian police uniform, carrying a Kalashnikov assault
rifle, on the evening of March 26. Two of Ozaslan’s
colleagues were shot dead; he was injured. The Palestinians
blamed the attack on the Israeli army.
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"This institution exists to recall and memorialize
persecution, not to surrender to it."
An unidentified staffer at the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum
in Jerusalem, upon hearing of the cancellation of the U.S.
Holocaust Memorial Museum delegation for the April 8-11
conference in Jerusalem, entitled "The Legacy of Holocaust
Survivors, The Moral and Ethical Implications for Humanity."
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6. HIGHLIGHT ARTICLES
THE 1930S, AGAIN - A HARD RAIN IS GOING TO FALL.
The problem is them and their unelected and unfree regimes,
not us — just as it was Hitler, not us; Tojo, not us;
Mussolini, not us; and Stalin, not us — just as it always
is when unelected maniacs take control and hijack an entire
country and culture. We can either step up and stop Islamic
fundamentalism, Arab terrorists, and Middle Eastern
dictators or we can step back and watch it all continue to
grow. If 9/11 was the beginning of a war, then we should
remember that wars usually end when one, not both sides, win.
http://christianactionforisrael.org/isreport/mar02/1930s.html
PALESTINIAN PRETENSE & ISRAELI REALITY
There will be no second Holocaust. If almost all of the West
Bank is returned, as is likely, and in a few years
hostilities nevertheless resume as they did during phases
1-3 of the Middle East wars, as is also likely, the
battle will be over Israel itself, not Palestinian land.
That will be a war Israel will not lose, and it will be
fought outside not inside the Jewish state. And that will
be a nightmare compared to the current crisis. Those in Europe
and in the United States who now lecture about morality will
then prove to be not only amoral, but also answerable for
far, far more still.
http://christianactionforisrael.org/isreport/mar02/pretense.html
THE ONLY WAY TO PEACE
In normal life, it is a sign of being unhinged if you do
the same thing over and over again and expect a different
result. But in the business of Middle East diplomacy such
behavior could earn you a Nobel Peace Prize.
http://christianactionforisrael.org/isreport/mar02/only_way.html
For more great reading, visit our new EDITORIAL ARCHIVE
http://christianactionforisrael.org/previous.html
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