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Barry Shaw made Aliyah from England in the 1970s, is manager of Netanya Real Estate, and founder of the Netanya Terror Victims Fund. He is the author of "The View from Here" series of commentaries from Israel.
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By Barry Shaw
August 7, 2005
The terrorists have declared war against us and no liberal cantations of harmony and peace will stop them. It's time to turn on the light and see them for who they are before it's too late.
Since my early days in Israel I had always voted Labor. I had lived on various kibbutzim, a working expression of true socialism. I had been ardent in supporting the Oslo Accords, that brought Yasser Arafat and his cohorts back into our region, in the vain glorious hope that it would speed a two-state solution and peace to the region. I supported any move that would bring peace and harmony to the Middle East. I, like the vast majority of Israelis, was prepared to make the deep land cuts and painful concessions with a proven terrorist like Arafat, in the name of putting an end to his terror and turning him into a statesman with a country of his own, alongside the shrinking Jewish state.
Why then did I change my rhetoric? Why then do I talk like some right wing radical? Why did this left-wing liberal become a right-wing neocon? Actually, I didn't. I still, deep inside, retain a glimmering hope of a two-state solution as the only possible solution to the conflict.
As someone a lot smarter than me once said, "Anyone under the age of thirty who is not a socialist does not have a heart. Anyone over the age of thirty who is a socialist doesn't have a head!"
I removed my rose-tinted glasses about the time of the horrendous suicide bombing at the Dolphinarium disco on the Tel Aviv beachfront when yet another Palestinian killed twenty two teenagers gathered for a night of fun.
Once again I read the reporting in the Western press and saw the coverage on the English-speaking foreign media. Once again, I heard the words that those who sent the bomber were really the victims and we, the dead and injured, were the reason for this ghastly act.
I began to question, and to study, the driving forces behind this growing phenomenon of passionate hatred and murder against us.
It became very clear to me that the core of this whirlwind of gate and mayhem had nothing at all to do with Israeli policy or actions. Protests against occupation, roadblocks, Israeli (or coalition) military action, smudge the reality and truth behind the deadly attacks. It is said, and it is true, that Arafat never had any intention of creating a Palestinian state alongside the major democratic and Western-developed Israel. That would simply relegate him to the position of a minor head of an inconsequential rump of a state.
Instead, Arafat saw himself as a modern day Saladin, and as such he was encouraged and supported by the surrounding Arab and Muslim countries. His inciteful cries were always couched in Islamic terms. Jihad, martyrdom, glorious deaths in the name of Allah, were
commonplace exhortations. It was no accident that his last four year reign of terror was aptly named the Al-Aqsa Intifada; Al Aqsa being the holy Moslem shrine in the heart of Jerusalem.
The wave of Palestinian terror washed over my town of Netanya with the massacre of Jews celebrating Passover, followed by further suicide attacks. We had already experienced shootings and car bombings that had killed many of our citizens and seriously injured many more. This is now all too sadly familiar to people worldwide, even to the blissfully innocent of London.
My statistics show that not one Palestinian suicide bomber was Christian, or non-Muslim. I found that strange. If the desire to kill Jews in Israel was based our actions, or the unanswered desires and oppression of Palestinians, or Arabs anywhere, why weren't non-Muslim joining this killing spree? The answer is that the situation in the Middle East, Afghanistan, Iraq, or anywhere, is NOT the reason behind the homicide attacks, the car bombings, the beheadings. The real and only reason is deep-seated within Islam.
It is the same drive that makes a Palestinian walk into Netanya's Park Hotel and blow up a room full of worshippers, or cuts of the heads off Daniel Pearl, Kenneth Bigley, Nick Berg, and countless, headless, others. It is the same drive that makes people fly passenger planes into buildings, or plant bombs in underground trains or on buses. It is the same desire that makes people blow up vacationers in Sharm el-Sheikh, Bali, Istanbul, and their God knows where in the future.
It is time to stop hiding from the light. We are at war. They are at war against us. Believe me when I say, no liberal cantations of harmony and peace is going to stop them. Wake up. Identify your enemy before it is too late.
The bombers are just the tip of the Islamic iceberg. There is a rumbling undercurrent of resentment and ambition that is the worldwide driving force of Islam. The shining face may smilingly try to persuade you that theirs is the one true religion of tolerance and truth, but their brand of tolerance and truth is no different from the tolerance and truth expressed by Nazism seventy years ago.
It is the tolerance that imposed a fatwa on Salman Rushdie. It is the tolerance that killed Theo Van Gogh in Holland for exposing Islam's brutal oppression of women. It is the tolerance that preaches anti-Semitism and death to the Jews and infidels.
It is time to shine a light on those who protest suicide bombings in one part of the world yet support it in another.
We had Arafat arming, exhorting, inciting, supporting the terror groups of Islamic Jihad and Hamas, then condemning their inhuman crimes, but claiming victimhood. But then, how many times have the people of Britain heard the sob of victimhood by Muslims who have not been harmed or attacked? Yet, it was their co-religionists who are carrying out their heinous acts on an innocent public in London. The condemnation of the London attacks from the Muslim Council of Britain rang as false to me as the crocodile tears of Arafat every time that Jews were killed in Israel.
You are at war. Your enemy are those who carry out the terror attacks, those who train them and send them, those who incite them, those who excuse their actions where ever and whenever they occur, those who advocate or defend their actions, those who hide the real cause of their actions by raising false demons (Israel, Bush, Blair, etc.). They are all on the other side in this war.
Your enemies are not only an external foe. They are ingrained in your society. They are in leading positions of power and influence. They are people, if truth be told, who should be accused of treason for aiding and abetting your enemy.
You may cherish vital liberal democratic values but your enemies have been trampling on these values to overpower you.
Your enemies are the jihadists. Your enemies are those wishing to impose Sharia Law in your country. Your enemies are those using the democratic values of your town or country in order to change your norms to their will. You enemies are the very politicians and institutional leaders who are changing the laws and regulations to carry a Marxist-Islamic platform.
There are those that hide the truth. There are those who innocently or malevolently side with the enemy. We in Israel currently see the alignment of many heads of Christian churches with radical Islam. They couch their words and actions in high moral tones, but they support the Jew killers and do not allow the Jew to make his case in places like Scotland.
What is badly needed today is clarity, and the courage to express the truth. This is singularly lacking for fear of upsetting the enemy.
Until Muslims clearly and unequivocally renounce ALL acts of terror and killings in the name of Islam, until they clearly state that a peaceful resolution of the Middle East dispute can only be solved with a peaceful state of Palestine living alongside the Jewish state of Israel, until they declare that they have no desire to impose Sharia Law on their host country and will expose those who wish to do so, until this happy day, you are at war with them.
As I write, we in Israel are making one-sided painful steps. The forceful removal of thousands of our citizens from their homes looks to many of us as a futile act that will bring no peace and no resolve with an enemy desirous of our eradication.
We in Israel have, at least, stopped hiding from the light. The painful light of day may often hurt the eyes. But it is essential to open your eyes to the truth, however painful that may be.
Views expressed by the author do not
necessarily reflect those of israelinsider.
 
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