by Debra J. Saunders, October 2001
If the United States were to walk away from Israel, would Osama bin Laden and
terrorist networks back off, as some Chronicle readers apparently believe?
Big No.
First, bin Laden hates the United States more than Israel.
As Afghanistan specialist David B. Edwards of Williams College noted, “The
biggest issue for Osama bin laden isn’t Israel. The biggest issue is the U.S.
troops in the (Persian) Gulf, near holy places.”
Bin Laden readily admits that he turned against America after U.S. troops
were deployed to Saudi Arabia in 1990.
“If Israel had never been created,” asserts pro-war activist Clifford May, “we’d
still be going through this.”
Former GOP Gov. Pete Wilson, now a member of the Bush
administration’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, adds, “If Israel had not
existed, Iraq still would have attacked Kuwait.”
Or take the word of bin Laden himself: “The call to wage war against America
was made because America has spearheaded the crusade against the Islamic
nation, sending tens of thousands of troops to the land of the two Holy
Mosques,” he told Time Magazine in 1999, referring to the Persian Gulf War
deployment.
TWO, you don’t appease mass murderers.
Said Wilson: “The people who say that (America should abandon Israel) are
precisely like the people who said back in the 1930s that if we just let Hitler
have Czechoslovakia, he’ll be satisfied. It doesn’t take very much research to
understand that these militant Islamic terrorists want much more than the
destruction of Israel.
They seek the destruction of America and the West.”
He continued: “There is no appeasement. Appeasement does not do more than
gain a small amount of time at a great cost, because it encourages aggressors
to expand their evil efforts.”
Williams College’s Edwards, who thinks to the left of May and Wilson, has a
different take, but ends up at the same place: “There is no doubt that as long
as the Palestinian-Israel situation festers, there is going to be terrorism. There’s
going to be a deep-seated mistrust of the United States.”
But: “If we were to suddenly drop our support of Israel, it would be
tremendously destabilizing, and a sign of weakness.”
THREE, if America ends its alliance with Israel, more blood will flow, not only
here, but also in the Mideast.
The only question is whose blood, and for that there is no good answer. Wilson
fears terrorists “would try to murder every last Israeli. They would try to literally
destroy Israel. May believes “if Israel is destroyed it will only whet their
appetite.”
Edwards has a different take: He fears that in an isolated Israel “the temptation
would be much greater to use nuclear weapons if need be to protect
themselves. I’d hate to see the Masada complex come to life again.” Masada is
the high mesa on which almost 1,000 Israelis killed themselves rather than
submit to a Roman army in 73 A.D.
FOUR, free people must defeat murderous thugs.
Many times I’ve heard people wonder out loud how it is that the world could
turn a deaf ear to Hitler’s well-aired genocidal plans. Of course, it’s easier to
accept murderous intent when other people are the target. But also, the answer
can be found today when well-meaning people say that they need to
understand the motives of the terrorists, as if there is some mystery (there
isn’t), or worse, some redeeming cause behind the slaughter.
Some, to their discredit, see Israel as the sop to throw at Terror.
They do not understand that they can’t feed Jews to Terror, and then expect
Terror not to crave other Infidels. They do not understand that peace and terror
cannot co-exist.
They do not understand that sometimes people have to fight for
freedom, or that freedom is worth fighting for.
