MarkSilverberg

Recognizing Hamas, as CENTCOM and the Obama administration seem poised to do, would be a colossal blunder that will have major ramifications for American interests and credibility in the Middle East for years to come, and provide Iran with its long sought after base within missile range of Tel Aviv.

The President may think that his single-digit approval ratings in Israel are simply because his middle name is “Hussein”, but he’s wrong. The Israelis have plenty of reasons to distrust the man and his promise of an “unbreakable bond” between our two countries. From their perspective, he’s been doing everything possible to break that bond for the past year and a half. In reality, his middle name could have been “Smith” and the Israelis would still distrust him because his actions have spoken louder than his words, and no charm offensive or eloquence can change that perception.

When Jackson Diehl of the Washington Post attacks Obama’s outrage over the Jerusalem District Planning and Building Committee’s decision to approve the construction of 1,600 housing units in Ramat Shlomo (a post-1967 Jerusalem neighborhood) as “ideological - and vindictive,” you know that Obama has made a serious political blunder.... The Obama Administration seems to see Israel as obstructionist, defiant and intransigent. He does not yet understand that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not territorial, but existential. The Arab Street will never support America. When the U.S. distances itself from Israel, it does not win influence with the Arab world. It proves only that the U.S. is not a reliable ally, and in the case of our friends and our enemies, it merely earns their scorn.

In the aftermath of World War II, with the hideous revelation that 2/3 of European Jews had been systematically exterminated by the Nazis, anti-Semitism became unfashionable. But that is no longer the case. As the memory of the Holocaust fades into history, as we continue to transfer petro-wealth to our enemies; as Europe morphs into Eurabia; as dictators, despots and Islamists take control over the UN and other international bodies; and as our universities become hotbeds for virulent anti-Israel teachings and rhetoric - logic fades, facts become confused with fictions, distinctions between democracies and tyrannies become irrelevant, history becomes unimportant, and anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism become indistinguishable.

In 1945, after the liberation of France, it would have been unthinkable for the Allies to have stopped at the French-German border (believing they could contain Nazi expansionism in the post-war era) and begun attempts to stabilize and reconstruct France without first destroying the Third Reich and de-Nazifying Germany. For the same reason, the stabilization and reconstruction of Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan, the Palestinian territories, and indeed the entire Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa cannot be accomplished unless and until the Iranian mullahs have been removed and Iran has been de-Islamified.

The foreign policy paradigm that an apocalyptic, messianic Islamic enemy bent on establishing a global caliphate can be appeased and contained is not only delusional, but guarantees the rise of Iranian Islamic hegemony throughout the region and beyond. Iran is to go nuclear, we had best insure that a friendly government rules in Tehran. If not, no nation that ever opposes the mullahs' global Islamic ambitions will be secure once their nuclear shield is in place.

The shadow of Shari’a law is descending on Gaza. In November 2009, Shin Bet (Israel's internal security service) issued a Report describing how Hamas has begun instituting Islamic law and thought in all areas of Gaza life since its violent takeover of the area in June 2007. Should Israeli security forces withdraw from Judea and Samaria, it is a safe bet that the implementation of Shari’ a law would follow a Hamas take-over there as well.

Concerns are growing in Israel’s government over the possibility of a unilateral Palestinian declaration of independence within the June 4, 1967 borders, a move which could potentially be recognized by the U.S. and the United Nations Security Council. On August 26th, Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad issued a 54-page plan ("Palestine: Ending the Occupation, Establishing the State") that proposed the establishment of a de-facto Palestinian state within two years – a state to be established regardless of negotiations with Israel and outside the framework of the performance-based March 2003 Roadmap and the Oslo Agreement

The assumption that the Obama administration's diplomatic initiative to our enemies will enhance America's image in the world and increase our security is becoming more questionable with each passing day. What we have learned is that dialogue and accommodation with messianic, apocalyptic Islamic regimes like Iran are not only pointless, but threaten the stability of the international order.

The problem with the insistence on a "two-state solution" is that a Palestinian peace partner doesn't exist and has never existed and no amount of rhetoric, Israeli concessions or Arab pandering can make it so. The Palestinians have consistently rejected the concept of a Jewish state in the Middle East and until that changes, all talk of a two-state solution is not only irrelevant but dangerous.

Prime Minister Netanyahu’s speech at Bar-Ilan University on June 14th was more than an exercise in judicious phraseology. It returned realism to Israeli foreign policy and set out a clear and precise diplomatic formula that reflects the worldview of the Israeli majority.

If the Israelis are balking at a two-state solution, their hesitation is based on the realistic prognosis that any Palestinian state under current circumstances would, in the end, be controlled by terrorists and would represent an existential threat to their country. While the US would never countenance a terrorist state contiguous to the continental United States, at Annapolis, it had no qualms in requiring Israel to accept such a threat. No wonder Israel is worried.

On April 3, 2009, the New York Times ran an anti-Israel op-ed by University of California Hastings College of Law professor George Bisharat titled “Israel on Trial”. The piece, false where it is not misleading, is a disgrace. It offers a sounding board for all those who believe that only Muslims have a right to self-determination, that Gaza remains “occupied” even though Israel disengaged in 2005, and that Israel - a sovereign and legitimate nation - doesn’t have the right to defend itself against attack.

Anti-Semitism never really died after the Holocaust, it just became unfashionable. That is no longer the case. In the wake of the Gaza War, and with the global economy in a tailspin, disturbing events have been occurring in Britain - events that do not bode well either for the future of British Jewry or for the future of British democracy.

Despite the belief of President Obama and his advisers that not talking to our enemies is a mistake, and given the pressure the Europeans can be expected to exert on Mitchell to negotiate with Hamas, the Obama administration had best tread carefully before engaging an organization that is the ideological cousin of al Qaeda and the Palestinian offspring of the Egyptian Moslem Brotherhood. Granting Hamas legitimacy and access to the prerogatives of state power in conjunction with the Palestinian Authority will prove to be a costly strategic error for all parties concerned - except Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria, Iran and its terrorist proxies throughout the Middle East.

With a new President assuming control of Middle East policy, Israeli forces withdrawing from Gaza, and the Europeans and the Egyptians discussing ways and means to restrict Hamas’s ability to re-arm through the Philadephi corridor bordering Egypt, there is rising optimism in Washington diplomatic circles that such actions will preempt future conflicts between the Israelis and the Palestinians in Gaza. Scant attention, however, is being paid to the continuing role the UN is playing in sowing the seeds of future discord. Separate and apart from the strategic error of leaving Hamas’s missile launching capability intact in the wake of the conflict, a far greater problem continues to fester in Gaza – a problem which, if not resolved, will inevitably lead to future conflicts.

What happens when the alternatives fail? What happens when all the negotiations, sanctions and compromises fail to dissuade an aggressor? What happens when a nation is forced into war as a last resort? When is "victory" over an aggressor truly achieved? The answer can be found in an analysis of American strategic war doctrine in the late 19th and 20th centuries.

The odyssey that has carried the Arab Muslim world from the heights of its ancient glory to its modern day abyss is a story that spans fourteen hundred years and innumerable humiliations most of which can be traced to its own failings. Those who support radical Islam fail to appreciate how their ancient Andalusian Empire in southern Spain a millennium ago achieved its greatness. In their zeal to exact revenge and to punish infidels for past transgressions (real or imagined), they have placed their faith in an interpretation of Islam that renders tolerance, independent thought, debate and all creative, scientific experimentation heresy unless carried out solely for the purpose of waging jihad (holy war) against the perceived enemies of Islam.

As a result, the radical Islamists of today are caught in a self-imposed religious prison. The kind of society that produced Andalusia – one that encouraged scholarship through the study of science, learning, independent thought, debate and discussion - represents the very antithesis of the kind of society they seek to impose on the world by force and submission. If Taliban Afghanistan is the best they can do, it is a far cry from the glories of their past. Without an Islamic Reformation, their quest to restore the dignity of Arabia will fail.

If the EU and Human Rights Watch are correct in their interpretation of international law (and they are not*), Israel’s targeted killings of Hamas leaders and its destruction of Hamas’s terror infrastructures in Gaza constitute a violation of international law because such actions, by definition, “endanger civilians”. If so, we have handed our enemies virtual immunity from attack because no war can be conducted without endangering (or even killing) civilians – especially those being used as human shields to protect that enemy.

Pakistan may well be the single largest state sponsor of terrorism in the world, possibly even greater than Iran, yet it has never been listed by the U.S. State Department as such, even in the wake of the 9/11 Commission Report and the recommendation of the State Department's counter-terrorism director. That is because the prevailing attitude in past U.S. administrations has been that such a designation would destroy U.S. influence in Islamabad. That attitude, however, seems to be changing. In August 2007, then Presidential candidate Barak Obama issued a pointed warning to then Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf saying that as president, he would be prepared to order U.S. troops into that country unilaterally if it failed to act on its own against Islamic extremists. The 11/26 Mumbai attacks have now brought Pakistan’s dilemma onto center stage.

The Palestinians will eventually learn to reject violence not because it is politically ineffective, but because it is morally wrong. To achieve that level of understanding may take decades, but one thing is certain - only a society freed from the demons of its past can succeed. The scourge of "martyrdom" and the jihadist rationale that epitomizes Hamas must be eradicated from Palestinian society. Anything short of this merely prolongs Palestinian agony, delays Palestinian reconciliation and re-construction, sows the seeds for continuing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and renders a new Palestinian rebirth impossible.