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Shimshon Ben-Yosef has nothing to lose because his life will mean nothing if his nation and his people are lost.
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By Shimshon Ben-Yosef
August 30, 2006
A couple days after September 11, 2001, in the fury and fear that followed that terrible event, someone in these pages penned a piece that caused great anger and outrage even by the elevated standards of those angry and outraged days.
"Time to Face Mecca" proposed that the United States should make it clear to its enemies in the Muslim world that the next time a terrorist should contemplate carrying out an attack on an American city or national symbol, he should know with a certainty that the result of his act will be the utter destruction of Islam's most holy sites.
I disagree with his prescription. It doesn't go nearly far enough.
Even if the principle were applicable to the United States and al-Qaeda then, it would hardly suffice now to solve Israel's current predicament, with the looming multivalent threat of thousands of weapons of mass destruction from Syria, Iran, Pakistan and other enemies.
Israel is a nation about 40 miles wide, even including all of its Biblical heartland. A third of its population lives in the Tel Aviv area, another third around Jerusalem. Tel Aviv is the center of our economic life, Jerusalem is the center of our collective soul: our history, our traditions, our meaning as a people.
One nuclear weapon over Israel's center could cripple if not destroy our country, murder millions, repeat the Holocaust in an instant. Two would be overkill.
When our enemies say they want to wipe us off the map, they mean it. When they say the Holocaust was a myth, they want to make another myth. They want us all very dead and gone. Back to the friendly confines of Germany, as Ahmadinejad suggested to the doddering Mike Wallace.
While I imagine that the Iranian and Lebanese and Syrian and Palestinian leaders who say these things do not intend to sacrifice their own lives, and the lives of their family members for the eradication of the Zionist entity, there no doubt are millions of Muslim faithful who would see it as their highest calling to become martyrs for the sake of ending the humiliation to Islamic manhood that is Israel.
The Jewish State by its very existence is an insult to Muslim masculinity and proof of the inferiority of the Muhammad-myth. Indeed, the ability of the Jews to withstand the vastly larger oil-fueled Arab nations, and now the Persian one as well, is proof that the Muslim deity is inferior and false. Allah bows down before the Lord of the Jews, just as Hagar and Ishmael were cast out into the desert, unwanted and discarded, by father Abraham. Vibrant, successful, ethical and freedom-loving Israel is proof that Ishmael is culturally castrated and spiritually corrupt.
So there can be no doubt that if the Muslims should ever get the bomb, they will do anything and everything to try to assert their till-now impotent pseudo-manhood (expressable now only by murdering women who assert their independence and by turning non-Muslims into dhimmis) by launching a missile in our direction and, they hope, maybe getting lucky.
Israel, with its own defective and mediocre leaders, with our self-destructive and idiotic policies of withdrawal and surrender, has done much, incomprehensibly, to emasculate its own deterrence. We have invited the threat into our heartland. We have spread our national legs for these infections. We have allowed the threat to breed and multiply in our midst.
And now we will need to pay the price. But if our enemies contemplate killing us, they must know they will pay much, much more.
Defense analysts agree that the next war will likely involve unconventional weapons. For the weak of heart, that euphemism means that our enemies will attack us with chemical, biological and, if they possess them, nuclear bombs, designed to kill hundreds of thousands if not millions at once and in the sickening hours and days that follow.
Our only choice is to hit them first, to hit them so hard that they will not be able to realize their murderous aims.
It is brinksmanship in its most terrible manifestation, more terrible than anything humanity has ever faced.
But if the Jewish State is faced with genocide and annihilation, our enemies -- or even "neutrals" who allow it to reach that point -- have no remaining right to survive.
Like it or not, that's how we think. That's how we feel. We won't let Israel go down, allow our families to be slaughtered again, without taking the whole evil world with us.
The story of Samson says it straight. We may have made mistakes up and down the block. We may have let ourselves be seduced. We may have squandered our assets and let ourselves to dragged by our shorthairs into danger. We may be led by the vain pride of preening idiot politicians which our foolish people somehow found fit to elect.
But chain us, blind us, and prepare us for mass death and you can bet your little red button that we're going to bring down the whole temple down with us.
And that's why the best use of Israel's presumed arsenal of nukes should be pointed not so much at the population centers of our enemies but at their symbolic centers.
Yes, Mecca. And Medina. Najaf and Qum. Mount Arafat and Baalbek. And, not to be neglected: Al-Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock on Jerusalem's Temple Mount.
The Muslim world must be convinced absolutely that even the most feeble attempt to fire even one weapon of mass destruction at the state of Israel will mean the instant eradication of every site where Muhammed, his disciples, and the various mullahs and imams throughout the twisted history of Islam every set down their feet and their foreheads in prayer and supplication. They will never pray there again without glowing.
They must know of a certainty that any attempted act of genocide against the Jewish people will turn their religious legacy and pilgrimage routes into a radioactive wasteland that will bear witness before history to their utter corruption of civilization and just reward for the threat their "martyrs" have imposed on the freedom- and peace-seeking world.
Islamic fascists may be fanatical, but they are not fools. They calculated risk carefully, mathematically, like bankers or insurance brokers, as Nasrallah confessed this week. Before any attempt to wipe Israel off the map, they should understand that there is a 100% certainty that doing so will mean that Israel will erase the holy sites of Islam from history. When turning to face Mecca, Muslims will face a heap of radioactive rubble. When making the pilgrimage to Qum, when conditions permit a thousand years hence, they will supplicate on glowing earth through layers of lead-lined protective gear. And they will know that Jerusalem's golden and silver domes will be rubble, the holy mount soon to be reclaimed and restored by her rightful owner.
To be fair, the same principle should apply to those non-Muslim nations who aid and abet those who seek the eradication of Israel. The message should be communicated, gently but clearly, that we will not allow the lesson of Vichy and Mussolini and Pope John and Stalin to be repeated in our time without using every resource in our possession to encourage collaboration- and appeasement-oriented regimes to think twice before serving as silent and encouraging accomplices to the mass murder of the Jewish nation. If that means that the Vatican or the Louvre or the Kremlin are incinerated, then so be it. So much the better reason for them to stop aiding and funding our would-be exterminators.
Let them think the Jews are mad, and irresponsible, that we will do anything to live. We will.
Never Again. We meant it. We mean it.
Talk is cheap. Life is dear. Death may be loved by Muslim martyrs but the prospective instant incineration of all their sacred spots for trying to take away our one small plot on this earth, our homeland and our heritage, the nation of our forefathers and our foremothers, the places where we and our families live and love, may yet give our many enemies, and their appeasers, pause before trying yet again to murder us.
And that pause would be a very good thing for everybody.
May G-d protect us from the evil that surrounds us and means us harm.
I bet He will. I bet on Israel.
Views expressed by the author do not
necessarily reflect those of israelinsider.
 
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