January 03, 2009
ISRAEL’S continued demolition of the terrorist Hamas government of Gaza has highlighted the impotence of the United Nations.
In a small bonus, call it collateral damage, it has also flushed out some members of the Fifth Column in Australia’s Muslim community who are dedicated to the destruction of Western culture. The politics of war in the Middle East are often too muddied for all but the cognoscenti to follow, but the current situation is as clear as gin, which may be why there remain a few in the alcophobic Islamic world who attempt to deny the realities.
Since 2001, Hamas and its allies launched more than 6400 rockets, mortar bombs and other missiles at Israel. Not at specific military targets, not at strategic targets ... just at the nation.
Fortunately, there were few casualties because the Israeli Government was able to give its citizens a warning system that gave the 250,000 people in the most exposed areas exactly 15 seconds to take shelter.
Since mid-2008 a truce was nominally in effect, but Hamas chose to stockpile smuggled weapons through a series of tunnels from Egypt into Gaza. Israel sought to extend the truce when it expired last month but Hamas rejected the offer, firing some 80 rockets a day into Israel between December 24 and December 27.
Obviously Hamas’s leaders were unfamiliar with Stanley Holloway’s cautionary tale about Albert and the lion, in which young Albert Ramsbotham pokes his ``stick with an ‘orse’s ‘ead ‘andle’’ into the ear of Wallace the lion in the Blackpool Zoo, and is eaten for his troubles.
Perhaps Sheik Dr Nizar Rayan, one of the most prominent leaders of Hamas in Gaza who was killed in the first air strike in the Gaza Strip _ should have been reading Holloway’s instructional rhymes to the son he encouraged to become a suicide bomber, rather than applauding his decision to obliterate himself and two Israeli citizens.
The missiles that killed Rayan also killed nine other people, including one or two of his wives (the reports are conflicting) and three children.
Hamas said that a further 25 people were wounded when it issued a call for ``mass rallies of wrath’’.
Its call coincided with a rally in Lakemba, the centre of Sydney’s Muslim ghetto, by the familiar figure of the Islamic Friendship Association of Australia’s Keysar Trad, the faithful apologist for that old beneficiary of Labor politics, Sheik Taj al-Din al-Hilali, to protest the retaliatory attacks against the Hamas leadership.
No record can be found of any rallies conducted by these prayerful representatives of Australia’s Islamic friends in protest at Hamas’s prolonged rocket campaign against Israeli civilians. It should also be noted that the Israelis took the trouble to phone Rayan, who was an advocate of the strict Wahhabist line of Islamist extremism, and warn his family to evacuate their home because it was to be attacked.
Trusting in their underground shelter to protect them, they remained. Secondary explosions indicated that their shelter was used to store arms and ammunition. One need not feel distressed by Rayan’s demise. He repeatedly urged young people generally and young women in particular to enlist as suicide bombers.
Two days before he was killed, he delivered a sermon at a Gaza mosque calling on Muslims everywhere to pray for Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, saying: ``We do not need money or weapons, we only need your prayers. We can handle the enemy ourselves.’’
Rayan was fiercely opposed to the moderate Palestinian Authority and to the notion of a secular Gaza. Last year, in an interview with the Palestinian al-Ayyam newspaper, he promised to turn the headquarters ofthe National Security Forcein Gaza into a huge mosque and to deliver sermons from the presidential headquarters.
As the moderates were defeated by the Hamas terrorists, he boasted: ``In a few hours, the secular era in Gaza will end without leaving a trace ... today heresy ends. Today the struggle is between Islam and the infidels, and it will end with the victory of the faith. [Once victorious], Hamas will open its arms to the members of the security forces, so that they will return to the faith, [for] Islam is generous with infidels [who repent]. We hold the truth and they [represent] falsehood ... how can we not fight against those who desecrate the sanctity of Allah, execute clerics and sell out the Palestinian cause _ those who blasphemed in houses of worship, burned mosques, Korans and [Islamic] education facilities and executed jihad fighters? We will hold dialogue with these [people] only through the barrels of our guns.’’
Today, even most of the so-called Arab street is tired of Rayan’s chosen form of dialogue.
And as Iran’s income from oil declines and it cuts back its sponsorship of Hamas and other terror groups, militants like the late Rayan will now find themselves further isolated.
In the clash of cultures, those who offer little more than death (and a promise of martyrdom) to followers, will find their currency doesn’t hold its value against the hope of prosperous, fruitful lives.
Little wonder that free, democratic and genuinely progressive Israel’s mere existence poses such a threat to its regressive, repressive Islamic neighbours.
ISRAEL’S continued demolition of the terrorist Hamas government of Gaza has highlighted the impotence of the United Nations.
In a small bonus, call it collateral damage, it has also flushed out some members of the Fifth Column in Australia’s Muslim community who are dedicated to the destruction of Western culture. The politics of war in the Middle East are often too muddied for all but the cognoscenti to follow, but the current situation is as clear as gin, which may be why there remain a few in the alcophobic Islamic world who attempt to deny the realities.
Since 2001, Hamas and its allies launched more than 6400 rockets, mortar bombs and other missiles at Israel. Not at specific military targets, not at strategic targets ... just at the nation.
Fortunately, there were few casualties because the Israeli Government was able to give its citizens a warning system that gave the 250,000 people in the most exposed areas exactly 15 seconds to take shelter.
Since mid-2008 a truce was nominally in effect, but Hamas chose to stockpile smuggled weapons through a series of tunnels from Egypt into Gaza. Israel sought to extend the truce when it expired last month but Hamas rejected the offer, firing some 80 rockets a day into Israel between December 24 and December 27.
Obviously Hamas’s leaders were unfamiliar with Stanley Holloway’s cautionary tale about Albert and the lion, in which young Albert Ramsbotham pokes his ``stick with an ‘orse’s ‘ead ‘andle’’ into the ear of Wallace the lion in the Blackpool Zoo, and is eaten for his troubles.
Perhaps Sheik Dr Nizar Rayan, one of the most prominent leaders of Hamas in Gaza who was killed in the first air strike in the Gaza Strip _ should have been reading Holloway’s instructional rhymes to the son he encouraged to become a suicide bomber, rather than applauding his decision to obliterate himself and two Israeli citizens.
The missiles that killed Rayan also killed nine other people, including one or two of his wives (the reports are conflicting) and three children.
Hamas said that a further 25 people were wounded when it issued a call for ``mass rallies of wrath’’.
Its call coincided with a rally in Lakemba, the centre of Sydney’s Muslim ghetto, by the familiar figure of the Islamic Friendship Association of Australia’s Keysar Trad, the faithful apologist for that old beneficiary of Labor politics, Sheik Taj al-Din al-Hilali, to protest the retaliatory attacks against the Hamas leadership.
No record can be found of any rallies conducted by these prayerful representatives of Australia’s Islamic friends in protest at Hamas’s prolonged rocket campaign against Israeli civilians. It should also be noted that the Israelis took the trouble to phone Rayan, who was an advocate of the strict Wahhabist line of Islamist extremism, and warn his family to evacuate their home because it was to be attacked.
Trusting in their underground shelter to protect them, they remained. Secondary explosions indicated that their shelter was used to store arms and ammunition. One need not feel distressed by Rayan’s demise. He repeatedly urged young people generally and young women in particular to enlist as suicide bombers.
Two days before he was killed, he delivered a sermon at a Gaza mosque calling on Muslims everywhere to pray for Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, saying: ``We do not need money or weapons, we only need your prayers. We can handle the enemy ourselves.’’
Rayan was fiercely opposed to the moderate Palestinian Authority and to the notion of a secular Gaza. Last year, in an interview with the Palestinian al-Ayyam newspaper, he promised to turn the headquarters ofthe National Security Forcein Gaza into a huge mosque and to deliver sermons from the presidential headquarters.
As the moderates were defeated by the Hamas terrorists, he boasted: ``In a few hours, the secular era in Gaza will end without leaving a trace ... today heresy ends. Today the struggle is between Islam and the infidels, and it will end with the victory of the faith. [Once victorious], Hamas will open its arms to the members of the security forces, so that they will return to the faith, [for] Islam is generous with infidels [who repent]. We hold the truth and they [represent] falsehood ... how can we not fight against those who desecrate the sanctity of Allah, execute clerics and sell out the Palestinian cause _ those who blasphemed in houses of worship, burned mosques, Korans and [Islamic] education facilities and executed jihad fighters? We will hold dialogue with these [people] only through the barrels of our guns.’’
Today, even most of the so-called Arab street is tired of Rayan’s chosen form of dialogue.
And as Iran’s income from oil declines and it cuts back its sponsorship of Hamas and other terror groups, militants like the late Rayan will now find themselves further isolated.
In the clash of cultures, those who offer little more than death (and a promise of martyrdom) to followers, will find their currency doesn’t hold its value against the hope of prosperous, fruitful lives.
Little wonder that free, democratic and genuinely progressive Israel’s mere existence poses such a threat to its regressive, repressive Islamic neighbours.
Source: The Daily Telegraph
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