Saturday, February 4, 2012

The sword of Islam




The sword of Islam

Dr. Haim Shine

This week 75 people were killed and more than a 1,000 were injured when a riot broke out after a soccer match in Egypt. The violence began when fans of the team from Cairo started waving a banner reading “The vendors from Port Said [the other team] are not men.” The police officers at the scene did not do a thing to prevent the massacre. Those in the know say that the police’s indifference was an act of revenge on the Cairo fans, many of whom had clashed with police during the protests in Tahrir Square.
In the Syrian city of Homs, hundreds of people were killed this week in clashes between the Syrian army, still loyal to President Bashar Assad, and anti-regime forces including many army defectors. The Syrian military fires indiscriminately and the majority of the casualties are innocent civilians. The Syrian army is mostly comprised of members of the Alawi sect, a minority that forcefully oppressed the Sunni majority in the country for many years.
Any intelligent person can see that a regime change, which will happen soon, will bring about a deadly score settling: Sunnis will seek revenge for their brutal oppression, enacted by Bashar’s father Hafez Assad. Thousands of Alawites will likely be massacred. The country’s Alawites have already begun their escape. Some say that many of them will ultimately bang on Israel’s gates hoping to be saved from eradication.
The events in Port Said and in Syria demonstrate just how little our neighbors value human life. Masses of people are being killed, without any moral or cultural restraint, and there is no one to seek justice for their deaths. The world is indifferent and silent. This is true for Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq as well. Those whose religion sanctifies killing do not distinguish between good and evil, between the guilty and the innocent. The killing becomes a legitimate method in promoting religious, political, social and economic ideologies.
For some 130 years the renewed Jewish settlement in Israel has faced the violent nature of the desert culture. Since the birth of Zionism, the Jews have not had even one calm and peaceful year. The land of Israel is soaked with the blood of many good Jews, killed by rioters, Fedayeen, terrorists and standing armies. Women, children and senior citizens paid for their simple desire to live in their homeland with their lives. Suicide bombers, boasting the elevated Muslim status of “shahid,” have detonated [explosives on] buses, planted bombs, and even used knives to commit indiscriminate cold-blooded murders in Israel’s border towns as well as in the heart of the populated cities.
Many countries, some out of naïveté and others out of hypocrisy, pressure Israel to make concessions and build trust with the Palestinians. The same Palestinians who want to impose their culture of the sword on the citizens of Israel. Israel’s leadership, with good intentions, has conceded again and again. But every concession brings about a harsher and more violent response. The Israeli Left hoped that the Oslo accords would lead to reconciliation and rapprochement but instead, as they quickly discovered, they resulted in an Intifada.
Until there is a sweeping cultural change across the Middle East, the hope for peace is but a dangerous delusion. Our neighbors use peace talks as a strategic weapon of war against us and not as a tool for reconciliation. There is no peace to be made with the violent culture of the sword, the sword must be shattered. A nuclear Iran only emboldens those who promote violence in the Middle East. The terrorist entities around us are expanding their arsenals.
In light of these circumstances, Israel’s citizens and its leaders must not become complacent. The misguided quest for peace has prompted many groups within our society to take military service and Israel’s security needs too lightly. Peace will be achieved one day, but until then, we must realize that the battle for Israel, and the Jews’ right to live in it in peace, is far from over.

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=1318

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