By Edward B. Driscoll Jr.
Iran is on the verge of nuclear weapons capability. ISIS in Iraq, and Syria is gaining ground and terrorizing the West. Hamas and Hezbollah are fomenting hatred of Jews. And nations like Qatar and Saudi Arabia fund radical Islam even as they foster alliances with the United States.
This is the tumultuous Middle East.
“It’s been that way for thousands of years,” Bill Whittle said in PJTV’s new four-part discussion on the future of the region. “And, unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be getting any better.”
Whittle moderated the panel, which featured Yaron Brook, a former Israeli intelligence officer who is now executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute, and PJTV contributors Tammy Bruce and Andrew Klavan. They explored everything from the influence of radical Islam to the significance of refugees in the oil-rich nations of the Middle East.
The first episode focused on the existence of Israel as a nation and whether that is the region’s bane or its blessing.
View excerpt below:
[jwplayer y4eccFQN]
Whittle described Israel as “a small outpost of Western civilization in the Middle East,” but he noted the country is constantly demonized when compared with enemies that have less firepower.
“Automatically the guy with the rock is the winner; the guy with the tank is the bad guy,” Whittle said.
That perception leads Israel to pursue counterproductive negotiations with barbaric groups like Hamas.
“Any time you compromise with evil, you lose. You can’t negotiate with people committed to killing you,” Brook said. “The only alternative is to destroy them.”
Bruce bemoaned the fact that U.S. policy effectively limits Israel’s response to attacks against it, and that in turn makes the war against radical Islam seem unwinnable.
“I think the World War II generation would scoff at that because you can [win],” she said. “But you have to be willing to wipe out the enemy.”
In the second episode, the panelists ominously pondered the future of Israel if Iran develops just one nuclear weapon. Klavan praised Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to the United Nations last fall, which compared militant Islam with Nazi Germany.
“He drew a very true and excellent picture that sticks in the public’s mind,” Klavan said.
While he voiced optimism that U.S. policy in the Middle East will change for the better once President Obama leaves office, the other panelists emphasized that the militants will still be in Iran – and they are irrational even when compared with dictators in North Korea and Russia.
“North Koreans are atheists,” Brook said. “They don’t want to die. … The mullahs in Iran don’t care about death. Indeed, they [believe they] get rewarded if they get to die.”
Bruce added: “There is the belief of the 12th imam, which can only arise from the ashes. And in order to have the 12th imam, there has to be ashes.”
The third part of the roundtable weighed the claim that radical Islam does not accurately represent the religion as a whole. The panelists debated whether the Quran, the creed behind the religion, is to blame for radicalism or whether its followers have perverted the text.
Whittle called the Quran “a conquest manual,” while Brook cited radical Islam as an example of “unconstrained religion.”
“It’s not useful to wage war on Islam. It’s too big,” Brook said, adding that the focus should be on the mullahs in Iran and Saudi Arabia, along with groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood.
Bruce said “the tumor of the problem” is the strict Wahhabi movement within Islam, which has roots in Saudi Arabia and funds mosques in the United States.
“That has radicalized that whole area, and it’s brought out the worst elements within Islam,” she said.
The panel concluded the series with a discussion of the two Middle Easts – the Westernized wealthy nations and the terrorist-promoting areas that are riddled with refugee camps – and how they are connected.
“Rich Islam needs poor Islam,” Bruce said. “They need this dynamic of people who are desperate, then to be controlled by religion.”
Brook noted that the perception of economic freedom in countries such as Qatar and the United Arab Emirates is a façade built by the oil money of kings and sheiks. He said they can take it away any time because there’s no fundamental rule of law or concept of individual rights.
Klavan is concerned that the rich nations have found a way to create prosperity without freedom, undermining the sentimental Western belief that the two are intertwined.
“Freedom is a good in and of itself,” he said. “That is the thing that we are not selling to people.”
The four-part PJTV series “The Future of the Middle East” is available at the PJ Store.
