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Jack Engelhard is the author of the international bestseller "Indecent Proposal" and is a former radio and newspaper editor covering the Mideast and former American volunteer in the Israeli Defense Forces. His columns can be read online at . Jack can be reached at:
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By Jack Engelhard
July 11, 2003
"A View of the Absurd" op-ed column published with permission of ComteQ Communications.
Suppose 1,300 Israelis had been slain in one day? Wouldn't that be war? Instead, that same amount of murder has been spread out over some two years.
So what do we have? Merely a "situation."
Two years, one day, what's the difference? That's still 1,300 Israelis dead.
In the event of such wholesale catastrophe within a 24 hour period, there'd be wailing, outrage, a summons to gather all tanks, ships and planes to destroy the enemy from land, sea and air. The nation would be mobilized, even the world would nod its affirmation as Israel recovers and retaliates to save its homeland.
Think back to October 6, 1973, when Egypt and Syria came calling. Israel rose up as one soldier. Or think December 7, 1941, when Japan came calling.
Both were "dates which will live in infamy," FDR, and in neither case was there dithering.
What we have here, instead, are slight infamies -- yes, like being slightly pregnant.
For this enemy is clever. He goes retail. Virtually every day more killings, five on Monday, eight on Tuesday... a wedding here, a bar mitzvah there... a kibbutz here, a moshav there... a bus... a restaurant... a man, a woman... a child... all that but never enough to awaken and startle the Israeli populace.
As another conflict once had it: "acceptable losses."
President Bush himself has gotten sucked into the same wobbly thinking. Back on May 1, on the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, Bush said it's over in Iraq. Hmmm. What about our American troops being picked off two at a time day after day? Bush is still declaring victory and American boys are still being shot dead -- more than 50 at the time of this writing.
Indeed, watching it on TV you double-take as to where the scenes are coming from, Iraq or Israel, for in both cases the enemy's tactics are the same. Ambush. We have the enemy sneaking up from behind, sneaking in as a friend, and we even have women performing the task of suicide bombers. Is it Israel? Iraq? Take your pick.
Can the leaders of Israel and America be so deluded? Yes.
Do you remember the movie "Marathon Man" and that famous line from the Nazi dentist: "Is it safe?"
Yes, it's safe says Bush and yes it's safe says Israel's Chief of General Staff, Lt. General Moshe Yaalon, who publicly decided, for the living and the dead, that the Intifada is over. Just like Bush. So what if a few Israelis and a few Americans get killed every day? It's not like there's, heaven forbid, a war going on. What war? We won, didn't we?
How would it be, however, if those 50-plus Americans had all been killed in one day, one firefight?
Still safe? Still no war?
Here's a news alert: both our countries are at war, and with the same enemy! Contrary to philosopher Francis Fukuyama, who announced the end of history, and in defiance of the leadership here in America and in Israel, there is a very big war going on and it's coming from radical Islam, whose ambitions are global domination.
Yes Virginia, the Koran has arrived and it has come to devour the Bible!
Don't take my word for it, for even such newspapers as the New York Times admit that Saudi Arabia is energetically exporting (extremist) Wahhabi Islam across the globe, even to a mosque near you. Or consider France's leading intellectual, Bernard-Henri Levy, who visited Pakistan to research a book on slain Wall Street reporter Daniel Pearl.
Ordinarily a leftist, Levy returned stunned by the depth and ferocity of radical Islam. Here's what he reported to Le Figaro:
"Radical Islam is as much to be feared as the Communist and fascist totalitarianisms of yesterday."
I agree and disagree.
Communism, for all its Stalinist ruthlessness, will end up being dumped as a footnote, and as for fascism -- even the Nazis did not raise up an entire generation to the cult of self-sacrifice. Who knows what's coming next from over the Islamic horizon...?
The end of history? No, it's only the beginning -- and is it safe? No, it is not safe.
Views expressed by the author do not
necessarily reflect those of israelinsider.
 
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