Hello,
I just read this opinion piece on A7 news and it expresses an idea I posted in the forum the other day. I dont think that Jews and Muslims can co-exist in the same country. This writer, Victor Sharpe, expresses my opinion in a very concise manner.
Here is the article reprinted from A7 news.
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/8400
Forget Waiting for Peace
Kislev 1, 5769, 28 November 08 12:51
by Victor Sharpe
(IsraelNN.com) Islam will never accept Israel unless the ideology undergoes a reformation, but it cannot do so and still be called Islam. That said, there is no future for the Jewish state if it believes that the Muslim world will ever accept it in true and lasting peace.
Israel has to accept the dismal fact that it cannot ever have peaceful neighbors who will not at every opportunity wish to destroy it. Israel must continue to prosper and thrive as a state in the knowledge that it can never let down its guard.
Even with an Arab sword of Damocles hanging over it, Israel can survive and grow. Though the Jewish state yearns for peace, as all other civilized societies do, the very external threat can be turned to great advantage militarily, politically, socially and economically. Nothing keeps internal divisions at bay more than when the barbarians are at the gate.
Since the great Zionist leaders of the likes of Theodor Herzl, Ze'ev Jabotinsky, David Ben-Gurion, Menachem Begin and Yitzchak Shamir have passed from the scene, there has been a long and depressing parade of weak and incompetent Israeli leaders and politicians who have brought unnecessary disaster down upon the state. The worst ever is the present caretaker prime minister, Ehud Olmert, whose idiocy is incomprehensible. Here is a man, deeply flawed and under police investigation for alleged corruption, who seems driven by some infernal force to harm his own nation, and aid and support her enemies, by turning a blind eye to every Palestinian Arab provocation and act of naked aggression.
In response to veiled threats from the Palestinian Authority’s Mahmoud Abbas that Israel must give him everything he demands or else, the Israeli premier ignores the suffering of his people under bombardment in Sderot and Ashkelon and, instead, frees 250 Arab thugs, who will immediately return to murdering Israeli civilians. Abbas is a miserable Holocaust denier whose crimes should place him beyond the pale for every Israeli leader.
Prime Ministers Yitzchak Rabin, Shimon Peres, Binyamin Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon, down to Olmert and would-be Prime Minister Tzipi Livni, have been resistant to accepting the awful truth that even if Israel shrunk to one downtown city block in Tel Aviv, the Arab and Muslim world would still not recognize a Jewish state or agree to live with it in peace and harmony. Why would it not? The answer to that question is Islam itself.
True peace can never be achieved between Muslim and non-Muslim nations. Islam mandates the faithful to spread their religion through territorial conquest or, as in the case of Israel, by reclaiming what Muslims believe they have lost.
Even though the native and indigenous peoples of Israel are the Jews, and even if the Land of Israel was given to the Jewish people in an eternal covenant with God, it does not matter to Islam, for wherever the Muslim foot has once trod triumphal, that territory is forever regarded as Islamic. If such territory is lost to Muslims, then Allah has been diminished and the land must be retaken. Peace, then, is merely a mirage in the desert sands.
World leaders fail to understand the Muslim mindset. Israeli leaders, who of all people should know better, still fall into the fatal trap of believing that the Western model of lasting peace between nation-states can equally apply in the Middle East between Muslim and non-Muslim nations. It is a fallacy.
The conflict between Israel and the Arabs in general, and between Israel and those who call themselves Palestinians in particular, is not territorial. It is theological. It is part of the existential conflict that has existed between Islam and the rest of the world since the 7th century.
Much of the Islamic world now feels empowered, as perhaps never before, and seeks global domination with renewed vigor. This is the tangible and growing threat to the world; not global warming.
The policies of the Jewish state must be ordered within the recognition of that reality; somber and depressing as it may be. But only when world leaders understand the nature of Islam’s theological rejection of a genuine and irrevocable peace with Israel, and Israeli leaders realize the uselessness of trading tangible and ancestral land for a delusional “peace,” will a long and overdue realism finally enter the conflict.
What we witness today is Israeli caretaker Prime Minister Ehud Olmert bending the knee constantly and making endless concession to the deceitful leader of the Palestinian Authority. This Arab leader is interested only in taking whatever he can from the foolish Olmert and giving nothing, absolutely nothing, in return, because as a Muslim he is not permitted to make peace with a non-Muslim. Yet, the obtuse Olmert, and so many liberal and left-wing Jews inside and outside of Israel, remain infuriatingly blind to these simple facts.
New Israeli leaders must look to the Torah and into their own people’s Biblical history. They must see again the nature of their enemies as spelled out in crystal clarity by the Almighty through the words of the Jewish prophet Jeremiah: “They dress the wound of my people as though it were not serious, saying, 'Peace, peace,' but there is no peace. We looked for peace, but no good came; and for a time of health, and behold trouble.”
I think of the disasters that Israeli leaders like Rabin, Peres and Yossi Beilin brought upon the Jewish state. They were the architects of the Oslo Accords, which we now more accurately call the Oslo War. The premise of those failed accords, which inflicted terrible suffering on so many Israelis, was for Israel to accept that its ancestral and Biblical lands can be given away to implacable enemies in order to make them peaceful and accept what was left of the Jewish state.
The midrash teaches that we are like a sheep among seventy wolves. Only the great Shepherd (God Almighty) can protect us from all of our enemies. We are instructed to do what we can to defend ourselves. But at this time it seems that no recent Israeli government has been able to face the task of protecting the residents of Israel. We must pray to God, the true guardian of Israel, to protect us.
It was the prophet Joel who reminded his fellow Jews that the covenanted land must never be given away, for as he said: “In those days and at that time, when I restore the fortunes of Judah and Jerusalem, I will gather all nations and bring them down to the Valley of Jehoshaphat. There I will enter into judgment against them concerning My inheritance, My people Israel, for they scattered My people among the nations and divided up My land.”
Joel, speaking God’s words, then proclaimed: “The Lord will roar from Zion and thunder from Jerusalem; the earth and the sky will tremble. But the Lord God will be a refuge for His people, a stronghold for the people of Israel.”
Topic: Forget Waiting For Peace - From A7 (Read 497 times)