CAFI Newsletter #94

[cafi-list@christianactionforisrael.org]

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* CHRISTIAN ACTION FOR ISRAEL NEWSLETTER  #94 *
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"ON YOUR WALLS, O JERUSALEM, I HAVE APPOINTED WATCHMEN"
Isaiah 62:6
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               Friday, July 26, 2002

IN THIS ISSUE:

  1.    CIVILIAN CASUALTIES: NO APOLOGY NEEDED
  2.    SUPPORT FOR ISRAEL DOESN'T NEED A LOBBY
  3.    ISRAEL CAN'T PROTECT THEM EVERY TIME
  4.    ISRAEL MAY LOOM LARGE, BUT NOT IN TERRITORY
  5.    SITE OF THE WEEK - THE SPIRIT OF ISLAM
  6.    QUOTES TO NOTE
  7.    HIGHLIGHT ARTICLES

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   1.    CIVILIAN CASUALTIES: NO APOLOGY NEEDED

By RALPH PETERS  Wall Street Journal   July 24, 2002

Earlier this week, Israel succeeded in killing Salah
Shehada, a savage Hamas mastermind, and one of his
top aides. A dozen Palestinian civilians died in the
attack, including members of Shehada's family. The
civilian deaths may be lamentable, but they also were
justifiable. A terrorist leader used his relatives
and neighbors as shields, and they died with him.
Their deaths were Shehada's fault, not Israel's.

Once again, much of the world has applied a double
standard, accusing Israel of barbarity for inflicting
civilian casualties as part of a legitimate military
operation, while overlooking the hundreds of Israeli
civilians killed intentionally by Shehada and his
subordinates. For Europeans, especially, Jewish lives
count no more today than they did in 1944.

Why are Palestinian terrorists allowed to target
civilians without exciting an international outcry,
while every accidental civilian death inflicted by
Israel is a crime against humanity?

Europe's reflexive anti-Semitism doesn't really
matter much, since today's Europeans lack the power,
will and courage to act upon their bigotry. But the
Bush administration needs to stop pandering to corrupt
Arab regimes and to recognize that Israel is fighting
for its life; that Israel is fighting with great
restraint; and that Israel's pursuit of terrorists is
every bit as legitimate as our own. Instead of
criticizing Israeli policy, we should be studying it.

Recently, our own forces were demonized for causing
civilian deaths in Afghanistan. Some Afghan factions,
with their intricate agendas, claimed we had attacked
an innocent wedding party. Of course, the global media
were only too willing to deplore American evil
(despite the fact that we overthrew a monstrous
regime and conquered an "unconquerable" country while
causing, at most, a few hundred civilian casualties).
Though combat videos proved that our aircraft was
fired upon first, we nonetheless stumbled through
witless apologies and promised to impose greater
safeguards in the future.

As with the Israelis, our military response was
justified. It is the apologies that make no sense.

The war against terrorism must be prosecuted
judiciously, but the terrorists themselves must be
pursued without remorse.

When terrorists attempt to hide amid the civilian
population, we must pursue them without hesitation.
They cannot be allowed a single safe haven. If they
use their neighbors as shields, it is the terrorists
who are to blame should civilians die. If they
attempt to use their families as cover, they will
be responsible for the deaths of their own loved ones.
The world must learn that, when civilians allow
terrorists to use them, the civilians become
legitimate military targets.

This is not about diplomatic table manners. It is
a fight to exterminate human monsters.

Earlier this month, the Israelis were attacked for
a plan to deport the families of terrorists from the
West Bank to the Gaza Strip. Of course, the Europeans
and our own tattered left began comparing the plan to
death trains bound for Auschwitz. While Europe's
incurable nostalgia for the Wannsee Conference makes
their hatred of Israel understandable on some level,
the enthusiasm American leftists show for equating
the Holocaust's survivors with the Holocaust's
perpetrators is as dishonest as it is tasteless.

The fact is that the Israelis have begun to make a
crucial link in dealing with terrorists: their
families. In the Middle East, Arab armies fight
ineptly because the soldiers feel no deep loyalty to
their states. In the Arab world and in related cultures,
earthly loyalties are, above all, to family. If left
with no useful alternative, the Israelis -- and we
Americans -- must be willing to pursue the
terrorists through their relatives.

Of course, our outdated conventions make this
proposition anathema to us. Thus, when dealing with
a culture in which only faith and family matter to
our enemies, we insist on making war on governments
and negotiating with political organizations that
are no more than mobs with diplomatic representation.
We are punching thin air.

Meanwhile, few of Israel's critics complain when
Palestinian mothers and fathers praise the gruesome
suicides of their children or accept blood money from
Riyadh and Baghdad. If you want a stark indicator of
the power of family in the Middle East, consider that
of the many suicide bombers to date, none has been a
close relative of a Hamas leader or of the leadership
of any other Palestinian faction. Suicide bombers
employed to inflict mass murder on Israel are always
drawn from marginal families. The terrorist leaders
would no more send their own sons and daughters out
as suicide bombers than they would go themselves.

If you cannot kill your enemy, threaten what he holds
dear. Force him to come out and confront you in
desperation. Today, we do not have the stomach
for this. Tomorrow, we may find it a necessity.

In the meantime, as the U.S. slowly learns the real
meaning of a war on terror, the Israelis continue to
struggle against the Arab vision of Jewish annihilation.
Israel will do what must be done, as humanely as
possible. And Israel must accept that no matter what
it does or fails to do, no matter how much success it
achieves and how few civilian casualties it inflicts
among its enemies, it will be hated by those who cheer
on the enemies of mankind from the safety of Strasbourg,
Stockholm or Harvard Yard.

Critics persist in claiming that attacks upon
terrorists do not work, since results are not
instantaneous. But the war against terror is a war
of attrition and can only be won over decades. We
may not know the real effects of Israel's current
efforts for several years. But there is no course
worse than cowardice and inaction.

The same critics will tell you that by killing
civilians in their attacks, the Israelis -- or the
Americans -- simply turn other civilians against them.
This is nonsense. Civilians who shield the enemies of
Israel or the U.S. are already anti-Israel or
anti-American. But if our strikes against the masters
of terror come to seem inevitable, those same civilians
will turn against terrorists who try to use them as
living shields -- as villagers in Afghanistan
already have done.

Terrorists and their supporters must learn that
they will be allowed no hiding places. Not in their
homes, not in churches or mosques, and not in
foreign countries to which they might flee.

This is a war that must be fought without compromise.

It is, above all, a contest of wills.

Every apology is a surrender.
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   2.    SUPPORT FOR ISRAEL DOESN'T NEED A LOBBY

by Dennis Prager -  The Media Line

All those who disagree with American support of Israel
 -- the Arab world and its supporters in America such
as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR),
the left and the State Department (privately, if not
publicly) -- explain American support of Israel by
attributing it to the "pro-Israel lobby" and its
alleged power over Congress.

This is a thought-through charge that has both
explicit and implicit meanings.

Explicitly, it means that were it not for the power
of a special interest group, the "pro-Israel lobby,"
America would not support Israel. Therefore, this
lobby -- and by implication the pro-Israel position
itself -- does not serve America's interests and
may therefore even be somewhat disloyal.

Implicitly, "pro-Israel lobby" means "American Jews,"
thereby suggesting that this small percentage of
Americans is responsible for America's support
of Israel.

Given the grave implications of this charge -- that
pro-Israel policy is against America's interests and
that Jews and their money are the reasons for American
support of Israel -- it is very important to clarify
why the charge is untrue.


The first reason is that it ignores Christians,
specifically evangelical Christians. These Americans
have supplanted Jewish Americans as the most powerful
support group for Israel. They believe the Bible when
it says, in Genesis, that the Creator will bless those
who bless the Jews and curse those who curse the Jews.
They are, incidentally, quite right: America and the
Arab world today are examples of that biblical promise.
They also believe that the return of the Jews to Israel
was prophesied thousands of years ago in the Bible.

This, more than any other single factor, explains the
powerful support given to Israel by President George W.
Bush. The president is a Bible-believing Christian
(and therefore considerably more supportive of Israel
than his father, whose Christianity was more
"mainstream Protestant"). If the "pro-Israel lobby"
were the reason for American support of Israel, and
if it were synonymous with Jews, President Bush would
hardly be susceptible to its influence. President
Bush received few Jews' votes and few Jews' money.

The second error is to suppose that pro-Israel
support is a function of politics and money. Opponents
of Israel and the Jews do not want to acknowledge that
most congressmen support Israel because their values
impel them to do so. Most Americans have a strong
preference for free societies over tyrannies and
understand that the real underdog in the Middle East
is the tiny state of Israel struggling to survive
in a sea of medieval hate.

Has Vice President Dick Cheney always supported
Israel because of the "pro-Israel lobby's" efforts?
Was the former Wyoming congressman beholden to
Wyoming's Jewish electorate? Or does he support
Israel because of his values?

What about Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld?
To what lobby is he (an appointed, not elected,
official) beholden?

And what about Condoleezza Rice? What influence
does any lobby have with her?

The third error in attributing support for Israel
to the "pro-Israel lobby" and to using that term as
a euphemism for American Jews is that many American
Jews do not support Israel. Many Jews are leftists
-- that is their identity as well the source of
their values, not Judaism. Anti-Israel rhetoric from
Jews is so common that letters to the editor about
the Middle East signed with a Jewish surname are
now almost as likely to be anti-Israel as pro-Israel.

American support for Israel emanates from the
deepest of America's core values -- support for
societies that reflect American values and
opposition to those that threaten such societies.
Of course, there are Jews and Christians and atheists
and Democrats and Republicans who lobby Congress
on Israel's behalf, and they have clout. But in the
final analysis, it is a libel of America, its
president and its Congress to assert that they have
all sold their souls for a pot of gold, when in
fact their pro-Israel policies and votes reflect
America at its best.
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   3.    ISRAEL CAN'T PROTECT THEM EVERY TIME

For every Palestinian bomber that succeeds, Israeli
authorities have prevented dozens of others. But
Israel cannot be secure only by playing the
percentages on attacks that are already underway.
The operational structure that plans, finances,
trains and launches attacks must be destroyed.
That means eliminating Hamas leadership, which has
been responsible for dozens of bomb attacks
killing hundreds of Israelis, and the almost
daily (and almost forgotten) mortar attacks on
Jewish communities in the Gaza Strip.

The IDF has targeted Palestinian terrorists before,
but taking out Salah Shehadeh, founder of Izzadine
el-Qassam, the Hamas terrorist army, clearly was
different. It had to be. And one hopes it
engenders a different response.

Shehadeh, like most cowards, was sleeping in a
crowded civilian neighborhood in an apartment
surrounded by own his family and other people's
families, probably thinking Israel wouldn't risk
collateral casualties by hitting the building.
And the people who let the mastermind of the
Dolphinarium and the Passover massacre sleep
there either
a) ascribe to his ethic, or
b) also had such faith in the IDF that they believed
they could have Shehadeh among them with impunity.

Their faith in the IDF's willingness and ability
to protect Palestinian civilians from the evil
that lives among them is touching and generally
well-placed. But after another week in which
Israeli women and children were gunned down on a
bus, and Israelis and foreign workers were blown
up in a pub, the IDF had to go after the head of
the snake. It is Israel's primary obligation to
protect its own civilians, not those of the
people who are making war against Israel.

And therein lies a message, or maybe a threat,
or at least a responsibility.

In his speech, President Bush went to great lengths
to separate "good Palestinian people" from
"bad Palestinian leaders." Just this week, the
Israeli government engaged in discussion with
elements of the PA to try to make life easier
for "the people" while continuing the war
against "the terrorists."

The distinction may not so clear. If "the people"
don't believe evil leaders are using them against
their own best interests; and if "the people" like
having Shehadeh and his goons among them; and if
"the people" do as Hamas said they would, i.e.,
turn themselves into human torches so that
"restaurants [in Israel] will run with blood
[of Jews]," they and we will have to accept that
"the people" are morally inseparable from their
"leaders." And there are consequences to all of that.

The killing of children is awful, from whatever
quarter, but Shehadeh set them up. The Palestinians
have to know what Israelis have painfully learned:
the IDF is an excellent and moral military force,
but it can't protect their children every time.
What will the Palestinians do about it and who
will they hold responsible? The answer will tell
a lot about "the people" and their future.

-Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs
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   4.    ISRAEL MAY LOOM LARGE, BUT NOT IN TERRITORY

Robert Fulford  National Post

JERUSALEM - In a way that will always be hard to
imagine from a distance, Jews and Palestinians live
in each other's pockets. Whether they like it or not
(and mostly they do not), they are intimate enemies,
still existing, after 54 years, in terrifying
proximity, their communities flowing together in
ways that make borders imperceptible.

This may be the hardest aspect of life in Israel for
a foreigner to comprehend, and the hardest to remember.

Israel's discordant narratives and irreconcilable
passions make it difficult to grasp on any level,
but the question of space creates special difficulties.
Israeli space differs from North American space.

In 1976, in his wonderful little book, To Jerusalem
and Back, Saul Bellow noted: "Because people think
so hard here, and so much, and because of the length
and depth of their history, this sliver of a country
sometimes seems quite large. Some dimension of mind
seems to extend into space." He suggested that while
the actual Israel may be territorially insignificant,
the Israel we carry in our minds (and depict on our
TV screens) seems "immense, a country inestimably
important, as broad as all history." Our knowledge
of Israel's past, stretching back four millennia and
more, also expands it in our minds. Time magnifies
space. So many dramas have been enacted here, so much
said and so much written over so many centuries, that
it occupies an immense space in human consciousness.

In a literal sense, everything is much smaller, which
is often the first fact we encounter when we read
about the country. We discover, early on, that all
Israel is smaller than New Jersey, that it contains
only about 1% of the land in the Middle East, that
the longest distance in Israel, north to south, is
shorter than the distance from Montreal to Toronto.
One rule: everywhere in Israel is closer to everywhere
else than you expect. In peaceful times you can walk
from Jerusalem to Bethlehem, two different worlds,
in an hour. The main cities, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem,
are strikingly distinct, each with its unique form
of urban culture. They differ far more than Halifax
and Calgary. Yet only a one-hour drive separates them.

But so much happens in Israel that we are almost
forced to think of it as a large territory. The daily
news we receive only confuses our sense of geographic
reality, because TV expands whatever it covers. The
Israel of our imagination becomes huge. (Whereas Egypt,
a big country, feels in the media like a footnote
because so little seems to happen there.) We often
construct false mental pictures of places in the news;
with Israel, our imaginings are likely to stray
especially far from reality.

An ordinary journalistic phrase like "the West Bank
town of Ramallah" can unintentionally mislead us. When
used often enough, without context, it makes us imagine
(I have caught myself imagining) that "the West Bank"
of the Jordan River is some kind of distant region,
separate from other places we hear about. We may also
imagine that the "town of Ramallah" is literally a
distinct town, which it really isn't. And after we
see scores of TV reports on Israeli forces occupying
Ramallah and imprisoning Yasser Arafat in his headquarters,
we may unconsciously acquire the idea that we are looking
at somewhere distant, isolated, out in the wilderness.
Chairman Arafat seems a desert chieftain cut off from
his community, as false an idea as any we could
install in our heads.

Reporters rarely have time to add the geographic data
that might bring spatial reality into a news story.
In the case of the Palestinian Authority headquarters,
a couple of facts improve our notion of what's going on.
One fact is that Ramallah (pop. 40,000) is a suburb of
Jerusalem. On the most-used road from central Jerusalem
to central Ramallah, you don't encounter as much open
country as you see when commuting from Burlington to
downtown Toronto. And in the worst traffic, with
checkpoints along the way, it takes only 40 minutes
to drive from the Knesset in Jerusalem to Arafat HQ
in Ramallah.

This also means that the West Bank begins more or
less on the doorstep of Jerusalem. All those "camps"
(some of them resemble suburbs), where refugee status
passes down the generations like a curse or an heirloom,
and where poets lovingly enhance the narrative of
displacement and write songs of yearning for lost Jaffa
-- those places are just down the road from Jerusalem.
We should remember that when politicians speak of
Jerusalem handing back the West Bank to the (proposed)
new Palestinian state, it's much like Ottawa handing
over the Hull region to a violent enemy. Geography
gives the politics of Israel a gravity that foreigners
rarely appreciate. All this is the awkward legacy of
the 1967 war, when Gamal Abdel Nasser, the dictator
of Egypt, tried to push the Jews into the Mediterranean
and instead was calamitously defeated along with his
allies, leaving astonished Israel with its territory
tripled overnight and 1.2-million Palestinians
unexpectedly under its control.

Arabs and Jews live on top of each other, so close
that they barely leave breathing space for each other.
In ideal circumstances that might produce affection,
but instead it produces the opposite. Claustrophobia,
induced physically and culturally, is the subtext of
Israeli life, the enduring condition that colours
every thought and feeling.
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    5.   SITE OF THE WEEK - THE SPIRIT OF ISLAM

This website is dedicated to informing the public about
the religion of Islam from a Christian perspective. It
primarily contains the writings and videos of renowned
Biblical and Islamic scholar, Dr. Labib Mikhail.
Dr. Labib is a former professor of homiletics from the
Faith Mission Bible College in Cairo, Egypt. He is a
television speaker, journalist and has authored more
than 60 books. For 42 years, Dr. Labib was the editor
of the Good News Magazine and has pastored the
Evangelical Bible Church in Fairfax, Virginia. He has
a humble heart and a wealth of knowledge about the
differences between Christianity and Islam.

There are many Christians who are ignorant about Islam
and what it teaches. It is our goal to tell them the
truth about Islam. As you will see, everything said
in this series is fully documented. What is said about
the standards of Islam is from the Quran , nothing has
been invented. When we speak about the Allah of Islam,
it is from the Quran. All subject matter we deal with
is documented carefully, honestly, and strictly.

http://www.thespiritofislam.com/
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     6.   QUOTES TO NOTE

   “Predictably, a wave of intense international
    condemnation [ensued over] yesterday’s IAF strike
    on Hamas military chief Salah Shehadeh…‘
    Unacceptable and counterproductive,’ [says] the
    British Foreign Office. ‘Heavy-handed’ pronounces
    the White House…‘ The Secretary General calls on Israel
    to conduct itself in a manner that is fully consistent
    with international humanitarian law,’ intones Kofi Annan’s
    spokesman… But] if responsibility is fairly to be assigned
    begin with the responsibility of the PA… What of the fact
    that Shehadeh had earlier been released from a Palestinian
    prison by Yasser Arafat, who also had repeatedly refused
    requests from both the Israeli and American governments to
    have him rearrested?… We do not hear international
    condemnation of the PA for its failure to meet its
    obligations to arrest, isolate, and punish known terrorists.
    On the contrary: Israeli attacks against the PA security
    apparatus are now taken as the cause of Palestinian
    nonfeasance in combating terror….”

—Editorial (Jerusalem Post, July 24)

   “This is a crime. No normal-minded, conscientious and
    feeling person could imagine such a massacre. I ask the
    whole world how they can stand silent and not stop
    these crimes.”

—P.A. Chairman Yasser Arafat, referring to Israel’s strike
on Shehadeh’s Gaza neighborhood (National Post, July 24)

   “We will not rest until we have our revenge, until we
    see Zionist body parts in every restaurant, bus stop,
    buses and sidewalks.”

—Statement by Hamas’ Qassam Brigades, whose members joined
the tens of thousands of mourners participating in the
funeral procession for Sheikh Salah Shehadeh, while wielding
Ak-47s and homemade mortars and chanting “Revenge, revenge!”.
(New York Times, July 24)


   "He who is kind to the cruel is cruel to the kind."

a Jewish proverb from Pirkei Avot (The Ethics of the Fathers)
By that same token, he who would risk American or Israeli
lives to save enemy civilians is cruel to the kind.
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     7.    HIGHLIGHT ARTICLES ON OUR SITE

THE ANTI-SEMITIC LIES THAT THREATEN ALL OF US
Rampant anti-Semitism in the Muslim world, from schools
to press, TV and internet, not only makes Middle East
peace impossible, but makes us all targets now.
http://christianactionforisrael.org/antiholo/lies.html

KOFI AND THE EURO-BOYS
One would think that after being so embarrassingly
wrong about Jenin, these jokesters of Mideast
diplomacy would be too red-faced to cry "war crimes"
before the facts are even clear, but evidently they
just don't care about being taken seriously.
http://christianactionforisrael.org/un/euroboys.html

LIES, PATHOLOGIC LIES AND THE PALESTINIANS
Lying is, to borrow a legal definition, the
"deliberate misrepresentation of fact." Lying, as
practiced by the Yasser Mob Squad, can be a very
rational activity when placed in the service of
some goal.
http://christianactionforisrael.org/isreport/july02/lies.html

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Become a WITNESS TO THE NATIONS and let them know what
great things our Lord is doing for Israel and what great
things He will continue to do for her, His firstborn.
http://christianactionforisrael.org/witness/home1.html
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