Islamist terrorists hate all democracies as much as Israel's
THE new year dawned with excellent news from Iraq. For the first time since Saddam Hussein created a compound that protected him from the people he oppressed, his Republican Palace is in the hands of representatives of Iraq's citizens. During the terrorist attacks that followed the US occupation of Iraq in 2003 it was the heavily fortified coalition headquarters, but now it is under the control of an Iraqi government that relies on the voters, not soldiers and secret police, for its power. This outcome offers hope that the horror Iraqis have long endured is coming to an end. Just as important, it shows that change is possible in the Middle East, that the cynics who suggest that the US invasion was misplaced idealism at best and more likely an imperialist assault on Islam that was doomed to fail, were wrong.
Whether the people of Iraq will ultimately decide that the blood and treasure spent in pursuit of a democratic state was justified cannot be known now, but this morning there is light at the end of a long tunnel and cause for hope that Iraq could actually become a stable democracy.
The news from Israel is far darker. Israeli air power is hitting Gaza hard, making it clear to the Hamas regime there that Israel will retaliate for every rocket fired across the frontier. And the Israeli army is ready to roll into Gaza to destroy whatever elements of the Hamas command structure and armoury the air force has missed. Like every Israeli exercise in self defence in the last 60 years, this campaign has generated understandable anguish all over the world at the loss of civilian life. Of the 400 or so fatalities in Gaza over the past week the UN estimates 25 per cent were civilians, as ordinary people were caught in a futile fight that Hamas started but has no hope of finishing. The terrorist movement dreams of Israel's end, of a new holocaust where the Jewish state ceases to exist. This is something that Israel will obviously never allow and if Hamas wants to end the suffering of the people of Gaza in the short term it will renew the ceasefire it ended on December 19.
And in the long term it will accept Israel's right to exist as a starting point for negotiations for a permanent peace. And a permanent peace is what is required to end the appalling privations of the 1.4 million people of Gaza, subsisting in what is effectively a 360sq km open prison, where Israel ruthlessly regulates what is allowed in at one end and Egypt does the same at the other.
It does not have to be this way. The people of the West Bank are no friends to Israel but, under the secular Fatah regime that rules there, a peace of sorts exists and while its people are hardly prosperous they are not deprived of medicine and meals because their government is more interested in pointlessly sniping at Israel than in the wellbeing of its people.
It is more than passing strange that Hamas, which was fairly elected in 2006 on a platform of improving living standards in Gaza, is now making things much worse through violence that serves no purpose.
But in addition to anguish, there is international anger at Israel, as its enemies blame it not just for the constant crisis in the Middle East but for the most ominous threat to the peace of the planet - Islamic terrorism.
Theirs is an obvious argument: the existence of the Jewish state has caused the poverty of the Palestinian people. And the way in which nations that Osama bin Laden calls the "crusader states", Britain, Europe, Australia and especially the US, support Israel is part of the plot against Islam that is responsible for the US invasion of Iraq, the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan and opposition to Iran developing nuclear power, and weapons, if it wishes. According to this argument, if the US abandoned its imperialist plan to impose democracy on Islamic nations and if it stopped supporting Israel the world would be at peace. According to opponents of Israel, while the Jewish state exists in its present form and within its existing boundaries, Muslims will rage at the oppression of the Palestinians and they will protest against their treatment by any means they can.
According to this argument, the underlying cause of terror attacks, from September 11 to the murders in Mumbai last November, where the attackers made a point of targeting a Jewish centre, is the existence of Israel, which in its present form puts people everywhere at risk.
It is all dangerous nonsense. There is no doubting the rage of millions of Muslims over the condition of the Palestinians. It is equally assured that anti-Semitism runs deep in much of the Muslim world, just as it was endemic in Europe 70 years ago. But the real reason for Islamic terrorism has less to do with Israel than the fact that around the world small groups of men, and they are almost invariably men, feel powerless in cultures where women have the same rights they do, where people can say and wear what they like and where democracy, not theocracy, is the universally supported form of government.
For all their invocations of the Koran, Islamists who believe in mass murder have no real connection with the honoured Muslim faith as practised by billions of people on all continents. The Muslim people of democracies such as Indonesia and Turkey have no truck with terror and are accordingly a target for Islamic extremists.
Certainly, religious conservatives won the last election in Iran, but only because a council of clerics decides who is allowed to run for office. And the people of Afghanistan, in the October 2004 presidential poll, and Iraq, in the 2005 general election, demonstrated they preferred democracy to dictatorships.
Islamist terrorists see these many millions of Muslims as enemies, just as they hate the Americans and Europeans, the Africans and Australians, the people of every and no faith who they murder whenever they are able. And they will use any explanation they can come up with to excuse the gratification they take in ideologically driven killing.
Osama bin Laden used to explain that US bases in Saudi Arabia were an affront to his faith, but he did not call off al-Qa'ida when the US pulled out of the kingdom.
And, short of every Jew leaving the country, there is nothing Israel, or any other nation can do to placate the Hamas ideologues and their allies.
Last week, the Taliban banned girls attending school in a frontier province of Pakistan. To show people they meant it, a few days later a suicide bomber murdered 13 schoolchildren just across the Afghan border. It is the same sort of strategy that Hamas suicide bombers have used to kill people in Israel, Jews and Muslims alike. Such savage nihilism serves no rational purpose in the world of practical politics. But the men who design doctrine for Hamas and the Taliban, and the many terror cells who follow their lead, are not much interested in the world the rest of us live in.
THE new year dawned with excellent news from Iraq. For the first time since Saddam Hussein created a compound that protected him from the people he oppressed, his Republican Palace is in the hands of representatives of Iraq's citizens. During the terrorist attacks that followed the US occupation of Iraq in 2003 it was the heavily fortified coalition headquarters, but now it is under the control of an Iraqi government that relies on the voters, not soldiers and secret police, for its power. This outcome offers hope that the horror Iraqis have long endured is coming to an end. Just as important, it shows that change is possible in the Middle East, that the cynics who suggest that the US invasion was misplaced idealism at best and more likely an imperialist assault on Islam that was doomed to fail, were wrong.
Whether the people of Iraq will ultimately decide that the blood and treasure spent in pursuit of a democratic state was justified cannot be known now, but this morning there is light at the end of a long tunnel and cause for hope that Iraq could actually become a stable democracy.
The news from Israel is far darker. Israeli air power is hitting Gaza hard, making it clear to the Hamas regime there that Israel will retaliate for every rocket fired across the frontier. And the Israeli army is ready to roll into Gaza to destroy whatever elements of the Hamas command structure and armoury the air force has missed. Like every Israeli exercise in self defence in the last 60 years, this campaign has generated understandable anguish all over the world at the loss of civilian life. Of the 400 or so fatalities in Gaza over the past week the UN estimates 25 per cent were civilians, as ordinary people were caught in a futile fight that Hamas started but has no hope of finishing. The terrorist movement dreams of Israel's end, of a new holocaust where the Jewish state ceases to exist. This is something that Israel will obviously never allow and if Hamas wants to end the suffering of the people of Gaza in the short term it will renew the ceasefire it ended on December 19.
And in the long term it will accept Israel's right to exist as a starting point for negotiations for a permanent peace. And a permanent peace is what is required to end the appalling privations of the 1.4 million people of Gaza, subsisting in what is effectively a 360sq km open prison, where Israel ruthlessly regulates what is allowed in at one end and Egypt does the same at the other.
It does not have to be this way. The people of the West Bank are no friends to Israel but, under the secular Fatah regime that rules there, a peace of sorts exists and while its people are hardly prosperous they are not deprived of medicine and meals because their government is more interested in pointlessly sniping at Israel than in the wellbeing of its people.
It is more than passing strange that Hamas, which was fairly elected in 2006 on a platform of improving living standards in Gaza, is now making things much worse through violence that serves no purpose.
But in addition to anguish, there is international anger at Israel, as its enemies blame it not just for the constant crisis in the Middle East but for the most ominous threat to the peace of the planet - Islamic terrorism.
Theirs is an obvious argument: the existence of the Jewish state has caused the poverty of the Palestinian people. And the way in which nations that Osama bin Laden calls the "crusader states", Britain, Europe, Australia and especially the US, support Israel is part of the plot against Islam that is responsible for the US invasion of Iraq, the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan and opposition to Iran developing nuclear power, and weapons, if it wishes. According to this argument, if the US abandoned its imperialist plan to impose democracy on Islamic nations and if it stopped supporting Israel the world would be at peace. According to opponents of Israel, while the Jewish state exists in its present form and within its existing boundaries, Muslims will rage at the oppression of the Palestinians and they will protest against their treatment by any means they can.
According to this argument, the underlying cause of terror attacks, from September 11 to the murders in Mumbai last November, where the attackers made a point of targeting a Jewish centre, is the existence of Israel, which in its present form puts people everywhere at risk.
It is all dangerous nonsense. There is no doubting the rage of millions of Muslims over the condition of the Palestinians. It is equally assured that anti-Semitism runs deep in much of the Muslim world, just as it was endemic in Europe 70 years ago. But the real reason for Islamic terrorism has less to do with Israel than the fact that around the world small groups of men, and they are almost invariably men, feel powerless in cultures where women have the same rights they do, where people can say and wear what they like and where democracy, not theocracy, is the universally supported form of government.
For all their invocations of the Koran, Islamists who believe in mass murder have no real connection with the honoured Muslim faith as practised by billions of people on all continents. The Muslim people of democracies such as Indonesia and Turkey have no truck with terror and are accordingly a target for Islamic extremists.
Certainly, religious conservatives won the last election in Iran, but only because a council of clerics decides who is allowed to run for office. And the people of Afghanistan, in the October 2004 presidential poll, and Iraq, in the 2005 general election, demonstrated they preferred democracy to dictatorships.
Islamist terrorists see these many millions of Muslims as enemies, just as they hate the Americans and Europeans, the Africans and Australians, the people of every and no faith who they murder whenever they are able. And they will use any explanation they can come up with to excuse the gratification they take in ideologically driven killing.
Osama bin Laden used to explain that US bases in Saudi Arabia were an affront to his faith, but he did not call off al-Qa'ida when the US pulled out of the kingdom.
And, short of every Jew leaving the country, there is nothing Israel, or any other nation can do to placate the Hamas ideologues and their allies.
Last week, the Taliban banned girls attending school in a frontier province of Pakistan. To show people they meant it, a few days later a suicide bomber murdered 13 schoolchildren just across the Afghan border. It is the same sort of strategy that Hamas suicide bombers have used to kill people in Israel, Jews and Muslims alike. Such savage nihilism serves no rational purpose in the world of practical politics. But the men who design doctrine for Hamas and the Taliban, and the many terror cells who follow their lead, are not much interested in the world the rest of us live in.
Source: The Australian
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