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Michael Anbar , PhD, is a professor in the School of Medicine at the University of Buffalo. Formerly a professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, he is the author of , published by iUniverse.
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By Michael Anbar
December 17, 2003
Osama bin Laden and his Wahabist ilk have been aiming to destroy Western civilization by attacking its paramount symbols - starting with American embassies and warships and escalating to the 9/11 murderous assaults. It is well known that the September 11, 2001 demolition of the Twin Towers, the attack on the Pentagon and the forestalled attack on the White House or the Capitol were well planned Islamistic assaults on major national symbols of the United States and the Western world. The prime objective of these atrocities was not to kill as many Americans as possible but to demoralize the U.S. public by bringing down its symbols of global business, defense and democratic government.
The last two years have shown that American spirit has not been broken. Its resolve, under the leadership of President Bush, has absorbed the losses and prevented additional Islamist assaults on targets inside the USA. However, the war with Islamism is far from over as we witness in Iraq and elsewhere. Judging from Arab current behavior elsewhere, the strategy of the Islamists may change from targeting American symbols to attempts to demoralize the American public by indiscriminate terrorism.
The PLO follows a similar Islamist policy as Al Qaida. Very much like Bin Laden and the Iranian Ayatollahs, Yasser Arafat openly calls for a Jihad against Israel and the West, a holy war that nominally obligates all Muslims worldwide to kill infidels, Jews in particular. Like Bin Laden, Arafat recruits, trains and arms terrorists who must be ready to die to further Islamic political and religious objectives. Moreover, Arafat is training a whole generation of hundreds of thousands young zealots brainwashed to sacrifice their lives for "the Islamic cause." The PLO and its associated Hammas and Islamic Jihad are now in a strategic alliance with Al Qaida to target Jews worldwide.
Symbolic Jewish targets of Al Qaida and its sympathizers are Jewish synagogues, cemeteries, schools and community centers. These have been violently attacked in Tunisia, Turkey, Morocco, France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and the UK, among other countries. In Morocco and in certain European countries also individual Jews have been physically assaulted and some were murdered by Muslim zealots who were incited by Islamistic clergy. The situation in France has become so dangerous that Jews have been urged to remove personal ethnic or religious tokens that might reveal their Jewish identity.
In Israel, the PLO has used both Islamistic strategies. On one hand, in order to demoralize the Jewish public, they have been trying to murder indiscriminately as many Jews as possible -- in cafes, restaurants, public transportation, shopping malls and supermarkets. Jewish schools and school buses have been targeted specifically, to inflict enhanced psychological trauma. At the same time Arafat and his associates also assault Jewish symbolic targets such as Jews celebrating the Passover Seder, or Jewish worshippers walking to or from synagogue. Moreover, they desecrate Jewish holy places, such as the Tomb of Joseph in Nablus, and declare them as mosques - which symbolizes the irreversibility of their misdeed. During the 1948-1967 Jordanian occupation, all Jewish synagogues in the Old city of Jerusalem were desecrated to symbolize to Muslim masses the supremacy of Islam over Judaism.
However, the symbolic grand prize coveted by the Arabs is the ancient Temple Mount in Jerusalem, which has been claimed to be an exclusive Islamic holy place. While Arafat has repeatedly declared that the First and Second Jewish Temples never existed - being in his words "a Zionist myth," his people have been busy destroying with bulldozers archeological remains of these very temples, mimicking the destruction of the Buddhist statutes in Bamiyan by the Taliban Islamists in Afghanistan. The Afghani and Palestinian Islamists follow the old Islamic tradition of destroying temples and relics of other religions, replacing them with Islamic religious symbols, generally, mosques. They did this centuries ago to hundreds of Hindu and Buddhist temples in the Indian subcontinent; they did this to the grand Hagia Sophia church in Constantinople and to tens of ancient Eastern Orthodox churches in Kosovo; yes, in Kosovo. Actually, Muslims religiously emulate Mohammad's celebrated conversion of the pagan Kaaba in Mecca into the center of Islamic worship.
It is noteworthy that the American "peace" demonstrators who call for a boycott of the Caterpillar Company, the known bulldozer manufacturer, because its equipment is being used by the IDF, never said a word against Arabs bulldozing the veritable evidence for the physical foundations of Judaism and Christianity. Those "peace activists" seem not to consider that humongous Islamic crime against humanity worthy of protest, unlike the destruction of readily replaceable Arab contemporary residential buildings used by Arab terrorists.
True, all this is just symbolic. But so are the White House, the Capitol and the Pentagon in Washington, and so were the Twin Towers in New York City. The Temple Mount has been the central symbol of Judaism for three thousand years, not less than the Vatican for Catholics or Mecca for Muslims. In order to disseminate Judaism and symbolically "prove" the theological supremacy of Islam over Judaism and Christianity, the Muslims must destroy any tribute of the Temples in Jerusalem and replace them by Islamic shrines that must be under exclusive Islamic rule.
This is why the absolute jurisdiction over the Temple Mount has been a major stumbling block in the 2000 Camp David talks with the Arabs. In other words, while Osama Bin Laden has tried to destroy the symbols of American culture, Yasser Arafat has been trying to control and destroy the principal symbol of the Judeo-Christian tradition on which Western culture is based. Surprisingly, while the U.S. is trying to hunt down and eliminate Osama Bin Laden and his Al Qaida, the American Administration is preventing Israel from doing the same to Arafat and the PLO.
Given the Islamic fourteen-hundred-year-old tradition, if Islamists controlled the old city of Jerusalem and ever became politically and militarily secure (having Iranian or Libyan Islamistic atomic bombs) it is not far fetched to expect that the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem will be converted into a mosque; the same might be the fate of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. There is no reason that these and other ancient churches, most of which predate Islam, should be spared the fate of the ancient Jewish Temple or of the Hagia Sophia church. These conversions would be prime symbols of Islamic religious supremacy.
A current example of Palestinian Islamistic policy to assault Christian symbols has been the attempt to erect a new mosque in the front-yard of the Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth; an Israeli court eventually prohibited this.
Why then have the Geneva "Accord" and the Ayalon - Nusseibeh "plan" (which have been praised by Secretary of State Powell), conceded sovereignty over the Temple Mount to the Muslims? Did not the Jewish proponents of those plans realize the disastrous implication of their suggested concessions for the future of both Judaism and Christianity? They must have realized that giving up the rights of the Jewish people to the Temple Mount implies justification of the Arab claim that the ancient Jewish Temple in Jerusalem is "a Zionist myth." This would violate both the Old and New Testaments and destroy a basic tenet in traditional Judaism. For the Arabs, these "peace loving" Jews are "useful idiots," using Lenin's classical descriptor of such people.
However, this should not be surprising because those Jewish peace proponents are secular Marxist-socialist extremists who consider religion the "opium of the masses," so they have been happy to give up this paramount ancient Jewish and Christian religious symbol and relegate it to oblivion. Actually, in their ultra-left secular zeal they believe that they are doing the right thing as "progressive" Universalists. They have not realized that by doing this they would excise the heart of Judaism and pull out the rug from under Western civilization to which they themselves belong!
What is harder to understand is the position of Colin Powell. Although he is not a Christian fundamentalist, he must realize the social value of religion and its symbols in Western culture. He might have thought that if the Jewish advocates of those "peace plans" agreed to those far-reaching symbolic concessions, why should he worry about them? This has been a most unfortunate oversight. What he should have recognized in those "accords" is that they imply a symbolic cultural suicide of Judaism and eventually of Christianity as well. Also President Clinton failed to recognize the religious-political importance of the sovereignty over the Temple Mount when he tried in vain to come up with some cute "creative" ideas of splitting that sovereignty between Arabs and Jews.
Conceding the Temple Mount in Jerusalem to Islam in perpetuity would be a tremendous victory of Islam over the West, emboldening Islamism to subjugate the rest of the world. Failing to recognize such an ominous threat to a major symbol of Western civilization, which is at least as important as the symbolic targets of the 9/11 atrocities, is a cardinal blunder.
Views expressed by the author do not
necessarily reflect those of israelinsider.
 
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