The media insist on labelling those who American and Iraqi forces are battling in Fallujah as "insurgents." This improper use of language legitimizes what is a repulsive collection of Islamists and facists united in their determination to deprive the Iraqi people of representative government and fundamental freedoms. Maj. Gen. Richard F. Natonski, commander of the 1st Marine Division properly characterized the terrorists in Fallujah in the Washington Post today, "In almost every single mosque in Fallujah, we've found an arms cache. We've found IED factories. . . . We've also seen the use of schools for the storage of weapons. This is the enemy that we fight. It doesn't respect the religious mosques or the children's schools."
The Post article also described a hostage discovered shackled to a wall by his wrists and ankles in a house that marines were searching in Fallujah. "The man, who identified himself as a taxi driver from nearby Abu Ghraib, said he had been kidnapped by men who refused to give him food or water and beat him with electrical cords during 10 days of captivity. ... Speaking to the marines, the freed hostage said that, "when his captors fled, he told them he would die without food or water. They responded: "We brought you here to die.""
Using schools and mosques as staging points? Kidnapping common people for no apparent reason? These sound more like the actions of Islamists and Baathists than insurgents. Would that the media understood the difference.
While much of the world attempts to make a statesman and a hero out of a goat, it is important to remember who Yasir Arafat really was and what he really stood for.
I noticed on Instapundit yesterday afternoon that National Public Radio corrected its reporting about which I commented yesterday morning. Apparently, what Marines found in Fallujah were sarin gas testing kits, not sarin gas proper.
I was pleased to hear on National Public Radio this morning that soldiers have discovered vials of sarin gas amongst weapons and munitions captured during the liberation of Fallujah. There was some expectation that terrorists who controlled the city had such weapons, as soldiers involved in operation Phantom Fury were instructed to carry gas masks into combat.
Will John Kerry now retract his campaign statements about WMDs?
Yasir Arafat's death last night brings to the Holy Land a possiblity for peace between Israel and the Palestinians that did not exist while he lived. The Palestinian people, the Muslim world, and the media will ignore the blood on Arafat's hands in hopes of creating a nationalist hero from a mass murderer. They will overlook the stolen election, the disastorous second intifada, the graft and embezzlement, the exploitation of power, and countless decisions depriving Palestinians of peace and an autonmous state. Their rewriting of history will fail- the trail of blood and money is too telling. Moreso, if peace progresses between Israel and the Palestinians after Arafat's death, it will evidence the fact that peace was not possible while he lived. Good riddance and R.I.P.
Did Arlen Specter promise to oppose President Bush's judical nominees in exchange for newspaper endorsements? All the more reason why he should not chair the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Yasir Arafat is dead or alive- it is unclear which. Either way he has little if any value to add to the pursuit of peaceful coexistence between Israel and the Palestinian people. President Clinton presented Arafat with the opportunity to forsake violence with an act of peacemaking and statesmanship that would have resulted in an autonomous Palestinian state. At Camp David in 1990, Clinton wrung from Israeli leadership unprecedented concessions on every Palestinian demand save for the right of return, and for a moment it seemed as though peace was within reach of the Holy Land.
Alas, Arafat wanted no compromises. Rather than continuing negotiations, he began the second intifada, gambling that Israel could be bloodied into complete submission. That decision has resulted in death and misery for Jews and Palestinians- disproportionately for the latter. The intifada backfired, failing to produce the totality of concessions that Arafat envisioned, resulting instead in a security wall partitioning Jews and Palestinians and defining borders (even if temporary) less generous than those previously offered.
Arafat’s survival in the aftermath of the disastrous intifada has had only one benefit, preventing open civil war between Palestinians, which is no consolation when one considers that he might well have accomplished a lasting peace with Israel. Arafat uses traditional Arab and Muslim anti-Semitism to direct the focus of Palestinian Islamists including Fatah, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades away from each other and firmly on Israel. While apportioning misery to all around him through divide and conquer schemes, Arafat has amassed a stolen fortune that Forbes Magazine last year estimated at $300 million.
Arafat was the principal roadblock for President Bush’s Roadmap for Peace. With Arafat’s death, the President, newly reelected, with a mandate to wage war on Islamism, will have an opening for change in the Middle East not seen since Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat asked President Carter to finance what became the Israel Egypt Peace Treaty. Demonstrating American commitment to a Palestinian state in coexistence with Israel through aggressive peacemaking could be the best way to move the hearts and minds of Muslims round the world.
While peace in the Holy Land may be possible as a result of Arafat’s death, the path to peace will be treacherous. In a power vacuum, Palestinian Islamists could divide the focus of their hatred between Israel and each other, and Iran and Syria could use the chaos to engage the ancient feud between Shiites and Sunnis. At the same time, any American progress in brokering peace could result in a new front in the war on terror, as the permanent presence of a Jewish state on land coveted by Islam is a threat to Islamic dogma.
To counter Islamist aversion to peace, the President should engage a statesman on par with James Baker to press an aggressive new roadmap for peace between Israel and the Palestinians. He should throw the weight of America behind free and fair elections based upon the Palestinian Constitution. In the event moderate leadership, committed to peace, emerges from the elections, America and Israel should embrace it.
Most of all, the President should challenge the Islamic world to compare and contrast their circumstances and leadership today with the circumstances and leadership they might hope for in the future. He can demonstrate through American resolve and results in Afghanistan and Iraq that replacing tyranny and corruption with self-rule is the best way for Palestinians, and Muslims, to realize pluralism, democracy, and freedom.
Some Palestinians seem to think that Israel should join them in mourning the death of Yasir Arafat. ABC News reported today that when Arafat’s death was announced prematurely, ““… several dozen Jewish demonstrators gathered in a downtown Jerusalem square to celebrate, singing, dancing, distributing sweets and declaring that one of the greatest enemies of the Jewish people was “on his way to hell.”” Responding to the celebrations, Saeb Erekat, a Palestinian lawmaker, told CNN, “I hope the Israeli public will show sensitivities. I've seen some Israelis dancing in the streets, hugging each other… I think it's alien… I cannot describe my feelings. It's heartbreaking to see Israelis hugging and kissing in such circumstances.”
This is rather like telling Americans not to celebrate the death of Osama bin Laden.
Erekat is obviously a prat, but one wonders if he remembers the Palestinians who took great pains to demonstrate their sensitivity by publicly celebrating the murder of thousands of civilians by Muslims who flew hijacked airplanes into the World Trade Center towers on November 11, 2001? Is he aware of the posters, music, and street rallies celebrating successful terrorist strikes against Israel that dominate Palestinian public life? Surely he is not oblivious to the hundreds of Israeli deaths attributable to organizations funded and directed by Yasser Arafat.
There are many reasons to celebrate Arafat’s death. He is a bigot, a racist, a mass-murderer, and a terrorist with the distinction of having invented airplane hijacking. He is insatiable in his love of money- stealing more than $300 million from the impoverished Palestinian people, and he is shameless in his lust for power- rigging his own election and undermining every effort at constitutional power sharing. The biggest reason of all for celebrating his death is that Arafat is the single biggest roadblock, both to peace in the Holy Land, and to an autonomous state for the Palestinian people.
There is only one reason not to celebrate Arafat’s death; doing so lowers the celebrant to the despicable level of animalistic brutality at which Arafat has lived most of his life, and to which he has dragged much of Palestinian society.
The fruits of Islamism were evident in two countries in recent days. In the Netherlands on Tuesday, film-maker, Theo van Gogh, was murdered in broad daylight by an Islamist of Dutch and Morrocan citizenship. In Sudan yesterday, forces controlled by the Arab Islamist government destroyed a Darfur refugee camp in yet another example of genocide. The events differ in scale and location, but are bound together by the common threads of bigotry, intolerance and persecution that are Islamism.
Theo van Gogh's most recent movie, Submission, portrayed Muslim women in violent and abusive marriages. The film was narrated by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali refugee turned Dutch polician, who survived an abusive marriage, renounced Islam, and lives under state protection from Islamist death threats. The film asserted that the theology and culture of Islam is misogynistic. For this message, Theo van Gogh was murdered.
The Darfur refugees in Sudan were attacked without warning. They may have considered themselves safe in a refugee camp with international observers on hand, but international observers are no protection from Islamism. Hundreds of refugees lost shelter and possessions to fire and rampage. They were beaten and in some cases shot because they are African and not Arabic, because they are Christian, or animist, or not Muslim enough.
Around the world, Islamists seek to impose the conditions of dhimmitude on non-Muslims. Dhimmitude does not permit questioning- van Gogh questioned and is dead. Dhimmitude requires submission- the Africans of Sudan are submitting with their lives. Islamism swallows freedom like night swallows day, and the world watches.
The election results are good news for America. President Bush was reelected with a majority of the popular vote, conservatives won almost every in-play congressional contest of importance, and voter initiatives affirming marriage as the legal union of a man and a woman passed in every state in which they were on the ballot. The leftist assault on public morality is imperiled. The Democrat strategy of usurping legislative perogatives through judicial fiat is neutered by a Republican President and a strengthened Republican Senate majority. The Supreme Court is safe and with it the Constitution and our democracy.
Voters turned out in record numbers and a majority of them said no to the politics of hatred and recrimination that inflated Democrat rhetoric since the disputed election of 2000. The biggest losers yesterday were not defeated politicians, but left-wing operatives like Michael Moore, George Soros, Terry McAuliffe, Dan Rather, and the New York Times, who tried to win an election by turning Americans against each other.
John Kerry was disingenuous on so many issues during the election, but he had the good grace and patriotic sense to leave the Ohio results unchallenged. His concession speech addressed the need for Americans to come together and that is what we must now do.