Palestinian National Covenant<\/a>\u00a0make clear. You can measure the power of the pretext over the truth by looking at the media\u2019s outraged reaction to Mitt Romney\u2019s statement that Palestinians are \u201ccommitted to the destruction and elimination of Israel\u201d and \u201chave no interest whatsoever in establishing peace.\u201d<\/p>\nOver the years Islamists have similarly ginned up pretexts for violence in order to bully Western governments into serving the jihadists\u2019 long-term goal \u2014 the establishment of a global Islamic super-state founded on Sharia law. The most successful pretext has been the canard that Israel\u2019s treatment of the Palestinians is the cause of Muslim anger and violence against the West, even though more Palestinians have died at the hands of other Arabs than have been killed by Israel in its wars of self-defense and attempts to prevent the terrorist murder of its citizens. Numerous other pretexts are regularly produced by the Islamists, from novels and cartoons to comments by the Pope. In each case, the West has uncritically accepted the pretext, agreeing with the aggrieved Muslims that something or other has \u201cinsulted\u201d their prophet or Islam and that they are justified in their anger.<\/p>\n
The 14-minute video that surfaced on 9\/11 is just the latest example. The Obama administration and its media shills immediately validated the pretext as an explanation for the violence, most recently UN Ambassador Susan Rice, who said that the violence was sparked by \u201ca very hateful, very offensive video that has offended many people around the world.\u201d Yet within hours this assertion was exploded, as evidence piled up that the murder of our ambassador was a carefully planned act of vengeance for the drone killing of a Libyan al-Qaeda leader, and the assaults on our other embassies were planned and executed as a celebration of the 9\/11 attacks. That\u2019s why rioters in Cairo chanted, \u201cWe are all Osama!\u201d<\/p>\n
The larger point of the violence is to demonstrate power and influence over the US and its foreign policy by compelling our government spokesmen to validate the pretext, no matter how preposterous, and admit that Muslims are justly aggrieved by the West\u2019s depredations. And the violence is used to change US behavior, which the most recent attacks and murders seem to have achieved, if the reports of State Department negotiations to release the mastermind of the first World Trade Center bombing, the \u201cBlind Sheikh\u201d Omar Abdel-Rahman, are true. In the end such appeasing behavior confirms the superiority of Islam. After all, even the infidel affirms that Islam, unlike all other faiths, deserves special treatment and deference, and that the sensibilities and feelings of the faithful are more important than the feelings and lives of the infidels routinely insulted, attacked, and murdered by Muslims without a peep of protest from Susan Rice, Hillary Clinton, or Barack Obama. The ensuing apologies, never reciprocated by Muslims, likewise confirm the superiority of Muslims.<\/p>\n
All this anxious obsessing over the feelings of Muslims proves to the jihadists that Islam\u2019s spiritual power trumps the greater material power of the infidel, whose submissive, apologetic behavior and willingness to compromise its own core belief of free speech confirm that Islam is the true faith destined to rule the world. Indeed, the Obama administration has colluded with the Organization of the Islamic Conference to make Sharia blasphemy laws part of international law, thus weakening our First Amendment, merely the latest example of Obama\u2019s groveling \u201coutreach\u201d to the Muslim world. In a long war of morale, such incidents hearten and strengthen the jihadists to continue and intensify the fight against what bin Laden called the \u201cweak horse\u201d whose civilization rests on \u201cfoundations of straw.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Use of Verbal \u201cMind-blockers\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\nRobert Conquest, discussing the imprecise and simplistic use of terms like \u201cimperialism\u201d and \u201ccolonialism,\u201d called these words \u201cmind-blockers and thought-extinguishers,\u201d which serve \u201cmainly to confuse, and of course to replace, the complex and needed process of understanding with the simple and unneeded process of inflammation.\u201d The Palestinians early on became masters of using such terms, casting the creation of Israel and Zionism as a neo-colonialist enterprise meant to maintain and advance Western imperialist designs on the Middle East. Of course, such charges are historically false. The creation of Israel was followed in ensuing decades by the precipitate retreat of the West from its former colonial possessions. Nor did the Western nations in 1948 lift a finger to protect its supposed imperialist client when it was attacked by the whole Arab Middle East. And it bespeaks a brazen shamelessness for adherents of one of history\u2019s most successful imperialist and colonial ideologies, Islam, to complain about the practices rejected by the West.<\/p>\n
But again, these terms are meant to extinguish such thoughts about historical fact. So too with the word \u201cracist,\u201d which has long been a staple of anti-Israel rhetoric. Just recently, Saeb Erekat, an aide to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, responded to Mitt Romney\u2019s comment about Palestinian cultural dysfunction by incoherently saying, \u201cIt is a racist statement.\u201d The most brazen example of this use of mind-blocking terms was the UN resolution designating Zionism a racist ideology.<\/p>\n
The jihadists have adopted all these leftist tropes. Iran\u2019s Ayatollah Khomeini was the master of such rhetoric, using Frantz Fanon\u2019s anti-colonialist Marxist screed\u00a0The Wretched of the Earth<\/em>\u00a0in his sermons and writings. Particularly when speaking to gullible Westerners, modern jihadists skillfully play on Marxist dogma and progressive obsessions. The godfather of modern jihadism, Sayyid Qutb, attacked capitalism \u201cwith its monopolies and usury\u201d and its \u201cmaterialistic attitude which deadens the spirit\u201d with all the fervor of a progressive English professor. Bin Laden laced his missives to Americans with progressive bromides about \u201ccapitalists, the lords of usury, and arms and oil dealers,\u201d and chastised America for securing \u201cthe profit of your greedy companies and industries\u201d and \u201cspilling [American soldiers\u2019] blood to swell the bank accounts of the White House gang and their fellow arms dealers.\u201d All these dead leftist clich\u00e9s can be found not just in the works of rabid leftists like Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky, but in the editorial pages of the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0and the screeds of pundits on MSNBC.<\/p>\nThe jihadists use these left-wing clich\u00e9s in order to exploit an internal weakness of the West: the existence within its civilization of leftists who despise their own culture as the foremost cause of oppression, exploitation, and conflict because of its primal sins of colonialism and imperialism. Such people become natural allies of the jihadists, serving as virtual spokesmen and publicists, eroding from within our morale. Once more, the purpose is to eat away at America\u2019s confidence and persistence in resisting jihadist violence, and to demonstrate once more the superior power of Muslims, who show none of the self-loathing, self-doubt, and fear of their Western progressive apologists.<\/p>\n
Confusing Tactical Differences with Ideological Differences<\/strong><\/p>\nThe Palestinians have been the masters of presenting \u201cmoderates\u201d to the West who say everything the West wants to hear, and who contrast themselves with violent \u201cradicals.\u201d So today we support with billions of our tax-dollars the \u201cmoderate\u201d Palestinian Authority, who tells us that Palestinians want to live \u201cside-by-side in peace\u201d with Israel, and who appears to be the enemy of the terrorist Hamas organization that controls Gaza. But the differences between the PA and Hamas concern tactics. Both want to destroy Israel, but Hamas wants to destroy her now with violence, whereas the PA favors a longer-term destruction by \u201cstages,\u201d in which violence is one of several tactics, like participating in \u201cnegotiations\u201d and \u201csummits\u201d and \u201croadmaps\u201d that keep the flow of Western money coming. Of course, these two factions will slaughter and torture each other with gusto, but that doesn\u2019t mean the PA isn\u2019t our enemy or doesn\u2019t want to destroy Israel.<\/p>\n
The same anointing of jihadists as \u201cmoderates\u201d because they use more subtle duplicity in attacking the West has been evident in our dealings with the Islamist regimes we laughably anointed as budding democracies. Most recently, the jihadist Muslim Brothers were brought to power with America\u2019s help because they were deemed \u201cmoderates\u201d who would hold the more radical Salafists in check. But considering the billions in aid the Brothers stand to gain if they make a pretense of moderation, such deception shouldn\u2019t surprise us. Nor should we be cheered by analysts who tell us that the recent riots are really about internal power struggles or other more practical motives. Like the hostility between Sunni and Shia, such internecine hatred doesn\u2019t lessen one bit the larger, religiously inspired aim to destroy the West and exalt Islam to its rightful global glory and influence. Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood president Mohammed Morsi\u2019s recent pilgrimage to Tehran to hobnob with the genocidal anti-Semite Mahmoud Ahmadinejad should remind us that we are still the Great Satan whose overthrow every pious Muslim should be fighting for.<\/p>\n
The Islamists\u2019 success at turning Israel into an international pariah responsible for all the region\u2019s ills has provided the playbook for the jihadists\u2019 struggle to control the behavior of Western governments to promote jihadist interests, and to demonstrate the power of a superior Islam over a spiritually corrupt infidel civilization. The fight to destroy Israel has been the jihadists\u2019 training for the larger fight to destroy the West.<\/p>\n
\n
\u00a92012 Bruce S. Thornton<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
by Bruce Thronton Frontpage Magazine The most depressing thing about the Obama administration\u2019s foreign policy debacle unfolding in the Middle East is that for sixty years we\u2019ve repeatedly experienced the same Islamist game plan for defeating us that is being employed today. There is no tactic currently being used by the Muslim Brothers and other […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[152,22],"tags":[1051,12,91,1055,231,1061,1043,1046,110,1016,58],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-78","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1327,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/newt-challenges-the-myth-of-palestinian-nationalism\/","url_meta":{"origin":442,"position":0},"title":"Newt Challenges the Myth of Palestinian Nationalism","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 15, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton FrontPage Magazine Newt Gingrich touched off a mini-firestorm when he told a Jewish television channel that the Palestinians are an \u201cinvented\u201d people \u201cwho are in fact Arabs,\u201d and \u201cwho were historically part of the Arab community.\u201d This simple statement of historical fact was of course met\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Palestine"","block_context":{"text":"Palestine","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/palestine\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3357,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/memo-to-the-general-free-speech-doesnt-kill-people-jihadists-kill-people\/","url_meta":{"origin":442,"position":1},"title":"Memo to the General: Free Speech Doesn’t Kill People, Jihadists Kill People","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 10, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton Advancing a Free Society Citizen control of the military is one of the most important foundations of political freedom. Rather than an instrument of a powerful autocrat or king, the army in a republic serves the collective interests, security, and policies of the state as determined\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2004,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/yet-another-reason-to-leave-the-un\/","url_meta":{"origin":442,"position":2},"title":"Yet Another Reason to Leave the UN","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 30, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton FrontPage Magazine No one familiar with the sordid history of the United Nations should be surprised at the moral idiocy recently on display in Turtle Bay, when the General Assembly cheered Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas\u2019 demand for statehood despite offering Israel nothing in return. Yet those\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8734,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-middle-east-and-orwellian-historical-arguments\/","url_meta":{"origin":442,"position":3},"title":"The Middle East and Orwellian Historical Arguments","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 21, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"When lies are the foundation of policies. by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/ FrontPage Magazine Many of our policy debates and conflicts both domestic and foreign call on history to validate their positions. At home, crimes from the past like slavery and legal segregation are used to justify present policies ranging\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Israel"","block_context":{"text":"Israel","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/israel\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Photo via www.breitbart.com","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/john-kerry-deep-thoughts-ap-500x375.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":978,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/harvard-promotes-the-palestinians-slow-motion-final-solution\/","url_meta":{"origin":442,"position":4},"title":"Harvard Promotes the Palestinians’ Slow-Motion ‘Final Solution’","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 12, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton FrontPage Media There is no idea so hateful or useless that some university somewhere won\u2019t hold a conference on it. The latest example of this unfortunate truism is the recently announced \u201cIsrael\/Palestine and the One-State Conference\u201d scheduled for early March at the Harvard Kennedy School. Nineteen\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Israel"","block_context":{"text":"Israel","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/israel\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":390,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-stakes-in-tonights-foreign-policy-debate\/","url_meta":{"origin":442,"position":5},"title":"The Stakes in Tonight’s Foreign Policy Debate","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 22, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce Thornton FrontPage Magazine Foreign policy, the topic of tonight\u2019s debate, was suddenly thrust into the voters\u2019 consciousness by the murder of 4 Americans, including our ambassador, in Benghazi on the anniversary of 9\/11. Intensifying the fallout of this event has been the Obama administration\u2019s incoherent, clumsy, duplicitous, and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Libya"","block_context":{"text":"Libya","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/libya\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/442"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=442"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/442\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":443,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/442\/revisions\/443"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=442"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=442"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=442"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}