The first
dangerously violent protests in the Muslim world that have been
directed against Denmark and other EU nations in the current cartoon
crisis were in the Palestinian territories. Those attacks have
grown more serious in the past few days.
It is not
surprising that ground zero for these violent attacks against
European institutions was not in Saudi Arabia or Iran (Islam’s
most fundamentalist states) nor in Pakistan (the nation on the
receiving end of the strictest Wahhabist teachings financed by
the Saudis), but in Gaza and the West Bank. The violence then
spread to Israel’s neighbors Lebanon and Syria.
It is in
the Palestinian territories that the protests have a focused purpose:
shaking down the EU (and to a lesser extent the United States)
to continue funding the Palestinian Authority and work with it
to pressure Israel, despite the election victory of Hamas.
Appeasers
like Jimmy Carter are encouraging Western nations to continue
the money flow to prop up the bankrupt PA, in exchange for some
mushy statements from Hamas. Carter and his acolytes in the Guardian,
other Western papers, and Middle Eastern think tanks, are pushing
Hamas to signal its new more moderate intentions, now that is
has governing responsibility. An acceptable phraseology might
be to agree to wipe out Israel over a number of years, rather
than immediately.
This will
be their new roadmap.
1) An Israeli
surrender of all territories captured in the 67 war.
2) A right
of return for Palestinian refugees and their three generations
of descendants.
This is all
that Hamas will demand (in the short run).
These same
two points, of course, are what Arafat demanded as the endpoint
of Oslo (in his staged approach towards obliteration of Israel).
Since much of the world adored Arafat, it can learn to adore Hamas
(which is even more efficient at street cleaning). This acceptance
of the new “moderate Hamas” will work as long as they
agree to the same earlier lie: that this formulation means acceptance
by the Palestinians of a two state solution and an end to the
conflict.
Israel
breaks
Regrettably,
Israel’s new caretaker government has been the first one
to break on the money issue, with Ehud Olmert signaling that he
will transfer to the PA certain tax revenues that the Israelis
have collected. In the recent past, the Israelis agreed to transfer
these revenues to the PA, because of the Roadmap Quartet group’s
confidence in the Palestinian Finance Minister, Salam Fayad, one
of the rare uncorrupted members of the PA governing establishment
(the Quartet consists of the US, the EU, Russia and the UN). But
Fayad resigned his post, bemoaning the waste and corruption in
the PA , and then ran and lost in the recent elections. Those
who claim that the Hamas win was a vote for efficiency and clean
government (and not wiping out Israel) might try to explain why
having a 76th Hamas legislator instead of one Fayad accomplishes
that.
If Israel
wanted to play hardball with Hamas on the tax transfer issue,
it could do so. (Of course we do not know what kind of pressure
may have already been applied to Olmert by Israel’s “friends”
on this point.) Undoubtedly, some Western nations might have found
a way to distinguish between the tax revenue issue and new funding
from Western nations, and might have communicated that to Israel.
This is known
as kicking the can down the field, and delaying having to make
a tough decision yourself.
In any case
Olmert chose to play
hardball with some West Bank settlers this week. Exactly what
message the Prime Minister is trying to convey with these two
actions is unclear. The apologists for Palestinian terror have
always claimed that the suicide bombing attacks were brought about
by the occupation. That is the party line of the editorial page
of the New York Times, Israel hater Pat Buchanan, and
the Palestinians and their hard left allies. These are strange
bedfellows if you consider their positions on other issues, but
they are all part of the huge club that always agrees that Israel
is to blame, and Zionism is the problem.
With a more
than 20% lead in the polls, Olmert might have been expected to
move right in the interregnum before the Israeli election. Instead,
with the money transfer he has signaled that maybe he can work
with the new PA, even one run by Hamas, a terrorist Muslim Brotherhood
offshoot committed to Israel’s destruction. And he seems
to be sending a message that he believes that Israel’s settlers
are the immediate problem that needs to be dealt with in the territories.
Exactly why
an Israeli prime minister would think a massive show of force
against Israelis was required in a period when Iran is
moving ahead with its nuclear bomb program, and Hamas is now next
door ready to create an Iranian style regime on Israel’s
border, is baffling. The misplaced priorities rival those of many
American Jews who seem to care more about protecting abortion
rights, than ensuring Israel’s survival.
But for Palestinians,
there is good reason to believe that the European nations will
back down and find a way to keep the money coming. After all,
many of these nations have allowed radical Islamists into their
countries, including imams who preach the need to destroy their
new nations if they will not accept sharia (Islamic) law, and
who tell their congregants that the political laws of these nations
can have no hold on Muslims. For the Europeans, the threat of
Hamas to Israel is a more distant problem than their own internal
cancers, assuming of course that they are recognized.
But in the
meantime, to the extent a connection is made between Palestinian
anger over the Danish cartoons and threats to Europeans, a solution
is obvious: do not provoke the Palestinians any further by cutting
off aid.
It seems
far more than coincidental that the Danish cartoon controversy
was heated to full boil by Muslim provocateurs (including Danish
Muslims who created and circulated additional and significantly
more inflammatory cartoons to stoke up the Muslim world’s
reaction) in the week after the Hamas election, and just before
the IAEA was considering recommending that the Security Council
examine Iran’s nuclear program.
In other
words, at a point when the Europeans seemed ready to sanction
both Iran and the Palestinians, a new issue diverted their eyes
with the cartoon riots- self preservation.
While Danish
products have been removed from many store shelves in Middle East
and other Muslim countries, there seems to have been a run on
one Danish product: their national flag. After all, you need to
have one in order to burn it.
It seems
strange
that all these flags were ready for this crisis to get hot, as
several keen observers have noted. Who sells Danish flags in the
Arab world, after all? I would have never thought that they would
be so readily available. Were the flags manufactured in advance
for the ritual burning ceremonies this week?
The strange
plethora of Danish flags also may be evidence of something more
than coincidence in the timing of this new crisis. Much like after
the 9/11 attacks, the flag burnings and demonstrations in the
Palestinian territories seemed as much an act of celebration,
as defiance (street theatre for the world media). Manufacturing
the flags in order to burn them, is not that different from the
worldview of one newly elected member of the Palestinian legislature,
a Hamas woman, who has already given up three of her six sons
to terrorist acts, and wants to give up the other three to the
cause of destroying Israel.
In this case,
you have to produce the weapons (I mean children), before “using”
them.
There is
plenty to digest in all of these events – the Iranian nuclear
program, the Hamas victory, the Muslim anger suddenly ratcheted
up by the four month old cartoons. My own view is that those who
argued that we only needed to capture bin Laden, and beat al Qaeda,
and then this Islamic extremism problem would go away, were deluded.
So were those who argued that that this was a problem of a few
rogue states, and that most Muslims were basically fine with the
West and Western civilization.
If we are
in the early stages of a war of civilizations, and on one side
are many of the world’s 1.4 billion or so Muslims, then
the actions by the West, the besieged party, in the early phases
of this clash, will count for something in determining the future
progression of the conflict. Many in the West have continually
separated the Israeli Palestinian conflict from the war against
terrorism and terror supporting nations. One would have hoped
that might have changed after the Hamas election victory, and
the group’s very transparent message about its goals, reiterated
quite clearly in astonishing op eds in the Los
Angeles Times and Washington
Post this week (maybe bin Laden and al Zarqawi will explain
to American readers their world views next week in these papers).
But that may be too much to hope for.
There is
nothing cartoonish in any of this.
Richard
Baehr is the chief political correspondent of The
American Thinker.
