Play it again, Uncle Sam

In the middle of an ongoing Palestinian uprising, a radical Arab Muslim leader launches a self-proclaimed jihad holy war that threatens the stability of the entire world. His opening act, carried out by well-trained forces under his direct command, is so violent and audacious that it completely shocks and stuns the international community – including Western security services caught napping on the job.

After regaining his composure, President George Bush immediately begins an attempt to put together a worldwide coalition to fight against the charismatic Arab leader and his holy-war supporters. Meanwhile, Israel is told to sit quietly and absorb a series of attacks upon her civilian citizens in Tel Aviv and elsewhere, lest nervous Muslim members of the shaky coalition jump ship.

If you guessed that I am writing about Saddam’s surprise invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, and its aftermath, you are dead on the money. Yet this description also clearly applies to the dramatic story that began unfolding the morning of Sept. 11, except that the George Bush in question has a different middle name.

Why is this sorry chapter of history seemingly repeating itself 10 years later? More importantly, will we never learn from our past mistakes?

Many terrorism experts suspect that the current crisis, sparked off by Saudi-born militant Osama bin Laden, is more than just d?j? vu. Substantial evidence points to Saddam’s guiding hand and generous purse behind the September terrorist attacks and the subsequent anthrax assaults, even if Western leaders choose to ignore or play it down lest they upset their Muslim coalition partners. (What these supposed partners are actually contributing is a mystery to me, apart from Pakistan, Turkey and the former Soviet “-stans” located north of Afghanistan.)

Widely reported government suspicions that it might be U.S. citizens – read white Anglo-Saxons – who actually mailed the deadly anthrax letters do not necessarily exonerate the Iraqi leader. American security officials have known for ages that Iraqi and other Mideast-based terror networks have developed close associations with various U.S. white-supremacist groups, as they have in Europe. After all, both share a perceived common enemy they call ZOG – the “Zionist Occupation Government” – that has supposedly ruled Washington in one form or another for many years.

When neo-nazis take over America – as many white supremacists are fully convinced they will do in a coming end-of-days race war – they will subdue the Arabs as well. Meanwhile, why not spend flowing petrol dollars in the common campaign to weaken and eventually wipe out the ZOG?

Sit still, Israel!

As an American journalist living in Israel since 1980, I am most concerned by the repeat historical performance in my neck of the sprawling Mideast desert.

Israeli newspapers reported this week that the current Bush administration is deeply upset with perceived indifference in Jerusalem to American fears that Israeli actions might upset the anti-terror coalition. The president and his top aides were said to be “furious” that Israeli troops were sent into several Palestinian-ruled towns in the wake of the assassination of Israel’s tourism minister on Oct. 17. Israeli leaders should have minimized their reaction in order to help keep the anti-terror coalition boat afloat.

However, 2001 is not 1991, in some very important ways.

When Saddam launched his Scud missiles at this tiny country, which is about the size of New Jersey, Israeli leaders knew that the U.S.-led coalition would deal with him (although no one here dreamed that the wretched Butcher of Baghdad would be left sitting on his dictatorial throne when the dust of Desert Storm finally settled down). This time around, only Israel, itself, is prepared to stop Islamic Jihad and Hamas terrorists from carrying out further outrageous assaults like the June 1 Tel Aviv massacre of 21 people – mostly teenage girls – or the Aug. 9 slaughter of 15 pizza-parlor patrons in the heart of Jerusalem.

Democratically elected Israeli leaders would be negligent in the extreme if they sat on their hands as Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists, along with those belonging to the Damascus-based Popular Front PLO group, plotted to carry out additional deadly assaults. George W. and Tony Blair are not going to fight this battle on Israel’s behalf. Therefore, to expect Israel to act with the same level of restraint that it did during the Gulf War a decade ago is way off the mark.

Israeli leaders did not send their armed forces into Yasser Arafat’s zones of control to spite America or wreck the anti-terror coalition. They have been pleading with the aging Palestinian leader to arrest over 100 known terrorist activists since the start of the violent “Al-Aksa intifada” over one year ago. They have tried to remind him time and again that he pledged to round up such militants as part of the Oslo peace accord of 1993. Under pressure from Germany and other Western nations, Arafat finally promised to apprehend the wanted militants when a CIA-mediated ceasefire pact was arrived at following the insidious Tel Aviv attack.

Apparently fearing for his life if he really went after the known extremists in his camp, the PLO chief failed once again to act – providing fresh evidence that his 1994 Nobel Peace Prize was premature, to say the least.

The audacious assassination of an Israeli cabinet minister in a Jerusalem hotel naturally produced a strong response from the Sharon government. Surely this would also be the case in Washington or London if a government leader were similarly slain by a group professing its intention to wipe out the country that the murdered minister represented.

The bottom line is this: Israel cannot just sit quietly and absorb further terrorist blows simply to please her powerful Uncle Sam, however much she likes him and seeks his protection in a region featuring Islamic extremists and other anti-Semites.

Nervous officials in Washington must keep in mind that Israel did not seek this war. America did not send an engraved invitation to Osama and his jihad-crazed minions to come and crush the One World Trade Center (the destroyed complex’s official full name, by the way). Neither did Israel ask the Palestinians to launch a new wave of violence the previous September so that bored Israeli soldiers could visit shops and homes in Bethlehem and Jericho once again.

Former Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered Arafat a final peace settlement in July 2000, that was considered overly generous by most Israelis. Of course, the Palestinian leader wanted more, including complete sovereignty over Jerusalem’s walled Old City (Barak offered partial control). More than that, Arafat insisted on the “right” of some three million Palestinian refugees to “return” to family homes inside Israel, even though most were born elsewhere after their parents or grandparents fled or were forced out in the midst of the Arab-initiated 1948 war. Such a “suicidal concession” would effectively destroy Israel, argued Barak, sensibly suggesting instead that the refugees move to the Palestinian state to be created as part of the final peace accord.

Speaking of historical repeats, it was actually the fourth time that Israel tried to arrive at a final peace settlement with her stubborn Arab cousins. The first attempt came in the days when the fledgling Jewish state was reappearing on the world stage after a 2,000-year absence. David Ben Gurion and other officials accepted the U.N. Partition Plan, which would have created an independent Palestinian state next door to Israel in 1948. Most regional Arab leaders rejected it – due mainly to the strong influence of Islam’s doctrine that Muslims are destined to rule over Jews (and Christians), and not the other way around.

Israeli leaders tried again to make peace in the immediate aftermath of the 1967 war, offering a full withdrawal from captured lands if neighboring Arab countries would formally end their war of annihilation. The same offer was implied in the Camp David treaty with Egypt in 1978, although Prime Minister Menachem Begin denied it for political reasons. It was more clearly stated in Barak’s final peace proposal at the same secluded Maryland retreat last year, although Israel would remain in small portions of Judea and Samaria and deed Arafat an equal amount of land elsewhere.

As I’ve written several times in recent weeks, American and British pressure on Israel to be quiet in the face of ongoing terror attacks only invites more of the same. Popular Front leaders knew that Ariel Sharon would face enormous Western resistance if he tried to strike back at the group’s Damascus headquarters under the present circumstances. So they felt free to gun down a sitting cabinet minister, thinking the Israeli leader would only mildly respond. And even if he did strike back with might, this would also suit the radical Palestinian groups and their Lebanese Hezbollah Muslim allies, since it could ignite a regional war and deal a final blow to the hated Oslo peace process.

By sending his troops into Arafat’s towns to hunt down his cabinet colleague’s assassins, Sharon demonstrated quite clearly that he is not inclined to play by the terrorists’ evil rules of engagement. Washington should not expect him to. Indeed, it is the height of hypocrisy for Western leaders to go after Osama bin Laden and his Taliban buddies while demanding that beleaguered Israel coddle terrorist enemies who openly declare they will not hammer their swords into plowshares until the detested Jewish State is no more.