Satan then said:
How do I overcome
This besieged one?
He has courage
And talent,
And implements of war
And resourcefulness.
Only this I shall do,
I'll dull his mind
And cause him to forget
The justice of his cause
Then Satan Said, By Natan Alterman

The besiegers fully understand that through extreme stress they can get the delusion to set in. 
 They realise that eventually the appeasers amongst the populace will rise to
 the forefront and try to convince the people that if they just give the barbarians at their gates
 what they want then they'll go away.  History shows us that people under siege
will eventually start saying and doing crazy stuff to make it go away.  History also clearly
shows that appeasing people hellbent on your destruction never produces a favorable outcome...
  
 As the flames of hope burn down to a flicker, the mind plays tricks and starts seeing shadows
 of hope which aren't there.  The beleaguered mind clings to any solution no matter how small,
no matter how absurd, no matter how likely to fail, no matter how dangerous the outcome, just so
 that the siege will end and 'they' will go away.

Mahdi Al-Dajjal comment in FrontPage Magazine on The Abu Mazen Fantasy

 

People Will Hang on To Illusion as Eagerly as to Life Itself
Ben Hecht

“It is always a losing battle, this trying to out shout authority.
Those who have been in one are left with the conviction
 that it is easier to waken the dead than the living.
But what a hopeless world it would be without this record of lost battles.”
Ben Hecht

All must be made to know that the result of choosing fantasy over reality
 is the murder of thousands of real people. 
Speech of Carolyn Glick upon Receiving Ben Hecht Award, 12/11/05

Sometimes an Ugly Truth is No Match For a Beautiful Lie
Kevin Carter in
How Faculty Radicals Made Me a Paleo-Conservative 

Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful
 and murder respectable, and to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind.
George Orwell

Hallucinating moderation in a ruthless enemy is like hallucinating an
oasis in a desert: you end up choking to death on sand
?

The course of history in recent years suggests that the ultimate victims may be those who delude themselves
Marjorie Housepian Dobkin's final sentence in her book, The Smyrna Affair 

The struggle of man against power, is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
The Czech writer, Milan Kundera,

Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder
The historian Arnold Toynbee

What wrath of gods, or wicked influence
Of tears, conspiring wretched men t' afflict,
Hath pour'd on earth this noyous pestilence
That mortal minds doth inwardly infect
With love of blindness and of ignorance?
Spenser's Tears of the Muses

How many times must a man turn his head,
and pretend that he just doesn't see?"
Bob Dylan, Blowin in the Wind

Men occasionally stumble over the truth,
but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing happened.
Winston Churchill

Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions,
which move with him like flies on a summer day.
Bertrand Russell, Skeptical Essays p28, 1938

We hanker after instant solutions, dismiss bitter truths and prefer the sweet comfort of delusion.
Sarah Honig, Another Tack: Horse Sense or Horse Trade, Jpost 11/17/2006

Whom the Gods Would Destroy
They First Make Mad
Euripides

"When falls on man the anger of the gods, first from his mind they banish understanding."

Lycurgus

 

"When divine power plans evil for a man, it first injures his mind."

Sophocles

  

"Whom God wishes to destroy he first makes mad."

Seneca

The ultimate tragedy of the fool
is the inability  to recognize
the continuance of one’s own folly.
Proust

Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I am not sure about the universe
Albert Einstein

You better look at facts because facts are looking at you.
?

 

Introduction

I Delusion or Error

IB Are Suicide Bombers Delusional?

II Resistance to Evidence

III Sealing Delusion with Paranoia

IV Turning against Those who Reject Delusion

IVa Creation of Delusion so that One Can do What One Wants

IVb Delusions of Grandeur and Control

V The Appeasement Delusion

VA Creation of Delusion to Prevent War

VB Creating the Delusion of Moral Relativism to Avoid War

VI Creating Delusion to Avoid Facing Uncomfortable Realities

VIa Creation of Delusion to Avoid Responsibility

VIb Creation of Delusion To Avoid Blame

Vic Creation of Delusion To Blame

VII Holding On To Beliefs Despite Contrary Evidence

VIII Arab Denial and Deception

IX Historical Examples of Delusion

X Reasons People Cling to Delusions

XI Creation of Delusions to Explain Delusions

XIA Creation of Delusion as Self Defense

XIA2 Creation of Delusion to Discredit Opposition

XIB Creation of Delusion to Conquer

XII Creation of Delusions to Justify Conquest

XIIb Creation of Delusion to Prevent Competitors From Gaining Power

XIIC Creation of Delusion to Obtain Relief

XIID Creation of Delusion Because of Fear

XIII Creation of Delusions to Bring Peace

XIIIb Creation of Delusion Because of Desire For Peace

XIIIb2 Creation of Delusion to Avoid Conflict

XIIIB2b Creation of Delusion to Help the Oppressed

XIIIb3 Creation of Delusion to Prevent Discrimination

XIIIb4 Creation of Delusion to Prevent Punishment

XIIIb5 Creation of Delusion to Protect Secrets

XIIIc Creation of Delusion to Stay in Power

XIIId Creation of Delusion to Prevent Hate

XIIId2 Creation of Delusion Because of Hate

XIIIe Creation of Delusion Because of Fear

XIV Whitewashing

XIVa Creating Delusions of Peaceful Intentions To Weaken the Enemy

XIVB The People are People Delusion

XV How Moderate Are the Moslems?

XVI The Good Terrorist Bad Terrorist Delusion

XVII Misidentifying the Enemy

XVIIb Creation of Delusion To Cover Up Guilt

XVIIc Creation of Delusion to Not Feel Guilty

XVIII Creation of Delusion to Create a Better World

XVIIIB Creation of Delusion to Make Money

XVIIIC Changing History

XIX The Consequences of Delusion

Introduction: 

     This web page mostly deals with non-paranoid delusions.  Another web page on this site deals with paranoid delusions.  The opposite of a paranoid delusions is choosing to believe that there is no threat when there is one.  There can be pathological situations where delusion of one group is in a vicious cycle with paranoia with another group.  An example of this is shown in the cycle diagram below.

   Paranoia/Delusion Cycle

 

   This is a living web page about creating delusion.  By living web page I mean it is not a finished product and I periodically add items I come across that are relevant.  For this reason it is not written as well as an article would be.   I have written an article about this subject called Creation of Delusion which was published by the International Bulletin of Political Psychology and which I encourage the reader to read before reading this web page.  Creation of Delusion can consist of simply attempting to silence those who wish to tell the truth, and so examples of this are given on this web page.  Much of this web page is devoted to delusion in American Foreign Policy.  Much of this delusion exists in regard to the Middle East so this web page includes many examples from the Middle East.   Delusional aspects of the Islamic world regarding the Middle East are discussed in on the paranoia web page of this web site.

I Delusion or Error

    Is delusion a fair way to describe the erroneous beliefs of people who otherwise function normally in society?  Can the beliefs of normally functioning people accurately be described as madness or simply as diversity of opinion.  My article Creation of Delusion discusses the answer to this question.  Writers about politics sometimes describe what they perceive to be madness among otherwise sane people.   Ariel Natan Pasko in an article titled The Peace Madness Syndrome in Israel Again (freeman center broadcast 2/16/05), wrote:

The "peace at any price" bug has returned to Israel. .. Once
infected, messianic hallucinations of "peace" begin to confound the victim's
moral compass, leading to confusion, lack of moral clarity, and a
suicidal death wish for the "Peace of the Grave." It also weakens the
patient's resistance to falsehood, distorting the infected person's ability
to distinguish right from wrong, good from bad, and enemy from brother.
This moral-AIDS disease is sweeping through Israel again, on a scale
not seen since the "peace drug" induced false euphoria of the Oslo days.

We know what that led to, death and destruction.

IB Are Suicide Bombers Delusional?

A recent Los Angeles Times investigative report (7/31/2002) by Benedict Carey, surveying psychologists worldwide who have studied terrorists, concludes that the notion that suicide bombers are deranged fanatics is obvious myth.  “The evidence is the opposite,” he states.  “They tend to be free of obvious mental illness. Many are competent, successful, even loving and loved.” Clark McCauley, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania who studies terrorism states “ Suicide terrorists are anything but isolated. Often, they have connected with others deeply, and it's this affiliation that helps prepare them to take their own lives.   It's the group that's abnormal and extreme. The individual terrorist is psychologically as normal as you or I.”

II Resistance to Evidence

   In my article Creation of Delusion I discuss the Anointed and their resistance to evidence.  When actions fail instead of concluding that the reasoning behind the actions is flawed they conclude that not enough has been done.  Steve Plaut wrote a parody called The Disengagement of the Wisest Men of Chelm, in which he shows this kind of reasoning being used. 

    After the Gaza disengagement terrorism increased.  Instead of concluding that the disengagement was a mistake Meretz party leader Yossi Beilin concluded that it wasn't enough (Fendel, H., Funerals of Three Young Terror Victims, Israel National News, 10/17/05).  After three young people were shot at a hitchhiking post in Gush Etzion following the Gaza withdrawal Israel enacted temporary security measures.  Yossi Beilin then said:

 "Hamas is now rubbing its hands in glee, as these tough new measures are exactly what it wanted. We have said all along that if the diplomatic process does not continue in Judea and Samaria, the disengagement from Gaza will have been [a waste]."

Beilin instead of coming to the  realization that disengagement leads to terror concludes that more disengagement is necessary.
 

   After Hamas won the PA elections, it should have become clear to anyone that the Palestinians support violence against Israel, yet the the Los Angeles Times opined (2/2006),

"Most Palestinians, like most Israelis, want peace."

    Columnist Uzi Benziman, (Ha'aretz 9/30/01) wrote about how Shimon Peres of Israel resists evidence as follows:

He [Peres] has been suspected of being primarily concerned with saving his honor, and the honor of the Nobel Peace Prize he received; and this is the light in which his actions should be understood...   The decisive fact is that the IDF, and Military Intelligence in particular, correctly predicted the developments in the Palestinian Authority and its intentions, and then translated its diagnosis into a reasonable operational language. This fact is lost on the initiator of the Oslo idea: he repeatedly argues that process that began in September 1993 is threatening to drown not because of an inherent flaw, but due to the mistakes made in its implementation - particularly during the periods of the Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak governments...

   There are those who argue that Ariel Sharon when he embraced the policies advocated by Peres became delusional as well as one of the anointed in his thinking.  Shmuel Katz in an article titled Sharon, the 'ex-messiah' (Jerusalem Post 12/9/04) wrote:

Having embraced the beliefs of the Labor Party and the wishful thinking on which they are based, he treats those who have remained faithful to the ideas they had in common with him as though they were ignorant peasants.

These pygmies dare to defy the suddenly great all-knowing, all-seeing panjandrum. At best, they are treated as rebels, and he talks of taking revenge. But even the people whose hurt he is now planning – the Gush Katif victims of his "painful concessions" – are subjected to his scorn.

See how swiftly, in his recent speeches, he has assimilated even the semantics of the Left (and of the Arabs, and the international opponents of Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria). He now talks of "occupation" – which is a lie by any reading of the Fourth Geneva Convention on which (mendaciously or ignorantly) the term is based.

And now he has accused the people whom he personally helped to settle in Judea and Samaria and Gaza of being Messianic. If they are Messianic, what then must he himself be? An ex-messiah?

    Although generous financial aid to the Palestinians has not made them less violent, after Arafat's death Nigel Roberts, the World Bank’s director for the West Bank and Gaza, said to donors, “Maybe your $1 billion a year hasn’t produced much, but we think there’s a case for doing even more in the next three or four years.”

Daniel Pipes writes ($1 Billion for Palestinian Terror, frontpagemagazine 12/21/04):

Roberts is saying, in effect: Yes, your money enabled Arafat’s corruption, jihad ideology, and suicide factories, but those are yesterday’s problems; now, let’s hope the new leadership uses donations for better purposes. Please lavish more funds on it to enhance its prestige and power, then hope for the best.

This la-la-land thinking ignores two wee problems. One concerns the Palestinians’ widespread intent to destroy Israel, as shown by the outpouring of grief for arch-terrorist Arafat at his funeral, the consistent results of opinion research, and the steady supply of would-be jihadists. The Palestinians’ discovery of their inner moderation, to put it mildly, has yet to commence.

The other problem is blaming the past decade’s violence and tyranny exclusively on Arafat, and erroneously assuming that, now freed of him, the Palestinians are eager to reform. Mahmoud Abbas, the new leader, has indeed called for ending terrorism against Israel, but he did so for transparently tactical reasons (it is the wrong thing to do now), not for strategic reasons (it is permanently to be given up), much less for moral ones (it is inherently evil)...

To give additional money to the Palestinians now, ahead of their undergoing a change of heart and accepting the permanent existence of the Jewish state of Israel, is a terrible mistake, one that numbingly replicates the errors of the 1990s’ Oslo diplomacy. Prematurely rewarding the Palestinians will again delay the timetable of conciliation.

As I have argued for years, money, arms, diplomacy, and recognition for the Palestinians should follow on their having accepted Israel. One sign that this will have happened: when Jews living in Hebron (on the West Bank) need no more security than Arabs living in Nazareth (within Israel).

    One reason for resisting evidence that one is wrong is if one's career or prestige is threatened if one admits one was wrong.  Daniel Pipes in an article titled Business as Usual in the Palestinian Authority (frontpagemag.com 5/17/05) wrote: 

It is hard to argue with Caroline Glick’s conclusion that the Sharon government and the Bush administration were both “horribly wrong” in betting on Abbas. And yet, neither of them concedes this error because, having stressed Abbas’s good intentions, both now find themselves deeply invested in the success of his political career.

 

III Sealing Delusion with Paranoia

   In order to hold on to delusions one needs to find ways to discount contradictory evidence and those who disagree with one's convictions.  If one views those who disagree as evil then all their evidence can be construed as false evidence created for devious motives.  Thomas Sowell in his book The Vision of the Anointed : Self-Congratulation As a Basis for Social Policy describes the paranoia of the anointed. 

The contemporary anointed and those who follow them make much of their "compassion" for the less fortunate, their "concern" for the environment, and their being "anti-war" for example--as if these were characteristics which distinguish them from people with opposite views on public policy.  The very idea that such an opponent of the prevailing vision as Milton Friedman, for example, has just as much compassion for the poor and the disadvantaged, that he is just as much appalled by pollution, or as horrified by the sufferings and slaughter imposed by war on millions of innocent men, women, and children--such an idea would be a very discordant note in the vision of the anointed.   If such an idea were fully accepted, this would mean that opposing arguments on social policy were arguments about methods, probabilities, and empirical evidence--with compassion, caring, and the like being common features on both sides, thus cancelling out and disappearing from the debate.  That clearly is not the vision of the annointed.  

  Why do the annointed develop this paranoid mentality?   Perhaps they are defending their self esteem against those who would expose that they are wrong with opposing arguments.  Perhaps they also are holding on to beliefs they want to believe in this way.

IV Turning against Those who Reject Delusion

   One of the ugly sides of delusional thinking is that those who embrace delusions may turn against those who reject them.  This was mentioned by Sowell who talked about demonization of the opposition by the deluded.  This has been the case for both Islam and Christianity in regard to non-believers throughout history.

IVa Creation of Delusion so that One Can do What One Wants

Jamie Glazov started a Frontpage Magazine symposium, The Radical Lies of Aids (6/3/05) with the following introduction:

Back in the early 1980s, when the AIDS epidemic was just starting to break out in the three gay communities (San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York), David Horowitz was one of the few individuals who stood up and publicly opposed gay leaders' efforts to subvert the public health system and conceal the nature of the epidemic. Specifically, in the name of "gay liberation," gay leaders denied that sexually transmitted AIDS was almost exclusively caused by promiscuous anal sex, refused to close sexual "bathhouses" which were the breeding grounds of AIDS, opposed testing and contact tracing which were the traditional and proven public health methods for containing epidemics, and promoted the false idea that AIDS was an "equal opportunity virus" when in fact it was a virus threatening very specific communities -- gays and intravenous drug users. For speaking truth to gay power, he was widely condemned by radical activists who demonized him and caricatured his warnings as, among other things, homophobic prejudice. As Horowitz has written in these pages, the success of the gay radicals resulted in a ballooning epidemic that has killed some 300,000 Americans, the majority of them young gay men. The AIDS catastrophe, as he wrote in “A Radical Holocaust,” a chapter in The Politics of Bad Faith, is “a metaphor for all the catastrophes that utopians have created.”

   Why did the AIDs activists do this?  One reason is they wanted to have sexual bathhouses.  Another is that they wanted heterosexuals to be motivated to fight AIDS and thought that if it was considered a gay disease, heterosexuals would not make as much as an effort to eradicate it.  Also gays did not want to be seen as the spreaders of disease.

    Worldnetdaily posted an article about Lesbian gang rapes of girls and how homosexual groups attempt to keep this information from the public.  The following is an excerpt from Payback for exposé on 'dyke' gang rapes 7/9/07:

 

"The Eyewitness News Everywhere" report in Memphis documented incidents of gangs known as GTOs, or "Gays" Taking Over, attacking schoolgirls…  On the Memphis report, Deputy Beverly Cobb of the Shelby County Gang Unit said lesbian gang members "will sodomize [with sex toys] and will force [young schoolgirls] to do all sexual acts. They are forcing themselves on our young girls in all our schools."

 

The report included a long list of Memphis-area schools where such incidents were documented.

 

The gang members, Cobb said, "carry weapons … they will use them quicker than any male that I've ever come upon – to try and fight them you'll get hurt."

 

Reports also said in some of the locations the organizations called themselves DTOs, or Dykes Taking Over.

But the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, which had tried to suppress the Memphis report before it aired, issued a statement charging the reporting was "without … one solid statistic or credible source."

Rashad Robinson, GLAAD's senior director of media programs, called the reporting "inaccurate tabloid journalism" and said it "perpetuates dangerous stereotypes about lesbians and feeds a climate of homophobia, anti-gay discrimination and violence." ..

"All they wanted to do was shut down the story," LaBarbera told WND. "This epitomizes the selfishness of the gay activists." ..

GLAAD contacted the station managers and after a private preview concluded it was "shockingly defamatory." …

"They are taking the line that there's no other side," LaBarbera said. "If you read that GLAAD release about perpetuating negative stereotypes, you can't write anything negative about any homosexuals..  It's a stunning bit of crude bullying. Here you have girls being raped by other girls, and somehow GLAAD manages to turn the homosexual lobby into the victims."

 

IVb Delusions of Grandeur and Control

    The psychiatrist Kenneth Levin wrote a book titled The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People Under Siege in which he discusses the self destructive delusions of Israeli society.  He wrote about the Israeli belief that if they blame themselves and make concessions they can get the Arabs to like them.  Dr. Levine wrote:

the delusion - based on exhaustion with the siege and a desperate and overwhelming desire for its end - that the right self-abnegations by Israel, the right mix of territorial and spiritual retreat, can win Israel the peace it desires no matter how much the objective evidence of words and deeds by the other side indicates otherwise.

Dr. Levine also wrote about the delusion that Israeli aid to the Arabs could stop Arab hate.  He wrote:

delusional grandiosity was also apparent, as in arguments that Arab quiescence could be won by Israel's proffering benefits to Arab partners in economic, environmental, medical, and other endeavors...  Such arguments ignore, of course, the relative inconsequentiality of the economic strength of Israel, however impressive for a country of six million, and the relative insignificance of opportunities potentially provided by cooperation with Israel, in the context of the vast Arab world of over a quarter billion souls.  They ignore the obvious consideration that hostility to Israel may have a utility in the domestic and inter-Arab politics of Arab governments that far outweighs in those governments' calculations the benefits any rapprochement with Israel might provide.  They ignore the fact that the fundamentalist threat to so-called moderate regimes is another reason for those regimes to keep Israel at arm's length.  They ignore the example of Egypt, which has reneged on virtually all of the numerous accords touching on economic cooperation that were part of the 1978 Camp David treaty.

Both the self-deprecating and the grandiose distortions of reality have a common source: A wish to believe Israel to be in control of profoundly stressful circumstances over which it, unfortunately, has no real control...

An interview of Dr. Levin with Israel National Radio from 3/16/06 can be heard online.

V The Appeasement Delusion

  The belief that appeasement can bring peace is one that has been proven wrong by history over and over again but is a belief that guides much of American and Israeli foreign policy.  This is discussed further on the appeasement web page of this web site.  The United States appeases the Saudis in an effort to keep the oil flowing and to avoid a solid block of Arab countries joining with Iraq.

  If you are a woman unfortunate enough to have had children with a Saudi Muslim and he decides to leave with the kids to Saudi Arabia, don't expect any help from the U.S. State Department in getting them back.  Pat Roush wrote a book about her experiences trying to bring her children back to America called At Any Price.  A Saudi told Pat Roush:

Mrs. Roush, your government doesn’t want you, and your State Department will not help you. You will see your children if and when we decide.

Roush told WorldNetDaily (3/31/03) that:

The U.S. State Department has worked hand-in-glove with the Saudi Arabian government to keep my innocent daughters captive inside Saudi Arabia,  They have deliberately thwarted all my efforts to have my daughters, who were illegally stolen from me, brought back to America where they were born. The State Department not only destroyed all my deals that were arranged with the Saudis to return my girls, but they have participated in cover-ups, lied to Congress, and taken sides with the Saudis.

and that

There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of American woman and children inside Saudi Arabia who cannot leave.  They are terrified of being killed or beaten by either their Saudi husbands or the Saudi government. They told this to Congressman Burton last year. One woman told Burton’s aide, 'My husband told me he would bury me alive and let my children watch me die.' Another begged, 'Please, just put me and my children in the belly of the military plane and get us out of here.'

Roush has asserted for years that the State Department has an alternative agenda in protecting its relationship with the oil-rich kingdom – which has military bases critical for the coalition's operation in Iraq – and deliberately works to suppress all "bad news" concerning the Saudis.

Roush wrote a brief to the UN Human Rights Commission about this situation.  The brief notes a male family member who so wishes can keep a girl or woman within the confines of her home – virtually under "house arrest" – for her entire life. Out of fear that their abducted daughters and wives will escape or that foreign officials or others will try to "recapture" them, Saudi fathers and husbands typically prevent them from using the telephone. And in the rare case that visitation rights are allowed, they're under strict rules and usually supervised by male relatives.

The brief concludes the abductions and the aftermath constitute a contemporary form of slavery, which cries for implementation of international human rights law.

According to Worldnetdaily (posted 6/18/03)

Sarah Saga, 23, was kidnapped by her father as a child in 1985 and taken to the kingdom (of Saudi Arabia). She has been prohibited from leaving there ever since. As has happened with other Americans, Saga was married off to a Saudi and bore her own children. Now the woman, who claims to have been abused by her father, stepmother and husband, has sought refuge in the U.S. Consulate. She is pleading with U.S. officials to help her and her children, age 3 and 5, travel to America. According to her mother, Debra Dornier, however, Saga has been told if she leaves, her Saudi-born children must stay in the kingdom.

Her mother, Debra Dornier says while Saga was living with her father, "he beat her; he threatened to kill her; he cut off her hair; he threw her up against a wall ... because she talked to someone she shouldn't have."

She had a cruel stepmother, Dornier asserted, who "locked her up for three months."

"To be able to get out of her room, she would have to kneel down and kiss her stepmother's feet and beg her forgiveness so that she could eat," Dornier said.

"I was told I can't take my children out," Saga said. "I don't want to leave them. They don't need to live the life I've lived. … I am fighting all the time to have them go with me."

Saying she fears her father, Saga said she could not leave the consulate...

Dornier spoke a message to her embattled daughter: "Sarah, I'm so proud of

Quoting her daughter after reaching the consulate, Dornier said Saga told her: "Mama, I can go for a walk. My kids played in a playground for the first time. … Mama, I'm free."

Pat Roush, said that:

"The State Department is doing everything it can to intimidate Sarah Saga inside the consulate," Roush said, adding that U.S. officials told the woman "that if she goes on American television, all her chances will be dashed to get out of Saudi Arabia."

Roush compared Saga to her own children's plight: "She did not ask to go to Saudi Arabia. She did not ask to be married off and have children. And she should not be forced to trade her freedom for her children."

Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind., also appeared on the program. Burton has been working to help free American kidnap victims in the kingdom.

"There are hundreds, probably thousands, of women over there who are kept not only as hostages but literally as chattel. They are owned by their husbands," Burton said.

   Saga did return to the U.S. but was forced to leave her two young children behind in Saudi Arabia.  WorldnetDaily 7/10/03 quotes her as saying that

The people at the consulate were acting as if they worked for the Saudis.

Saga noted her mother, Debra Dornier, was told the U.S. could not risk relations with Saudi Arabia for one child. Also, Saga said she was instructed to avoid the media because it might embarrass the consulate.

   Another example of the perfidious behavior of the State Department was its coverup of the financing of terror by the Saudis.  After the news that Princess Haifa al-Faisal, wife of the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the United States, had given many thousands of dollars to a person connected to two of the 9/11 suicide hijackers, the spokesman for the State Department Richard Boucher praised Saudi efforts to prevent the financing of terrorism as "very strong" though he did concede that "there is always more to be done."   Daniel Pipes wrote that after the News Colin Powell said (New York Post 12/3/02):

I think it's unlikely that Prince Bandar or her Royal Highness would do anything that would support terrorist activity.

and that:

The president's press secretary, Ari Fleischer, promoted the self-serving Saudi line that Osama bin Laden specifically recruited Saudi hijackers for the 9/11 attacks to "drive a wedge" between the United States and Saudi Arabia.  (This idea is palpably false: That 15 out of the 19 hijackers were Saudi was not a political ploy but the results of the fact, as Stephen Schwartz explains, that "Saudis are the largest national contingent by far in al Qaeda.")

   Robert Baer in his book Sleeping with the Devil, wrote that when the Defense Policy Board, issued a report that Saudi Arabia was "central to the self-destruction of the Arab world and the chief vector of the Arab crisis and its outwardly directed aggression." Powell was on the phone within hours assuring Bandar that such apostasy was not the official stance of the Bush II administration.  Baer writes:

To reinforce the message, Bush II invited Bandar down to the family ranch at Crawford, Texas, an honor usually reserved for the heads of state.

   Baer wrote (Sleeping with the Devil p166):

Washington fiddles and pretends Riyadh won't burn, watching passively as wealthy Saudis channel hundreds of millions of dollars to radical groups in hopes of buying protection.  Washington pretends that all the loudspeakers in all the mosques throughout all the kingdom that are blaring out their messages of hate against the West haven't been paid for with contributions from the royal family that America so readily declares to be its best friend and ally in the Middle East.  ... Ex-presidents, former prime ministers, onetime senators and members of Congress and Cabinet members walk around with their hands out, rarely slowing down because most of them know that this charade can go on only so long.  The trick is to get on that last plane loaded with gold before the SAM launchers are set up around Riyadh International.

   FBI Agent Robert Wright uncovered a wide network of Hamas and al Qaeda financiers across the United States.  In August 1999 his investigation was shut down.   Debbie Schlussel the author of an expose about this in the New York Post (FBI Takes a Dive on Terror 7/14/04) was told by FBI personnel that the reason given to Mr. Wright was that his work was too embarrassing for the Saudis.  The fact that his investigation was shut down just as he was uncovering evidence that Saudi banker Al Qadi was a banker for Al Qaeda confirms that the FBI is appeasing the Saudis.  Months before 9/11, Wright complained on several occasions to FBI officials that Americans would die because of the closing of his investigation and the incompetence of the FBI's International Terrorism Unit.  He was told to "let sleeping dogs lie."  Debbie Schlussel writes "Those "sleeping dogs" after all, were known terrorists walking free.  John Roberts then the chief of the FBI's Office of Professional Responsibility said that FBI Assistant Director Robert Jordan and Deputy Assistant Director  Jody Weis told him to "deceive, misrepresent and hide" from Justice Department investigators "the facts of this matter".

   According to WorldnetDaily (Saudi Al Qaeda Ties Excised From Congressional Report 7/24/03) an 800-page report on the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, that had been completed on December 2002 and a companion report by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks, was delayed for months because of the information it had regarding Saudi support of Al Qaeda.  According to WorldnetDaily:

The administration kept the report quiet for six months and the commission said the White House withheld documents required for the investigation.

   In addition 28 pages on Saudi complicity in the attacks of 9/11 were blacked out.  The top Republican senator involved in creating the congressional report, Richard Shelby, said Sunday on NBC that 95 percent of the classified pages could be released without jeopardizing national security (Associated Press 7/29/03).

Steve Schwartz, author of "The Two Faces of Islam: Saudi Fundamentalism and Its Role in Terrorism" and director of the Islam and Democracy Program at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington, D.C., wrote: (The New York Post 7/29/03)

THE blacking out of 28 pages on Saudi complicity in the 9/11 attacks isn't the only hole in Congress' report on the terrorist atrocity: The rest of the report skirts issues and evidence that point directly to the desert oil kingdom.

Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar were two of the 9/11 hijackers.  Steve Schwartz writes:

Some time before 9/11, the National Security Agency had information linking al-Hazmi to Osama bin Laden but failed to hand the CIA what it knew about him and al-Mihdhar.

The CIA learned that al-Hazmi, whom it had identified as a "terrorist," had come to the United States but did not inform the FBI.

According to the congressional report Omar al Bayoumi a Saudi known to have terrorist connections, befriended al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi while they were in San Diego.  Steve Schwartz points out that Omar al Bayoumi was named by the U.S. media as the conduit for the charitable donations of Princess Haifa of Saudi Arabia and he asks:

Why no mention whatever of Princess Haifa in the report's narrative on al-Bayoumi...

The same claim of "national security" that justified blacking out the Saudi chapter?

The report simply fails to follow up on another shocking disclosure: Al-Bayoumi was an employee of the Saudi Civil Aviation Authority, and his immediate superior in that body had a bin Laden connection.

The Saudi Civil Aviation Authority would be the ideal center for a hijacking conspiracy: Its employees would know everything, from Saudi attendance at specific U.S. flight schools, to the regulations for carrying sharp objects aboard airliners, to the fuel capacities of long-range flights.

So why hasn't our government focused a bright light on this agency? Is it not possible that the agency was tasked with the 9/11 atrocity from higher up in the Saudi regime?

   In August 2001, customs agent Jose Melendez-Perez turned away a Saudi national named Mohammed al-Qahtani at Orlando International Airport despite being warned by coworkers that he risked his job because of guidelines to treat Saudi citizens with kid gloves.  Officials now believe al-Qahtani was the intended 20th hijacker.  (New York Post 1/27/04).  This kid glove policy toward the Saudis may be the reason that several of the hijackers, including ringleader Mohamed Atta, entered the country despite having fraudulent visas and suspicious stories. 

The State Department ignores Saudi violations of religious freedom and in fact acquiesces to Saudi demands regarding religion .   The U.S. Commission on Religious Freedom an organization independent of the State Department issued a report in 2003 on the status of religious liberties worldwide.  Julia Duin, in an article in the Washington Times wrote (Saudis Top Religious Violators, 5/2003):

Commissioners ...criticized the kingdom for "harassment, detention, arrest, torture" and deportation of foreign Christians employed in the country.  The country's "mutawaa" religious police metes out similar treatment to Shi'ite Muslim clergy and scholars, they added.  The commission also took the country to task for "offensive and discriminatory language" disparaging Jews, Christians and non-Wahhabi Muslims found in government-sponsored school textbooks, in Friday sermons preached in prominent mosques, and in state-controlled Saudi newspapers.

One theme in the report was American acquiescence to Saudi demands, such as a recent U.S. Postal Service prohibition against mailing materials "contrary to the Islamic faith" to U.S. troops in the Middle East. As recently as March, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell failed to designate Saudi Arabia as a "country of particular concern (CPC)," the diplomatic term for the most severe violators of human rights.  "We don't understand how one could not name Saudi Arabia as a CPC," Mr. Young said. "Saudi Arabia has been explicitly left out of any [State Department] citations."

   Daniel Pipes writes that this undue solicitation for Saudi feelings may be the result of bribes.  He writes that the tie to Saudi Arabia is premised on:

accommodating the kingdom's wishes and in return, being plied with substantial sums of money...A culture of corruption...pervades the upper reaches of the White House and several departments.

   John Loftus, a former attorney of the Dept of Justice was quoted as saying (Have the United States and Britain willfully Betrayed Israel? 11/27/1998, D. Maimon) :

"State Department disease"greed and self-interest have since the beginning of Mideast conflict between Jews and Arabs, infected powerful bureaucrats, perverting their sense of right and wrong. The ever present temptation to enrich oneself and one's family through Arab oil-related favors and industry, has turned the political sympathies of countless officials in the State Department and CIA away from Israel.

   Robert Baer, in his book, Sleeping With the Devil wrote about the history of Saudi money in Washington.  He wrote that Nixon Treasury Secretary William Simon went to Riyadh hoping to sell T-bills and bonds.

The idea was to get the Saudis to underwrite the U.S. budget deficit.  Eager to become America's lender of last resort, with all the leverage that implied, the Saudis took the bait and happily swallowed it.  Washington knows fast money when it sees it, but it had never seen anything like this.  The cookie jar was bottomless.  It wasn't long before the Saudis were spreading money everywhere, like manure on a winter's field.  The White House put out its hand to fund pet projects that Congress wouldn't fund or couldn't afford, from a war in Afghanistan to one in Nicaragua.  Every Washington think tank, from the supposedly nonpartisan Middle East Institute to the Meridian International Center, took Saudi money.  Washington's boiler room - the K street lobbyists, PR firms and lawyers - lived off the stuff.  So did its bluestocking charities, like the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Children's National Medical Center, and every presidential library of the last thirty years...  There's hardly a living former assistant secretary of state for the Near East; CIA director; White House staffer; or member of Congress who hasn't ended up on the Saudi payroll in one way or another, or so it sometimes seems.

   The United States has sold the Saudis a powerful airforce with the condition that the Saudis keep their aircraft away from the Israeli border.  The Saudis have placed F15s near the Israeli border and on October 2003, launched a major air and naval exercise in the northwestern part of the kingdom near the Israeli border with their F15s and AWACs.  The United States promised Israel that should the Saudis deploy their aircraft near Israel, it would withhold spare parts from the Saudis.   That has not happened.

    In addition to the U.S. not facing the danger they are creating to Israel by arming the Saudis, members of the Israeli government refuse to face it as well.   A member of Independent Media Review and Analysis (IMRA) wrote that (Freeman Broadcast 10/22/03):

It should be noted that government elements outside the IDF have consistently followed a policy of underrating/ignoring security risks associated with Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Adding the Saudis with their considerable quantities of advanced American weapons disturbs Arab-Israeli balance of power estimates used to promote various withdrawal schemes.  Highlighting Egypt - with their gross violation of their treaty obligations to stop weapons smuggling along with massive arms acquisitions, serves to weaken the value of the "land for peace" precedent of the Egyptian-Israeli treaty. It is feared by critics that a dangerous combination of wishful thinking combined with an ideologically driven desire to avoid hurting the prospects of various withdrawal schemes has seriously interfered with the decision making process of these government elements.]

   According to Adam Ciralsky, the CIA lie detector test stereotypes Jews as security risks.  Ciralsky charges the CIA with carrying out a purge of its Jewish employees by using an extraordinarily antisemitic security profile which won't allow clearance for employees who speak Hebrew well, give money to Zionist organizations, attend an Orthodox synagogue or visit Israel frequently, on the grounds that they pose a security risk.

   When the author of Terrorist Hunter worked together with Green Quest, an agency of U.S. Customs to uncover the SAAR network with which the Saudis financed terrorist in the United States, the FBI and the CIA put them all under surveillance.  The author writes:

It's a terrible sensation to know that you have no privacy... and no security.   That strange clicking of the phones that wasn't there before...the oh-so-crudely opened mail at home and in the office...and the same man I spied in my neighborhood supermarket, who was also on the train I took to Washington a week ago...Life can be miserable when you know that someone's always breathing down your neck...

I don't know for certain what's the deal with the CIA investigating the SAAR investigators, but it sure feels as if someone up in that agency doesn't like the idea that the Saudi Arabian boat is rocked... investigating and giving the people behind the raids a hard time is a most efficient way of making sure the SAAR investigation stops there... Which, come to think of it, may be the reason the government looks so unfavorably on the lawsuit filed by 9-11 victims' families against several Saudi entities and individuals, accusing them of funding terrorism and seeking damages.

   According to Worldnetdaily (Wahabi Lobby Polarizing FBI 7/13/03)

Sources say the FBI has silenced a senior counterterrorism agent, Robert Wright of the Chicago field office, for exposing how senior figures in the bureau blocked investigations of al-Qaida terror networks inside the United States prior to Sept. 11, and for complaining that a Muslim special agent, Gamel Abdel-Hafiz, refused to wear a wire when questioning terror suspects, allegedly saying, "A Muslim doesn't record another Muslim."

   Debbie Schlussel wrote how in August 2001,

top Justice and FBI officials turned down Minneapolis FBI agents' requests for a special counterintelligence surveillance warrant to open the computer hard drive of bin Laden associate Zacarias Moussaoui. An Eagan, Minn. Flight school tipped them off that the French Algerian sought instruction on steering a Boeing 747, but not taking off or landing. French intelligence alerted the FBI that Moussaoui, in custody since Aug. 17 on immigration violations, has ties to terrorist groups.

But, under Bush's and Ashcroft's new rules against secret evidence and profiling – competing against Democrats like Bonior for the Arab Muslim vote – that information was deemed insufficient for a warrant. According to Newsweek and MSNBC, when agents finally cracked into Moussaoui's hard drive, after the attacks, they found information detailing plans for terrorist attacks. Moussaoui, trained in Afghani camps, has been linked to hijacking-leader Mohammad Atta's roommate, and is now believed to have been a would-be hijacker on Flight 93 that crashed near Pittsburgh.

    Here are some excerpts from the Los Angeles Times coverage of Agent Harry Samit's testimony

The FBI agent who arrested Zacarias Moussaoui weeks before Sept. 11 told a federal jury Monday that his own superiors were guilty of "criminal negligence and obstruction" for blocking his attempts to learn whether the terrorist was part of a larger cell about to hijack planes in the United States.

During intense cross-examination, Special Agent Harry Samit - a witness for the prosecution - accused his bosses of acting only to protect their positions within the FBI. . . .

"They obstructed it," a still-frustrated Samit told the jury, calling his superiors' actions a calculated management decision "that cost us the opportunity to stop the attacks." . . .

Samit said that officials at the FBI headquarters in Washington rejected a series of attempts to obtain a warrant to search Moussaoui's personal belongings.

Had the belongings been opened before Sept. 11, agents would have found numerous small knives, jumbo-jet pilot manuals, rosters of flight schools and other clues that might have helped them understand the Sept. 11 plot.

Samit wanted to seek a criminal search warrant, and later one from a special intelligence court. But officials at the FBI headquarters refused to let him, because they did not believe he had enough evidence to prove Moussaoui was anything but a wealthy man who had come to this country to follow his dream of becoming a pilot. . . .

He said that as Washington kept telling him there was "no urgency and no threat," his FBI superiors sent him on "wild goose chases."

For a while, Samit said, they did not even believe Moussaoui was the same person whom French intelligence sources had identified as a Muslim extremist. Samit said that FBI headquarters wanted him and his fellow agents to spend days poring through Paris phone books to make sure they had the right Moussaoui.

Samit said that when he asked permission to place an Arabic-speaking federal officer as a plant inside Moussaoui's cell to find out what Moussaoui was up to, Washington said no.

And he said that when he prepared a lengthy memo about Moussaoui for Federal Aviation Administration officials, Washington deleted key sections, including a part connecting Moussaoui with Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

Samit said he was so frustrated and so convinced that attacks were imminent that he bypassed FBI officials in Washington and met with an FAA officer he knew in Minneapolis. But he said FAA agents never got back to him, and never asked to see a pair of small knives, similar to box cutters, that Samit had found in Moussaoui's pocket and in his car.

Samit further described how he took it upon himself to cable the Secret Service that the president's safety might be in jeopardy. He recounted in the cable how Moussaoui had told him he hoped to be able to one day fly a Boeing 747 from London's Heathrow Airport to New York, and how he also hoped to visit the White House one day.

Samit said he warned the Secret Service that those desires could spell disaster. "If he seizes an airplane from Heathrow to New York City," Samit alerted the Secret Service, "it will have the fuel on board to reach D.C."

Samit said he never heard back from the Secret Service either.

   On February 12, 2007 Solejman Talovic a Bosnian Muslim refugee opened fire in Trolley Square in Salt Lake City.  Police and the FBI did not search Solejman’s computer.  It seems they don’t want to find out that he was a terrorist.  Or perhaps they already know .  Debbie Schlussel received the following email from one of her readers:

I read your article on the terrorist attack at Trolley Square in Salt Lake City with interest. I knew as soon as I spoke with my friends Monday night in law enforcement (the ones who actually killed the shooter) that this was a terrorist attack.

According to my friends on the SWAT team who responded to the scene first, the terrorist killed four individuals inside a gift shop Jihad execution style. He actually made them kneel down. Then he put the gun barrel to the back of their heads and killed each one of them one by one.

The day after the shooting, I observed a man dressed as a Muslim cleric being arrested by the West Valley Police on his way to the Kaadeeja Islamic Center in West Valley City. My friends in law enforcement confirmed that this man is the Uncle of Sulejman Talovic.

   The FBI requires that all federal agents undergo Islamic sensitivity training.  Perhaps viewing a Muslims computer is insensitive.

   Mark Steyn wrote an article detailing how subservient and accomodating the United Statesis to the Saudis.  He wrote in (Bush and The Saudi Princess Freeman Center Broadcast 12/4/02):

On 20 September, George W. Bush said, 'You're either with us or you're with the terrorists.' A couple of weeks later, a small number of us began pointing out the obvious: the Saudis are with the terrorists. But the US-Saudi relationship is now so unmoored from reality that it's all but impossible to foresee how it could be tethered to anything as humdrum as the facts. Seven of the nine biggest backers of al-Qa'eda are Saudi, and Riyadh has no intention of doing a thing about it; but the White House insists, as it did on Monday, that the Kingdom remains - all together now - 'a good partner in the war on terrorism'. Fifteen out of the 19 terrorists were Saudi, but the state department's 'visa express' programme for young Saudi males remained in place for almost a year after 11 September and, if it weren't for public outrage, Colin Powell would reintroduce it tomorrow. The overwhelming majority - by some accounts, 80 per cent - of the detainees at Guantanamo are Saudi, but the new rules requiring fingerprinting of Arab male visitors to the US apply to Iraqis, Libyans, Syrians, Sudanese, Lebanese, Algerians, Tunisians, Yemenis, Bahrainis, Moroccans, Omanis, Qataris, but not Saudis...At the specific request of the Saudi government, no Arabic speakers are appointed to the post (of U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia), a unique self-handicap by the US...We have a huge Saudi-financed pile of American corpses, the Saudis are openly uncooperative, and meanwhile back at the ranch it's ribs with Princess Haifa.

   The behavior of 16 Saudi employees who came as diplomats but who taught at the Institute of Islamic and Arabic Sciences in America (IIASA) in Fairfax, Va. was too much even for the State Department who expelled them (Perfidious Princes, Steven Schwartz, New York Post 2/11/04).   Al-Ahmed a Saudi dissident revealed the radical nature of the texts being taught at that institute.  One the Arabic-language textbooks was titled "A Muslim's Relations with Non-Muslims, Enmity or Friendship," by Dr. Abdullah al-Tarekee. The author wrote, "unbelievers, idolaters and others like them must be hated and despised . . . Qur'an forbade taking Jews and Christians as friends, and that applies to every Jew and Christian, with no consideration as to whether they are at war with Islam or not."  One of the Saudi employees, a cleric named Jibreen, called on Saudis to go north of the Iraqi border to attack Coalition troops.  Jibreen also praised Osama bin Laden only months ago, calling on God to "aid him and bring victory to him and by him."

   Unfortunately radical Saudi textbooks fill American Mosques according to a study published in January 2005 by Freedom House.  Daniel Pipes summarized the study's conclusions as follows:

 

These writings...

Reject Christianity as a valid faith: Any Muslim who believes “that churches are houses of God and that God is worshipped therein … is an infidel.”

Insist that Islamic law be applied: On a range of issues, from women (who must be veiled) to apostates from Islam (who “should be killed”), the Saudi publications insist on full enforcement of the Shari‘a in America.

See non-Muslims as the enemy: “Be dissociated from the infidels, hate them for their religion, leave them, never rely on them for support, do not admire them, and always oppose them in every way according to Islamic law.”

See the United States as hostile territory: “It is forbidden for a Muslim to become a citizen of a country governed by infidels because this is a means of acquiescing to their infidelity and accepting all their erroneous ways.”

Prepare for war against the United States: “To be true Muslims, we must prepare and be ready for jihad in Allah’s way. It is the duty of the citizen and the government.”

 

   Dr. Yassin Al-Khatib, a professor of Islamic law at Saudi Arabia’s Um Al-Qura University, declared on Saudi/UAE Al-Majd TV on May 10 that, “the fact that [the U.S.] entered [Iraq] … makes it every Muslim's duty to go out against them, not only the Iraqis… Jihad today has become an individual duty that applies to each and every Muslim… When the Muslims fought in Afghanistan they destroyed the Soviet Union… It collapsed, and Allah willing so will [the U.S.] collapse.”  Many other Saudis have made similar calls for Jihad against the U.S. (Saudi Terror Conference, Part IV by Steven Stalinsky Frontpagemag.com 2/1/05).

   The author of Terrorist Hunter wrote:

And as long as we call terrorist supporters "friends and allies," we are headed for disaster.  We should never allow such a calamity as the 9-11 attacks to happen again.  Countries that sponsor, fund, and educate for jihad should not be allowed to extort any deals from us, either through the ridiculous threat that if a Middle Eastern regime is destabilized a worse one follow in its place or through oil related blackmail.  No regime could be worse than one that pays for jihad.

   A roadmap for Middle East peace was developed by the State Department and the European Union, Russia and the United Nations. Tom DeLay, leader in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, warned President. Bush against pressing Israel to ease its crackdowns in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and to withdraw from some settlements, as called for in the peace plan. He said:

The Israelis don’t need to change course. They don’t need to travel the path of weakness as defined by the neo-appeasers,

He called the road map:

A confluence of deluded thinking between European elites, elements within the State Department bureaucracy and a significant segment of the American intellectual community.

   Terrorism that was supposed to stop with the roadmap continues.  Naomi Ragen wrote that

In a single day, we had two Jerusalem residents axe-murdered near Hadassah, four soldiers killed by terrorists in Gaza, and a man dead near Abraham's tomb.

VA Creation of Delusion to Prevent War

   Michael Ledeen when asked Why was the U.S. so unprepared for 9/11? replied: 

“Lousy intelligence, driven by many years of policy makers who didn't want to know what was really going on, because they were not prepared to act against the terror masters.”

    They wanted to live in a world of delusion in which there was no terrorist threat so they wouldn’t have to engage in military action against them.  David Frum wrote an article in the National Post on Tuesday 10/9/07 in which he discussed how the United States is afraid to treat Russia as the threat it really is.  He wrote:

     Russia's behaviour toward its former satellites has grown steadily more aggressive since Vladimir Putin's arrival in power. This summer, Russia waged a weird cyber-war against Estonia, jamming its Web sites and damaging the commerce of one of the most wired nations in Europe. Russia is deploying missiles along its western border in ways that Poles perceive as threatening….    American policy-makers fear that taking precautions against Russia will only provoke Russia. They worry that treating Russia as a potential threat will hasten the transformation of Russia into an actual threat.   

   We have here a vicious cycle in which the more Russia is threatening the more the West doesn’t want to see it as a threat and doesn’t take the necessary defensive measures such as arming Poland with a missile defense.

 

 

 

   Michelle Malkin wrote an article (8/1/07) about how the human rights community ignored the plight of South Korean Christians who went to Afghanistan on medical and humanitarian missions.  At the time of writing of this paragraph they are being held hostage by the Taliban and two of them have already been killed.  One possible reason for being silent about their plight is the desire to prevent military action against the Taliban and get the United States out of Afghanistan and Iraq.  Part of doing this involves discrediting Bush who made the decision to send the American military into both countries.  If the human rights community makes noise about this the cruelty of the enemies who Bush fought becomes apparent and his decisions become more justifiable in the public eye.  Support for fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan and terrorists in Iraq might increase.  The United States has allowed much of the Christian community of Iraq to be chased out.  In both cases the media hasn’t said much and the human rights organizations have been relatively silent.  Perhaps it is opposition to American involvement that is one of the factors behind this silence.

 

VB Creating the Delusion of Moral Relativism to Avoid War

   The problem with believing in evil is it creates an obligation to fight it.  There is an incentive, therefore, for those who wish to avoid war to blur the difference between good and evil, to argue that the “evil” people really aren’t that evil and we, are at least in part responsible for the “evil” behavior of the other.  At the time of this writing the left wing in the United States are worried that the U.S. might go to war with Iran to prevent it from manufacturing nuclear weapons.  A movie called 300 that portrays the Persians (what are now called Iranians) as evil oppressors and tells of how 300 Spartans stood up  against them for their freedom has been criticized by the left.  Benjamin Shapiro wrote in regard to the movie (wnd.com 3/14/07)

 

the left doesn't like it at all. Many reviewers have panned "300" not on artistic grounds, or even on grounds of inanity, but on the grounds that the Spartans in the film are a bunch of jackbooted thugs; that the tyranny they fight is less tyrannical than Sparta; that good vs. evil is too simplistic.

 

    In order to defeat a Nazified enemy it is necessary for a time to occupy that enemies territory and to stop the incitement so that the process of deNazification can take place.  No one wants to be labeled as an occupier or as supporting occupation a word that has come to mean the height of evil.  Israel under pressure to stop occupying the south of Lebanon withdrew which gave Hezbollah the opportunity to build fortifications and ultimately defeat Israel’s attempt to dislodge them from Lebanon.  The same thing is happening in Gaza (I write this on 3/15/07).  David Hornick wrote about this:

 

Incredibly, the same scenario of an Iranian-backed buildup is repeating itself while Israel is passive and the U.S. appears not in the least perturbed. And while before summer 2006 Hezbollah rocket attacks and kidnap attempts sometimes drew an Israeli response, the present rocket attacks from Gaza find the Olmert government, crippled by unpopularity and scandals, not lifting a finger.

Again, whatever the unnecessary costs arising from Israel having “disengaged” from Gaza and turned it over to Hamas in the first place, a decisive Israeli action in Gaza would score a victory for the West. Again, it would not be possible without some loss of Arab civilian life—and in this case, not just Lebanese, but Palestinians, beloved of the media and darlings of dhimmified Europe (it goes without saying that losses of Israeli life pose no PR problems for anyone). Again, genuine Israeli victory would entail some measure of Israeli “occupation” of the territory—also an ultimate evil in the contemporary ethos, far worse than Iranian buildups.

So instead, Jerusalem and Washington prefer to keep their heads in the sand and chase diplomatic phantasms while the arms keep pouring over the border and the bunkers keep getting dug.

 

 

 

VI Creating Delusion to Avoid Facing Uncomfortable Realities  

 

   Rich Lowry in an article titled Dithering Dialogue: Deluded Outreach to Iran 3/31/07 wrote:

 No act of warfare against the civilized world, no defiance of the United Nations, no violation of international norms, no brazen lie is ever enough to mark Iran as unworthy of outreach, dialogue and the art of sweet persuasion….If talking with the Iranians doesn't work, it is because we aren't talking to them enough; or the wrong people (i.e., not the United States) are talking to them; or when we're talking to them, we aren't saying the right things; or we haven't talked to them long enough - or maybe they don't realize just how very sincere we are in our talking. But, surely, sometime soon, if we just keep talking and offering to talk, all these "misunderstandings" will fade away.

 

   On March 3, 2006 an Iranian student drove into students in the pit, a pedestrian Plaza at the University of North Carolina in an attempt to kill them.  Derek Poarch, chief of the university's police department, told the Associated Press news agency Mr Taheri-azar had said he wanted to "avenge the deaths or murders of Muslims around the world".  Tony Blankley in an article titled Media won't report radical Islamic event, Jewishworldreview.com 3/8/2006 wrote:

 

Neither the university nor most of the media has been willing to characterize this event as a terrorist attempt by a radical Muslim. Mr. Colmes, on "Hannity and Colmes" seemed to express genuine puzzlement as to why it mattered whether we called it that or merely an act of violence. Similarly, the attack at the Los Angeles International Airport a few years ago was for nine months just called a violent attack, before it was finally characterized by police as a radical Muslim act of terrorism.

I have been in contact with British politicians who tell me that there is increasing radical Muslim street violence in Britain that is explicitly motivated by radical Islam but is not reported or characterized as such. Even in its cleansed versions, I am told, these incidents are being extremely underreported.

In Antwerp last month, according to the reporter Paul Belien, rioting Moroccan "youths" went on a rampage destroying cars and beating up reporters, but the police were instructed not even to stop them or arrest them. According to an anonymous policeman, "An ambulance was told to switch off its siren because that might provoke the Moroccans." This event, too, was under reported, or not reported at all in American media.

And of course, last October in Paris and other French cities, hundreds of buildings were torched and tens of thousands of cars burned by Muslim "youths" through weeks of rioting, while both the French government and most of the "responsible" experts denied there was any radical Muslim component to the greatest urban violence to hit France since World War.

 

    The 9/11 commission was formed to determine why the attacks of 9/11 were not prevented and to determine how to prevent such attacks from happening again.  The commission received at least two briefings that showed that government agents knew of Mohammed Atta's affiliation with al-Qaeda two years before 9/11, that Clinton-era policies prevented intelligence officials from sharing that information with the FBI and that the movements of Atta are consistent with Czech reports that he met with Iraqi intelligence and was paid enough funds to complete the September 11 attack.  Frontpagemag discusses an article by Podhoretz that explains that the commission was "protecting" its interpretation of Mohammad Atta's international and domestic U.S. travels. (9/11 Coverup Commission, frontpage magazine.com 8/15/05)  

 

Key in this “interpretation” in the minds of Clinton supporters and Bush haters of all stripes is the necessity to deny all ties between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and al-Qaeda. After all, in the endless cacophony of criticism against the Iraq War, the two steady drumbeats have been the failure to find WMDs, and the assertion that there were no links between Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and the September 11 attacks. Until now the Left has issued a series of deliberate misinterpretations of a series of reports – including that of the 9/11 Commission, and WMD reports by David Kay and Charles Dueffler. However the unimpeachable “Able Danger” report was at first denied by 9/11 spokesman Al Felzenberg, then was reluctantly confirmed to be correct. Felzenberg said that “the information that [the “Able Danger” briefing officer] provided us did not mesh with other conclusions that we were drawing.” (Emphasis added.)

And here we get to the crux of the matter. The movements of Atta prior to the terrorist attack as detailed by “Able Danger,” if acknowledged, would support statements by the Czech Republic that link Atta, and hence the al-Qaeda attack on America, irrefutably to Saddam's covert intelligence operatives. This is something that surfaced shortly after 9/11. A former Czech deputy foreign minister, later ambassador to the UN, gave statements that he personally expelled a high raking Iraqi embassy official in Prague for being a covert foreign intelligence agent after the latter was discovered to have met with Mohammed Atta in the international lounge at the Prague airport in August 2001. There the Iraqi transferred a large amount of cash to Atta, sufficient to fund the completion of the September 11 attack. Despite cruel pressure from mainstream media, the hard Left, the U.S. State Department, and the CIA, the Czechs insisted that their report was correct. Former Congressman John LeBoutellier was furious at the Bush administration for bowing to CIA pressure to discount the Czech report because it verified a vital deadly connection within the covert terrorist community. Now it appears as if the Czechs – and those who supported their account – were right.

   Former intelligence officer Ralph Peters wrote  “Admitting that [terrorist] threats were real.threatened to destroy the belief system the Clintonites had carried into office,” Peters detailed. In regards to the entire terrorist network, methodology, and ideology, the Clintons were “a textbook case of denial.” The “Able Danger” reports indicate, that the Clintons were willfully ignorant of the threat.

Phyllis Chesler in an article titled Appeasement and the West, (World Jewish Digest 3/6/2002) wrote how the term Islamist is used to avoid facing the reality of the threat of Islam.  She wrote:

The tendency to appease can also be seen in our language, which can be used to either describe or obscure reality. Those who use the word “Islamist” want desperately to believe that Islam itself is, or can be, essentially peaceful and that moderate Muslims can wrest back control of their religion from the totalitarian fanatics who have hijacked it. One therefore also uses the words “jihadist” and “terrorist” to further distinguish the potentially “good” and “reasonable” Muslims from the killers and fanatics. Many Westerners turn themselves inside out in order not to describe even the 9/11 terrorists as “Muslims” or “Arabs” lest they be attacked as politically incorrect “racists.” The fear of this particular slander has led many good Western thinkers and writers to obscure reality.  

   One way people avoid facing a threatening reality is by blaming a weaker group for it.  Then the reality is less threatening.  Many in Israel do not want to face that their Arab enemy wants to destroy them simply because they are Jewish and independent.  It's much easier to blame their own Jewish settlers.  As a result they have uprooted settlers from Gaza, and have brutally attacked them at Amona.  The consequence of this is that they are weakening themselves against the real threat they face by creating internal divisions, by destroying the morale of their security forces and by withdrawing from strategically important areas.

   Robert Spencer in an article titled Fantasies About Jihad  (frontpagemag.com 3/15/2006) wrote about how he had criticized statements by former Indonesian President Abdurrahman Wahid  that Islam is a Religion of Peace and how a reader then took him to task for “suggesting that Islam is irredeemable in some sense.” The reader asked: “if we assume this to be true, what is to be done. What would Mr. Spencer suggest that this or any American president do to deal with this reality? Spencer wrote:

What would I suggest that the President do about this reality? I would suggest that he acknowledge it as a reality. That he address the nation and the world, and tell them that the United States is going to lead the resistance to jihad and Sharia supremacism in the name of equality of rights and dignity of all peoples. That any state that oppresses non-Muslims or denies them equality of rights in any way will receive no American aid whatsoever. That any state that allows the idea that Muslims must make war against non-Muslims until they either convert to Islam or submit to the Islamic social order will be no friend of the United States. That the idea that the U.S. Constitution should one day be replaced by Islamic Sharia, whether by violent or non-violent means, will be understood within the United States as seditious.

    Spencer did not suggest the obvious that Muslim immigration be stopped even though he did mention how Bat Ye’or spoke about how European officials themselves had brought Eurabia into being by encouraging immigration while eschewing assimilation at the insistence of the Arab League. Spencer wrote: "Only now are Europeans realizing that their culture, their soul, has been sold by their leaders for oil, and the jihad is upon them.

It is a reality so bleak that it is no wonder that most officials prefer fantasy. But they won’t be able to maintain their comfortable illusions much longer".

     The United States faces a growing threat of a nuclear attack from Iran that it doesn't want to face up to.  Newt Gingrich said: (Gingrich sees Iran Threat to U.S. like Nazi Germany, worldnetdaily.com 11/21/05)

"Not since the failure of the League of Nations in the 1930s to confront the aggression of the dictatorships in Japan, Italy and Germany have we seen the willful avoidance of reality which is now underway with regard to Iran.  There are lessons to be learned from the 1930s and those lessons apply directly to the current government of Iran....

An attack by a single Iranian nuclear missile could have a catastrophic impact on the United States by causing an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) over a portion of the country,Such an attack could quickly turn a third or more of the United States back to a 19th century level of development. Electrical transformers and switching stations would fall. Without electricity, hospitals would fails, water and sewage services would fail, gas stations would be unable to provide petroleum, trucks would not be able to distribute food supplies, and essential services would rapidly disintegrate...  This is not idle speculation, but taken from the consensus findings of nine distinguished scientists who authored the Report of the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack, which was delivered to the Congress on June 22, 2004, the same day the 9-11 commission report was published.

Contemplating an EMP threat makes more troubling reports that certain Iranian missile tests resulted in missiles that have detonated in flight at or near apogee, which the Iranian press has reported as successful events.  Normally, it would be expected that the ability to target specific locations would be the standard for success for ballistic tests. However, if the ability to launch an EMP attack was being tested, detonation at apogee would be the measure of testing success. "

The Independent April 8, 04 writes how about self deluding Japanese who don't want to face their responsibility for World War II as follows:

In the Yasukuni Shrine in central Tokyo, suicide bombers are heroes, America is the enemy and the Emperor, supposedly reduced to mortal status after Second World War, is still a deity, directly descended from the sun goddess, Amaterasu.

Here, at least, Japan was not the brutal aggressor but the liberator, fighting to defend itself from the US and European powers and free Asia from the yoke of white imperialism. Imperial troops were not guilty, as most historians suggest, of some of the worst war crimes of the 20th century, but the "normal excesses" of armies everywhere.

Japan's 5,000 dead suicide bombers - most, like the self-immolators of the Middle-East, barely old enough to take their first legal drink when they died in a fruitless attempt to turn the tide against the US military juggernaut - are venerated in photographs and in testimony from comrades who survived. On a giant video screen, Iwao Fukugawa, who was just 48 hours from detonating his plane against a US ship when the Emperor announced Japan's surrender in August 1945, says he would have been happy to die for his country. "I was sad and ashamed we lost the war."

   Nicholas Eberstadt in his article North Korea's Latest Con, (Frontpagemag.com 1/13/2004) wrote about how North Korea blackmails the west.

Long ago, Kim & Co. figured out a formula for extracting protection money from abroad in return for promising to scrap the nukes: make a deal, break the deal, then demand a new deal for more, issuing threats until you get what you want. So far, it's worked pretty well.

It has worked very well for North Korea for details see the Appeasement of North Korea web page. Why does it work so well?  Mr. Eberstadt explains:

As North Korea's neighbors prepare to be fleeced, one may wonder: What keeps this con going? It's not that American and Asian leaderships are invincibly ignorant. They've just bought into a variant of La Grande Illusion (as such thinking was called in France in the late 1930s). The notion that the Kim regime has absolutely no intention of ever giving up its nuclear capability--at any price, for any reason--is too terrible to face. Better to play pretend, even if this means being bilked in return for fake "breakthroughs" and bogus "accords."

   There is a great deal of antisemitism in the feminist movement but feminists don't want to admit it.  Phyllis Chesler, in her book, The New Anti-Semitism wrote about how a feminist jew was disinvited from a feminist meeting.   When Phyllis suggested to some feminists that the reason was anti-semitism she writes that most of them begged to differ:

"No they probably weren't thinking clearly, who knows what pressure they were under."

Women, you see, cannot be accused of racism. - unless of course they are Jewish women.  Whatever other women do is entirely due to undue male pressure for which women can never be held accountable. 

   The multicultural movement sees the United States as the oppressor and so tends to side with Islam.  Feminist multiculturalists tend to be blind when it comes to Islamic persecution of women.  Phyllis Chesler a feminist who is trying to open the unwilling eyes of other feminists about this, said in an interview with frontpage magazine (2/24/04) that:

First, we must recognize that Islam is the largest and most systematic practioner of both gender and religious Apartheid on earth. The multi-culturalists refuse to see what is staring them in the face and civilians may not truly comprehend how ruthlessly circumscribed and endangered the lives of girls, women, and non-Muslim minorities are under jihadic Islam.  

    23 year old Ilan Halimi of France was found dying, covered with burns and cuts, on Monday February 13, 2006. He had been kidnapped three weeks earlier, after a Muslim gang sent a blonde to seduce him during which time he was mutilated, and burned.  The police refused to acknowledge that Ilan was abducted because he was Jewish even though  in their e-mail and telephone communications with Ilan's family, his captors repeatedly referred to his Judaism, and on at least one occasion recited verses from the Koran while Ilan was heard screaming in agony in the background. The family alleges that if the police had been willing to acknowledge that Ilan was abducted because he was Jewish, they would have recognized that his life was in clear and immediate danger and acted with greater urgency.  Apparently the French were afraid of angering the Muslims by accusing any of them of antisemitism.  (Ilan Halimi and Israel, The Jerusalem Post, 2/24/2006)

   There is a great deal of antisemitism in France yet the French leadership has been reluctant to admit it.  Jeff Jacoby in an article titled The Cancer of Antisemitism in Europe (Boston Globe 3 /14/04) wrote that the French president, Jacques Chirac, admonished a Jewish editor.:

Stop saying that there is antisemitism in France, There is no antisemitism in France.

   Ezra Halevi mentioned this unwillingness to acknowledge antisemitism in an article in Israel National News (April 29, 2007).  He wrote:

A young Jewish woman was brutalized by two Muslim Arabs in France Thursday.

Audrey Brachelle, 22, was attacked in the French city of Marseilles Thursday evening. The attack began as she walked back from her job as an accountant at a textile factory toward the metro station in the La Rose neighborhood of the city, which is home to many Jews.

Two Arab men followed her and attempted to steal her cell phone. After they grabbed it, the attackers noticed the Jewish ornament on the woman’s necklace, at which point she says they realized she was Jewish and began focusing on brutalizing her rather than stealing her phone.

The men then punched her in the face, sliced her dress with a knife and carved at least one Nazi swastika into her chest. They also cut off a clump of her hair.

Despite the swastikas and epithets expressed by the attackers, the French government is hesitating to admit that the attack was an anti-Jewish one. French Jews say the government is hesitant to admit the attack was anti-Semitic as that would have political ramifications and sway the upcoming presidential elections set to take place May 6.

   When Bill Clinton was president he refused to meet with the CIA director.   When asked what he thought Clinton's motives were Robert Baer a former CIA agent said (frontpagemag.com 2/11/04)

I think Clinton was naive.  He didn't have the slightest idea there was a dangerous world out there.  A baby-boomer, he was more concerned about Nasdaq and the way he felt about things than he was about national security.

   Perhaps Clinton didn't want to face the fact that there was a dangerous world out there.  Perhaps that is why he refused to meet with his CIA director.   Bob Baer wrote that if during this time

the CIA had been running sources in the mosques in Germany and Saudi Arabia it would have found out bin Ladin was recruiting suicide bombers.  It was an error we will pay for years.

   Dick Cheney made a speech in Nashville on Aug 26, 02 in which he spoke about the need for the United States to attack Iraq.  He said (New York Post 8/27/02):

What we must not do in the face of a mortal threat is to give in to wishful thinking or willful blindness...The risk of inaction is far greater than the risk of action.

Frank Gaffney in an article With Friends Like These (National Review Online Sept 19, 2001) wrote how the U.S. was being encouraged to enlist terrorists to fight terror.  He wrote that:

President Bush is being encouraged by his State Department and some allies to make an extraordinary mistake: In the interest of creating the impression of worldwide solidarity in the war against international terrorists and their sponsors, they want the U.S. to enlist — incredible as it may seem — international terrorists and their sponsors in the cause...

At the very best, these initiatives will utterly compromise the nature of the war Mr. Bush has correctly said we must now wage. It is simply impossible, not to say incoherent, to pretend such "allies" can possibly be part of the solution when they are so manifestly part of the problem.

   Angelo Codevilla in his article Reforming the CIA Means New Leaders, New Ways of Doing Business and a Truckload of Pink Slips (InsightMag.com Posted March 25, 02) wrote:

Often, regardless of the information available, the agency sees only what it wishes to see.

and that:

The CIA defends its operatives' incapacities by asking rhetorically how even the most linguistically talented and well-disguised collectors could get inside six-man terrorist cells.

But the question wrongly presupposes that terrorism consists of autonomous (and, hence, spontaneous) cells. In fact the autonomy and spontaneity of terrorists, the "loose-networks" theory, largely is the self-serving invention of U.S. government officials who don't want to look into the role of Arab governments in terrorism.

   Dinesh D'Souza in his book What's So Great About America, theorizes that the reason the U.S. government blamed loose networks instead of Islam was to avoid antagonizing future Moslem members of an anti-terrorist coalition.  Another reason may have been to prevent attacks by angry Americans on Moslems living in America.

Delusional thinking often occurs in order to avoid facing uncomfortable truths.  The Western attitude toward Islam is an example of this.  Steve Emerson wrote in the Jewish Monthly (3/95) that:

 

The level of vitriol against Jews and Christianity within contemporary Islam, unfortunately, is something that we are not totally cognizant of, or that we don't want to accept. We don't want to accept it because to do so would be to acknowledge that one of the world's great religions - which has more than 1.4 billion adherents - somehow sanctions genocide, planned genocide, as part of its religious doctrine.

     The delusion regarding the cause of the Middle East conflict is another example of delusional thinking to avoid unpleasant truths..  Major Shawn Pine in his article Bush's Capitulation wrote (The Jerusalem Post, March 12, 2002):

IN THE last decade, Israelis have deluded themselves into believing that the crux of the Arab-Israeli conflict was over territories captured in the 1967 war. Hopefully, Arafat's rejection of the offer made at Camp David, and his launching of the intifada, have disabused Israelis of that notion. The reality is that Israel is involved in an existential war and any agreement by Sharon to cease military operations against Palestinian terrorists will be perceived by the Palestinians as a victory and will embolden Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat to continue his terrorist war against Israel.

   In an interview in the Forward, Yoram Kaniuk, a pioneer of the Israeli peace movement said: Since the failure of the Camp David talks, when the truth came out, I've had to face the fact that the Arabs simply don't accept Israel being here... Our (peace) partner is the suicide bomber. (Riva Rubin, "True Lies: Two Israeli Novelists on War and Oranges," Forward, Nov. 29, 2002)

   Daniel Pipes wrote about the delusional expectations raised by the Oslo Accords (New York Post 9/9/03)

President Clinton lauded it as a "great occasion of history," Secretary of State Warren Christopher ruminated on how "the impossible is within our reach."...Foreign Minister Shimon Peres of Israel discerned in it "the outline of peace in the Middle East."..  Pundits like Anthony Lewis of the New York Times called it "ingeniously built" and "stunning."..

Oslo brought the Palestinians poverty, corruption, a cult of death, suicide factories and militant Islamic radicalization.  The Israelis have mainly suffered from terrorism's toll of 854 murders and 5,051 injuries, plus assorted economic and diplomatic losses.

Jeff Jacoby wrote (Oslo's terrible toll, Boston Globe, 9/14/03)

Oslo quickly became a cult, worshipped with a fervor that brooked no doubts and disdained all skeptics.  There was never peace but there was a "peace process," and the more the evidence of its failure mounted, the more fervently it was venerated.

Within a few months it should have been clear to all that Arafat and the PLO leadership had not abandoned terrorism.  Empowering them with land and money and authority had inflamed, not quenched, their thirst to "liberate" Israel from the Jews.   Buses exploded and funerals proliferated, but Israelis told themselves that they were fashioning a "peace of the brave" and that there was no alternative but to return to the negotiating table and offer new concessions.

Yet each concession only further convinced the Palestinians that the Jews were weakening, and that upping the violence would make them even more desperate for peace.

Many Israelis rather than face the truth of the implacable hostility of the Arabs towards their very existence, have developed the delusional ideas that if they just appease the Arabs with territorial concessions there will be peace.  Shimon Peres outlined his delusional thinking in his book, The New Middle East.  Around 1995 in the days of Israeli Euphoria about the Oslo peace process, Shimon Peres was asked about the dangers of terrorism under his new Oslo regime and replied:

I am far more worried about the danger of infiltration into Israel of cable television than about the danger of infiltration of Palestinian terrorists.

A typical news item during this period shows the absurdity of this statement.   On 5/30/01, the day I wrote this paragraph, three Israelis including a 53-year-old former Long Island woman who were killed by Palestinian gunmen (New York Post 5/30/01)

Sara Blaustein was gunned down in the West Bank near Bethlehem in an ambush that also wounded her husband, Norman, 53, and left her 28-year-old son Samuel seriously wounded with three gunshots to the back.

Authorities said members of Yasser Arafat's Fatah paramilitary strafed the family's car as it headed to the funeral of another settler, killed hours earlier.

Another woman in the Blausteins' station wagon was killed and two others wounded in the attack.

  The Faces of the Victims web page of the Women in Green also shows the absurdity of Shimon Peres's statement.

   Foreign Minister Shimon Peres told Israel Radio on the morning of Nov. 1, 2001  that it does not matter what weapons the Palestinians have since "guns don't matter - what matters is suicide bombers." The biggest attack during the prior week was in Hadera when two Palestinian police armed with Oslo-issue assault rifles, murdered four and wounded many.  This was not a suicide mission.   During the year prior to the attack the overwhelming majority of Palestinian attacks were NOT by suicide bombers.

A year later Shimon Peres repeated his profoundity to Israel Radio on the 30 May 2002 morning news program that "people say about Oslo 'why did you give them guns' - but guns don't matter - what matters are suicide bombers."  This was two days after a terrorist with a single assault rifle murdered three teenagers and another terrorist murdered an Israeli in a car - also with a rifle.  IMRA on 5/30/02 speculated about why Shimon makes such absurd statements as follows:

Perhaps because Mr. Peres does not want reality to interfere with his plans.  As far as Shimon Peres is concerned, full Israeli withdrawal and the declaration of a Palestinian State is a few Kodak moments away.  A declaration here.   A signing ceremony there.  A few days that the Palestinians keep their appetite for Israeli blood to just a "few" murders and its back to the heady days of "hearing the fluttering of the wings of history".

Aaron Lerner in his weekly commentary on Israel National Radio (Nov. 1, 2001) said:

Peres' case reality is a big problem: it suits his script for the problem to be suicide bombers rather than Arafat's Fatah PA gunmen or PA police.   Peres doesn't want to accept that Arafat is behind the violence or part of the violence.  Instead Peres claims that the only problem with Arafat is that he isn't doing enough to stop these third parties.

  It's fascinating that Shimon Peres sees others as delusional.  In a stormy Cabinet debate after the assassination of Rechaam Zeevi (New York Post Oct. 18, 01) Shimon Peres said:

Go on with your dreams and illusions -- and at the end you will understand that there is no one to talk with but the Palestinians.

   One of Shimon Peres's many illusions was that there was any benefit in talking to the Palestinian leadership.

   Elyakim Haetzni wrote an excellent article about the delusional thinking of the Israeli government called The Psychiatric Ward.  Bernard Shapiro in his excellent article Will Israel be Lost Because of Deception and Delusion writes:

Words are distorted and their meaning obfuscated. Concessions to terrorism equals "peace." Resistance to terrorism means you are an "enemy of peace." Terrorists, whose hands drip with Jewish blood, are freed from prison or welcomed to enter Israel from abroad. Rabbis, Zionist patriots, and housewives with a love of Israel are placed in jail for "sedition." The world cheers the "peace loving" Israeli Stalinists while condemning similar behavior in other countries like China. Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres agrees to place Syria on the committee to monitor Hizbullah in Lebanon. Allowing the fox to guard the henhouse certainly comes to mind.

Has the world gone mad? Are Israelis that stupid as to allow such delusions to masquerade as policy?

  In The National Interest (Fall 2001), Yossi Klein Halevi, the Jerusalem-based analyst for The New Republic, recalls another haunted September, 1993, when after the Oslo signing he read a column by David Bar-Ilan reporting Yassir Arafat telling an Arab audience that Oslo was simply part of a “stages” policy.   Halevi wrote:

My instinctive reaction, was that the account must be exaggerated: Bar-Ilan, after all, was a right-wing ideologue. Despite the devastating implications of that speech, I did not bother checking whether Bar-Ilan’s report was accurate, precisely because I feared it might be. Nor did I want to be tainted by association with the right-wing opposition.

Israel Harel in an article called "The Price of Ideological Collectivism" (Ha'aretz Thursday, June 7, 2001) wrote:

   After the Yom Kippur War, Israeli intellectuals and journalists admitted the error of their ways. "We misled the public," some of them said. "We served the top brass who were responsible for the debacle," confessed the military correspondents, "we refused to listen to the few military intelligence experts who had sounded the alarm bells."

   "Both a sense of social commitment and the belief in monolithic ideology," wrote others, "sabotaged our performance. We ceased being skeptics, Doubting Thomases and catalysts - and that, after all, is the very essence of the role of intellectuals and media people." There were even those who solemnly promised never to repeat their horrible mistake.

  In his article Israel Harel writes that these intellectuals and journalists have returned to the same patterns of behavior and are embracing new delusions.

  Emanuel Winston in his article "No Apologies" (Freeman Center  Broadcast 6/19/01) wrote about the illusions of the Israeli intellectuals as follows:

The picture which they concluded was real wasn’t. It was as if a mirage could be real. Their vision turned out to be a dream-turned-nightmare based upon their wishful thinking. This aberrant self-identified intellectual pool of dreamers had little grasp of reality. The gaggle of academia was well-represented by the Media in offering their theories to the public. They saw the vision of what peace could be IF the Arabs would only comply, hence their visions were more like hallucinations.   Non-compliance did not fit their carefully constructed formula so they simply dismissed it...

Like flies drawn to manure, the self-designated ‘intellectual party’ pounced on the slogans of "Peace Now" - as if they not only could control the Arabs but, in fact, had conjured up the mirage as if they had actually done so.   Failed agreements and unremitting terror did not fit their scenario so they dismissed them as temporary phenomena...

Even as the battles of terror rage on, the followers of Oslo are trying to inject life into that corpse. We see Arabists in the U.S. State Department and the Arabists of Europe reconnecting with the Jewish Left as if nothing deadly has happened. The perennial pall-bearers are back, assisting Jews into their graves, explaining how the dead were volunteer "sacrifices for peace".

  Unwillingness to fact a bad reality is one of the explanations given by Rand H. Fishbein in his speech Beyond Compliance: The Victory of Illusion Over Reality, Outpost August 1999, regarding the creation of delusion by the United States that the PLO was in compliance.  Mr. Fishbein said:

Ever since the signing of the Oslo Accords in September 1993, conventional wisdom has held that compliance by Israel and the PLO to both the letter and spirit of the agreement was key to its success, and hence, the future of the "peace process."   This understanding was acknowledged by the signatories at the time, and was reaffirmed in subsequent years by the Israeli and Palestinian leadership, the U.S. Congress and the President in numerous speeches, resolutions and declarations.

This was not an unreasonable expectation.  After all, no agreement, contract, or treaty can long survive attempts to undermine its integrity.

Yet, that is exactly what has happened. Over the last six years, the PLO has brazenly, and persistently, set about to circumvent virtually every term and condition of Oslo. They have done so with the tacit, if not express, approval of the U.S. Department of State which regularly, and unflinchingly, certifies that the PLO is in substantial compliance with the requirements of Oslo and its companion agreements. It does so even though the overwhelming pattern of available evidence clearly demonstrates otherwise.

So, too, the PLO has carried out its deception with the full knowledge of the White House, knowing all too well that the President and his advisors are unwilling to countenance the collapse of a process which they have worked so hard to nurture and in which they have invested so much political capital.

   Fishbein continues:

The public record documenting Palestinian non-compliance is clear, abundant and growing with time. With shameless contempt, the Palestinians continue to:

   *   incite violence and mastermind terrorist acts;

   *   frustrate efforts to confiscate illegal weapons;

   *   defy prohibition against administrative offices in Jerusalem;

   *   oppose the crackdown on terrorist cells;

   *   resist the repeal of provisions of the PLO Charter calling for Israel's destruction; stockpile offensive weapons;

   *   train and equip paramilitary forces;

   *   publish official maps which make no mention of a Jewish State in the Middle East and depict a Palestinian entity encompassing all of sovereign Israel; and

   *   thwart the apprehension, prosecution and transfer of known criminals (twelve of whom are wanted by Israel, yet today serve in senior positions in the Palestinian police force).

Today, the Palestinian police force is over fifty percent larger than what is permitted under Oslo. Nine separate and distinct police detachments now operate in the territories. Despite claims by both the Administration and Palestinian leaders that the Palestinian Authority (PA) is making strides to reduce terrorism against Israel, nationalist-inspired Palestinian violence increased by 25% in 1998.

   Fishbein continues that Israel to creates delusion regarding Palestinian compliance and gives the following explanation:

But perhaps most astonishingly, Israel has contributed significantly to its own predicament. For over three years, a Likud Government, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has chosen to mute its criticism of Palestinian violations. On the surface, at least, it took this position in an effort to bolster Yassir Arafat's authority, keep the Oslo talks on track and avoid an open conflict with the U.S. Administration.

  In addition Fishbein spoke about how the Labor Government of Shimon Peres actually opposed American legislation that would have denied American funding to the Palestinian Authority unless they were in compliance with the Oslo Agreements.   Fishbein said:

Later, the Labor Government of Shimon Peres strongly opposed the "Middle East Peace Compliance Act of 1995," which would have denied any U.S. funding to the Palestinians until the PA fulfilled all of its commitments under Oslo. Also included in the legislation was a prohibition on funds to known PLO terrorists and a requirement that the PA make available for prosecution in the U.S. members suspected of having killed or injured Americans.

Both Israel and the U.S. made it clear it wished no disruption of Palestinian assistance and accused those Members who backed the legislation of undermining the peace effort. Astonishingly, it was a position taken by Israel's Labor government even as the PLO and Hamas were mounting a vicious terrorist bombing campaign on the streets of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

  Peres even said that Arafat shouldn't be held accountable for the way he spent donated money.  On Thursday Jan 4 it became apparent where some of that money was going.  Israeli naval commandos slid down ropes from air force helicopters and simultaneously climbed up the sides onto a PLO freighter carrying 80 tons of arms bought from Iran.  Yehudah Poch wrote (Freeman Center Broadcast 1/9/02)

For more than eight years, the world's democracies have joined the Arab states in funding the Palestinian Authority, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year, in an effort to "improve the living conditions of the Palestinian people." In so doing, the world's leading states, including the US, Russia, the G7, most European states, and the oil-rich states of the Arab world, have deliberately chosen to turn a blind eye to the real destination of the funds...

he [Arafat] has pocketed the entire sum, leaving the Palestinian people living in slum conditions, often without the basic necessities of life.

In such conditions, it has been easy for Arafat and his henchmen to incite the masses into hatred of the economically prosperous Israel...

If that money had been spent instead on the things it was meant for - infrastructure development, education, social services, and employment programs - there would have been no Intifada today, and there likely would have been a healthy and vibrant Palestinian state joining Israel in economic prosperity and progress.

But Yasser Arafat managed to pull off a stunning maneuver. He convinced the world to give him such incredible sums of money and to dispense with any accountability measures. After all, he needed to provide for his people, and with international supervisors looking over his shoulder, such provisions would be hampered. He then pocketed the money, spending it on weapons to entrench his regime of terror.

   It turns out that some of the money was going for bombs for suicide terrorists.  The New York Post (4/5/02) reports that Israeli officils found documents seized by Israelis during their sweep into PA controlled territories had Arafat's signature on them and instructions for payments to suicide bombers.

   Sharon and the United States had a theory that replacing Arafat with a Palestinian democracy will make peace possible.  Yet democracy follows the wishes of the people and the wishes of the Palestinian Arabs is for an end of the state of Israel.   In addition they wish for an Islamic theocracy so the moment they get a democracy they will vote in a theocratic dictatorship. 

    After the Israelis uprooted their fellow citizens from Gaza terrorists terrorists used their villages as training grounds as well as launching pads for rockets.  A reporter named Marie Colvin who saw this thought that:

"Israelis contemplating the evacuation of West bank settlements will shiver at the discovery that al-Qassam fighters now live and train on the ruins of a place that was home to 37 Jewish families." 

Sarah Honig wrote:

That, however, is where she gets it all wrong. Reasonable folks would indeed be shaken to the core and rebuff those who uprooted the most dedicated of their compatriots in order to facilitate genocidal preparations against the entire national aggregate.

But Colvin misjudged us. Israelis, alas, are neither reasonable nor even normal. It's not that our nonchalance is born of extraordinary courage in the face of adversity. Instead it's the product of denial of adversity.  (Denial of Adversity by Sarah Honig, The Jerusalem Post 4/6/2006)
 

Lawrence Auster theorizes that the U.S. doesn't want to face up to the possibility that they can't make the Muslims peaceful by spreading democracy.  He wrote (Global Democratization: The Unasked Questions, Outpost September, 2005):

 For one thing, if Muslims are so different from us that they can never be expected to construct societies based on liberal individual freedom, then there is no hope for a peaceful world unified around a shared belief in democracy. Irreconcilable differences of values between Muslims and Westerners, expressed in terms of political conflict and ultimately military conflict, must be perpetual, not only internationally, but, even more frighteningly, within the West itself, where millions of Middle Eastern Muslims have settled as immigrants. In the interests of maintaining both international and domestic peace, any thought of irreconcilable cultural and religious differences must be suppressed.

Beneath the fear of irresolvable conflict, there was, and is, a deeper, ideological reason for the suppression of discussion. If liberal individualism is rejected as a matter of principle by one-fifth of the world’s population who follow one of the world’s major religions, then the claim of liberal individualism to be the universal truth would lose its credibility. It would mean that there was something particular about Western culture, perhaps even about the peoples that had founded and created Western culture, that makes liberal individualism possible, which in turn would mean that religious, cultural, and ethnic differences matter politically.

The idea that such differences matter and need to be taken into account is, of course, the antithesis of the liberal universalist creed of contemporary conservatives, which says that all peoples are fundamentally the same and therefore equally ready for democracy and equally assimilable into America. And this is why none of the very smart people on the Bush team ever asked the obvious question whether there was anything about Islam that would make liberal democracy unacceptable to Muslims.

The United States insisted that Arafat appoint Abu Mazen as prime minister as a step toward democracy because they see him as a moderate. 

   Abu Mazen told his PA colleagues on April 29, 2993 that he would "accept nothing less than an independent state with its capital in Jerusalem, a state with continuous borders clean of settlements in all the lands captured in '67."  This shows no willingness to recognize Israeli rights to live in Judea and Samaria.   The big hope regarding Abu Mazen was that he would be willing to give up on the right of return. 

   The right of return is a codeword for the destruction of Israel because it would mean the influx of millions of people from refugee camps.  Although Israel has been willing to give land for peace that is not enough for the Palestinian Authority who are unwilling to settle the refugees in that land.  Regarding the "Right of Return," Abu Mazen said it is a topic for future negotiations.  That means that Israel could give the Palestinian Arabs a state and still be pressured to allow an influx of violent refugees.

   Abu Mazen’s doctoral thesis accused the Zionist movement, of conspiring against the Jewish people and collaborated with the Nazis to annihilate it, because the movement considered "Palestine" the only appropriate destination for Jewish emigration.

   He was the treasurer of the PLO, and provided financing for the attack on Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. 

   Israeli attorney Darshan-Leitner told Arutz-7 (4/29/03)  that PA sources themselves told her that it is ridiculous to claim that Abu Mazen was never involved in terrorism.   In addition, Abu Daoud, who masterminded the Munich attack, has said that Abu Mazen provided the funds to carry it out.  He made these charges in his autobiography, "Palestine: From Jerusalem to Munich" (published in French in 1999) and again in an interview last August in Sports Illustrated magazine.   The mastermind of the Munich Olympics massacre, Mohammed Daoud Oudeh, says it was Mazen who provided the money for the attack. Arafat and Mazen both kissed him on the cheeks before he set off to kill 11 Israeli athletes.

   It's also important to hear what Oudeh had to say about the group he commanded on that attack. The terrorist group Black September launched the assault. But the top operative explains the organization was simply a new name for terrorists working under the Fatah umbrella – directly under the orders of Arafat and Mazen. (Roadmap to Nowhere by Joseph Farah, WorldnetDaily 5/6/03)

To believe that such a man will bring peace is extremely delusional.  Another example of delusion is the Western reaction to the appointment of Muhammad Dahlan as Palestinian Minister for State Security.  Michael Freund wrote:  (Jerusalem Post 4/30/03)

The New York Times this week labeled Dahlan the “Palestinian security ace”, as though he were a beloved hero from an action film.

 The Miami Herald called him a “moderate”, while the Associated Press said he is “urbane” and “carefully coifed”.

 Of course, what the guardians of the public’s right to know neglected to mention is that Dahlan has a nasty habit of trying to blow up schoolbuses full of Jewish children.

 On at least three separate occasions in the past six years, Dahlan has reportedly been linked to such attacks.

 His first attempt came on April 1, 1997, when Palestinian suicide bombers blew themselves up outside Netzarim and Kfar Darom in Gaza in an attempt to hit two Israeli schoolbuses packed full of students. In both cases, miraculously, no Israelis were hurt.

 The Chief of General Staff at the time, Lt.-Gen. Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, said the bombers were wearing Palestinian police uniforms and that at least one, and possibly both, belonged to Dahlan’s Palestinian Preventive Security Service (The Jerusalem Post, April 2, 1997).

 Undeterred by his first failed attempt to kill Jewish kids, the “moderate” and “urbane” Dahlan tried again. On October 18, 2000, a busload of 40 Israeli women and children was attacked by gunfire and a bomb west of the Gush Katif junction in Gaza as it passed near a Palestinian police station. In this attack, too, no one was injured, but it was certainly not for lack of trying.

Two days later, Israeli intelligence concluded that Dahlan himself was behind the assault (Israel Radio, October 20, 2000).

 Less than a month later, though, Dahlan finally got his wish when, at last, an Israeli schoolbus was consumed by flames. On November 20, 2000, a roadside bomb outside Kfar Darom blew up as a schoolbus drove by. Two adults on the bus were killed, and nine other Israelis were injured, including five children.

 Among them were Tehilla, Yisrael and Orit Cohen, three beautiful young people who each had to have limbs amputated as a result of the blast.

 Within days, Israeli intelligence had cracked the case and the trail once again led straight back to Dahlan. His second-in-command, Rashid Abu Shabak, is said to have personally supervised the preparation of the bomb, and other people under him were also involved in the planning and implementation of the attack (Ha’aretz, November 23, 2000).

 Still another of Dahlan’s men, Baha Said, was involved in an attack on November 18, 2000 in which two Israeli soldiers were shot to death in Kfar Darom. Rather than denouncing Said’s actions, Dahlan reportedly eulogized him at his funeral, praising his actions and posthumously promoting him for killing Jews. (The Jerusalem Post, December 20, 2000)...

But hoping and longing for someone to be a moderate does not make them so, as all the wishful thinking since 1993 about Yasser Arafat has painfully demonstrated. Deluding ourselves about the true nature of our enemies is not only foolish. It is dangerous, too.

The war against radical Islam has been called the war against terrorism probably to avoid antagonizing Muslims and to make it easier to get Muslims to assist in fighting Muslim terrorists.  Richard Rubenstein gave another reason that it is called the war against terrorism.  He wrote (Encounter with an Angry Muslim Academic, Frontpagemag.com 9/7/05):

many public officials and much of the press are more comfortable talking about the “war against terrorism” than radical Islam’s war against the West. There is risk in openly identifying, as I did, a religious war for what it is. There may be greater risk in failing to do so.

    J.R. Nyquist wrote an article titled Russia’s Undeniable War Preparations which came to my attention in August 2007 and was probably published then.  In it he discusses how the U.S. doesn’t want to face the truth that those war preparations are for war with the United States.  It may be that the U.S. wants to show Russia that it is not the enemy so Russia won’t feel threatened and so won’t feel it necessary to arm and to launch preemptive wars against U.S. allies.  Whatever the reason the U.S. is not facing the reality of the threat.  Here is an excerpt from his article:

Last week, in an obvious upgrading of nuclear war readiness, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the resumption of long-range nuclear bomber patrols that had previously been suspended in 1992. “I made the decision to restore flights of Russian strategic bombers on a permanent basis,” said Putin. “Combat duty has begun.” For some reason, Americans cannot digest Putin’s statement or his decision to resume bomber patrols. Why is this happening? Well, we say to ourselves, there is no reason other than the peculiar psychology of the Russians. President Bush has not put U.S. strategic bombers on patrol. And why should he? Russia isn’t our enemy. We are all friends. We are all economic partners and allies in the war against terror. 

In Washington the State Department spokesman, Sean McCormack, responded to the Russian announcement of permanent strategic bomber patrols by saying, “It’s interesting. We certainly are not in the kind of posture we were with what used to be the Soviet Union. It’s a different era. If Russia feels as though they want to take some of these old aircraft out of mothballs and get them flying again, that’s their decision.”

It’s as if the Russian military had resumed stamp collecting or archery. There is no strategic alarm, no threat, no difficulty and no discomfiture. Let them play with their obsolete toys. We are living in a new era, and these activities no longer trouble us. The Cold War ended and the animosity between the great powers is gone. Say good-bye to it. Any evidence to the contrary is not evidence. We’re living in “a different era.” Anyone who doesn’t know this, even if they are the president of the Russian Federation, is out-of-step. One might imagine Washington’s reaction to a Russian missile strike against U.S. targets. “It’s interesting,” the State Department would purr. “This is not the sort of missile strike we would have expected from the Soviet Union. Of course, it’s a different era. If Russia feels that they want to launch some old, useless missiles, that’s their decision.” 

Our lack of imagination, our inability to grasp our enemy’s thought process, leads us to dismiss what is obvious. The Russians are getting ready. Why isn’t the American side responding? Why aren’t the Americans getting ready? We have been seduced by a series of comforting illusions. We are also absorbed in a struggle against Islamic terrorism (only we are at pains to admit the “Islamic” aspect of it). The American shopping mall regime produces stupefaction and complacency. The regime is predicated on economic optimism and entertainment. This optimism is about to be shattered. The Russians know this is going to happen, and they are preparing even as we fail to prepare. 

    Ann Coulter wrote an article in which I think she made a very insightful statement.  She said:

Like the noose hysteria currently sweeping New York City, liberals are always fighting the last battle because the current battle is too frightening.

One example of this is the liberal battle against Global warming when the world is faced with a nuclear threat from Iran and North Korea which the liberals do not want us to fight.  Maybe they blame Bush for everything because Bush is a lot less threatening than Osama Bin Laden.

 

VIa Creation of Delusion to Avoid Responsibility

     Henry Morgenthau was President Franklin Roosevelt's treasury secretary.  In late 1943, several of Morgenthau’s senior aides discovered that State Department officials had been secretly obstructing rescue opportunities and blocking transmission of Holocaust-related information to the U.S..  In an article titled Lobbying Against Genocide Then and Now (Israel National News 3/5/04) , Dr. Rafael Medoff writes that:

The State Department did not want them to be rescued, because that would increase pressure on the Allies to give them shelter.

Despite ongoing anti-Jewish violence in France , French President Jacques Chirac admonished a Jewish editor to "stop saying there is anti-Semitism in France. There is no anti-Semitism in France."

Author Salomon Malka, a Jewish community leader and director of one of the Jewish radio stations in Paris, says a president who says "no anti-Semitism" when synagogues are being bombed is a president saying "not France's problem" when it comes to its Jews. (Barricaded in Paris, frontpage magazine.com 11/24/05)
 

VIb Creation of Delusion To Avoid Blame

Haim Harari former president of the Weizmann Institute of Science, gave a speech in April 2004 in which he said:

It is a daily occurrence that the same people, who finance, arm and
dispatch suicide murderers, condemn the act in English in front of
western TV cameras, talking to a world audience, which even partly
believes them. It is a daily routine to hear the same leader making
opposite statements in Arabic to his people and in English to the rest
of the world.

    After terrorist attacks that killed Saudis, the Saudi Government began cracking down on terror in Saudi Arabia and claimed to be an aggressive ally against terror.  When Imams preach hatred towards others they are dismissed.  This has not stopped Saudi Clerics from encouraging Jihad against the United States (Saudi Clerics Still Encouraging Jihad, MSNBC 3/31/05) 

"I praise the jihad against the occupiers in Iraq," said Sheik Ai'dh Al-Qarni on Arabic-TV. "Throats must be split and skulls must be shattered."

Another cleric says suicide bombings are forbidden inside Saudi Arabia, but outside they can be "a good thing."

"There is nothing wrong with [suicide attacks] if they cause great damage to the enemy," said Sheik Abdallah Al-Muslih, also on Arabic-TV.

In fact, in November 2004, 26 Saudi clerics published a religious statement urging Muslims to wage holy war in Iraq. "Jihad against the occupiers is a must," said the statement. "[It is] not only a legitimate right but a religious duty." ..

A Saudi dissident says Saudi leaders engage in double talk.

"The public message says, 'Terrorism is bad.' The private message says, 'Terrorism is bad only when it’s against us.' When it's against the infidels or other people, it's OK and even celebrated," says Ali Al-Ahmed with the Saudi Institute.

VIC Creation of Delusion To Blame

    A major cause of the conflict in the Middle East between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs is constant incitement of the Palestinian Arabs to hate Israel.  Kenneth Levin wrote an article that demonstrated how the New York Times minimizes that aspect and instead pins the blame on Israel.  The New York Times minimizes that aspect by saying that Israelis say that there is incitement instead of documenting the many examples of incitement.  After a Palestinian Arab mob murdered two Israeli soldiers the New York Times wrote that

 “Israelis cite as one egregious example a televised sermon that defended the killing of the two soldiers. 'Whether Likud or Labor, Jews are Jews,' proclaimed Sheik Ahmad Abu Halabaya in a live [official PA television] broadcast from a Gaza City mosque the day after the killings."”

What’s so bad about saying Jews are Jews?  Jews afterall are Jews.  What’s the big deal?  The big deal is that the New York Times omitted Halabaya's further comments:

"[The Jews] are the ones who must be butchered and killed, as Allah the almighty said: Fight them; Allah will torture them at your hands, and will humiliate them... Have no mercy on the Jews, no matter where they are, in any country. Fight them, wherever you are. Wherever you meet them, kill them. Wherever you are, kill those Jews and those Americans who are like them..."

 

VII Holding on to Delusions Despite Contrary Evidence

   Religions often teach that God will protect the faithful.  When tragedy strikes the faithful religious leaders instead of questioning their assumption often claim the tragedy was punishment by God of the faithful for not being faithful enough.  Examples of this are given on the Negative Aspects of Religion web page.

   Shimon Peres continued to believe that Arafat shouldn't be held accountable regarding how he spent donated money inspite of the discovery of a ship of arms that Arafat bought with it.  Steve Plaut wrote (Email Newsletter Jan 9, 2002):

When Israel a few days back captured the PLO's Ship of Death, carrying 80 tons of missiles, shells, mortars, and other weapons, I was convinced that THIS TIME the nature of Oslo was undeniable, even for the most obstinate Oslo Believer.   Here were the weapons spread out on the docks for all to see.  Here was the proof that Arafat and the PLO itself were directing then terror, that they would NEVER comply with ANY Oslo-like Accord, that the PLO was planning a huge escalation of violence... Here was the proof, if any were still needed, that the PLO had no interest in any state as a framework to pursue the welfare and wellbeing of the Palestinian people, but rather solely as a base from which to launch attacks on Israel.

But, I guess I am just getting old. Once again, I succumbed to the temptation to think that THIS time the Oslo Camp would collapse. Like Fukayama, who keeps predicting the "End of History", I keep expecting the "End of Oslo". And we both are wrong. Israel's Left would pursue appeasing the PLO even after the PLO would put them inside concentration camps.

Within moments of the capture of the PLO's Ship of Death, the Oslo Love Boat, the Labor Party's Titanic, Shimon Peres and his henchmen were out in force to explain why nothing had changed and that Israel was still seeking to hold "talks" with the PLO to achieve new agreements which no doubt the PLO would honor and with which it would comply...

Yossi Beilin and the rest of the PLO's parliamentary contingent in the Knesset agree that the Ship of Death just proves how correct they have been all along and how Israeli concessions to the PLO need to be accelerated.

   Inspite of the discovery of the ship of death the United States defended Arafat.  Powell said:

The information we are receiving and developing on our own make it clear that there are linkages to the Palestinian Authority, but I have not seen information that yet links it directly to Chairman Arafat.

According to an Editorial in the New York Post 1/11/02

successive U.S. administrations, including this one, have invested so much time and effort depicting Arafat as the only Palestinian leader capale of delivering peace that they're unprepared to acknowledge a now-irrefutable reality: Arafat has never had any intention of reaching a genuine peace with Israel.

A great letter to the editor of the New York Post (Jan 13, 02) by Gerald Barsoni captured the absurdity of American policy.  He wrote:

How can Bush tell Arafat to "arrest those involved"?  Does the president really think that Arafat is going to arrest himself?

Charles Krauthammer, in an article "Ship of Truth" (1/11/02 Washington Post Friday, January 11, 2002; Page A21) wrote:

The ship's cargo is a candy store of terror. Two tons of explosives.
Countless machine guns. Fourteen-hundred mortars. And dozens of Katyusha
rockets, the quintessential weapon of terror: They go 12 miles and have no
accuracy, perfect for random killing in Tel Aviv...

This is plain as day. Yet the State Department professes puzzlement. "We have
told him [Arafat] we need a full explanation."

Need a full explanation? I can save State the time and the translator's fees.
Arafat is embarked on a strategy of war -- and has been ever since he signed
the September 1993 Oslo "peace" accords on the White House lawn. Don't take
it from me. Take it from the mouth of one of the leading Palestinian
moderates, Faisal Husseini. Shortly before his fatal heart attack last year,
he openly admitted that Oslo was "a Trojan Horse . . . just a temporary
procedure . . . just a step towards something bigger."

That something bigger is "Palestine from the river to the sea," Husseini
said, i.e., from the Jordan to the Mediterranean. ...

There is nothing new here. This strategy has been the declared PLO position
ever since it adopted the "Phased Plan" in Cairo in 1974. Phase 1: Accept any
territory offered of whatever size within Palestine. Phase 2: Make it the
forward base for the war to destroy Israel.

Our refusal to acknowledge this overwhelmingly obvious strategy is one of the
great acts of self-delusion in diplomatic history. European Union foreign
policy chief Javier Solana says that he hopes the weapons ship incident will
not scuttle peace talks. The peace efforts, says a U.S. official, will not be
derailed. "The Zinni mission will continue, ship or no ship."

This is madness. The ship is not an incident. The ship is not an accident.
The ship is an announcement, inadvertent and therefore indisputable, of
Arafat's duplicitous intentions: a temporary truce -- as he girds for war, a
far wider, deadlier, more explosive war.

What to do? Dare to face the truth.

  The State Department did not take Mr. Krauthammer's advice.  In their 2002 report "Patterns of Global Terrorism" they left out the terror activities perpetrated by PA security forces themselves, as well as Arafat's calls and praise for terrorism. Instead the report mentions how Arafat forcefully denounced the September 11 attacks.  The State Department Report described the Tanzim, a group controlled directly by Arafat who were responsible for many terror attacks as "small and loosely organized cells of militants drawn from the street-level membership of Fatah."

In the section on Egypt, the report does not even mention the "terror underground tunnels highway" from Egypt to the Gaza Strip that is the primary source of weapons and explosives in the Gaza Strip.

Of the nearly 100 fatal terrorist attacks perpetrated against Israelis in 2001, the State Department's Chronology of Significant Terrorist Incidents includes only nine of them. Omitted from the list of "significant" attacks were such incidents as the purposeful bus crash into a bus stop south of Tel Aviv [Feb. 14; 8 killed]; the suicide bombing of a bus in Haifa [Dec. 2; 15 killed]; the massacre outside Emanuel [Dec. 12; 11 killed]; drive-by murders such as that of a young woman and her husband - Sharon and Yaniv Bar-Shalom - and her brother on the Modiin highway [Aug. 25]; and dozens of others (Israel National News May 22 02)

   The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) in a letter to U.S. President Bush and Secretary of
State Powell about the State Department Report wrote:

Once again, the State Department is misleading Congress and the American   public by whitewashing Arafat's murder of Jews. Despite the capture... of Arafat's 50-ton ship of terror weapons [and] of truckloads of documents signed by Arafat in which he orders terrorism and pays individual terrorists, the State Department continues to pretend that Arafat is innocent. The State Department also ignores the culture of anti-Jewish hatred and violence in Arafat's school textbooks, in the 90 PA-sponsored summer camps, and in sermons by PA-appointed clergymen.  "The State Department's policy... sends a message to Arafat and other Arab terrorists that the United States will tolerate his mass murder of Israeli men, women, and children, and that the U.S. will not respond strongly even to the murders of 29 of its own citizens by Palestinian Arab terrorists since 1993.

…[T]he Bush administration is, in effect, rewarding Arafat's terrorism by giving the Palestinian Arabs an extra $50 million (in addition to the annual $100 million) and by helping to prop up the Palestinian Authority police force, which itself is involved in perpetrating terrorism against Jews.  This policy tramples President Bush's own doctrine of zero tolerance for terrorism, and actually increases the likelihood of terrorism against the U.S. and the rest of the West, for if suicide bombers succeed in Israel, they will inevitably strike in America as well."

   Frank Gaffney, president of the Washington-based Center for Security Policy, appeared before a House Armed Services subcommittee in May 2002 and said (Israel National News 5/27/02):

I would suggest that not since [1995] has the Congress been served such a distorted and, frankly, fraudulent document as that the State Department has just rendered describing Palestinian compliance with its obligations and other terrorist threats.

   He added that the State Department refused to acknowledge evidence that Arafat was involved in financing suicide bombings and buying rockets to attack Israeli cities.

Americans For A Safe Israel in a Press Release (5/24/02) regarding the State Department Report wrote:

Suffice it to say that the State Department lists nine attacks against Israelis in Israel in 2001 while Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs listed 81 attacks.   The terrorist murder of Israel’s Ministry of Tourism, Rechavam Ze’evy did not make the list.

The report inverts truth by blaming Israel’s destruction of the PA terrorist infrastructure for the “ineffectiveness” of the PA “security” forces.   The fact that these “security” forces are the terrorists themselves, organized and paid for by Arafat himself, is never mentioned.

   Herbert Zweibon, AFSI’s Chairman, said:

The fixation by the State Department on a “solution” to the Israeli/Arab conflict spins it into a world of illusion, where reality is ignored.  This is a dangerous position to take because it flies in the face of America’s fight against terrorism as outlined by President Bush, and as endorsed by the American people.  

   David Bedein in his article (Slurring Israel, Frontpagemag.com 3/22/04) wrote about the delusional world of the State Department exposed by its human rights report, released on 2/25/04 as follows:

Since 1991, the Israelis and the Palestinians made repeated attempts at negotiating peace. Despite meetings between high-level Israeli and Palestinian officials, efforts to resolve the conflict yielded few results…” 

Such a statement gives the distinct impression that both sides made equal effort. The reality, which is glossed over, is that during the course of the Oslo process, from 1993 to 2000, Israel met its obligations and turned over significant areas to the control of the Palestinian Authority, while the PA failed to meet its obligations. No less a participant than former President Clinton laid the blame for failure of the process squarely on PA President Arafat. Yet the State Department chooses not even to suggest that this might have been the case. ..

Only five specific attacks are listed even though there were at least 17 suicide bombings alone and hundreds of other attacks – knifings, shootings, etc. – that were perpetrated against Israel in the course of 2003.  

Nor is there is a single mention by name or circumstances of the victims of those attacks: There is no specific mention, for example, of the fact that children were bombed into non-existence when returning from prayers at the Western Wall, or of the fact that a recently released PLO prisoner had murdered Dr. David Applebaum – much loved and much mourned head of emergency services at Sha’arei Tzedek Hospital – and daughter, the evening before her wedding...

What is lacking is the information – well documented – that PLO gunmen frequently opt to position themselves behind civilians when there is a gun battle so as to put the civilians at risk. It is not the PLO, which sanctions this conduct, that is abusing the human rights of the Palestinian Arab population?   

   The State Department human rights report, released on 2/25/04 although condemning Arab terrorism also condemned Israel's efforts to fight Arab terror.   Caroline Glick in an article Titled Surrealism vs. Reality (The Jerusalem Post 2/27/04) wrote:

Yet aside from condemning every action Israel has taken to combat terrorism and thereby equating actions aimed at protecting Israeli citizens with terrorism, the report does something even more offensive.

The report very sensitively gives the names of a dozen or so Palestinian children who died during Israeli assaults against Palestinian terrorists who used these children for cover.

Yet, grotesquely, while the names of Palestinian children are listed, the report provides not one name of any Israeli victim of Palestinian terrorism. Not the Ohayon children, not 14-year-old Abigail Litle who was murdered on a bus on her way home from school and not the names of hundreds of other Israeli men, women and children who were murdered last year.

By naming Palestinian victims while not giving names of Israeli victims, the State Department report follows in the path of the general climate that has gripped us for the past 40 months. This general climate is characterized by the dehumanization of Israelis and Jews by the international community.

This dehumanization prevents anyone from ever seeing the victimization of Israelis. By balancing condemnations of Palestinian terrorism with condemnations of Jewish communities in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, our critics, even those among us, are cheapening the value of our lives.

By arguing that Israel abuses human rights when it defends itself against an enemy which has declared its aim as genocide, the State Department, like the UN, the EU, the foreign media and international human rights organizations, is creating a false reality where Israel is not fighting a war against an enemy bent on its physical destruction. Rather, Israel is simply being mean.

   The ongoing hatred preached by the Palestinian Authority against the United States despite the hundreds of millions of dollars of U.S. aid has not made any impression on the delusional thinking of the United States.

   In my articles on creation of paranoia I mention how self esteem can be a motivating factor.  This is also the case in creation of delusion.  When people are confronted with evidence that contradicts their beliefs they may desire to ignore that evidence rather than admit that they were wrong.  There are other factors as well that influence what people want to believe and their desire to believe may contribute to delusional beliefs.  Daniel Pipes in his article "The Left's ongoing Oslo delusion" that appeared in the Jerusalem Post, April 25, 2001,  wrote how the Israeli left was sure that:

If only Israel made extensive compromises, Palestinians would respond by accepting the permanent existence of a sovereign Jewish state in the Middle East. This certainty inspired the seven-year-long Oslo effort from September 1993 until September 2000 (yes, also during Binyamin Netanyahu's three years), when Israeli governments pursued a policy of niceness.

But instead of winning Palestinian acceptance, Oslo's painful concessions had the reverse effect. The more Israel showed flexibility, the more Palestinians smelled blood and became enraged at the very existence of the Jewish state. This culminated in the violence of the past seven months.

   Pipes writes how the extreme left did not abandoned their beliefs in the face of such overwhelming evidence.  Instead they blamed their leader Ehud Barak  The moderate left blamed Arafat but continue to believe that concessions will lead to peace.  According to Pipes:

The Oslo process did not fail because of poor implementation. Rather, its basic assumption - that a policy of niceness would seduce Palestinians into accepting Israel - proved profoundly wrong.  If Israel truly wants to end its problem with the Palestinians, it must adopt the opposite approach: convince Palestinians not of its niceness but its toughness. This means ...punishing violence so hard that its enemies will eventually feel so deep a sense of futility that they will despair of further conflict.

   Steve Plaut in his essay "But, really now, how will we KNOW until we TRY it?" (Freeman Center Broadcast `10/6/03)   wrote about how the left rejected evidence that the Oslo process was a failure with the argument that we need to try more and more and more...

Since the beginning of the Oslo war process, the mantra of the Oslo Left has always been, "But how do we really know till we try?"

When the Labor Party and their fellow travelers proposed turning the West Bank and Gaza Strip over to the PLO, promising the PLO would then seek peace and suppress the terror, that it would live in tranquility, the objections of opponents were snidely dismissed.   "How do you KNOW it will not work until you try it," hissed the Left.   "No one really KNOWS until it is implemented."

Well, it was implemented and now we know.   1300 Israelis were murdered as a direct consequence of the "testing" of the "ideas" of the Left.   And counting.

Then the Left claimed that if only Israel would offer the Palestinians a state in the West Bank and Gaza purged them of their Jewish civilians, along with international recognition of "Palestine", control of East Jerusalem, financial tribute, parts of pre-1967 Israel, and a well-equipped army, then the Palestinians would respond with agreement to make peace.  When opponents objected that this was insane and suicidal, the Left caterwauled, "But how do you really KNOW until you try it and make the offer?"  Well Israel did, at Camp David II, and now we know.   The
response was nazi atrocities and escalated war.

The Left has been wrong about absolutely everything in the past decade.  But it defends its "ideas" and insists that they be further implemented by screaming, "No one KNOWS whether or not it will bring peace until attempted."

Avi Davis in an article called WHOSE ETHICS?  WHOSE REVENGE? (Freeman Center Broadcast 8/14/02) wrote:

Among the more tragic examples of  self-delusion visited upon the State of Israel in recent years none has been greater than  the conception that unilateral action will set an example that Palestinians will emulate.  The Oslo Process – all nine years of  it -  was largely such an act,  held aloft  with crossed fingers, only to end in bitter disillusion.    For all Israel’s investment in peace making there has been little obvious return for its giant leap of faith.  The one thousand Israeli dead and thousands of wounded  provides brutal confirmation of Proust’s aphorism that  the ultimate tragedy of the fool is the inability  to recognize the continuance of one’s own folly.

   The Israelis also believed that withdrawing from Lebanon would be an excellent strategic move that would create a peaceful northern border.   Daniel Pipes wrote two excellent articles about this in the Jerusalem Post.  One was called Israel's Lebanon Lesson, about what he terms Israel's "sweet delusion" and the other is called Double Delusion in which he writes:

In 2000, Ehud Barak's government implausibly maintained that the unilateral retreat from Lebanon enhanced Israel's strategic position. His countrymen brainwashed themselves into believing that their ignominious loss was "a defeat for Syria and a victory for Israel." Israelis refused to see what was plainly before their noses, so desperately did they want the end to warfare.  In contrast, the Lebanese organization Hizbullah rightly claimed for itself a signal victory over the mighty IDF and the first Arab military triumph over Israel. Without exceptions or conditions, it achieved the goal of expelling Israel from Lebanon.

The consequences of the withdrawal from Lebanon are discussed further on the Appeasement in the Middle East web page of this web site.   Steve Plaut in his email newsletter of May 24, 01 wrote about the delusions underlying the Oslo Peace Process as follows: 

   Oslo has never been about Israel and the PLO striking deals and complying with them. Oslo has been about Israel making unilateral appeasements and capitulations. And Oslo is about Luddism, where Israelis convince themselves that these appeasements buy goodwill and sympathy from the world, convincing the world that Israelis are not such evil, cussed, racist demons as the world has always thought. In other words, Oslo is based on a complete denial of the past 2500 years of Jewish history.

   Another aspect of Middle East Luddism is the obsessive drive to reach yet a new "deal" with the PLO. The Israeli government, and NOT just the politicians of the Left, keep seeking ways to get Arafat to sit down and at last strike a new "deal". Sharon keeps sending his prodigal son to meet with the Palestinian fascists in the hope of such a "deal". Naturally, the Israeli press and the Left insist all settlements be frozen and the Mitchell Commission Investigative Report into the Reichstag Fire be adopted in full so that a new "deal" can be signed.

   This pious and mystical belief in the promise of tranquility from any such new "deal" with the PLO reminds me of all those millenary sects that keep taking to islands and jungles after selling all their worldly goods because they are sure the messiah (or at least UFOs) are imminently about to put an end to the planet. Never mind how many times the end of the world has been declared imminent and they are proven wrong, the true believers continue to march.

   How anyone could think for a moment that any new "deal" would result in ANYTHING but MORE PLO violence, atrocities, increased pressures on Israel from the world to capitulate, and even more intense anti-Jewish agitprop on BBC and CNN, is beyond me.

  Steve Plaut has a point.  Israeli concessions since Oslo have been met with more PLO violence, atrocities etc..  In an article "Are Most Moslems Anti-Terror?" 9/23/01 he also points out that:

One of the unchallenged axioms of American civic religion is that each and
every group of people on earth must consist of an "overwhelmingly vast
majority of decent hard-working honest people who want peace and are
tolerant and freedom-loving and anti-violence."

It is an unchallengeable presumption of this theology that "vast
majorities" of not only each and every racial/religious/ethnic group may
be so described, but even vast majorities of each and any subgroup within
society. Hence we even sometimes hear assertions that the vast majority of
prisoners, prostitutes, drug users, gang members, etc. are also decent,
honest, peace-loving, honorable people.

The one imponderable in American civic theology is the idea that somewhere
out there someplace there just might be is a group of people, the majority
of whom are NOT peace-loving or honest or tolerant. This belief in
universal peacefulness in the minds of Americans is the main obstacle to
Americans ever understanding the Middle East. The simple fact of the
matter is that the overwhelmingly vast majority of Arabs, and the
overwhelmingly vast majority of Moslems, are not peace-loving and are not
opposed to violence.

Noting this could not be more timely. Commentator after commentator among
the Western media discuss the reactions in the Moslem world to the US
atrocities with self-righteous fawning observation that Islam is a
religion of peace, that the terrorists are about as representative of true Islam as the IRA
bombers are of Christianity, or as white supremicists are of Christianity.
Each commentator goes out of his way to emphasize how we all understand
that the vast majority of Moslems oppose terrorism and violence.

The only problem with this is that it is simply false and empirically
disprovable. It is wishful thinking. The vast majority of Germans
supported Hitler, supported wars of aggression, and supported genocide.
The vast majorities of Hutus and Tutsis support massacres of the other.
Similarly, the vast majority of Arabs support terror and violence and war.
They do not see anything wrong with the blowing up of hundreds of
civilians in an Embassy of the United States or in an office building of
Argentinian Jews. They see any act of force taken against the perpetrators
of such things to be itself a crime. (This is not to say that the vast
majority of each and every subgroup of Moslems support such barbarism; the
Turks and Indonesian-Malays come to mind as possible exceptions.)

The vast majority of Moslems support the random and indicriminate use of
terror and violence against Jews and against Americans. The reactions of
Moslems everywhere are there on the TV screens for all to see and will be
more unambiguously pro-terror the moment the US begins to
attack Afghanistan and/or Iraq. Arab political thought is fundamentally
Orwellian: murder is peace, prevention of murder or
retaliation for murder is terror. Moslems are outraged by events in the
Balkans because Moslems are being massacred; if Bosnians and Albanians
were instead massacring Serbs they would have trouble hiding their
approval and delight.

We have known for decades that the vast majority of Moslems also approve
of Palestinian atrocities and bombings directly against Jews. There is no
act of savagery directed against Israelis or Jews of which they will not
approve by enormous majorities, and no act of defense by Israel that they
will legitimize.

Public opinion polls are not conducted in most Moslem countries, but if
they were they would no doubt reflect this popular approval. Polls ARE
conducted among Palestinians and they show without exception that
Palestinians approve of bombings and suicide bombs and atrocities
committed against Jews, by enormous majorities. Their approval rates have
generally increased with each Israeli concession to them under Oslo. The
vast majority of Palestinians support Saddam Hussein. The vast majority
probably support Bin Laden and the bombings of the Americans. The vast
majority would approve if Iran or Iraq dumped chemical weapons or nerve gas on Tel
Aviv.  These are the people with whom Oslo is supposed to produce peace.

Oh, you might object, but Arafat has DENOUNCED Bin laden and even endorsed
the US bombings in Sudan and Afghanistan. Well, yes he did, no doubt hoping thus
to get the US to force Israel to make a few more concessions as quid pro
quo, and he was no doubt as sincere as were the IRA folks who denounced
the bombing of Omagh. But the Palestinian fascist hordes, taking their
signals from the PLO, know he is posturing and winking and these folks
support Bin Laden by overwhelming majorities.

All this week there have been massive anti-American marches by the
Palestinian brownshirts. US flags have been burned throughout the
Palestinian zones...

Sweeney was the name of an Irish king who believed he was a bird and spent
his life in treetops. (Really.).. Oslo is based upon a fundamental denial of empirical reality. Like the old
Peter and Gordon song from the 60's, it is based upon the Sweeneyish
assertion that "I don't care what they say I won't stay in a world without
love." And what happens to Sweeneys who live in unlit corners of the earth
without love? They pretend to be birds and rise above such mundane things
as reality to live in treetops of utopian dreams. Leaving the rest of us
to face terror, murder, violence, Arab fascism, and threats of genocidal
extermination.

Peter Hutchins in an essay published on March 10th in the British newspaper, The Mail wrote:

In normal life, it is a sign of being unhinged if you do the same thing over and over again and expect a different result. But in the business of Middle East diplomacy such behavior could earn you a Nobel Peace Prize. Since 1978, Israel has been urged to give up a little more land in return for the promise of peace which always seems to evaporate. The land however is gone for good.

   One problem with the delusion that most of a population is nice is that when there is a conflict it leads to moral equivalence.  If one assumes that most of the Palestinians are peace loving people and many of them shoot Israelis than it appears reasonable to draw the incorrect conclusion that the Israelis must have given them a legitimate reason to do so.

Berel Wein in an article that appeared in the Jerusalem Post June, 21 2001 called "Rebuilding our Confidence" wrote:

We need leaders who will speak the truth forcefully and calmly. We are tired of suicidal delusions and shopworn slogans, of apple-cheeked youth dancing in celebration of a mythical peace while our enemies prepare again for an armed attempt to end the "occupation."

   In another article called "A Crazy World" (August 10, 2001 Opinion, Israel National News) Berel wrote:

The world in general ... is crazy beyond belief. How else can one explain that Amnesty International is after Carmi Gillon while the Pope exchanges kisses and hugs with Yassir Arafat? Arafat´s unblemished record of thirty five years of terror, murder, corruption and violence got him a Nobel Peace Prize and international approval, while all Gillon can show for his efforts at attempting to save the lives of innocents here in Israel is a lousy ambassadorial appointment to Denmark, with a threat of being arrested there. And what do you say to the "peace rally" last Saturday night in Tel Aviv? Does it not dawn upon the “peace camp” yet that there has to be another side willing to make peace with us for any "peace process" to work? I would also willingly join rallies for peace if I knew that such rallies were taking place in Gaza, Ramallah, Shechem and Jericho, as well. But as long as they are taking place only in Tel Aviv, I think that such gatherings, in light of present realities, border on the ludicrous, if not the insane. And what shall we make of the journalistic rewriting of the Camp David fiasco? What grain are these journalists eating? Somehow, it isn´t Arafat´s fault at all that he turned down the deal to end all deals, offered no counteroffer to Barak and unleashed the murderous campaign of terror and violence that, while it may be hurting Israel, is certainly destroying the Palestinian economy and social structure.

What are we to think about the "humanitarians" who unleash Code Red "viruses" and "worms" on the world´s computer systems in order to prove some obscure point? What sadistic pleasure they must gain from their twisted exploits. And how shall we understand the behavior of the noble anti-globalization protesters who have trashed Seattle, Genoa and other world cities in their quest for social justice? Nothing accomplishes the advancement of the cause of the poor and the downtrodden the world over as quickly and definitively as does breaking shop windows, looting goods from their legitimate owners, hurling rocks and firebombs at police and becoming drunk and stoned. And, naturally, in this lunatic world of ours, the police are to be blamed for "overreacting" and beating the firebomb throwing crazies.

The crazies are going to hold a conference on racism in South Africa next month. In attendance there will be, among others, the Hutus and the Tutsis of Burundi and Rwanda, the Zulus and the ANC of crime-ridden South Africa, Kadaffi of Libya and Mugabe of Zimbabwe, all of whom are experts in killing and stealing, with an horrendous record of accomplishments in these fields. They will gather and solemnly decide whether Zionism is racism. The Russians, whose methods of attempting to stamp out the Chechnyan uprising make the Middle East violence look like a touch football game, will undoubtedly intone on the matter. The righteous French, who have never yet admitted their collaborationist role with the Nazis in the Second World War, will also have something to say on the matter, as will the Oslo-creating Scandinavians.

   Uri Dan in his article "Bibi, Barak and Arafat" that appeared in the Jerusalem Post in July 2001 wrote that:

NETANYAHU and Barak both lacked the intellectual integrity needed by the leader of a Jewish state whose future is in jeopardy - integrity obligating him to disconnect the fake "peace-drug infusion" from the veins of the Israeli nation, which had been deluded into thinking that peace lay just around the corner.

The two leaders apparently succeeded in drugging themselves as well and hoped that they would achieve some kind of agreement with Arafat. For this reason Netanyahu gave Hebron to Arafat, an act he now deeply regrets. His office director, Uri Elitzur, was amongst those in favor of giving up another 13 percent of Judea and Samaria, based on the public-opinion polls which guided Netanyahu's actions. Barak, believing in his political blindness that he would bring about "an end to the conflict," hurried to hand over the remaining 11% in one go, destroying the Wye agreement in the process.

    Evelyn Gordon in her article "No End In Sight" that appeared in the Jerusalem Post on July 3, 2001, writes about the delusions of the International Community regarding a so called reduction in violence that supposedly occurred after Arafat agreed to a cease fire on June 13th.  She wrote:

The first flaw in the "progress" theory is the fact that eight Israelis (as of this writing) - the majority of them civilians - have been killed since the "cease-fire"began on June 13. This is an average of one murder roughly every two and a half days. Not only is this a completely unacceptable figure by any civilized standard, but it is also virtually identical to the death rate in the months preceding the cease-fire. Thus it is hard to fathom how this figure constitutes a decline in the violence.  Equally problematic is the fact that there have been numerous violent incidents that miraculously failed to result in death...

    It is not hard to understand why the international community so desperately wants to believe that an end to the violence is in sight. What is puzzling, however, is why so many people seem to think that closing their eyes to the truth will further this goal. In fact, the opposite is the case: by rushing to declare that "progress" has occurred when it has not - and that Arafat should therefore immediately receive the diplomatic rewards that were slated to accompany an actual truce - they are encouraging the violence to continue. After all, if Arafat can obtain all the proffered benefits merely by mouthing the right words, what conceivable incentive could he have for tackling the much more difficult task of making those words a reality on the ground?

   The Israeli belief that building a new fence will protect them against suicide terrorists may be a delusional decision that ignores prior experience.  Yehuda Poch in an article called "Political Fencing" (Freeman Center Broadcast 6/21/02) wrote:

For decades there has been a fence along the border between Israel and Lebanon.   Not once has this fence prevented missile attacks against northern Israeli communities.  Any terrorist who wanted to invade Israel and commit acts of war has not been deterred by a few electronic devices or barbed wire.  The fence never removed the need for the IDF to spend 20 years in Lebanon ensuring the security of the Israeli north, and in the last two years since Israel pulled out of South Lebanon, even a UN recognized border has not stopped Hizbullah from attacking the north at whim.

In the Gaza Strip, a fence exists along the 1967 line.  This fence also has not prevented mortar attacks or other terrorist outrages emanating from there.  On the Lebanese border and along the Gaza line, the fences have served more as a target for attacks than as a preventive, and have necessitated increased IDF activity rather than its reduction.

Like its two predecessors, the new fence will not prevent terrorism.  If an Arab is prepared to die in order to kill Jews, nothing as flimsy as an electronic wall will stop him.  Terrorists will find ways around, over, under, or through this obstacle...

   Interestingly the fence did reduce terrorism although as Yehuda predicted a terrorist dug a hole underneath and murdered Israelis and terrorists during the hudna (cease fire) built thousands of rockets to shoot over the fence.  In October, 2003, Hanadi Tayseer Jaradat, a 27-year- old law-school grad, blew herself up in Maxims a Haifa Restaurant and killed at least 19 people including three children, ages 1, 5 and 6,   (New York Post 10/5/03).  It later came to light that she was able to get past the fence surrounding Jenin (Israel National News 10/8/03).  Still if fences reduce terrorism it's better to have one than not to have one.  It is delusional however to believe that a fence is a substitute for uprooting terror at its source.

    In October 2002, the Quartet U.S., EU, UN, and Russia drafted a road map peace plan.  One of Bush's prerequisites for the plan was democratic reform in the Palestinian Authority.  Arafat simply appointed his right hand man Abu Mazen to represent him and that was considered sufficient  by the United States which pressured Israel to make concessions and agree to a Palestinian state as required by the plan.  Another part of the plan is that the Palestinian Authority crack down on terror.  Carol Glick wrote about this "crackdown" in an article titled Washington's Betrayal, (Freemanlist 5/30/03).  She wrote:

In an interview with Yediot Aharonot on Thursday, Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas repeated for the 1000th time that he has no intention of taking any action against the terrorist infrastructure. While he maintains that he is presently negotiating with Hamas to stop attacks on Israelis and states that once he has an agreement for a cease-fire, he will try to work out arrangements with Fatah and Islamic Jihad, Abbas will take no military action against any of the terror networks. "We will never have a civil war," he said...

For his part, Saeb Erekat was even more succinct. Speaking with the Associated Press on Wednesday, he explained that Abbas is aiming to get Hamas and Islamic Jihad to agree to wait until after a Palestinian state is declared before attacking Israeli targets. In his words, Abbas "will insist on this declaration [of a cease-fire] because that's the key... for him to go out and tell the Palestinians, 'Look, we've got the Israeli government to recognize the Palestinian state, [so] we need two years in a peaceful, meaningful peace process."

  As part of the roadmap the Palestinian Arabs agreed to a temporary cease fire and cessation of terror.  Yet according to statistics compiled by the IDF, there were a total of 167 Palestinian terrorist attacks against Israel in the four weeks after the hudna went into effect.  That's down from their usual 300 but is certainly not a cease fire.  Then Raed Abdul Hamid Mask, an Islamic scholar and father of two children, blew himself up on a bus packed with parents and young kids coming home from prayers in Jerusalem (NYPost 8/20/03).  The half-Hudna was over.  Did that change the mind of the American administration?  Did they now realize that something was wrong with the roadmap to peace?   The small piece in the New York Post (Peace 'map' still on course: Rice 8/26/03) answered that question:

The United States will forge ahead with the violence-ripped "road map"   because the peace plan is the only way to bring "durable peace and security" to the Middle East, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said yesterday.

She also called on Israel to carry out its "responsibilities" to help achieve a "peaceful change."

President Bush "remains committed to the course that he laid out... because it is the only course that will bring durable peace and security," Rice told veterans in San Antonio, Texas.

  Jedidiah Purdy, in his book Being America writes that:

Although Muslims from Egypt to Indonesia claimed in the fall of 2001 that they would accept Osama bin Laden's guilt if the United States proved it by public evidence, their promise sounded hollow after Washington released a video in December that showed bin Laden discussing having planned the attacks.  The so-called Arab street didn't blink: the tape was denounced as a fabrication.

      Stalin a former dictator of the Soviet Union was responsible for the murder of about 43,000,000 people.  When he died Russia went into mourning.  Before he died he concocted the Doctor's Plot to instigate progroms against Jews.  While one would think that all Jews would have breathed an enormous sigh of relief upon Stalin's death, there was no shortage of Russian Jews who shared in the country's paroxysm of grief. Even more peculiar, I. F. Stone, a well-known left-wing Jewish journalist in the United States, attacked President Eisenhower for not issuing a more effusive note of condolence on the mass murderer's death.

 

VIII Arab Denial and Deception

Ion Mahai Pacepa wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed (Jan 10, 02)

Arafat has made a political career by pretending that he has not been involved in his own terrorist acts.  But evidence against him grows by the day.

   Daniel Pipes and Jonathan Schanzer in an Op-Ed Denial A River in Egypt (New York Post 1/14/02), wrote how the editor in chief of the Egyptian Government's daily Al-Ahram announced that:

The story of the arms ship is but a licensed fabrication by Israel.

Pipes and Schanzer continue:

Saudi media agreed that the episode was a hoax with Arab News calling it an "elaborate trap" and Ar-Riyadh alleging that "it was necessary to fabricate the ship story" to implicate other Arab and Muslim countries as sponsors of terrorism...

this denial avoids problems rather than dealing with them.

Part of the U.S. war on terrorism, therefore has to be working with Muslim governments and pressing them to face reality.  This will not be easy but so long as they remain in denial the stage is set for fresh disasters.

  Zalman Shoval wrote an article in the Jerusalem Post (August? 2001) in which he points out groups in other countries have had delusions e.g. Britain's Cliveden set regarding Hitler, who espoused appeasing Nazi Germany and branded Churchill a warmonger, and how in in certain circles, in the US, France and Israel (Meretz), and Stalin was crowned the hero of peace and progress but that they let go of their delusions about Hitler during World War II and their delusions about Stalin when he perpetrated his reign of terror.  In his article Mr. Shoval asks:

Why, unlike those British pro-German appeasers or the pro-Soviet dupes, is our own Peace Now crop not yet able or willing to face reality, to admit it made a tragic mistake - and to contritely leave the stage?  Are they being disingenuous? Haven't they noticed? Do they lack civic courage? Or perhaps the answer lies in the realm of psychology - they recognize that everything they ever believed in and fought for was always a myth - or worse, a house of lies - but cannot admit it, even to themselves.

IX Historical Examples of Delusion

   Not all pro-Soviet dupes gave up their delusions during Stalin's reign of terror. 

   Jamie Glasov an emigre from the Soviet Union whose parents were dissidents and were persecuted by the KGB wrote that:

when the Soviet archives were opened after the fall of the Soviet tyranny in 1991, I hungrily devoured all the information inherent in the revelations in declassified documents, disclosures from former Soviet officials, etc. They all confirmed and substantiated what conservatives had been arguing for decades -- and what common sense had long ago instructed -- that the Soviets were totalitarian, power-hungry and expansionist brutes that started and prolonged the Cold War.

When I approached my colleagues with this new evidence, ranging from everything from the issues of the Korean war, Berlin, Soviet espionage, American communists’ links with the Soviet regime, etc., I showed how I had been correct on every issue that we had argued about for years.

And yet, instead of hearing a mea culpa, a stated regret or admission of some kind of lesson learned, all that I witnessed, in a manner that remains extremely eerie for me to remember, was a callous indifference and smug contempt for the issues at hand. Some of my colleagues articulated a few incomprehensible justifications of their positions; others just switched topics with remarkable speed and ominous neglect. All of them condescended to me for being interested in something so “old” and “ancient.” They patiently counselled me, with a disdain and arrogance that I will never forget, to stop chasing “old ghosts” and “engaging in necrophilia.”

   Jamie asked Professors John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, the authors of In Denial: Historians, Communism, and Espionage why these historians were so dismissive of the evidence that he presented to them.  Klehr answered:

Jamie, many of those you speak of live in a different reality from that of the rest of us. Psychologically, they do not see what you see. They see the present and the past through a special lens. What is overwhelmingly clear to them is an imagined future collectivist utopia where antagonisms of class and race have been eliminated, the economic and social inequalities that have driven people to crime have been removed, poverty does not exist and social justice reigns, world brotherhood has replaced war and international strife, and an economy planned by people like them has produced economic abundance without pollution or waste. Coupled with this vision of the future is loathing of the real present which falls woefully short of these goals and hatred for anyone or anything that stands in the way of their illusion of the radiant future.

At Solovki, one of earliest Gulag camps, Soviet administrators put up a sign that expressed the Communist program: "With an Iron Fist, We Will Lead Humanity to Happiness." That slogan captures the murderous nature of the utopian vision of the hard left.

Avi Davis in his article Iron in the Soul (Freeman Center Broadcast Aug 5, 2001) wrote that In 1954, the year following Josef Stalin’s death, the French intellectual Jean Paul Sartre,  author of the classic existential novel, Iron in the Soul, wrote in the journal Liberation  “Soviet citizens criticize their government much more effectively than we do.” “ Furthermore,” he later added, “ Soviet citizens do not travel abroad, not because they are prevented from doing so, but because they have no desire to leave the country.”  This was at a time when Stalin’s iron fist was still as tightly clenched around his people’s throats as ever. Freedom of speech had been brutally extinguished; Labor camps, filled with hundreds of thousands of war veterans, writers, middle class professionals and political enemies, groaned under the weight of their failing capacities. Spies were everywhere, with children reporting their parents and students their teachers.  Yet Sartre, together with his equally famous paramour Simone de Beauvoir, remained oblivious.  Convinced of the superiority and righteousness of the Communist cause, Josef Stalin’s regime stood as a model of human progress, unsullied by damning reports to the contrary.

   Avi also writes that the way the Cliveden Set (Hitler apologists) and the Fabian Society (Stalin apologists) who were thinkers, leaders and champions of freedom, remained so unmoved by mounting evidence of concentration camps and forced labor gangs, is one of history’s more egregious examples of moral gymnastics. 

   Avi writes that denial among intellectuals did not die with Sartre and de Beauvoir.   Its spirit lives on in a myriad of academic
and left wing incarnations.   No more so than in the left wing intellectual community’s assessment of the Arab-Israeli dispute.  One needs only to read recent revisionist accounts of  last summer’s  Camp David summit by such writers as Deborah Sontag, (New York Times)  Robert Malley (New York Review of Books) and Yossi Beilin (Ha’aretz) to be convinced that the members of the left wing intelligentsia are traipsing the same morally muddied terrain as their predecessors.

   Avi writes :The Arafat apologists, ... have succeeded in bringing that brand of denial to a new level of acceptability.  How these liberal commentators, who have access to far more graphic depictions of daily events, (than the Cliveden Set and the Fabian Society, could excuse Arafat’s resort to terror, his tolerance for targeting babies and children or the continued incitement and anti-Semitism of the Palestinian media   - no matter what Arafat did or did not do at Camp Damp David - is truly a thing of wonder.    But is the repeated incidence of self delusion an example of career advancement, or is it  just plain heartlessness?

  George Bush made a statement that he looked in Vladimir Putin's eyes and saw his soul and knew he was a good guy.  Later during the American war with Iraq, Russia supplied Iraq with GPS jammers.  Nyquist wrote: (5/2003)

Confirmation of Russia's enmity appears, even now, in the rubble of Baghdad. It has been reported that the Kremlin offered Saddam Hussein access to a network of assassins in the West. It provided transcripts of private conversations between Western leaders.

 

X Reasons People Cling to Delusions

   Avi writes that the British historian, Paul Johnson, wrote that history has shown certain members of the intelligentsia take stands that vitiate against both logic and their own principles.  Paul Johnson believed they did this for ego gratification or self publicity and/or in order to advance their careers.  

   One book that sheds light on why the left clung to delusions about Stalin is called The God that Failed  by Arthur Koestler.  This book is an anthology of essays in which the finest philosophers and writers of the West at the time describe the painful process of emancipation from the false charms of the Stalinist dream. Each in his own words and style, the contributors - Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, Richard Crossman, Richard Wright and others, some of them former communists, others only admirers of the Soviet Union - talk about how hard it was to give up the idea that the Soviet system heralded a new era for mankind. Even when the horrors of enforced collectivization, the Hitler-Stalin agreements, the Soviet forced labor camps and the lies and deceit of the Stalinist show trials came to light - even then emotional separation remained difficult.

   Most of the writers said that the hardest part was not dealing with the facts but with their own credo, their own self-image as soldiers battling for a better world. How difficult it was to admit that their dream of redemption was a fata morgana; that Stalin, the "shining sun," was a murderer; that the Soviet ideological system was a web of lies; that the new society, meant to be liberated and liberating, was nothing but a giant prison cell, founded on terror, cynically exploiting the innocent faith of some of the West's finest intellectuals.

   In otherwords the barrier for giving up delusion was the loss of self esteem.

   In a Ha'aretz op-ed, August 24, 2001, Shlomo Avineri - a leading professor at Hebrew University, former Director General of Israel's Foreign Ministry, and a prominent leader of Israel's peace camp who supported negotiating with the PLO long before the Oslo process began - argues that the difficulty of Israel's left to admit in the ideological failure of the Oslo process and Arafat's leadership, in spite of what happened at Camp David and since then, is similar in many ways to the European left's difficulty to give up the idea that Communism, the Soviet system and Stalin's leadership heralded a new era even when the horrors of Communism and Stalin came to light. Following are excerpts from Avineri's op-ed:

When Arafat rejected the Clinton plan, turned the right of return into a matter of principle, and denied that Israel has any right at all to the Temple Mount, it became clear that the Palestinians were not prepared for a historical compromise. In their eyes, the talks were only a way of getting what they wanted - not a painful process of give and take. That the Palestinian public and its leaders voice broad support for terrorism against Israeli citizens shows yet again that all the universal values cherished by the Israeli left mean nothing to the other side. Whoever expected Yasser Arafat to turn into Nelson Mandela was proved wrong, but admitting it is hard. Incredibly hard.

For that reason, there are members of the Israeli left who prefer to labor under the illusion that some compromise can
be reached. It is difficult for them to admit that "peace now," however desirable, is not possible at the present time. When the other side cannot come up with a single intellectual prepared to state clearly, without mumbling, that the murder of children in a pizzeria is a crime, then the Israeli left has no ally...

It was hard for those seduced by the charms of the Soviet Union to see that it was a ruthless, oppressive country,
but that was truth. Just as intellectual honesty enabled the foremost intellectuals of the Western world, smitten by
the idea of a new dawn in Moscow, to admit that "god [-Stalin -] had failed," one hopes that the excruciating
process of facing up to the truth will enable the Israeli left to accept a solution that is capable of ending much of
the occupation today.

If not, they are liable to find themselves - dialectically, if one can say such a thing - among those who perpetuate the occupation. For the solution they propose, there is no partner on the other side. It hurts, but that is the truth.

   Secretary of State Colin Powell explained on 3/3/02 why the U.S. would not call Arafat a terrorist.  He said:

    Arafat if the head of the Palestinian Authority an organization we helped create.  We need to work with him.

   Why does the fact that the U.S. made the terrible mistake of helping create Arafat's administration mean that "we need to work with him".  Is it because anything is less painful than facing up to the reality that it was a terrible mistake to support Arafat?

David Basch in a broadcast of the Freeman Center on October 14, 01 wrote that:

Israel is ravaged by various mental illnesses that skew the thinking of its people so that the nation ends up giving in to various stages of the Arab program for Israel's destruction.  Among these mental illnesses is a fanatic universalism that grips leftist Israelis so that they come to regard the same enemy that regards murder of Israeli civilians as legitimate and suitable partners for peace. With this thinking comes acceptance of the myths that somehow Arabs have a "right" to build a new nation on Israeli lands and territories. Perhaps related to the above mental illness is the undoubted fact that too many Israelis are swayed by a "Stockholm syndrome," an unreasoning fear of the Arab enemy that makes them identify with enemy goals and his propaganda.

   J. R. Nyquist in an article titled Are We Honest? wrote regarding the reason people misconstrue events:

One of the central culprits in political analysis is ideology. If you live and think according to a formula, you may be dead to reality -- and you certainly aren't thinking. We must keep in mind that it is human nature to err, and that ideology represents the ossification of error. It has to be admitted that we see the world through the lense of what we already know, think and feel. And sometimes, though we hate to admit as much, that lense is smudged. With ideology, it is blinkered.

XI Creation of Delusions to Explain Delusions

   Daniel Pipes wrote an excellent article in Commentary called Israel America and Arab delusions.   Once one has delusions then things that would be easy to explain become hard to explain unless one comes up with another delusion to explain it.  For example, the delusion that the Jews are evil, leads to the question "Why does the United States support Israel?"  One way to answer this is to create the delusion that the United States is evil.  Another is that Israel is incredibly powerful and controls the United States.  An example of this kind of delusional thinking was the statement of Mawdudi, the pre-eminent fundamentalist Muslim of Pakistan, who asserted that Jews rule the United States like the jinn rule mankind.  The Jinn are minor supernatural beings, like elves or sprites, a legacy from the Middle East's pre-Muslim polytheistic past. 

   The delusion of the power of the Jews has lead President Assad of Syria to describe the Zionists as "invaders who are threatening not just the Arab nation but the entire human race." Likewise, senior Palestine Liberation Organization figures portray themselves doing battle on behalf of all humanity. Amal, the moderate Shi'i movement in Lebanon, calls Zionism a continuing danger "to the whole of humanity."

   Raphael Israeli in his article "The Oslo Delusion: The Collapse of Assumptions - Part 1, (Outpost August 2001, page 3) wrote that

The Arabs are frightened by any act of the Jews that seems benevolent because that destroys the irrevocably negative image they have of them.  For example when Israel dispatched a team of agricultural experts to Egypt, and they did useful and laudable work, they were accused by the Egyptian press, followed by the rest of the Arab world, of spreading diseases in order to contaminate Egypt's land and ruin its farming.  The rationale is clear: how could miserable Israel, populated by those Jews that were born for humiliation, extend any help to the most ancient and experienced farming culture in the world?  Something does not add up; therefore it is better to deny that the Israelis are of any use and accuse them of ill will.  Since no Egyptian leader dares to come out against those calumnies, they are taken as valid and true.

  Raphael writes how since in the Arab perspective it is in the Jewish nature to perform acts of profanation the attempts of Israelis to put out a fire set by a Christian arsonist in the al-Aqsa mosque did not exonerate them from the guilt for the fire.

XIA Creation of Delusion as Self Defense

Amir Taheri wrote how Saddam paid for demonstrations on his behalf in other Arab countries.  He wrote: (Saddam's Orphans, New York Post 8/19/03)

Two prominent Lebanese pan Arabists have fled to France to avoid paying the mobs they hired for pro-Saddam demonstrations in Beirut last winter.  And other pro-Saddam Ba'athists are facing unpaid bills for anti-war demonstrations they organized in Morocco, Algeria and Egypt.

At the time, those efforts were seen in the West as a sign that the "Arab street" was about to explode against the U.S. led coalition.

XIA2 Creation of Delusion to Discredit Opposition

    Bat Ye'or, a very knowledgeable scholar of Islam and Islamic history has written several books which clarify Islam's terrible history and the threat it poses.   One of her books, Eurabia, is a book with very disturbing and fascinatiing information regarding Islamic influence on Europe.   The New York Times labeled her one:

“of the most extreme voices on the new Jewish right,”

which Robert Spencer writes is not only arrant nonsense, since Bat Ye’or is in no sense a figure of “the right,” but also Times-speak for “pay no attention to this person.”

Robert Spencer wrote (The New York Times: What Jihad?, frontpagemag.com 2/28/05) :

she “argues in her latest book, ‘Eurabia: the Euro-Arab Axis,’ that Europe has consciously allied itself with the Arab world at the expense of Jews and the trans-Atlantic alliance.” But she is of “the right,” you see, so the Times feels no need to examine the evidence for this that she marshals so relentlessly in Eurabia.

I think that the New York Times perceives the idea that Islam is a threat, as a right wing idea and so any scholar who demonstrates that Islam is a threat, by definition becomes a right wing fanatic who should be ignored no matter how in depth their knowledge an no matter how important or little known the information they present is that supports their case.

XIB Creation of Delusion to Conquer

  One of the most successful creations of delusion of this century was the creation of the delusion of the Palestinian identity.  Not only has the majority of the world been convinced of such an identity, many of the Arabs living in the Middle East now consider themselves oppressed Palestinians.  An excellent web site that exposes this delusion is called The Palestinian Identity.  Creation of this delusion greatly strengthened the Arab cause of destroying Israel.  Instead of the West viewing the conflict as the result of the vast Arab nation attempting to destroy little Israel, the conflict was now powerful Israel oppressing the weak Palestinians.

   Another very successful delusion creation was that Arabs who murder Israelis will go to heaven if they fall in action.  Ralph Reiland in his column Dying for Dubious Jihad, Inside the Suicide Strategy (American Enterprise Online 6/24/02) quoted Arabs about their beliefs in this regard.  He wrote:

A video released by the militant Islamist group Hamas shows a proud Naima al-Obeid holding a rifle beside her favorite son, Mahmoud, a 23-year-old college student. Mrs. al-Obeid is saying good-bye to her son as he heads out to kill some Jews.

The video starts with a warm embrace between mother and son, their final embrace as it turns out, and then a nice kiss. “God willing, you will succeed,” says the mother. “May every bullet hit the target, and may God give you martyrdom. This is the best day of my life.”

Mahmoud says: “Thank you for raising me.”  

Shortly thereafter, Mahmoud was shot dead after killing two Israelis in the Jewish settlement of Dugit in the Gaza Strip. His mother's response: “We believe our sons go to heaven when they are martyred. When Jewish sons die, they go to hell.”

And so, another perfect ending: Two more Jews go to hell, Mahmoud is up behind the clouds with a merry gang of virgins, and, praise be to Allah, Mrs. al-Obeid becomes a village hero.

“We found crowds coming to the mourning tent—and not just because of him,” reports BBC Middle East correspondent Orla Guerin. “People here aren’t just remembering Mahmoud—they are honoring his mother. She has become a heroine, being talked about on the streets, praised in the local papers. Some Palestinians are taking a great deal of pride in a mother who saw her son go to kill and die without shedding a tear. They are already saying she will inspire other women to do the same.”

Guerin asked Mrs. al-Obeid if it mattered whether her son killed women and children. “The women and children are also Jews,” she answered. “They're all the same for me.”

Naima al-Obeid has nine more children, whom, she tells Guerin, all have a duty to fight. And, according to documents obtained by Fox News, the Saudi Interior Ministry pays 20,000 riyals to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. Bottom line, if all nine kids blow themselves up, they'll be nine more parties at the mourning tent and Mrs. al-Obeid will pocket some 180,000 Saudi riyals, the equivalent of $48,060 in U.S. currency. ..

The London-based Arabic-language daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat recently published an interview with Umm Nidal, the mother of  "shahid" (martyr) Muhammad Farhat. The following are excerpts from the interview as translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute.

Q: "How did the idea of martyrdom develop in your son?"

Umm Nidal: "Allah be praised, I am a Muslim and I believe in Jihad. We must instill this idea in our sons' souls, all the time. Jihad is one of the elements of the faith and this is what encouraged me to sacrifice Muhammad in Jihad for the sake of Allah. My son was not destroyed, he is not dead; he is living a happier life than I. Because I love my son, I encouraged him to die a martyr's death for the sake of Allah. The atmosphere to which Muhammad was exposed was full of faith and love of martyrdom. I maintain that a man's faith does not reach perfection unless it attains self-sacrifice. I prayed from the depths of my heart that Allah would cause the success of his operation. I asked Allah to give me 10 Israelis for Muhammad, and Allah granted my request and Muhammad made his dream come true, killing 10 Israeli settlers and soldiers. Our God honored him even more, in that there were many Israelis wounded."

Q: "How did Muhammad say good-bye?"

Umm Nidal: “Muhammad was willing to carry out any martyrdom operation. He would tell me, ‘I am going out now to an attack. I cannot control myself.’ I would answer him, ‘You will yet have a great opportunity. Be patient, plan well, so that you don't sacrifice yourself in vain. Act with your mind, not your emotions.’ He swore to me that the only reason he loved life was Jihad. He would brandish his weapon and tell me: ‘Mom, this is my bride.’ He loved his gun so much.”

Sheik Ikrima Sabri, leading clergyman of the Palestinian Authority, sums it up: "The Muslim loves death and martyrdom, just as the Jews love life."

   The Muslims are succeeding in bending Christian theology to justify their occupation of Israel and to undermine the Jewish claim to Israel.  Bat Ye'or wrote a chapter titled The Islamization of Christianity in her book Eurabia about this.  She wrote:

The Arab dhimmi Churches - especially the Syro-Palestinian ones - have elaborated an entire theology of the non-Jewish, Arab roots of Christianity: Palestinian Liberation Theology.  According to this trend, Christianity was born in an Arab tent and with a Palestinian identity.  This new Arab-Palestinian sui generis embodiment of Christianity evidently also denies any historical rights to the modern State of Israel in its Hebrew-Israelite birthplace...

Palestinians describe the flight of Muslims and Christians to neighboring Arab countires in 1948 following the Arab war against Israel as the exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt, with the Israeli leaders representing pharaoh...   In other mytical Arab appropriations, Israel symbolizes Herod, "killer of the Innocents," or the Roman oppressors in Judea - the Muslim Palestinians being the oppressed Jews.

The Arab Palestinians, heirs and symbol of the Arab Palestinian Jesus replace the fallen deicide Jewish people, whose sins, in this view, have deprived them of their history and rights to their own land.   Palestinianism cements  the sacred Islamo-Christian fusion in Jesus as symbolized by a Palestine crucified by Israel - a concept and image constantly propagated during the Muslim/Christian Palestinian war against the Jews.  The suffering of the Palestinians in their struggle to destroy Israel evokes Christ's passion, his suffering on the cross to save the world.  Moreover, like Jesus, the mission of Palestinian Liberation Theology is to liberate the world from Israel's evil by unveiling its diabolic character, and cement through Palestinianism a worldwide Muslim-Christian alliance...

Since the emergence of Palestinianism in the 1970s, the Arab dhimmi churches have striven for a united front against Israel by identifying totally with the Arab Palestinian cause.  They saw their service to Islam as bringing together the whole Christian world in solidarity with the Palestinians and promoting an anti-Israel campaign in the West. 

The Christian service to Islam thus consists primarily in its worldwide support of the Muslim jihad against Israel.  It has also included spreading Islamic propaganda through Western religious channels, encouraging and giving practical or moral succor to anti-Israel terrorism by blaming it on Israel, demonizing Israel and America, vindicating Islam, and, above all, concealing the Islamization and religious "purification" of Arab societies - including the discriminatory and humiliating restrictions imposed on native Christians...

Yet this supine attitude has not worked to the advantage of Christians in the Holy Land and the Middle East in general.  The appeasement policy that blames on Israel and America the deterioration of their condition to evade any criticism of Muslim intolerance, highlights the dangers inherent in Christian dhimmi life. 

    The Christians living under Muslim control are afraid to speak up against their persecution by their Muslim masters.   Of course their silence just makes it easier for their Muslim masters to dominate them.

XII Creation of Delusions to Justify Conquest:

    In the past, Arabs themselves have admitted that the Palestinian identity is a recent creation in the propaganda war against Israel.  Now they target their propaganda to declare that the Palestinian identity has existed from the beginning of time and that Israelis are a recent import.

    Ehud Ya'ari: in an article called "Not Just Anti-Semitic Lies! No possibility of making peace with the Jews" (The Jerusalem Report December 16, 2002) wrote that:

Syrian TV is running the dramatic locally produced series, "The Collapse of
Legends." Its central premise is that there is no archeological evidence to
support the stories of the Old Testament; that the Torah we hold holy is
nothing but one big forgery made up by rabbis; that it has no connection
with the Ten Commandments, but is rather a fabrication of history designed
to give the Jews a claim to the Land of Israel. So in the dramatized serial,
a group of Syrian archeologists sets out on a campaign to expose a group of
Zionists who have infiltrated their party with the aim of tampering with the
ancient antiquities at the famous archeological site of Ebla, in order to
give some scientific basis to the forged scripture.

  And in case you were worrying, Arafat is not being left behind. Palestinian
TV is broadcasting a series of documentaries with one single objective: to
disprove the "myth" that any Jewish Temple ever stood in Jerusalem, and to
present any historical reference to that claim as an act of deception.

   According to Joseph Farah (The Jewish Temple WorldnetDaily 8/14/03) Palestinian Authority Mufti Ikrima Sabri told a German publication just last week,

There is not [even] the smallest indication of the existence of a Jewish temple on this place in the past. In the
whole city, there is not even a single stone indicating Jewish history.

   Similar statements have been made by Yasser Arafat.

He made the assertion again recently in the London Arabic paper Al Hayat: Archaeologists, he said, "have not found a single stone proving that the Temple of Solomon was there because historically the Temple was not in Palestine."

   According to a study by Dr. Yitzhak Reiter, conducted for the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies, the claim that Jews have no real connection to Jerusalem and its holy sites has been adopted by the Palestinian leadership and has become entrenched in Arab and Muslim communities. At the heart of this new version is the argument that Arabs ruled Jerusalem thousands of years before the Children of Israel.  According to this new history the First and Second Temples are lies fabricated by the Jews. This view was even adopted by the website of the Egyptian Embassy in Washington, which declared that there has never been any archaeological evidence of Jewish life in the Jerusalem of ancient times. Film producer Arthur Cohn when given the Rennert Prize in 2004, spoke about this and said:

No wonder, then, that the Palestinians seize every opportunity to destroy in the most uncivilized way all the precious archaeological artifacts beneath the surface of the Temple Mount. What an irony: No other people except the Jews has ever made Jerusalem its capital, despite its conquest by many imperial powers, but now clear facts are denied and history is rewritten.

    Raphael Israeli in his article "The Oslo Delusion: The Collapse of Assumptions - Part 1, (Outpost August 2001, page 3) wrote about the creation of the Palestinian/Canaanite myth as follows:

Then there is the invention of the myth tracing the origins of the Palestinians to the Canaanites.  If they did that only to create a national myth that would cement in a remote past their claim on the land, one could perhaps nod with a smile of understanding.   But when they, at the same time, deny the existence of one millennium of documented Jewish history on that land, with its two commonwealths and exiles, just in order to brand the Jews as forgers of history, and they end up believing in their own concoction to boot, this is self-delusion, pure, and simple.

    Ariel Natan Pasko in an article titled Arafat TV- Disinherits the Jews wrote about what Palestinian TV broadcasts as follows (frontpagemag.com 8/12/04):

Thanks to Itamar Marcus over at Palestinian Media Watch, who monitors Palestinian television broadcasts, we now "know" that:

1. The Hebrews of the Bible have no connection to the Jews of today.
2. The Hebrews of the Bible were Arabs.
3. The Prophets of the Bible were Muslims.
4. Biblical King Solomon was a Muslim Prophet.
5. Solomon's Temple was not built by Israelites but by Arab Canaanites.
6. The Canaanites are the forefathers of the Palestinians.
7. The Bible is legends based on what Jews imagined and not on history.
8. The Jews of today are descendents of a 13th Century Khazar tribe with no history in the Land of Israel.
9. The location of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem is a Zionist invention.
10. Zionism is Racism.

   The following is a poetry video that has been broadcast often on Palestinian TV (Palestinian Media Watch Bulletin 7/30/04) claiming that Israelis are just phantoms in a land that belonged to the Palestinians for millions of years. 

"You are phantoms on my land [visuals of Israelis]

And our roots in her are deep [scenes of land]

For a million years it is our homeland

May the conquerors exploit as they will [war scenes]

We came - the dawn of man's creation in the world

And our arrival - the beginning and time

Before us no foot had strode through her [scenes of land]

And calls were not heard

Ours are the caves of her mountains

Ours are her rivers

Ours are her plants, vineyards, the fields

And a waterway there is, faced with fields

And the bones of our fathers that lived on the ground

And under it they died...

This is the beginning [scenes of Yasser Arafat]

This is the beginning

And every beginning is followed by an end [scenes of Al-Aqsa Mosque]

The days are long [war scenes]

The days have always been long

And the course of history - revolution [PA flag flying] ."

XIIb Creation of Delusion to Prevent Competitors From Gaining Power

    Bat Ye'or in an address to the International Strategic Studies Association (8/31/1995) explained how Great Britain created the delusion of Muslim tolerance in order to keep the Russians from gaining influence in the Balkans.  The Russians argued that they should intervene to save the Christians from Turkish persecution.  Bat Ye'or explained the situation as follows:

To simplify it: The super power of the 19th century, Great Britain, waged a "space game" with the other potential super power: Russia. Where interests of the two crossed was - Balkans (then under Turkish occupation).

It would be most natural that Russia should have the influence in the the area. Most of the subdued Balkan nations (Serbs, Greeks, Rumanians, Bulgarians) are Eastern Orthodox - like Russians. That did not fit British interests. That is how Britain allied itself with Turkey and invented the myth of the Muslim tolerance.

When Turks cut throats, raped women and steal children of Balkan Christians - it was OK for the Brits - it was an expression of tolerance... As long as Russians do not get influence in the Balkans.

XIIC Creation of Delusion to Obtain Relief

Psychiatrist/Historian Kenneth Levin wrote the following in an article titled From Jewish to Israeli Self-Hatred: The Psychology of Populations under Chronic Siege, which was published on  July 2, 2006 by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.

In 1997, Haaretz columnist Ari Shavit wrote of the course forged by Israel's political elite and passionately embraced by its intellectual and cultural elites, including himself: "In the early '90's...we, the enlightened Israelis, were infected with a messianic craze.... All of a sudden, we believed that...the end of the old Middle East was near. The end of history, the end of wars, the end of conflict.... We fooled ourselves with illusions. We were bedazzled into committing a collective act of messianic drunkenness."⁴

But while Shavit's "messianism" gives a label to Oslo-era thinking, it does not explain it. The explanation lies in the psychology of chronically besieged populations. Whether minorities enduring persistent marginalization, defamation, and attack from the surrounding society, or small states under continual siege, segments of such communities almost invariably embrace the indictments of their enemies. They hope that by reforming themselves in a manner consistent with those indictments they will win relief.

XIID Creation of Delusion Because of Fear

   The West is fearful of criticizing Islam.  After Muslims reacted violently to some Danish Cartoons about Islam there was widespread interest in knowing what those cartoons were but the majority of the media refused to reprint them.  Bill Warner from the Center of Political Islam said in an interview with Frontpage Magazine that It was fear that drove the vast majority of the media not to reprint the Mohammed cartoons, not some imagined sensitivity.

 

   After two Muslim “youths” ran from the police, trespassed into an electric substation to hide, and died as a result of short circuiting electrical equipment massive Islamic riots broke out, causing millions of dollars worth of damage and thousands of torched automobiles.

 

   The French reacted by prosecuting two of the police the Muslims ran away from ( 2 French police face pre-riot charges.)  This creates the delusion that the police were guilty in some way.

 

XIII Creation of Delusions to bring Peace

    Worldnetdaily reported how On Feb. 28, 1973, James J. Welsh, the National Security Agency's Palestinian analyst, was summoned by a colleague about a communication intercepted from Yasser Arafat involving an imminent Black September operation in Khartoum, Sudan.  Within minutes, Welsh recalls, the director of the NSA was notified and the decision was made to send a rare "FLASH" message -- the highest priority -- to the U.S. Embassy in Khartoum via the State Department.   But the message didn't reach the embassy in time. Somewhere between the NSA and the State Department, someone decided to downgrade the urgency of the warning.

 

   On March 1, 1973, eight members of the Black September terrorist organization, part of Arafat's Fatah faction of the PLO, stormed the Saudi embassy in Khartoum on Arafat's orders, taking U.S. Ambassador Cleo Noel, diplomat Charge d'Affaires George Curtis Moore, Beligan diplomat Guy Eid and others hostage, and one day later, killing Noel, Moore and Eid.  Audio tapes made in Cyprus and U.S. embassies in Beirut and Khartoum left no doubt that it was Arafat's voice directing the operation from Feb. 28 – the day before the men were kidnapped – to their execution two days later.

 

   When President Clinton invited Arafat to the White House for direct negotiations on the Middle East, Welsh said, that was the last straw. He has been on a personal one-man mission to uncover the tape recordings and transcripts of those intercepts between Arafat and Fatah leader Salah Khalaf, also known as Abu-Iyad, in Beirut and Khalil al-Wazir in Khartoum.

Welsh did not found many allies among members of the U.S. Congress -- in either party.

 

"No one wants to touch this thing,"

 

Welsh said.

 

"It's a hot potato. No one wants to be responsible for derailing the Mideast peace process."

 

   Only after Arafat was dead, in 2006, the U.S. State Department finally declassified a document admitting it knew the late Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, plotted and supervised the murders of two U.S. diplomats in Sudan in 1973.  The document, makes it clear the Khartoum operation "was planned and carried out with the full knowledge and personal approval" of Arafat.

Covering up the involvement of Arafat in these murders was done to help bring peace to the Middle East but did it bring peace to the Middle East?  Obviously not.  Did it make the Middle East more peaceful at least?  The violence increased as Israel gave in to Arafat’s demands under pressure from the United States.  Covering up the truth to bring peace brought more violence.

 

     An interesting aspect of the murder besides the lesson it makes about the consequences of covering up the truth for peace, is that one of the demands of the terrorists who killed these people was the release of Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, the convicted assassin of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy.  This suggests to me that the Palestinian Arabs may have been behind Sirhan Sirhans murder of Kennedy.  Sirhan was a Palestinian Arab who was angry at Robert Kennedy’s support of Israel.  There is evidence that he is not the only one who fired shots at Kennedy, there may have been other Palestinian Arabs involved.  Perhaps the murders in Khartoum are not the only murders being covered up for the sake of peace.

    Sir Ridley Scott directed a movie about the Crusades called Kingdom of Heaven in which he altered history to get across a message that he believed would help Muslims, Christians and Jews to get along.  According to the New York Times

Muslims are portrayed as bent on coexistence until Christian extremists ruin everything.  And even when the Christians are defeated, the Muslims give them safe conduct to return to Europe.

Sir Ridley according to the Times,

said he hoped to demonstrated that Christians, Muslims and Jews could live together in harmony — if only fanaticism were kept at bay.” 

Eva Green a French actress in the  movie said that the movie is intended to move people 

“to be more tolerant, more open towards the Arab people.”

Robert Spencer in an article titled Crusading Against History (frontpagemag.com 5/3/05) wrote:

[T]he Kingdom of Heaven script invents a group called the “Brotherhood of Muslims, Jews and Christians.” A publicist for the film elaborated: “They were working together. It was a strong bond until the Knights Templar cause friction between them.” Ah yes, everything was all right until those “Christian extremists” spoiled everything.

Kingdom of Heaven is designed to be a dream movie for those guilt-ridden creatures who believe that all the trouble between the Islamic world and the West has been caused by Western imperialism, racism, and colonialism, and that the glorious paradigm of Islamic tolerance, which was once a beacon to the world, could be reestablished if only the nasty white men of America and Europe would back off. A dream movie for the PC establishment, except for one little detail: it isn’t true.

Professor Jonathan Riley-Smith, author of A Short History of the Crusades and one of the world’s leading historians of the period, called the movie “rubbish,” explaining that “it’s not historically accurate at all... It has nothing to do with reality.” Oh, and “there was never a confraternity of Muslims, Jews and Christians. That is utter nonsense.”

  Professor Riley-Smith also labeled the movie "Osama Bin Laden's version of history" and said, "It will fuel the Islamic fundamentalists."  (Variety 5/8/05) The movie opened on 21 screens in the United Arab Emirates, nine in Lebanon, six in Kuwait, three in both Qatar and Jordan and on single screens in Bahrain, Oman and Syria.

   Does altering people's views of reality in this way help bring peace?  Altering perceptions of reality in order to prevent conflict can actually create more conflict.  Those who are influenced to believe that it is Western nastiness that causes friction with the Muslims are likely to think of those who warn about Islam as being nasty Westerners.  They are likely to see them as bringing about terrorism and war and to become hostile toward them.  Those who are influenced to see the Muslims as the "good guys" will vote for politicians who wish to appease Muslims regimes.  Appeasement by nature leads to the growth of power of the appeased and so will increase the chance of conflict.  Painting the West as evil reinforces the hostility of Muslims already hostile to the West and undermines the positions of Muslim reformers who wish Muslims to get along with the West.  

   Harvard University chose for its commencement speaker Zayed Yasin, the past president of the Harvard Islamic Society to give a speech titled "American Jihad".  Yasin declared an intention to convince his audience of 32,000 that "Jihad is not something that should make someone feel uncomfortable." Jihad sure made the thousands of people who burned to death in the World Trade Center very uncomfortable.  

   Hugh Fitzgerald in an article titled Jihad as a Spiritual Struggle (Outpost April 2005) wrote:

Muslims, and not only on NPR, have preferred that Infidels take the word Jihad to mean what they want those Infidels to think it means: "a spiritual struggle."  But the evidence, textual and historical, is overwhelmingly the other way.  We are told: Forget what people chant at rallies in Cairo, or Karachi, or Gaza, or what imams in Jiddah and Baghdad and Teheran preach.  Forget what the boys in the madrassas learn, or what the Qur'anic commentators have written.  Just remember - What the World Needs Now is Love Sweet Love, and not a "clash" but a "dialogue" of "civilizations," and if that means pretending that people do not mean what they mean, surely it is worth  it.

   Bat Yeor wrote (Freeman Center Broadcast (7/5/02):

The ideology of jihad was formulated by leading Muslim theologicans and scholars from the 8th century onward.  Their voluminous writings make clear the notionof jihad as a holy war of conquest.  Ibn Abi Zayd al-Qayrawani (d. 966), for example, stated,

"Jihad is a precept of Divine institution...We Malikis [one of four schools of Muslim jurisprudence] maintain it is preferable not to begin hostilities with the enemy before having invited the latter to embrace the religion of Allah, except where the enemy attacks first.  They have the alternative of either converting to Islam or paying the poll tax (jizya), short of which war will be declared against them..."

Why this creation of delusion about the meaning of Jihad?  A Harvard dean defends it as a "thoughtful oration" that defines the concept of Jihad as a personal struggle "to promote justice and understanding in ourselves and in our society." The dean promises, "The audience will find his oration, as did all the Harvard judges, a light of hope and reason in a world often darkened by distrust and conflict." According to Daniel Pipes (Harvard Loves Jihad, New York Post 6/11/02):

Unfortunately, Harvard's stance is typical of nearly all North America universities. Almost every Middle East specialist hides the truth about jihad and (as shown by a chilling report from the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, Defending Civilization) almost every campus drips contempt for the U.S. war effort (typical statement: "The best way to begin a war on terrorism might be to look in the mirror").

   According to Bat Yeor (Freeman Center Broadcast (7/5/02)

It is delusional and dangerous to maintain that this ideology is rooted in social deprivation, backwardness, injustice, or despair.  Moreover, paying subsidies to suspend global jihad terrorism is tantamount to paying a tribute to terrorist states.

   David Crystal spoke about the creation of delusion during the Clinton administration regarding the Middle East Conflict in an interview with frontpagemag.com (Defaming Israel 10/14/04).  He said:

We all know now what I knew back then, that the PLO had committed material breaches of the Oslo Accords, which stated that the PLO must confiscate illegal weapons, must dismantle militias and terrorist groups must do everything in its powers to fight terrorism emanating both from its borders and within its borders and must do everything within its powers to protect Israeli citizens, even within their own borders. Since 1994 they had violated these contingencies numerous times in a series of suicide attacks upon Israelis and were very active in disseminating jihadist-style propaganda. Also, Arafat himself was secretly taped by the Mossad planning at least one suicide bombing with Hamas officials in 1994-95, even though the Declaration of Principles relating to the Oslo Accords was signed by Arafat in 1993. But instead of condemning the PLO’s actions as Clinton should have, as any even handed broker would have, these actions were instead attributed to so called “enemies of peace." In reality, these enemies of peace were Yasser Arafat and his PLO but Clinton would never indicate this. Instead he perpetrated a fantasy that Arafat was in fact a “man of peace” when as any objective party could clearly see; he was nothing of the sort. On the other hand, when Israel would exercise its rights of reprisal in response to the material breaches of the Oslo Accords committed by the Palestinian Authority [PA], the Clinton State Department would then criticize Israel for making moves that were not acceptable or not helpful to the peace process. So real PLO violations were rarely criticized but alleged Israeli violations and appropriate responses by Israel to real Palestinian violations were criticized as having violated the Accords. In an effort to seem impartial, the Clinton State department adopted the tactic of having to criticize Israel as much as the PA. This created a false moral equivalency between Israel and the PA. When a terrorist attack was committed upon Israel, the Clinton State Department would characterize it as having been committed by so-called “enemies of peace” when in fact they were being committed by the PA itself.

    Why whitewash Arafat in this way?  It's possible that the reasoning of the Clinton administration was that Arafat was all the Israelis had to deal with so if he was a painted as a terrorist there was no hope for peace so they had to pretend he wasn't one.  Why blame Israel?  It is possible that the Clinton administration thought that blaming Israel would pressure it to make concessions that would lead to peace.

After a series of horrific suicide bombings of Israeli civilians the Israeli army went into the areas under PA control to rout out terrorists.  President Bush gave a speech on (4/4/02) in which he said:

I ask Israel to halt incursions into Palestinian-controlled areas and begin the withdrawal from those cities it has recently occupied.

In the same speech he said:

At Oslo and elsewhere, Chairman [Yasser] Arafat renounced terror as an instrument of his cause, and he agreed to control it. He's not done so.

Terror must be stopped. No nation can negotiate with terrorists, for there is no way to make peace with those whose only goal is death.

In the same speech he advocated a policy contrary to the principles he stated in that speech.   Daniel Pipes wrote an article in the LA Times (4/5/02) called Missing: Realistic Take on Arafat about the contradictions in Bush's speech.

  President Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell have been avoiding labeling Arafat a terrorist.  This even though as Netanyahu told CNN (4/2/02)

He's nightly and daily calling for ... a million suicide bombers in Jerusalem. He's not getting a million, but he's getting quite a few.

Benjamin Netanyahu in a speech to the U.S. senate April 10 2002 said that

Yasser Arafat brazenly pursues an ideology of policide – the destruction of a state –and meticulously promotes a cult of suicide.

With total control of the media, the schools, and ghoulish kindergarten camps for children that glorifies suicide martyrdom, Arafat’s dictatorship has indoctrinated a generation of Palestinians in a culture of death, producing waves of human bombs that massacre Jews in buses, discos, supermarkets, pizza shops, cafés – everywhere and anywhere.

Among the evidence that Arafat is a terrorist are the following items:

1.     The "Arafat file," presented on May 5, 02 by Minister Danny Naveh of Israel, is a 100-page document containing evidence that much of the money sent to the Palestinian Authority by the European Union for humanitarian purposes was used by Yasser Arafat for terrorism - and to line the pockets of top PA officials.  The file is based on the vast intelligence information garnered as a result of Operation Defensive Shield, including testimony by Fatah-Tanzim head Marwan Barghouti and other captured terrorists.   Minister Naveh, who oversaw the writing of the document, noted that many PA "policemen" received salaries for simply carrying out terrorist activity against Israel.  The file also shows that the EU sent over $9 million monthly to the PA for purposes such as building homes for refugees, food and medicine, and that Arafat diverted much of it - up to 2/3, in some months - to the Tanzim's Al Aqsa Brigades and other terrorist organizations.  Larger sums of money from Arab countries were also diverted in this manner.  In addition, much of the money also ended up in the pockets of senior PA officials, according to testimony gathered by Israeli investigators. A collection of documents seized by the Israelis can be viewed online.

2.     American and European officials have confirmed that Arafat's Palestinian Authority was the moving force, paymaster and operational supervisor of the attempt, foiled by the Israelis on Jan. 3, to smuggle 50 tons of Iranian supplied rockets, mortars, anti-tank missiles, assault rifles and C-4 explosives by freighter into Gaza.  Palestinians have been firing rockets and mortars at Israeli civilians.

3.     The United States recorded Arafat's commands to the terrorists on the Achille Lauro to kill Leon Klinghoffer.

4.     Israeli intelligence officials intercepted a phone call in 2001 in which Arafat told the head of his Tanzim militia Marwan Barghouti to accelerate attacks on Israelis despite what Arafat said publicly.  "When you hear me call for a cease-fire, step on the gas," Arafat said.(New York Post 4/16/02)

5.     The head of Arafat's "Office of Preventive Security Rajoub's headquarters were stocked with mortars, heavy machine guns along with disguises used by suicide bombers.

6.     The CIA has a lot of classified evidence that Arafat is a terrorist.  Robert Baer a former CIA agent wrote in his book See No Evil, The True Story of A Ground Soldier IN the CIA's War On Terrorism, that:   "At the end of the day, whether you're tracing 'Imad Mughniyah or seeking to unravel the Iranian revolution, a lot of the trails converge at the feet of Yasir Arafat." (Imad Mughniyah was probably involved in the bombing of the American Embassy in Lebanon and the kidnapping of Americans in Lebanon.)  He also wrote that: I unraveled the Beirut embassy bombing, at least to my satisfaction: Iran ordered it, and a Fatah network carried it out. 

   Incredibly after being given the information about the involvement of Arafat and his police forces in terrorism Bush decided to send George Tenet to unify Arafat's security forces (New York Post 5/9/02).  This can only make those forces more powerful.  In addition according to the New York Post  (5/17/02)

In Washington, the State Department said it had found "no clear evidence" that Arafat or other senior PLO officials ordered or knew in advance of terror attacks on Israel between June and December last year.

In regard to this outrageous intelligence assessment by the State Department Major Shawn Pine wrote (An Intelligence Abyss 5/18/02 Freeman Center Broadcast):

Unfortunately, the public record is replete with literally hundreds of violations of the Accords by Yasser Arafat and the PA.

and that

one can only conclude from the State Department's confirmation of PA compliance is that either the intelligence they are receiving and the analysis being applied, is extraordinarily faulty, or that the analysis is being manipulated so that the State Department can pursue its political agenda.

Major Pine argues that the correct explanation is the analysis is being manipulated and that this report and another DOD report:

will provide the Administration with justification for pressuring Israel to pursue a political solution with the Palestinians without appearing hypocritical as it pursues its war against Al-Qaida. By the issuance of these reports, the Administration can obfuscate Arafat's terrorist background and minimize the strength of the 100 page detailed report that Israel recently provided the United States regarding Arafat's participation in terrorism.  The importance of both of these news reports is that they reflect the inherent politicization of the nation's intelligence services to produce analysis that will facilitate political objectives rather than accurately report the truth.

    Not only does the State Department lie it also pressures Israel to hide the truth.  According to the global Israeli alliance the State Department  has demanded that Israel NOT publish the documents it has acquired that link the Palestine National Authority and Fatah in the premeditated campaign of murder in Israel over the last five years (2000-2005).

Sharon in an interview with Fox News (4/11/02) said:

Powell knows who Arafat is, but the U.S. is having a problem with the Middle East now and wants it to be quiet so it can get on with its own war against terror.  The Arab world is taking advantage of that and saying if Israel does not agree to conditions that it cannot accept, that would mean it cannot survive, then there will be no peace in the Middle East.

Arafat stands behind the terror in the world today. Israel will continue to act against terror. President Bush said one should not negotiate with terrorists. Well? Israel faces terror every day.  With Arafat it will never be peace because he doesn’t want peace.

Sharon conceded that Arafat is still secure in his role as Palestinian leader.

No one will dare to act like they could replace him. After all, he’s accepted as legitimate by the secretary of state of the world’s only superpower. I said it was a tragic mistake. It’s a mistake not just from Israel’s point of view, but for American interests.

Israel Radio correspondent Yoni Ben-Menachem asked Powell why the US has been fighting terrorism in Afghanistan for seven months, yet demands that Israel stop fighting terrorism on its own doorstep after only seven days.  Powell responded,

The President and I have spoken about this.  We understand Israel's need to defend itself, we understand that Israel is under threat of terrorist attack, and we have been supportive.  But at the same time we believe, as a friend of Israel, we have to take note of the long-term strategic consequences of the incursions that are underway and its effect on other nations in the region and the international climate.  I have explained our position to [Prime Minister Sharon] and he has explained to me what he feels has to be done.  And I hope we can find a way to come to an agreement on this point of the duration of the operations, and get back to a track that will lead to a political settlement.  We do understand what terrorism is, and as we have responded to terrorism, we know that Israel has the right to respond to terrorism.  The question is, how do we get beyond just the response? ... What is the next step?

  What is the long term effect?  If Israel withdraws after routing out the the terrorist infrastructure it will grow right back.  If Powell is worried about long term affects he should encourage Israel to take measures to prevent the terrorists infrastructure from coming back.

Major Shawn Pine in an article called "A Shameful Decision" (Freeman Center Broadcast 4/19/02) wrote:

It is almost surreal to follow the conduct and rhetoric of the United States as it conducts its operations in Afghanistan while simultaneously calling for Israeli restraint and urging the resumption of negotiations with Arafat, the quintessential terrorist. It is important to note, The victims of Palestinian terrorist attacks against Israel have numbered been some eight times the magnitude of that suffered by the U.S. last September...

The President appears to have accepted the false premise that by not fully supporting Israel's war against terrorism the US will gain Arab support in its operations against Iraq. However, the Saudi embrace of Iraq at the Arab summit should have disabused the US of that notion... The US experience vis-a-vis Afghanistan has clearly demonstrated that only when the US displays the requisite resolve to achieve an objective do the countries in the region acquiesce.

   Seven months after Shawn Pine's article was published the New York Post (11/4/02) reported that Saudi Foreign minister Saud el Faisal said on 11/3/02 that Saudi Arabia would not permit bases on its soil to be used in an attack against Iraq and would not grant flyover rights to U.S. military planes even if the U.N. sanctioned an invasion.

   Don Feder in an outstanding column Alice and the White Rabbit lead Israel to ruin(April 1, 2002 Townhall.com) quoted President Bush as saying:

"I call upon Mr. Arafat and the Palestinian Authority to do everything in their power to stop the terrorist killings,"

and writes:

Everything? How about anything?  The administration's response to Palestinian terrorism is a cowardly evasion of reality.  Mr. Arafat shouts, "Jihad, jihad, jihad." Mr. Arafat's Voice of Palestine radio praises suicide bombers as "heroic martyrs." Mr. Arafat releases known terrorists from his jails, like the two responsible for turning a Passover seder into a slaughterhouse.   Mr. Arafat's Tanzim militia competes with Hamas in murdering Jews. In January, Mr. Arafat tried to smuggle 50 tons of heavy armaments and explosives into his terrorist mini-state.

   Why won't Bush say the truth?  Why won't they brand Arafat as the terrorist that he is?  Secretary of State Colin Powell answered that question on CBS' "The Early Show" on 4/2/02.  He explained

We still believe there is more he can do and we are asking him to do more and it would not serve our purpose right now to brand him individually as a terrorist.

   So terrorists are only people who it is our advantage to call terrorists.  

   The Israeli Government does not want to deal with Arafat so Arafat appointed Abu Mazen for the Israelis to deal with.   Despite all the evidence given previously on this page that Abu Mazen is also a terrorist the United States refuses to see him as one.  Despite the disastrous results of CIA support for Arafat's polices forces and the use of those forces of donated guns against Israeli civilians Secretary Powell said at a G8 Press Conference in Paris 5/23/03 that:

We have been in conversation with the Palestinian Authority with Prime Minister Abbas, as well as his Minister for Security Mr. Dahlan, and they have come up with a plan. To execute that plan will require assistance to rebuild their security forces, their security apparatus, the infrastructure of the security organization. And the United States, working with other interested friends in the region and from Quartet membership will assist the Palestinian Authority in that regard.

Benjamin Netanyahu in a speech to the U.S. senate April 10 2002 said that:

Until last week, I was certain that the United States would adhere to its principles and lead the free world to a decisive victory. Today, I too have my concerns.   I am concerned that when it comes to terror directed against Israel, the moral and strategic clarity that is so crucial for victory is being twisted beyond recognition.

President Bush proclaimed   "If anybody harbors a terrorist, they're a terrorist. If they fund a terrorist, they're a terrorist.  If they house terrorists, they're terrorists. I mean, I cant make it any more clear to other nations around the world" (November 26, 2001). In the last week of Mar 2002 Bush said that:

I laid out a doctrine and it's really important [that] when the United States speaks, it means what it says,"

"And I said that if you harbor a terrorist, you're just as guilty as the terrorist. If you feed one or hide one, you're just as guilty as those who came and murdered thousands of innocent Americans."

The New York Post (4/4/02) writes that these statements:

beg the question of why the administration refuses to attach a terrorist label to Arafat - when, by Bush's criteria, he's the personification of international terror.

The answer, of course, is that the administration still looks to Arafat to play the critical role in forging an Israeli-Palestinian agreement - even though there is absolutely no reason even to hope that he'll do so.

Nyquist gave another explanation.  He wrote in his weekly column of April 16, 2002:

Everyone knows the Bush administration's posturing against Israel's West  Bank incursion has been for the benefit of that fabled creature, the Arab  moderate. To appease the "friendly" Arab suppliers of the West's life-blood  (i.e., oil) Washington's approach has been purposefully inconsistent:  Attack terror in petroleum-null Afghanistan while appeasing terror on the petroleum-sensitive West Bank.

Reuel Marc Gerecht was a Middle East specialist in the CIA for nine years and is the author, under a pseudonym, of "Know Thine Enemy, A spy's Journey into Revolutionary Iran" (1997).  He wrote a column in the Wall Street Journal (4/8/02) called CULTURE OF DEATH, They Live to Die Only war can stop the suicide bombers.

Devoid of a serious understanding of the religious component in Palestinian politics, American policy in the region will inevitably run aground on secular illusions.  Make no mistake: The Palestinian suicide bombers' motivations are rooted in a nihilist, amoral understanding of the Muslim's duty to wage jihad... The idea of jihad against Israel has extraordinary appeal even to secularized Muslims, who can feel the shame of Islam's long slide from glory and superiority over the West as acutely as any practicing Muslim.

The Palestinian use of female suicide bombers and the failure of the Islamic world to loudly condemn this practice shows how brutally modern ethics have become in the Middle East. It also shows how surreal and schizophrenic the Bush administration is becoming in the region. In 1979, Washington painfully learned that there was no way it could negotiate with the clerical regime [of Ayatollah Kholmeini]. Yet Washington now believes that it and the Israelis can somehow negotiate with a Palestinian Authority that encourages policies that would probably unsettle Ayatollah Khomeini.

Does the administration really believe that if all the Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza were removed--they occupy less than 1.5% of these territories--and East Jerusalem became Palestinian, the kamikazes would stop? Former prime minister Ehud Barak essentially offered this deal at Camp David in July 2000, but Yasser Arafat rejected it, preferring to unleash the second intifada.

Arafat asserted that his position mirrored the sentiments of most Palestinians. If he crossed those sentiments, Arafat remarked, he would forfeit his life. Though one can doubt that the PLO chairman ever really embraced a pragmatic approach to Israel, there can be no doubt that his obstinacy was popular among Palestinians. Arafat received a hero's welcome when he returned from Maryland.

Which provokes the question: What in the Palestinian kamikazes' psychological makeup makes the Bush administration believe that they are going to be more pragmatic than Arafat was in 2000? Or is Arafat supposed to be more willing to die for "peace" now than he was then? Arafat has consistently encouraged and endorsed suicide-bombings as blessed work. At what future point in negotiations is Arafat supposed to turn to wannabe martyrs and tell them that their holy war against the Jewish state is wrong? Even if Arafat wanted to, how could he even begin to construct the ethical argument to quiet the passions that he has unleashed?

The Bush administration seems to believe that there is some rational switch inside the Palestinian national movement, which has now elevated holy-war kamikazes to iconic status, that if flipped would make it a committed convert to the sober Western gradualism inherit in the Tenet, Mitchell and Oslo peace plans...

What is it that the Bush administration sees in the pro-martyr Palestinians that makes them more reasonable than Hezbollah, which has eagerly continued its war against the Jewish state after Israel's withdraw from Lebanon in May 2000? Can the Middle East hands in Foggy Bottom name one nation in the Middle East born of such radical, revolutionary violence that has become pro-American, peace-loving and opposed to terrorism? ..Unfortunately, it is only war--not the well-intended but meaningless Tenet and Mitchell plans--that can now burn out istishhad (Martyrdom) among the Palestinians. The sooner the Bush administration realizes this, the sooner the suicide bombers will cease. If the administration tries to "negotiate" with this syndrome, it will only fuel the fire and make America, not just Israel, look weak. As Osama bin Laden should have taught us, weakness in the Middle East never goes unpunished.

   According to Eric Fettmann (New York Post 4/10/02) The Arab world made clear to Cheney that it would not support any move against Iraq without an agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. 

   This may explain why Bush is pressuring Israel to withdraw.  Yet withdrawal won't bring an agreement it will just bring suicide bombings, demonstrate weakness and invite war.

Don Feder in the same article in which he criticized Bush's grasp on reality points out that Sharon hasn't been facing reality either.

For the past year, Sharon has been shadowboxing with butchers -- blowing up police stations and heliports in Gaza, launching air strikes and briefly occupying West Bank cities. Does he really expect one more shelling of Arafat's compound to succeed where all of the other half-measures have failed?  After an emergency cabinet meeting last week, the prime minister declared Arafat "an enemy." What was he before -- a potential ally?  "We have no interest in conquering or staying in the territories," the general assures the White House. Instead of cleaning out the terrorist nest known as the Palestinian Authority, he'll agitate it a bit, then withdraw so the suicide bombers can get back to work...

The protagonist of "A Beautiful Mind" saw things that weren't there and talked to people who didn't exist. The Arafat that America continues to court as a possible peacemaker isn't real. The Palestinians Sharon thinks he can intimidate with a hard kick exist only in his imagination. Alice occupies the Oval Office, and Gen. White Rabbit leads the Jewish state.

   The grasp on reality of the Israeli left is even less than that of Sharon.   Israel's defense minister, Ben-Eliezer, made a statement that Israel must take advantage of the “new wind that is blowing among Palestinians” by withdrawing systematically from Gaza, Hebron, and Judea and Samaria.  The chairman of Americans For A Safe Israel, Herbert Zweibon dismisses both suggestions as delusional talk.  He said (AFSI Press Release Aug 6, 2002):

There is indeed a “new wind” blowing.  In fact, it is the ill wind of sedition and terrorism among Israel’s Arab occupants.  Israel’s recent arrest of four Arab terrorists responsible for the massacres in Hebrew University on July 31, the Moment Café on March 9, the pool hall in Rishon Le Tzion on May 7 disclosed that they were residents of comfortable neighborhoods in East Jerusalem.  ...Those Israeli dreamers who capture the media’s attention in their invocations of more appeasement and more concessions, are either blind or deceptive, or both.

   A group of private left wing Israeli citizens without the authority of the Israeli government, negotiated the Geneva Accord with representative of the Palestinian authority.  According to the terms of the accord, in return for the Palestinians committing themselves to combat terrorism, refrain from incitement, limit the weapons in their arsenal, and accept the permanence of Israel, Israel would give the Palestinians a state and would put an International force in charge of combatting Palestinian terrorism. Nevermind that the Palestinians had agreed to do all this when they signed the Oslo accords and didn't.  Nevermind that international forces in the past have not stopped terror against Israel.  The architects of Geneva have assured the Israeli public that the Palestinian participants have renounced the demand for the return of refugees to pre-1967 Israel. Yet even a cursory reading of the Accord belies this claim. There is no explicit renunciation of the right of return. So, while Israel is to tangibly repudiate its claim to Greater Israel by removing settlements, the Palestinians under Geneva aren't even obliged to verbally renounce their claim to Greater Palestine. "The assertion that the Accord cancels the right of return...is inaccurate," Palestinian signatory Jamal Zaqout recently wrote. "It was spread by Israeli figures trying to make the document more palatable to Israelis." Zaqout is correct: The Accord cites both the Saudi peace plan for the Middle East and U.N. resolution 194, both of which say that refugees should return to Israel  (Fantasy, Yossi Klein Halevi and Michael B. Oren, New Republic, December 15, 2003).

   The mountainous Hindu Kush region of eastern Afghanistan means Hindu slaughter.  According to the National Geographic Article 'West of Khyber Pass'   'Generations of raiders brought captive Hindus past these peaks of perpetual snow. Such bitter journeys gave the range its name Hindu Kush - "Killer of Hindus"'(W.O.Douglas, National Geographic Magazine, vol.114, No.1, pp.13-23, July 1958).  The Afgan historian Khondamir records that during one of the many repeated invasions on the city of Herat in western Afganistan, 1,500,000 residents perished (T.J.Abercrombie, National Geographic Magazine, Vol.134, No.3, pp.318-325, Sept.1968 ).  In 1982, the National Council of Educational Research and Training issued a directive for the rewriting of school texts. Among other things it stipulated that: 'Characterization of the medieval period as a time of conflict between Hindus and Moslems is forbidden'. Thus denial of history or Negationism has become India's official 'educational' policy (Negationism in India, by Koenraad Elst, Voice of India Publ, 2nd Ed, pp.57-58, 1993).  It is possible that the Indian government is trying to promote peaceful relations between Moslems and Hindus by forbidding education regarding past Islamic atrocities against Hindus.  Or they may be appeasing the Islamic fundamentalists in India by forbidding teaching about the Hindu Kush.  India has a history of appeasement of Muslims, one example of this is that they never asked the Afghan Moslems to change the name of the Hindu Kush but when the Jerusalem symphony came to perform in India in July 1993 the Indian Government asked the symphony to change its name because the word Jerusalem in its name is offensive to Moslem Fundamentalists.

XIIIB Creation of Delusion Because of Desire For Peace

    Europe's policy toward the Arab world has been one of appeasement in order to avoid conflict, ensure the flow of oil, and gain influence.    They refuse to admit that there is a jihadist war on their continent in the hopes that by denying such a war exists and by not generalizing terrorist behavior to all Muslims by not even saying the word Muslim in association with terrorist actions, the Muslims will be convinced that they are friendly and will not wage such a war. 

    After Muslims attempted to commit multiple car bombings in England and Scotland, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown banned ministers from using the word “Muslim” in ­connection with the terrorist attacks and also instructed his team that the phrase “war on ­terror” be dropped. (Daily Express 7/3/2007) 

    It is interesting that not only does he try and avoid antagonizing Muslims by ordering his ministers not to say the word Muslim in connection with terrorist attacks that Muslims committed but he won’t even allow the phrase “war on terror” which doesn’t mention Muslims at all.  Why, perhaps because “war on terror” has come to mean “war on terrorist Muslims” since Muslims have been committing the terror that made it necessary to fight a war on terror.

   Mark Steyn wrote that Gordon Brown’s behavior has become a time-honored tradition and that his new home secretary said:

 

Any attempt to identify a murderous ideology with a great faith such as Islam is wrong, and needs to be denied.

 

Mark Steyn gave additional examples of this time honored tradition (Five Guys Named Mo, National Review Online 7/4/07):

 

After the 2005 Tube bombings, the first reaction of Brian Paddick, the deputy assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, was to declare that "Islam and terrorism don't go together." After the 2006 Toronto plot to behead the Prime Minister, the Canadian Intelligence Service's assistant director of operations, Luc Portelance, announced that "it is important to know that this operation in no way reflects negatively on any specific community, or ethnocultural group in Canada."

 

 In the old days, these coppers would have been looking for the modus operandi, patterns of behavior. But now every little incident anywhere on the planet apparently testifies merely to the glorious mosaic of our multicultural societies. Or as the Associated Press puts it, "Diverse Group Allegedly In British Plot":  LONDON - They had diverse backgrounds, coming from countries around the globe, but all shared youth and worked in medicine...

Bat Ye'or in her book Eurabia wrote the following about European denial:

The willful blindness of EU leaders has thus brought the jihadist threat to the heart of Europe.  While European authorities deny the existence of a radical Islamic terrorist war on their Continent, police and soldiers have to patrol its cities, train stations, and airports.  This reality, plus the anxiety of the public, points to the opposite conclusion: that, in fact, Europe is in a war she does not wish to recognize or to fight - preferring to maintain the illusion of peace.  Because the history of jihad and dhimmitude have been denied, and replaced by mythical narrative, we see the re-emergence in the twenty-first century of the millennial struggles between dhimmi collaborationists and the free leaders within the dar al-harb which is threatened by jihad.  The future of civilization depends on the outcome of the conflict.

  On March 16, The Forward carried a story about Americans For Peace Now founder Leonard Fein and how he now regrets supporting the Oslo Process.

It is time for reflection on where we, who so enthusiastically advocated for Oslo, were mistaken," says Fein. "Our mistake was to allow ourselves to be so carried away by the prospect of peace that we chose to close our eyes to the persistent Palestinian violations of the Oslo accords and to what those violations implied about Palestinian intentions. …Whether Mr. Arafat ever was sincere in his endorsement of peace remains an open question. That in the end he has proven either stupid, evil or both scarcely can be thought debatable.

   President Bush in a speech on June 24, 2002 said regarding Israel and a future Palestinian State "My vision is two states living side by side in peace and security," President Bush wants to believe that a Palestinian state if restructured into a democracy, could exist peacefully side by side with an Israeli one.  He would like to believe that a democratic state of Palestine would not want war.  In fact in his speech he said: "The hatred of a few holds the hopes of many hostage".  After Arabs killed students at the Hebrew University president Bush said "There are a few killers who want to stop the peace process that we have started. We must not let them." Yet the majority of the Palestinian people enthusiastically endorse suicide bombing.  Many cheered on rooftops as Iraqi Scuds flew into Israel.  Many cheered when thousands of Americans died in the World Trade Center. According to the New York Post (8/7/02) after a terror attack killed five Americans and two Israelis in the Frank Sinatra Cafeteria at Hebrew University

in Gaza, ... thousands danced in the streets, first to celebrate the mayhem wrought by their brave martyrs at the university and then, a few days later, to clap and laugh about their heroes' noble destruction of a commuter bus. At this rally, the "people" salivated as their Hamas leaders advised Israelis to "prepare more body bags."...

Polls reveal repeatedly that the Palestinian people support suicide bombers. Even among the minority who oppose them, it's mainly because they think the tactic may backfire.

Producers of a Palestinian version of Sesame Street are reluctant to broadcast a new series that gently promotes tolerance because they fear it would not have a market.

The findings of many polls including one released by the Palestinian Jerusalem Media and Communication Centre (JMCC) in June 2002 in the same month as Bush's speech about the hatred of a few holding many hostage,  showed that the Palestinian Arabs, not just their leaders want Israel destroyed..  The survey shows that a majority of PA residents believe the aim of their 20-month-old uprising should be to eliminate Israel, and not just to end Israeli "occupation" of Judea and Samaria.   Many official PA symbols show the entire map of Israel as their "future" country - contrary to the wishful thinking of "two states living side by side."

Don Feder, in his column of June 24, 02 wrote: 

Israel and Palestine living peacefully, side by side (and the suicide bombers shall lie down with the victims), is a dream of diplomats disconnected from reality. A provisional Palestinian state would be an interim, but irreversible, step toward the abolition of the Jewish state.

Frank Gaffney wrote before Bush's speech on 6/20/02 (Email Broadcast of the Unity Coalition for Israel  6/25 /02):

It can only be hoped that President Bush will heed his own instincts and eschew the sophistry of those whose idee fixe delusions about "peace processes" and "land for peace" have brought Israel to the present, perilous pass. If so, he will confine his "plans" for Mideast peace to a reaffirmation of America's desire to achieve that goal and a recognition that it cannot impose one through such seductive but ultimately disastrously futile ideas as a provisional Palestinian state or the even more benighted idea of inserting U.S. monitors/peacekeepers into the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

George Will wrote in the Washington Post that (6/2/02)

A slice of Czechoslovakia in September 1938 inflamed the recipient's appetite for the rest of it six months later. Today, only the delusional can believe that gratitude for the powers granted to a "provisional" Palestinian state will predominate over resentment about powers withheld.  Furthermore, the withheld powers that would make a Palestinian state provisional will not be withheld for long. Who will enforce any restrictions on the "provisional" state's armaments or diplomacy? The "world community"? The United Nations with its animus against Israel?..."

Gary Cooperberg (The Ostrich Syndrome 8/26/02 Freeman Center Broadcast) wrote:

It is nothing less than astounding to see the absolutely outrageous
attempts at self delusion our leadership is making to convince
themselves that we should still attempt to make peace with our Arab
enemies. We have eyes to see, yet we close them. We have ears to hear,
yet we refuse to listen. Innocent civilians have been murdered by the
hundreds by human bombs who have elevated murder to an act of worship.
Rather than completely destroy those who seek our destruction, we
continue with the mad obsession that we have no other choice but to find
a way to live with those who refuse to live with us.

    One delusion that has been very destructive is that the way to fight terrorists is to go on with the peace process that they supposedly oppose.  Both Israeli and American government officials have been possessed with this delusion.  So for example when two suicide bombers blew up Israeli civilians on August 12th during the Hudna or cease fire Colin Powell vowed to go on ("Bombs Shatter Truce, New York Post 8/13/03)

We will continue to move forward on the road map

he told a group of Israeli and Arab youths vacationing together in the United States with the group Seeds of Peace.

   We will not be stopped by bombs.

   Of course this plays right into the hands of the terrorists who want the peace process to go on since the peace process involves Israeli territorial concessions for a non-existent peace.

The State Department in order to maintain good relations with Saudi Arabia does not assist Americans whose spouses have kidnapped and imprisoned their children in that country.  According to Joel Mobray (New York Post 9/5/02):

The U.S. State Department surreptitiously undermined Congressional efforts this past weekend to rescue two abducted children from Saudi Arabia -- and two U.S. citizens remained trapped in the desert prison as a result... The abduction cases date back to 1986, when Patricia Roush's daughters, Alia and Aisha, were stolen from their suburban Chicago home by their Saudinational father...The Saudis shuttled Alia and Aisha to London - just as the Congressional delegation was arriving in Saudi Arabia - in order to have them sign a "statement" denounching their own mother and the country of freedom and liberty where they were born...Despite asking for - and being denied - Rouch's permission to take a statement from her daughters, a consular officer with STate willingly took the "statement" made by Alia and Aisha on Saturday anyway....With a straight face, State claims Alia and Aisha were - no joke - "on vacation."...State told the press not that Alia and Aisha did not want to move to the Untied States, but that they didn't even want to "travel" here...

The whole affair raises a serious question: If the Saudis refuse to be honest partners on something as simple as helping us retrieve kidnapped U.S. citizens, how can we trust them as a partner in the war on Terror?  And the fact that the Saudis' duplicity only succeeded because of State's complicity begs the more important question: How can we trust our own State Department to protect us when it willingly sacrifices the lives of two American citizens at the altar of its unholy alliance with the Saudis?

Jan Willem  van der Hoeven, Director International Christian Zionist Center in an article titled The Un-American Department of State (July 1, 02) wrote about how the CIA betrayed John Noble an American prisoner of the KGB to avoid antagonizing the Soviet Union.  He wrote:

Other high-profile betrayals of U.S citizens include the case of John Noble, the American held prisoner for nine years by the harsh KGB in Vorkuta, Siberia - and concerning whom the Soviet prison regime first denied any knowledge. The State Department denied knowledge of his plight, apparently out of a desire not to upset the then policy of Soviey-U.S. detente. Only when confronted at a press conference with evidence that Noble was indeed an illegally held U.S citizen in Siberia did State finally began to work for his release.  (Noble, John: "I Found God in the Soviet Union" St. Martin's Press, New York, 1959).

   The State Department releases an annual list of nations subject to diplomatic action because of their "systematic, ongoing and egregious" violations of religious freedom.  According to WorldnetDaily (3/3/03) Newsweek magazine first reported that Saudi Arabia will once again not be a "country of particular concern," a designation that requires action by the U.S., ranging from a quiet diplomatic demarche to sanctions. Saudi Arabia has never been listed despite the State Department's own repeated assessment that freedom of religion in the kingdom "does not exist."

   According to geostrategy-direct 7/11/03:

U.S. intelligence sources have told Congress in closed session that elements of the Saudi royal family continue to dole out tens of millions of dollars to Islamic terrorists in the Middle East who promise holy war.

They said Saudi money and volunteers are flowing into northwestern Iraq, where the Sunni insurgency against the U.S. military is raging.

Riyadh is one of several factors that comprise the Sunni insurgency, the sources said. The Saudi strategy has been to finance loyalists among the Sunni clergy and sponsor mosques and other institutions. A terrorist infrastructure has emerged that will continue to make itself felt for years.

The most shocking part of the congressional briefing was that al-Qaida-related agents from Saudi Arabia have been organizing and financing many of the attacks on U.S. troops. They are believed to have paid for weapons that come via Syria.

According to WorldnetDaily (CIA: Saudi Arabia funds Sunni Insurgency 8/26/03)

A CIA report which cites the activities of major Islamic insurgency groups in the country and their state sponsors was disclosed by Kurdish sources in Iraq to the London-based Al Hayat daily, according to a translation by Middle East Newsline.

Al Hayat reported U.S. intelligence officials assert Iran, Saudi Arabia and Syria have contributed insurgents and funding to a range of groups, including al-Qaida and Hezbollah.

The paper, which is owned by members of the Saudi royal family, said this marks the first time the kingdom was specifically identified as a supporter of the Sunni insurgency in Iraq. Last week, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage said Islamic insurgents have infiltrated Iraq from Saudi Arabia, but cleared the royal family of involvement.

  

XIIIb2 Creation of Delusion to Avoid Conflict and Prevent Violence

Kenneth Timmerman wrote how State Department Counselor Philip Zelikow advices Secretary of State Rice to hide the truth about Iran to avoid war.  Timmerman wrote:

 

Bob Woodward revealed in one of his books that, State Department Counselor Philip Zelikow learned that the Iranian government was supplying weapons and cash to the insurgents during a fact-finding mission to Iraq in September 2005, but advised Rice to keep this information under wraps.

 

Zelikow was worried that the Iranian action was “arguably an act of war against the United States,” and that if the U.S. revealed what it knew, “the administration might well start a fire it couldn’t put out.” And so the U.S. put a cork on what it knew about Iranian support to the insurgency until last December. 

 

    If the United States had aggressively attacked the Iranians who supported the Iraqi insurgents instead of pretending they didn’t exist many victims of the insurgents might be alive today.  In addition the growing nuclear threat of Iran might have been neutralized.

 

    According to worldnetdaily, 1/3/2007, one of the most unreported stories of 2006 was Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's driving conviction, as reported in WND, that a messianic figure known as the "Mahdi" to Muslims is poised to reveal himself after an apocalyptic holocaust on Earth that leaves most of the world's population dead.  Ahmadinejad is on record as stating he believes he is to have a personal role in ushering in the age of the Mahdi. In a Nov. 16, 2005, speech in Tehran, he said he sees his main mission in life as to "pave the path for the glorious reappearance of Imam Mahdi, may Allah hasten his reappearance."  With Iran on the verge of producing nuclear weapons and already in possession of sophisticated medium-range missiles, mystical pre-occupation with the coming of a Shiite Islamic messiah is of particular concern because of Iran's potential for triggering the kind of global conflagration Ahmadinejad envisions will set the stage for the end of the world.

    It is likely that the Western press underreports this because they don’t want the United States to go to war with Iran.  There is considerable evidence that Ahmadinejad was one of the hostage takers of Americans in 1979.  According to worldnetdaily

 

the White House and State Department made it clear they would rather not know the truth about Ahmadinejad because it would place the U.S. in a position of refusing to permit a head of government into the country to attend U.N. meetings.

One official said such a finding would "enormously complicate" matters.

U.S. "investigators" never bothered to interview any of the former hostages who made the charges against the Iranian leader.

   The State Department believes that it is better to avoid facing the truth about Ahmadinejad but that simply leads to not dealing with the threat he represents and paves the way toward wasting time on negotiations with him while he produces nuclear weapons.

   In April 2003, the North Koreans told a U.S. government delegation in Beijing,

"[A]s we had previously told you in New York, we have finished reprocessing all 8,000 of our plutonium fuel rods."

The North Korean statement floored the Bush administration because the State Department had kept these revelations from the White House National Security Council and the Pentagon.  (Newsmax June 2004)

A likely reason the State Department kept this information secret was fear that the Bush administration would go to war with North Korea to destroy their nuclear capability.  We can only speculate about how much other intelligence is being kept from the Bush administration in order to prevent war.

   Simon Aban Deng was a Christian native of the Shiluk kingdom of the Southern Sudan and was enslaved at the age of 9 by Arab Muslims.   During the ongoing genocide of his people, he met with Madeleine Albright's assistant and asked her why the United States wouldn't at least call the genocide, genocide.  Her assistant answered that the United States had signed covenants that it would intervene to prevent genocide and since the United States was unwilling to intervene (i.e. get involved in a violent confrontation), it wouldn't call it genocide.  (Daily Pennsylvanian 3/2/05)

   Sam Grace, a spokesman for the Coptic Christians told WorldnetDaily (6/13/2007) that

In the last 10 years, more than 5,000 Christians have been massacred in Egypt.  Hundreds of businesses and homes first have been looted, then burned and destroyed. Churches have been burned and destroyed.   And you know what? Not one Muslim has been indicted, let alone convicted.  When it comes to [Egyptian] Christians asking for asylum in the U.S., very frequently, the U.S. administration lies … and deceives by saying when it comes to Christians suffering from persecution … there is no proof that Christians are persecuted in Egypt.  However, such cases have been documented over and over by international Christian ministries as well as groups such as Human Rights Watch

    Why pretend that Christians are not suffering from persecution in Egypt?  Relying on Egypt as an ally is a cornerstone of American policy in the Middle East.  Facing the reality that Egyptians persecute Christians could jeopardize that illusion of Egypt being friendly with the United States.  Giving asylum to Egyptian Christians could antagonize Egypt and threaten the “friendly relationship” the delusional State Department believes it has with Egypt.

    The French (I wrote this before Sarkozy was voted into office) who are anxious to appease the Arabs for their oil and to create a joint French/Arab alliance so that they can match and perhaps excede American power, are willing to teach Arab history as if it was a glorious thing and to minimize Israel's historical claims.  

   Bat Ye'or wrote about how President Chirac of France was willing to meet the Arab demand for increased accommodation of Islam and Arab culture by opening an entire department devoted to the glory of Arab civilization in December 2003 at the Louvre.  The must have been difficult (see Islam's Contribution to Civilization).   What is more outrageous is the Louvre's exhibit of Israel in biblical times.   Palestine did not exist in Biblical times, Israel did but the exhibit is titled an exhibit they call "Palestine and Transjordan, from the origins to the Iron Age."   Historical descriptions on the walls mention neither Hebrews, Israelis nor Jews - with one exception where an archaeological find on display mentions Omri, king of Israel.   Perhaps to the find was to valuable to hide.  Bat Ye'or wrote:

The Aramaeans are remembered, as are the building and artistic competence of the Phoenicians and their kingdoms; in contrast, the contemporary kingdoms of Israel and Judea are omitted. 

  Michael Medved in an article called Commemorating 9-11: Blaming America, exonerating Islam (Worldnet Daily 8/19/02) wrote about another example of creating delusion to prevent violence.  He wrote that:

The National Education Association links its website to a detailed list of "Tips for Parents and Schools Regarding the Anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001," prepared by Dr. Brian Lippincott of John F. Kennedy University in Orinda, Calif. Professor Lippincott insists that commemorative programs must avoid any suggestion that Islamic fanaticism can be blamed for the attacks, and that the most important way to protect ourselves from future assaults is to embrace all religions and sexual orientations...

Among the "Tips for Parents and Teachers," Lippincott suggests that we must "Address the issue of blame factually … Do not suggest any group is responsible ." In other words, educators should avoid the implication that al-Qaida and the worldwide network of Islamic fanatics had something to do with the slaughter of Americans. "We have no reason to believe that the attacks on our country were part of an organized plan of any other country," the curriculum materials insist. "The terrorists acted independently without the sanctions of any nation."

What about Afghanistan, which welcomed Osama bin Laden as an "honored guest"? What about Saudi Arabia, which continues to raise money through telethons and the royal family to support international terrorism? What about Iraq, which lavishly praised the 9-11 attacks as a heroic blow against America?

According to the education establishment, we should avoid such unpleasant observations because "protecting against harassment of our Arab American classmates and neighbors is most critical right now. …

   This is an example of creation of delusion to protect Arab Americans.   

   Another example of creating delusion to protect Arab Americans was given by Robert Spencer in frontpagemag.com (8/26/04).  He wrote:

George Orwell knew that if you can control a people’s past, you can control its present; that’s why in 1984 he has a whole government department — the Ministry of Truth — devoted to rewriting history. Now, twenty years beyond Orwell’s nightmare year, we call the Ministry of Truth the State Department: in a press release issued Monday, “Islamic Influence Runs Deep in American Culture,” Phyllis McIntosh of State’s Washington File burbles that “Islamic influences may date back to the very beginning of American history. It is likely that Christopher Columbus, who discovered America in 1492, charted his way across the Atlantic Ocean with the help of an Arab navigator.”

Rewrite the history books, indoctrinate the children, and you can own the future. The bit about the Arab navigator is not just being put out by State, but will also be taught in Massachusetts public schools this year...

Did Columbus tag after the retreating Muslims and hire a navigator and a few sailors? Well, in fact his navigator’s name was Martin Pinzon, who served as captain of the Pinta. Of the known names of his crew members, there is an abundance of Juans and Pedros, but nary a Mahmoud or Ahmad... 

So why are the State Department and the Massachusetts public schools purveying this hooey? ...  Their multiculturalist fantasy history is designed, of course, to make Americans more accepting of an influential Islamic presence in the country. But unfortunately, since no one seems concerned about how to screen terrorists out of this Islamic presence, they’re likely to find that the Muslims to whom they have surrendered their history — and who they have invited into their future — are no less multicultural than their forefathers of 1492.

According to an article in the Washington Times (8/20/02) NEA plan for 9/11 not backed by teachers

Educators and clinical psychologists said the worst thing teachers can do is "sugarcoat" the events of September 11.  "Honesty is important," said Robin Gurwitch, a clinical psychologist at the pediatrics department at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center...   "There's always a part of us that says if we bring it up, we're going to need to downplay it or sugarcoat it," Miss Gurwitch said. "By doing that we may create more problems if we don't address it. The truth is always good."

   On August 21 the Board of Education unveiled a guide for remembrance of the Sept 11 attacks -- focusing on "hope healing and heroism," (NYPost 8/22/02).  Among the proposed lessons posted on the schools system's web site are:

In grades two through six students will make "hope chains," write recipes for "cooking up some hope" and place leaves on a "hope tree." 

The teachers are advised to tell students:

that being a certain religion does not make someone our enemy.  Just as there are some Americans who do great things, and some Americans who do terrible things there are all kinds of Muslim people...

  Statements in the Koran about killing the unbeliever of course will not be mentioned in order to ensure that Arab kids aren't picked on.

   Even though there were many intelligence warnings of an impending terrorist attack before July 4th 2002, when the attack did happen and Hesham Mohamed Ali Hadayet opened fire in the Los Angeles Airport on that day, the FBI spokesman has said that "there's nothing to indicate terrorism." According to Debka (7/5/02) a source that is not always reliable, Hesham was a member of Egyptian Jihad.  The Arabic London-based Al Hayat followed the original DEBKAfile disclosure of July 5 - that Hadayat was a member of the Egyptian Jihad Islami - and took it a step further.  According to the  Arabic paper, the Egyptian gunman met Dr. Ayman Zuwahri, the Jihad Islami chief who is Osama bin Laden's deputy, twice in California - once in 1995 and again in 1998. Yet the FBI has no evidence that Hesham's attack was terrorism.

   Daniel Pipes wrote an article in which he lists several other examples of the FBI denying that terrorists acts are terror (Daniel Pipes, New York Post 7/9/02).  Yashiko Sagimori in an article titled What Caused the Fall of the Roman Empire (freeman center broadcast 5/11/05) wrote:

[D]o you remember the recent murder of the Armanious family in New Jersey? They were Copts, members of a ruthlessly persecuted, mostly Christian ethnic minority in Egypt. The Copts are descendents of the ancient Egyptians, who had created one of the oldest civilizations on Earth, built the pyramids, kept us in bondage for a few centuries, and eventually lost their land to Arab occupiers who now call themselves Egyptians with about as much right to that name as Arabs occupying Gaza, Judea, and Samaria have to call themselves “Palestinian”. Hossam Armanious and his wife Amal had a dangerous hobby. They were trying to convert Arab immigrants from Egypt to Christianity. They received several death threats. In January 2005, the entire family, including two daughters, 15 and 8 years old, was brutally murdered in their home. The absence of any signs of forced entry indicated that the victims knew the murderers and let them in suspecting nothing wrong.! Burglary was ruled out since nothing was missing. The method of killing was consistent with the method of Islamic ritual slaughter. This led the Coptic community to suggest that the victims were killed by Muslims they were trying to convert. The authorities were unwilling to investigate such a possibility. Instead, they arrested two Christians and accused them of burglary and murder. One of them was the Armanious' tenant, which was supposed to explain why there were no signs of forced entry; the victims knew the visitor and let him in. The official version stated that the murderers were wearing masks. Initially, they weren't going to kill the family, and changed their minds only after the youngest girl accidentally saw the face of one of the burglars. This may explain why nothing was missing. This also implies that the victims voluntarily allowed inside their home two people wearing masks. In other words, the official version is total bull. Does the government cover Muslim crimes? 

On November 5, 1990, in the conference room of the Mariott East Side Hotel, an Egyptian immigrant fatally shot Rabbi Meir Kahane in front of dozens of witnesses. He was arrested, tried, and acquitted of murder, but convicted for illegal gun possession. The government refused to treat it as a terrorist act.

On March 1, 1994, near the Brooklyn Bridge in New York City, a Lebanese immigrant opened fire on a minibus carrying Lubavicher yeshiva students, killing one of them and injuring three others. He was charged and convicted of murder, attempted murder, and illegal possession of weapons. The government refused to treat it as a terrorist act.

On October 21, 1999, after taking off at JFK, an Egyptian pilot deliberately crashed his 767 into the Atlantic, killing all 203 passengers and 14 crew members. The government refused to treat it as a terrorist act.

On July 5, 2003, an Egyptian immigrant opened fire at the crowd near the El Al counter in the Los Angeles International Airport, killing two and injuring six. The shooter was killed by an El Al security officer. The government refused to treat it as a terrorist act.

These are only a few cases reported by the media. God only knows how many ere swept under the rug.

  Whether Mr. Sagimori is correct or not the following was posted on a Muslim web site.

Bibo 117: This is a picture of the filthy dog, curser of Muhammad (Hissam Armanios) and a photo of his filthy wife, curser of Muhammad (Amal Jaras). They got what they deserved for their actions in America. They were slaughtered along with their children as a punishment from the heavens to those who curse the most divine of all who were created. 

   Oriana Fallaci, in her book The Rage and the Pride, accuses Europeans and of not wanting to face the reality of jihad, for fear of having to do something about it.

   The American government deliberately avoids facing the truth regarding the Middle East. 

David Bedein in an article titled "Hear No Evil, Report No Evil" (Freeman Center Broadcast 1/25/2004) wrote that:

The Fateh, defined by both US and Israeli law as a terrorist organization, operates under a waiver that allows it to enter into political negotiations in both countries.

Talk about a license to kill.

When Rim Al-Riyashi a Muslim mother of two committed a suicide bombing the Palestinian media praised her heroism.  Mr. Bedein wrote that:

The US Ambassador's office was asked for comment on the official Fateh praise for the suicide bomber .

However, the US embassy spokespersons answered by saying that they were not listening to the Voice of Palestine radio. 

If US Ambassador Kurtzer is not listening to the Fateh praise of murder, then the US government will not know about it, and the waiver for the Fateh will continue so that 'political negotiations' can continue.

  American policy makers have a history of pressuring Israel into making more and more concessions for peace despite the fact that such concessions have always been met with more violence.  Although the concessions made by Israel as part of the Oslo accords were met with more and not less Arab violence the United States followed that up with the roadmap in which they are pressuring Israel to make more concessions.  The rationale is that sweetening the pot for the Arabs will lead to peace.  So in response to terror Arabs are rewarded with concession which surprise surprise leads to more terror.  Daniel Pipes (New York Post 7/8/03) wrote about his concerns with the roadmap as follows:

Yet I worry. Won't human nature and governmental inertia combine to induce the Bush administration to push the road map through to completion, riding roughshod over the pesky details to keep things moving forward? Suppose Palestinian violence continues; won't there be a temptation to overlook it in favor of keeping to the diplomatic timetable?

Such has been the historic pattern whenever democracies negotiate with totalitarian enemies to close down their conflicts, starting with the British-French attempts to appease Nazi Germany in the 1930s, then the American-Soviet détente in the ‘70s, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process in the ‘90s and South Korea's sunshine policy with North Korea since 1998.

In each case, the delusion that sweetening the pot would bring about the desired results persisted until it was dashed by a major outbreak of violence (the German invasion of Poland, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the second Intifada).

  President Bush announced his two state "vision" for settling the Arab-Israel conflict in his address to the UN on June 24, 2002.  Rael Jean Isaac wrote in an article called "Hubris" (Outpost Jul-August 2003) that:

The speech was widely praised at the time, even by Israel's staunchest friends, and Americans for a Safe Israel was almost alone in pointing up its disastrous potential.   yet the peril should have been clear.  Pursuing a mirage, shimmering but unattainable because it has no substance - the Arabs want to eliminate Israel, not make peace with it - can only lead to bitter disappointment...

While it might be objected that hindsight is 20/20, our vision was 20/20 when Bush made the speech, immediately following it, in the July-August 2002 Outpost, under the heading "And When the Policy Fails?" this writer asked: "So what happens when the kind of benign government Bush hopes to see replacing Arafat's regime fails to come into being""  Will President Bush tell the Arab world the Palestinian Arabs have missed their opportunity?"  I wrote that would happen was all too foreseeable.   The President would find "sufficient 'progress' being made to focus on the second half of his speech - driving Israel back to lines approximating the borders of 1949 and creating a Palestinian state."  In the same issue, we published an article by Jacob Miller, "No Way to Security; No Way to Peace" which also pointed out the fallacies in the President's speech.  Wrote Miller: "Democratization, though an admirable goal, is impossible to achieve at this time and in this place.  Who really believes that a people so full of hate could be capable of democratic nation-building?  Socialism's faith int he ability to change human nature lives in this proposal just as it did in the Soviet Union for  most of the last century."

And sure enough, although Yasser Arafat was still in charge, terror in full flower, incitement against Israel in the media as virulent as ever, PA corruption endemic, instituions unchanged, the mere appointment of longtime Arafat lieutenant Abu Mazen as a toothless Prime Minister was enough "progress" for our President to sign off on a "provisional" (whatever that means) Palestinian state by the end of this year...

With the ink scarcely dry, the Road Map has already gone from folly to farce.   The Road Map calls for the Palestinian Authority to dismantle and disarm terror groups.  Prime Minister Abu Mazen promptly announced he intended to do no such thing.   Instead, he proposes to form a unified national leadership with Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other terror factions and incorporate their members into the police, to be trained by the CIA.  As AAron Lerner of the IMRA news agency points out, "Senior Hamas, Islamci Jihad, and Tanzim terrorists aren't going to come in as buck privates - they will be officers.  And the men they bring in, steeped in both ideological fervor and baskign in the glory of past battles, will ahve no trouble turning the PA security service into a wing of Hamas/Tanzim."...It is precisely as if Afghanistan's Taliban government, in the wake of 9/11, had offered to include Al Qaeda's leaders int he government and turn over the army to its operatives, while the U.S. trained them to become more efficient fighters...

Te parallels between the road map of 2003 and the Munich sell-out sixty five years ago are of course striking - the diktat to the victim-state, even the fact that, then as now, four political entities signed off on the road map for peace "in our time."   So will the consequences be similar, should today's road map be implemented.   Just as Chamberlain was self-deluded to place any credit in Hitler's protestations that he had no designs after Czechoslovakia, so is President Bush deluding himself if he thinks that the Moslem world's chief quarrel with the West is over Israel.  Far from satisfying the Islamic tiger, the prize of Israel will only whet its appetite.  The little Satan gone, conquered by Arab determination and Western folly, can victory over the Great Satan be far behind?

  President Bush created the delusion that there was enough progress in order to make peace.  Another example of this type of delusion creation was the behavior of Scott Ritter.  One way Saddam kept Iraqis in line was by imprisoning the kids of parents deemed disloyal to the regime.  Former weapons inspector Scott Ritter knew about the children's prison because his team inspected it in 1998. He once said it was the most horrific thing he had seen. "Probably 200 kids from toddlers to 12-year-olds. The stench was unreal--urine, feces, vomit, sweat…" But Mr. Ritter told Time magazine (Saddam's Silent Collaborators,  Margaret Wente  Globe and Mail, April 15, 2003)

Actually, I'm not going to describe what I saw there, because what I saw was so horrible that it can be used by those who would want to promote war with Iraq, and right now I'm waging peace.

   It turns out that Saddam bribbed Shakir al Khafaji a Detroit businessman who then gave $400,000 to Scott Ritter to make "In Shifting Sands" an anti-sanctions film.  Saddam built new palaces with oil for food money during the sanctions while taking away U.N. ration cards from his people (New York Post 4/2/04).

XIIIB2b Creation of Deluson to Help the Oppressed.

   In Israel a group who called themselves the new historians make Israel out to be a lot worse than conventional Israeli textbooks do regarding the Middle East conflict.  Avi Davis in his article "History's Revenge" (Freeman Center Broadcast 11/19/01) writes about Teddy Katz, a doctoral candidate at Haifa University who was found guilty in a Tel Aviv District Court of making false accusations against the Alexandroni Brigade, a Haganah platoon from the 1948 War of Independence.  The Court agreed with the plaintiffs and found that not only had Katz fabricated the story, but that much of the Arab testimony he produced to defend his case, contradicted his claims.

Ilan Pappe is another "New Historian" who wrote in his introduction to his book "A History of Modern Palestine" that 

My bias is apparent despite the desire of my peers that I stick to facts and the "truth" when reconstructing past realities. I view any such construction as vain and presumptuous. This book is written by one who admits compassion for the colonized not the colonizer; who sympathizes with the occupied not the occupiers.

   The motivation of these new historians in creating new history may be to help who they perceive to be oppressed.  We can't assume that it is their true motivation even though Ilan Pappe claims it is his since he himself admits to not respecting facts and truth.  He admits being willing to lie in order to help who he perceives to be oppressed.  If they truly our oppressed why not tell the truth to make his case?  The fact that he and Palestinian Propagandists have to lie in order to do so indicates that the image of Palestinians victimized by Brutal Israeli Occupiers may be a mirage created by Arabs who want to destroy Israel. (Review by Ephraim Karsh of Pappe, Ilan., A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples, 2004)

   

XIIIb3 Creation of Delusion to Prevent Discrimination

   On Aug 22, 2006 Chelsea Schilling wrote in Worldnetdaily that:

A wave of illegal-immigrant gang rapes is sweeping the U.S. while public officials and law-enforcement authorities fear drawing the link, experts say.   Deborah Schurman-Kauflin, a Ph.D. researcher of violent crimes, told WorldNetDaily, "It appears as if there is a fear that if this is honestly discussed, people will hate all illegal immigrants. So there is silence.

Another example of hiding the truth (creating delusion) to avoid discrimination was reported by the New York Post (4/5/04)

In February 2003, the European Union's Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia secretly suppressed its initial 112 page report on European anti-Semitism Manifestations of Antisemitism in the EU 2002-2003, because its conclusion that radical Islamists and pro-Palestinian groups were largely responsible was deemed "inflammatory."

Now the latest report has decreed that the rise in violent anti-Jewish attacks is being perpetrated mostly by "young, disaffected white Europeans" who have been "influenced by extreme Right ideas."  That is neo-Nazi skinheads.

Yes, the report says "young Muslims of North African or Asian extraction" are "a further source of anti-Semitism... in some countries," but warns that such generalizations are "problematic".

    I wrote a web page about Muhammad which uses quotes from the Koran and the Hadiths to make a convincing case that he used religion to manipulate people into subjugating others for him and for adding women and money to his substantial collection of both.  An angry reader reacted by saying I was full of hate and that Islam is not a terrorist cult and that I should meet some Muslims and see what they are really like.  He did not address the facts and the quotes in the article because they undermined his argument.  His argument boils down to "there are nice Muslims out there therefore what you say about Muhammad is wrong."  The desire to prevent discrimination against "nice" Muslims is a big motivator to distort and ignore reality.  Tony Blair, the prime minister of England, in an article in the Observer (4/14/04) wrote:

In every country, including our own, the fanatics are preaching their gospel of hate, basing their doctrine on a wilful perversion of the true religion of Islam.

   Prime Minister Blair will not admit that Islam is the problem.  Likewise the President of the United States, George Bush, in a speech to the armies 101st Airborne on 11/21/01 (Bush to al Qaeda: 'We will never tire' CNN.com 11/22/01) said:

We fight now because we will not permit the terrorists -- these vicious and evil men -- to hijack a peaceful religion and to impose their will on America and the world.

   In yet another speech on April 14? 2004, President Bush said:

The violence we are seeing in Iraq is familiar. The terrorist who takes hostages, or plants a roadside bomb near Baghdad is serving the same ideology of murder that kills innocent people on trains in Madrid, and murders children on buses in Jerusalem, and blows up a nightclub in Bali, and cuts the throat of a young reporter for being a Jew.

We've seen the same ideology of murder in the killing of 241 Marines in Beirut, the first attack on the World Trade Center, in the destruction of two embassies in Africa, in the attack on the USS Cole, and in the merciless horror inflicted upon thousands of innocent men and women and children on September the 11th, 2001.

None of these acts is the work of a religion; all are the work of a fanatical, political ideology. The servants of this ideology seek tyranny in the Middle East and beyond. They seek to oppress and persecute women. They seek the death of Jews and Christians, and every Muslim who desires peace over theocratic terror. They seek to intimidate America into panic and retreat, and to set free nations against each other. And they seek weapons of mass destruction, to blackmail and murder on a massive scale.

   How does President Bush know that it's not religion?  Why does the President find it necessary to bring this up?  Is it just a coincidence that so many of these political fanatics are Muslim?  One reason in addition to wanting to avoid discrimination against Muslims may be a desire to show that he is not against Muslims so as not to further antagonize the Muslim world.  In addition the President may honestly believe that all religion is good.

   The world media also goes out of its way to  mention the Islamic element behind Islamic terrorist attacks.  Michelle Malkin, in an article titled "Remember 9-11: Stop sanitizing the killers" (worldnetdaily.com 9/8/04) asked:

How many times have you picked up a newspaper and read about terrorist attacks perpetrated not by Muslim terrorists, but by generic "militants" or "guerrillas" or "rebels" or, as Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes noted, the Pakistan Times called them, "activists"?

    Michelle pointed out the contrast between this and press coverage of the Waco Texas siege:

which constantly reminded us that David Koresh and his Branch Davidian followers were members of a "peculiar religious sect" (New York Times, March 3, 1993) and "a group of religious zealots with a known propensity for violence" (Washington Post, March 2, 1993) who were steeped in a "culture of Christian extremism" (San Francisco Chronicle, April 20, 1993).

XIIIb4 Creation of Delusion to Prevent Punishment

    When children misbehave they are often given the diagnosis Attention Deficit Order.  Arnold Ahlert writes (N.Y. Post 4/5/04) Thus another rash of generally annoying behavior is reduced to "symptoms" for which people can no longer be held "accountable."  They aren't annoying, they're "sick."..  Pardon the heresy, but sometimes the things we do are nobody's fault - but our own.

XIIIb5 Creation of Delusion to Protect Secrets

    One of the astonishing coverups by the United States is the link of Iraq to the attacks on the World Trade Center.  One would expect that the United States would want the world to know about this link to justify the war it fought with Iraq.  Perhaps there were secret sources and information the United States wanted to protect.  The following is an excerpt from an An article called 9/11 Lawyer Mystified Over Failure to Invoke Iraq-WTC Link (Newsmax 5/14/03) about the subject:

The lawyer who won a $104 million court award last week for families of two victims of the Sept. 11 attacks said Sunday that he remains mystified over the Bush administration's decision not to publicize evidence tying an Iraqi hijack training facility to the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

"Who knows exactly why they're not focusing on it," said Philadelphia attorney James Beasley, whose court victory last Wednesday gave legal validation to claims of several defectors that Saddam Hussein provided instruction for al-Qaeda recruits in hijacking techniques never employed before 9/11 at the terrorist training facility at Salman Pak...

Going back to the Clinton administration, American weapons inspectors working for the U.N. witnessed what they said were hijacking practice sessions conducted aboard a Russian Tupelov 154 airliner parked in an open field at Salman Pak.

The revelation that those sessions may have been dress rehearsals for the 9/11 attacks would leave more than a few in the intelligence community with some explaining to do.

"Once people focus on what was known beforehand," said Beasley, "then the obvious question is, well gee, what were you guys doing before 9/11." ...

In satellite photos taken over Baghdad on April 25, 2000, a commercial airliner parked in a field at Salman Pak is plainly visible.

"They didn't have the benefit of the satellite photo when they were drawing their pictures," Beasley told Malzberg. "But this one fella, Sabah Khodada, who was a captain there and one of the trainers of the Fedayeen Saddam, drew a picture that matched almost identically the satellite photos that we had."

Khodada, who worked at Salman Pak for eight years, defected to the U.S. five months before the 9/11 attacks. In November 2001 he told the London Observer, "The method used on 11 September perfectly coincides with the training I saw at the camp. When I saw the twin towers attack, the first thought that came into my head was, 'this has been done by graduates of Salman Pak.'"

The fact that the accounts of Khodada and others matched the satellite photo evidence lends credence to other parts of their testimony.

"Khodada also told a bunch of different people that they were training these non-Iraqi Islamic fundamentalists in groups of four or five on how to take over aircraft using non-conventional weapons," Beasley said. "That's exactly what we saw [on 9/11]."

When the Salman Pak defector told his story to PBS's "Frontline" on Oct. 14, 2001, Bush administration officials were quick to dismiss it. An editor's note accompanying the Khodada transcript on the PBS Web site explains, "Although U.S. officials acknowledge terrorists were trained at Salman Pak, they say it is unlikely that these activities were related to the Sept. 11 attacks."

But it's not clear how those officials could know for sure that the training camp had no 9/11 connection - especially since Khodada told PBS that his first interview with the FBI had taken place only days before.

Despite the official position that Salman Pak played no role in the attacks, attorney Beasley managed to convince federal judge to the contrary.

He pointed out that even after the war, evidence of Salman Pak's role in 9/11 continues to mount. "When the Marines went through there they found everything that Khodada had said," he told Malzberg.

   Those who argue that there is no link between Al Qaeda and Iraq, should tell that to Nicholas Berg, beheaded by al-Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who after being wounded in America’s war against the Taliban, took refuge and received medical treatment in Saddam’s Iraq and trained al-Qaeda warriors at Iraq’s Ansar al-Islam terrorist training base. A 16-page government memo provides convincing proof of the connection between Saddam and al-Qaeda. The Weekly Standard’s Stephen F. Hayes has written volumes on the matter. The al-Qaeda affiliate terrorist group Ansar al-Islam trained its terrorists in northern Iraq for years, even before Zarqawi arrived. A Saddam insider has testified that Saddam’s secret police, the Mukhabarat, provided weapons and funds to Ansar. Only diehard opponents of the war on terror, like the radicals at MoveOn.org could ignore this evidence to make the claims they do.

 Creation of Delusion to Protect Secrets

XIIIC Creation of Delusion to Stay in Power

  Some Politicians try and make their policies more successful than they really are in order to gain support.  One example of this is given by David Bedein who wrote in an article titled An Unquiet Peace (frontpagemag.com 2/14/04)

despite repeated statements of all Israeli government officials on tape and on the record that no ceasefire had been agreed to in Sharm, the public relations firm that works with the Prime Minister of Israel reported to every possible media outlet that a ceasefire had been achieved.

    Spreading this type of delusion among Israelis  is very dangerous for Israel because it gains support for territorial concessions that strengthen a regime bent on destroying Israel.

   Said Aburish in his book: The Rise, Corruption and Coming Fall of the House of Saud, writes about the measures taken by Saudi Arabia to make themselves look good in the press.  He wrote how the first king of Saudi Arabia Ibn Saud and his successor King Faisal dealt with Saudi newspapers:

Initially Ibn Saud ordered their editors to promote his regressive policies and their refusal to succumb prompted him to order members of his Committee for the Advancement of Virtue and the Elimination of Sin (CAVES) to arrest the people who read them in public.   When this produced unsatisfactory results, he confiscated their printing presses...

King Faisal introduced strict local press censorship and forbade the ownership of newspapers and magazines by individuals, families or groups...

   Said Aburish also writes about how the Saudis took control of the pan-Arab press and gained influence over the Western press.

Saudi ownership of the pan-Arab press started in 1979 with the newspaper Sharq Al Awsat, which they edited in London and transmitted via facsimile to printing presses throughout the Arab world.  This was followed by the purchase of an old Lebanese newspaper, Al Hayat, which they also edited in London.  Women's sports, business and political weekly magazines in London, Paris and Beirut followed.  The financial backing given by the House of Saud to its own publications gave them an edge over the competition, which could not afford news bureaux or modern printing presses, and made it easy for the Saudis to pressure others into joining them in return for financial aid.   It was a choice between following the Saudi line or perishing...

Saudi Arabia's decision to have its own pan-Arab publications was coupled with an attempt to influence the press in non-Arab countries, through financial and other pressures.  Refusal to grant visas to foreign correspondents and not inviting them to GCC or other meetings, threatening to cancel subscription to wire services, and newspapers' and magazines' syndicated offerings or the outright purchase of the loyalty of some British and American journalists who covered the Middle East are the most obvious methods used by the Saudis...The sinister, mostly secret activity of trying to influence Western publications has been relatively successful and part of the reason the ugly deeds of the Saudi regime have not received the press coverage they deserve is that major news organizations do not want to alienate the Saudi Government and because some Western correspondents covering the Middle East take bribes...

At present the Arab press is divided into a Saudi -owned press, a Saudi controlled press, a press controlled by the GCC and other countries friendly to Saudi Arabia who are loath to offend it and a small number of publications which oppose them and are fighting against huge odds.  And the Saudis are still buying the loyalty of an increasing number of Western journalists.

But they have not stopped at the purchase or direct or indirect control of Arabic-language newspapers and magazines and pressuring foreign publications or bribing foreign correspondents.  They have broadened their approach to ownership to accomodate technological developments which affect their overall purpose.  They own Middle East Broadcasting Corporation, MBC, an Arab language television station in London which serves the expatriate Arab community and transmits to the Middle East via satellite; ANA, the Arab radio station in Washington DC; and Radio Orient, the Arabic language radio station in France.  in 1981 some of their friends bought 14.9 per cent of London's TV-AM through a highly circuitous financial route and businessmen beholden to the House of Saud have bought into mainline London newspapers and are eager to buy more.  Recently they acquired United Press International for $4 million...The Saudi businessman Wafiq Al Said, a close friend of King Fahd bought 35% of London's Sunday Correspondent.  Saudi businessman Sulayman Olayan owns 5% shares of the Independent and the Sunday Independent...

I have ascertained that six well-known journalists who write about the Middle East for major London publications are either directly or indirectly in the pay of the Saudi Embassy. ..

In addition to hundreds of individuals and corporations who promote the Saudi image, universities and study centres have not proved immune to the influence of Saudi money.  The University of Southern California, Duke University, Georgetown University and the Aspen Institute have accepted Saudi grants which implied non-criticism of the House of Saud.  Many Middle East experts at American universities work in departments which are funded by the Saudis...

Nor is having control of the press and placing inexperienced, incompetent Saudi editors in charge enough for the House of Saud, for it has shown signs of wanting to control book publishing (at least two London publishers of books about the Middle East depend on them for their livelihood).  Some of my books failed to find Arabic publishers because of fear of Saudi reprisal and one of them was bought by a publisher who, unbeknownst to me, acted for them; he paid a lot of money for Arabic-language rights and then did not publish it.  More seriously in 1982 the Saudis objected to a book about the Mecca Mosque rebellion by the Egyptian writer Ahmad Al Hamadi, and went as far as threatening to cut off aid to Egypt in order to have both books confiscated by the Egyptian authorities.

The Saudis punish publishers of anti-Saudi books by banning all their products from their country and get members of the GCC to do the same.  No publisher can afford the accusation of being anti-House of Saud and Quartet books suffered for publishing God Cried, a book about the Israeli Invasion of Beirut, because, according to the Saudis, God does not cry.

The House of Saud also resorts to violence.  Some of the examples given by Aburish are the kidnapping of the Saudi writer Nasser Al Said from Beirut, the assassination in Athens of the critical publisher of Al Nashua, Muhammad Mirri, and the attack of a Syrian journalist by Saudi paid thugs who broke both his arms...

In summary, what we have is a situation where the Western press's ability to report on Saudi Arabia is hampered by the House of Saud's power to control journalists' entry into the country, and by the application of indirect financial pressure on journalistic establishments.  On top of that, reporting which supports and approves the House of Saud is facilitated through the Saudis' ability to buy into Western media, bribe journalists and exploit their business and academic contacts.

The ability to influence the Western press comes on top of total control of Saudi internal media and the elimination of opposition within the pan-Arab media.  The combined effect produces a false picture which everywhere overlooks, ignores or distorts the House of Saud's misdeeds.  In prospect is a world waking up to a country in flames and wondering why things have gone so far without anybody knowing about them.

The following is a quote from Robert Baer's book See No Evil a book which brings to light some of the shocking corruption in the CIA and the U.S. government and how it paved the way for attacks such as the one on the World Trade Center on Sept 11, 2001.

As for me, both items added to a growing rage that I was having more and more trouble containing.  Whether it was Osama bin Laden, Yasir Arafat, Iranian terrorism, Saddam Hussein, or any of the other evils that so threaten the world, the Clinton administration seemed determined to sweep them all under the carpet.  Ronald Reagan and George Bush before Clinton were not much better.  The mantra at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue seemed to be : Get through the term.  Keep the bad news from the newspapers.   Dump the naysayers.  Gather money for the next election -- gobs and gobs of it -- and let some other administration down the line deal with it all.

An excellent interview with Robert Baer can be heard online.

XIIId Creation of Delusion to Prevent Hate

   In December 2006, WorldnetDaily reported that more Americans were murdered this year by illegal aliens than the combined death toll of U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan since those military campaigns began.   In another disturbing expose, WND reported that a wave of illegal-immigrant gang rapes is sweeping the U.S. while public officials and law-enforcement authorities fear drawing the link.

As Deborah Schurman-Kauflin, a Ph.D. researcher of violent crimes, told WorldNetDaily:

"It appears as if there is a fear that if this is honestly discussed, people will hate all illegal immigrants. So there is silence. … But in being silent about the rapes and murders, it is as if the victims never even existed."

Michael Medved in an article titled "Why won't Hollywood admit terrorism's Islamic link?" (Jewish World Review 7/2/02 and USA Today) wrote:

Why does the popular culture - including the movie industry - place such a powerful premium on downplaying the obvious connection between international terrorism and fanatical Islam?

Just 10 days before the government announced the detention of Jose Padilla (also known as Abdullah Al Muhajir) on charges of plotting a "dirty bomb" explosion on American soil, Hollywood unleashed Bad Company, its second thriller in two weeks about nuclear terrorism in the United States.

But in that Anthony Hopkins-Chris Rock box-office dud - as in its high-profile predecessor, The Sum of All Fears - Islamic extremists bear no responsibility for the deadly designs against our country.

The Bad Company bad guys hail from Yugoslavia and wear colored scarves and nasty scowls to make them identifiable as they plan to explode a nuclear device under New York's Grand Central Station....

The Sum of All Fears is an even more ridiculous distortion of reality. Its producers changed the identity of the nuclear terrorists specifically to avoid any imagery that might show Muslims in an unflattering light. In Tom Clancy's best-selling novel, on which this film is based, Palestinian fanatics lead an elaborate conspiracy; but the movie version's laughably caricatured Nazis, complete with accents and overacting reminiscent of Hogan's Heroes, take over the plot and make it look ridiculous.

This same pattern applies to earlier movies about terrorist schemes against the USA. In 1997's The Peacemaker, George Clooney and Nicole Kidman battled a chilling attempt to blow up New York with a nuclear weapon. Again, the plotter came from the former Yugoslavia...

Even some schoolchildren understand the danger, but in today's climate must be careful describing it. A friend of my eighth-grade daughter got into trouble at their public school when a teacher asked why al-Qaeda hates us so ferociously. The 14-year-old girl accurately observed that some Muslims have always interpreted passages in the Islamic holy book, the Koran, to demand that believers conquer or kill infidels who refuse to follow the prophet. Her observation produced gasps of horror from fellow students and a stern reprimand from the teacher for her indulgence in "hate speech."

Michael Medved writes that one reason for this is fear that telling the truth will

encourage the persecution of Muslim Americans, the overwhelming majority of whom obey the law and honor our flag. But another even more powerful factor inhibits the honest discussion of Islamic ideas and helps explain Hollywood's reluctance to identify movie terrorists as Muslims.

Michael Medved believes that there is another more important reason. He writes that for secular people who believe in relativism:

The idea that any one religious approach might be especially dangerous or dysfunctional leads to unacceptable conclusions: If some religions are worse than others, then some are better than others - and perhaps even more true.

Such reasoning is a greater threat to secular relativism than any terrorist. The politically correct position therefore suggests that it's merely coincidence that most Islamic societies oppose Western ideals of liberty and progress, and it's only an accident that nearly all mass-murdering conspirators pledged to kill Americans take their inspiration from the Koran.

Ideas - including religious ones - have consequences, and examining those consequences is the best way to judge them. Americans are mature enough to handle the inescapable truth that our daily dangers come not, as Hollywood would have it, from freelance misfits and nostalgic Nazis, but from a serious and frightening Islamic mass movement implacably devoted to our destruction.

   One observation I have to add to Michael Medved's conclusions is that Yugoslavia is being painted by Hollywood as a source of terrorists when they actually fought with Islamic terrorist groups who were trying to take away part of their homeland.  That leads to the question why isn't Hollywood concerned about creating hatred to Yugoslavs?  Perhaps there is no fear of the consequences of angering the Yugoslavs the way their is of angering the Moslems.

  Another observation is that any answer to the teacher's question regarding why Al Qaeda attacked the U.S. is hate speech.  If the student had given the teacher the answer she wanted which was probably that Al Qaeda attacked the United States because the United States supports Israel and Israel oppresses the Palestinians that would have been hate speech toward both the United States and Israel.   Of course they wouldn't get in trouble for that answer. 

   Another observation I have is that hate is not always wrong if it is hatred of the guilty.  There is a web page in this web site about anger that has excerpts of articles that appeared after the attack on the World Trade Center that make this argument.

   Robert Spencer wrote an article titled "Terror Denial" in frontpagemag.com (5/6/05) about the extent to which federal authorities will go to deny an attack is a terror attack even when terror organizations claim responsibility.    Daniel Pipes has written about this as well (Denying Islamist Terrorism, New York Sun, 2/8/05 ).

   The biggest nuclear threat is from Iran and North Korea.  Sharon made a presentation about how imminent the Iranian nuclear threat is: ("Will Israel Strike Iran?", New York Post 8/13/03)

But Sharon's presentation to Bush challenges the assumptions and viability of the emerging U.S. nonproliferation strategy on Iran. U.S. intelligence estimates that put Iran's covert nuclear weapons drive about four years short of being able to turn plutonium into a workable nuclear warhead overstate the time factor by at least 100 percent, Sharon argued. One to two years is his projected timeline.

To be sure, Sharon would face formidable logistical and political problems in trying to update Israel's successful pre-emptive 1981 strike against Iraq's Osirak reactor. His Oval Office briefing may have been designed to pressure Bush to move more forcefully on Iran rather than to advertise an impending Israeli action.

Israeli leaders have consistently warned Americans for two decades that Iran's Islamic regime is a mortal enemy for the Jewish state and must not be underestimated. Sharon's account, while apparently more urgent and dramatic than past presentations, fits a pattern of Israel "treating a nuclear-arming Iran as an immediate existential threat," says one U.S. official, while Washington does not.

   Daniel Pipes in an article called "A War Against What?" (New York Post 10/1/02) wrote that the effort to deny the Islamic roots of violence extends to the American and European media.  He wrote:

Paul Marshall of Freedom House shows that American and European reporting on these many massacres in Pakistan overlooks the militant Islamic dimension, instead presenting the atrocities as vaguely anti-Western in purpose.

When it came to light that the Beltway sniper was a Muslim, Stephen Schwartz wrote (New York Post 10/25/02) 

U.S. media and law enforcement have joined in what might be called a "reverse rush to judgement": They have hurried to discount any suspicion that Muhammad belonged to an Islamic extremist group or had links to al Qaeda.

If he is indeed the sniper, John Muhammad fits a pattern:

* John Walker Lindh, the American Taliban fighter.

* Richard Reid, the shoe-bomber who tried to blow up a transatlantic flight.

* José Padilla, another petty criminal trained as a terrorist.

* And now John Muhammad

All are marginal, misfit individuals who entered Islam in the West, heard the appeal of the radicals, and acted on it.

They may not be easily identified as "card-carrying" terrorists. But they are still terrorists, seeking to fulfill the ideological dictates of the Wahhabi death cult that rules Saudi Arabia and seeks to control Islam throughout the world.

Like Lindh, Reid and Padilla, Muhammad did not have to go to Riyadh to acquire the violent, fundamentalist outlook of the Wahhabis: It came to them. The Wahhabi death cult dominates 80 percent of American mosques.

   Daniel Pipes also wrote about the unwillingness of the media to even suggest that Islam might have been behind John Muhammad's murdering spree.   He wrote (New York Post 10/29/02):

a friend who quoted John Muhammad, the senior alleged sniper, saying that the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks "should have happened a long time ago."

This implies that Muhammad might have seen himself as a foot soldier in the jihad (holy war) against the United States, and that he took up arms to terrorize Americans.

Media across the country as one, however, shut their eyes to this explanation. A Los Angeles Times article proffered six motives for Muhammad (his "stormy relationship" with his family, his "stark realization" of loss and regret, his perceived sense of abuse as an American Muslim post-9/11, his desire to "exert control" over others, his relationship with Malvo, and his trying to make a quick buck) but did not mention jihad.

Likewise, a Boston Globe article found "there must have been something in his social interaction - in his marriage or his military career - that pulled the trigger."

Unwilling to specify the possibility of jihad as even part of his motive, media analyses dismissed it by implication. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution merely reported that local Muslims rue the snipers having "once again tarred the image of a peaceful religion." All those interviewed by the Commercial Appeal in Memphis "agreed that it did not matter that one of the suspected snipers had converted to Islam."

   Michelle Malkin in an oped "The D.C. Sniper's Jihad" wrote in regard to the media's effort to downplay the possibility that Islam played a role in the sniper killings that:

CNN downplayed Muhammad's reliigous conversion calling him by his old name, John Allen Williams... Chicago Sun Times columnist Richard Roper railed against conservative commentators such as the indomitable Mark Steyn, who had taken note of Muhammad's Islamic faith... 

   The authorities spent their time looking for a white man in a white van.   It turns out that Lee Boyd Malvo, the teen assistant to John Muhammad was a Muslim as well (New York Post 12/5/2003).  The following lines come from a poem he wrote:

"Fight in the cause of Allah those who believe,
Destroy the devil and infidels, fear them not
(Crusader & zionist alliance) for Allah choose the humble
And the despised, so fight ye with all your possessions
and persons, fight ye and remember Allah will repay
your loan of life and property 10 fold, give your life to Allah."

In prison Malvo drew sketches which revealed his Islamic hatred of America.  In one sketch he is dressed as a soldier and carries an assault rifle.  In the text he writes about the victims of his sniping:

They all died and they deserved it.  I don't need your pity.  We will not stop.  This war will not end until you are all destroyed utterly.

In another sketch the Whitehouse is shown in cross hairs accompanied by the text:

You will weep, moan & morn.  You will bleed to death, little by little.   Your life belongs to Allah.  He will deliver you to us.  Sept. 11, we will ensure, will look like a picnic to you.  You can count on the above statement with every drop of my blood, being and soul... Welcome to the new war.  You are not safe anywhere at any time.

XIIId2 Creation of Delusion Because of Hate

    French hostility to the United States has led them to downplay the role the United States has in saving them from the Nazis.   Before the 60th anniversary commemoration ceremony of the allied D-Day landing in Normandy the U.S. press was full of personal accounts of veterans of the D-Day landings, the only eye-witness report in Le Monde recounted the horrifying tale of the forgotten casualties of D-Day — the French civilians who perished in the saturation bombing Nazi defenses in strategic towns in Normandy such as Lisieux .

    A French Web site dedicated to the civilian victims of the Battle of Normandy (unicaen.fr/victimes_civiles/), notes that 13,900 French men, women and children perished in Normandy between April 1 and Sept. 30, 1944. It makes no mention of the 6,000 American soldiers who died on June 6, 1944, at Omaha Beach alone.

   In Basse-Normandie, where the allied landings occurred, two vice presidents of the regional council announced they would refuse to take part in any ceremonies where Bush was present. (New York Post 6/5/04)

   I read an interesting argument made in the comments section on an article in Frontpage Magazine about how people will oppose a viewpoint because a group they generally oppose has that viewpoint.  Here is the relevant text of that comment:

Then there are those who would rather eat broken glass than be on the same side as Republicans and conservatives on any issue.  So they delude themselves into thinking that Jihad really isn't such a big threat, but rather just Right-wing bigotry made up by Republicans to justify war, and win elections, etc.

XIIIe Creation of Delusion Because of Fear

   School officials in Burlington, NJ who wanted to stage a hostage situation drill did not portray the terrorists as Islamic, instead they portrayed them as members of a right-wing fundamentalist group called the 'New Crusaders'.   Ironically this was reported on April 3, 2007 by Worldnetdaily , shortly after Iranian Muslims seized British soldiers and kept them as hostages.  How much of the motivation was fear to anger Muslims and how much was hatred of Christians or a desire to appear PC and enlightened is unclear.

   Fear silences those that would speak the truth and paves the way for delusion.  A government study in England found that teachers leave out the Holocaust for fear that the topic might offend or upset muslim students.  In addition they leave out education about how the Crusades liberated Jerusalem from the Islamic invaders. (Foxnews 4/3/2007)

Michael Medved in an article called Blaming the Victim for Murderous Muslim Rampages, (Worldnet Daily 12/2/02) wrote:

Christian authorities in the Middle East refused to blame Islamic killers for the murder of American nurse and missionary Bonnie Witherall, shot dead at the age of 31 while opening the clinic in which she ministered to Lebanon's poor. At an interfaith memorial service in her honor, Roman Catholic Bishop George Kwaiter told the assembled spiritual leaders: "We told her she might be vulnerable to insults, or even being hit, and she answered that she would consider it an honor." Concerning her efforts to preach the Gospel and to convert Muslims to Christianity, the bishop unequivocally declared: "We don't accept this kind of preaching. We reject it totally."

Even a Baptist pastor in Lebanon, Rev. Pierre Francis, fingered his fellow Christians Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson rather than the Arab extremists who murdered Ms. Witherall. Referring to harsh comments by the American evangelists toward Islamic extremism, Pastor Francis observed, "I would not think that this is our calling to say bad things about this religion. They just jeopardize our safety."

Many Christians are afraid to speak up against Islam because of what might happen to them or to Christians in countries such as Lebanon who they fear are endangered by such comments.

   According to an article titled Sins of Omission, (John Leo, City Journal | March 1, 2007) Some of the press in the United States fears saying a criminal was black if he was or someone is a communist because then they might be considered McCarthyite.  The North Carolina Observer omitted information that a criminal was black and in response the blogger Confederate Yankee ran the mock headline RACELESS FEMALE RAPED BY RACELESS MALE AT A PARTY HOSTED BY A RACELESS FRATERNITY IN THE SAME CITY WHERE RICH WHITE BOYS RAPED A POOR BLACK STRIPPER.  The media had not compunction about declaring the race of the white boys accused of raping a poor black stripper and had no compunction about painting them as guilty even though they later turned out to be innocent. 

XIV Whitewashing

   In an article titled Creation of Paranoia I discuss the paranoia of the extreme right.  The extreme left suffers from paranoia as well but also idolizes evil regimes.  

Humberto Fontova author of Fidel, Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant was asked in a frontpage magazine interview (5/17/05)  what his explanations were regarding this leftist mindset.  He said:

 

I used to ponder it often. I've read Paul Hollander, Malcolm Muggeridge, James Burnham, Arthur Koestler, David Horowitz, Robert Conquest, Paul Johnson, Jean Francois Revel, etc-- I've read an entire library on the Leftist mind-set.  But I finally resolved that life's too short to concern yourself with what motivates lunatics. Now I leave this strange study to competent psychiatrists (if any exist.) You finally get to a point where you regard it as a form of mental illness -- at least I do.

What gets me about these people is that the MORE murderous and repressive a regime the MORE popular it becomes with them. Think about it. The Soviet Union was never as popular with leftist intellectuals as during Stalin's blood-drenched reign. China was the Leftists' showcase Shangri-La precisely during Mao's mass butcheries during the Cultural Revolution. In the 1960's and 70's Cuba had the highest political incarceration rate on earth, (higher than the Soviet Union's) Castro and Che's firing squads were piling up thousands of corpses a year--well, it was at that very time that Western college kids like Christopher Hitchens and the Venceremos Brigadistas made a fetish of flocking to Castroland to help with sugar cane harvests and worship at the altar of the Maximum Leader. It was at that very time that Norman Mailer hailed Castro as "The Greatest hero to appear in our Hemisphere!" You finally give up on expecting sense from such people -- at least I do. So you grab a brewskie, pop it open and laugh at them as you would at a Chimpanzee in a zoo cage, or the characters in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest."

   One of the most outrageous examples of whitewashing was the reaction of world leaders and the press to the death of Yassir Arafat.  The French had an honor guard carry his coffin.  Don Feder wrote in  frontpagemag.com (Will Arafat Triumph From Beyond the Grave? 11/15/04):

At its New York headquarters, the United Nations (Thugapalooza) lowered its flag to half-mast, to honor its all-time favorite political killer. Secretary General Kofi Annan said he was "deeply moved" by Arafat’s passing.

The chief spokesman for the Vatican referred to the man responsible for thousands of deaths in the past four years alone as "the illustrious deceased." Just think, if he’d killed ten of thousands, he’d probably be "renowned."

A reporter for the BBC confessed that when Arafat was evacuated to France for medical treatment, on October 29^th, "I started to cry…without warning." Listening to such drivel, I’m close to tears myself. Previously, BBC documentaries had referred to the illustrious deceased as "an icon" and "the stuff of legends."

The New York Times outdid itself, with a 5,265-word obituary that read like Antony’s funeral oration...Once again, it was Jimmy Carter – who’s become the left’s most prestigious propagandist – who scaled the heights of absurdity. In an op-ed piece in the Times, the worst foreign-policy disaster to ever befall America remarked on Arafat’s "boldness" and "clarity of purpose."

   Much of the media whitewashed him as well.  Tom Gross wrote an article titled Arafat-mania (Jerusalem Post 11/14/04) about this.  He wrote:

For the Guardian, Yasser Arafat was to be compared to "Moses." On CNN, he was described as a "revolutionary romantic figure comparable to Ho Chi Minh and Nelson Mandela."

For USA Today, he "embraced" "sorrow and hope."

South Africa's City Press described him as a leader who "marshalled freedom fighters."

And in the Toronto Sun we were told he was "murdered" by Israel.

In scores of reports and interviews by dozens of correspondents on both BBC and CNN, acts of terrorism were left completely unmentioned. Instead we were treated to an almost endless stream of sanctimonious drivel.

Arafat "embodied the peace of the brave"; he "saved the Palestinian people from extinction"; his life was "marked by dignity."

Arafat, we were reminded, was "a leader," "a politician," an "inspirational figure."

So, too, is Osama bin Laden, but it is hard to imagine anyone in the Western media covering bin Laden's death with almost no mention of terrorism and virtually no allusion to his victims.

Reading much of the print media, watching BBC and CNN, listening to the even more partisan coverage of BBC World Service Radio – which attracts over 150 million listeners daily – it was as if these acts of terror had never happened.

It was as though those Olympic athletes had never been killed, those airliners never hijacked, those schools never bombed, those passengers in airline terminals at Rome, Vienna and elsewhere never gunned down.

It was as if the Ma'alot school massacre (of mostly 15-year old girls) had never occurred, or a bazooka had never been fired into a school bus from Moshav Avivim, wiping out an entire class and their teachers.

It was as if an American ambassador and a Jordanian prime minister had never been murdered, or a wheelchair-bound American pensioner had never been shot and dumped into the Mediterranean because he had a "Jewish-sounding name."

And it was as if an eight-month pregnant mother, Tali Hatuel, hadn't been shot in the head by Arafat's Fatah, execution-style, together with her four young children, only last May.

Arafat's terrorism was also omitted on the Web.

For example, the timeline on BBC online, titled "Yasser Arafat: Key dates," jumped straight from: "1994: Jointly awarded Nobel peace prize with Rabin and Peres" to "2001: Israel blockades him inside Ramallah headquarters."

The timeline put out by the Associated Press, the world's biggest news agency, and used by news outlets worldwide (titled "Key Events in Yasser Arafat's Life"), also omitted all acts of terrorism. Indeed we can only wonder what kind of terror AP's timeline says Arafat "renounced" on December 12, 1988.

   After the Muslim riots in France in November of 2005, the French Ambassador Jean-David Levitte said regarding the Allahu Akbar shouting teenagers:

"It was not about the role of Islam in France,  We never saw any link, direct or indirect, Religion played no role."

    He probably said this because the French want good relations with the Muslims especially oil producing Muslim countries. (Ambassador Says France "Back to Normal")  Also because they are afraid of angering the Muslims.

   In late November 1999, U.S. State Department spokesman James Rubin held a press conference regarding the recent forced repatriation of the anti-communist Hmong hill tribes of Indochina back to Stalinist Laos  (James Rubin's White Lies and Damned Lies, WorldNetDaily 12/14/1999 ).   The Hmong had served in the CIA's special forces during the CIA's secret war in Laos during the Vietnam War. Rubin said:

We have no -- found no evidence to confirm that the Lao government engages in the systematic violation of the Hmong minority's human rights as part of a nationwide policy.

   Mr. Rubins statements are in blatant contradiction to a book called, "Tragedy in Paradise," by medical doctor Charles Weldon, who served with the Hmong for 11 years between 1963 and 1974 under USAID, a CIA front. Weldon witnessed many genocidal events waged against the Hmong, and describes one of them on page 128:

As a Hmong column of men, women and children attempted to flee from the town of Phou Nong and escape the Pathet Lao forces in the southern enclave of Muang Moc.

The enemy began firing at random into the mass of terrified people with automatic weapons and mortars. The Pathet Lao soldiers physically blocked the trail to prevent the people from escaping. They clubbed some with rifle butts, some were stabbed with bayonets; women and children were thrown off the cliffs and their bodies broken on the rocks below; infants were grabbed by the legs and their brains bashed out as they were slammed against the tree trunks. The slaughter went on for an hour.

   One motivation for whitewashing a group is to discredit a group who opposed them.   For example the American Indian is whitewashed to discredit the Americans who fought against him.  In my opinion the Americans were guilty of taking away the land of the Indians and killing a great many of them  That doesn't mean however that the Indians were innocent victims which is how they were portrayed by the LA Times.  According to the the L.A. Times article (5/17/03) about Custer's Last stand:

The Plains Indians ... were not brutes and vicious killers.

   The Advocate a historical magazine responded:

Yes they were. ... After a battle, including Little Big Horn, they smashed in the skulls of the dead and wounded, gutted the living and gouged out their eyes. This has all been documented. ....

   The most common motive for whitewashing the behavior of one's own group is to gain acceptance and power for that group.  An excellent web site by Abdullah al Araby called the Facade and the Facts discusses how Moslem groups whitewash their religion to

be accepted, included and involved in all activities; religious, social and political.

According to Mr. Araby Moslems have actually altered translations of the Koran so that it is more acceptable to the West.  He writes:

An example is the new French translation of the Quran which has caused tremendous furor among Muslim fundamentalists. The translation attempted to please Jews by modifying some verses of the Quran that condemned Jews. An example is a verse that used to read "The people of Israel, after sowing corruption twice on earth for the purpose of dominating other people, will push themselves up into a position of extreme power before being punished by God."

The new translation reads just the opposite: "The people of Israel will be twice destroyed as an innocent victim, and God will reward them by elevating them to great heights."  

   Moslem leaders in the United States argue that they are moderate.   For example Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), says that his group only seeks

justice and accommodation for the Islamic-American community so we can practice our faith in a multiethnic setting.

   Yet Mr. Cooper said in 1993 that:

I wouldn't want to create the impression that I wouldn't like the government of the United States to be Islamic sometime in the future.

Also Nihad Awad (executive director) proclaims his "support" for Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group while CAIR Chairman Omar M. Ahmad says that suicide bombers "kill themselves for Islam" and so are not terrorists (Daniel Pipes, "Islam's Image Problem", New York Post 7/29/03). Omar also told a crowd of California Muslims in July 1998,

Islam isn't in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Koran . . . should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on earth.

    Joel Mobray wrote in frontpage magazine 8/2/07:

Given the opportunity to condemn Hamas by Newsweek last December, CAIR executive director and co-founder Nihad Awad refused, claiming that the question was “the game of the pro-Israel lobby.”

   Daniel Pipes points out that CAIR's support of terrorism is not only verbal.  He writes that

Two of its (CAIR's) former employees, Bassem Khafagi and Ismail Royer, have recently been arrested on charges related to terrorism. And a member of CAIR's advisory board, Siraj Wahhaj, was named by the U.S. attorney as one of the "unindicted persons who may be alleged as co-conspirators" in an attempted terrorist assault.

   The Philadelphia City Paper in an article called Pipe's Dreams criticized Daniel Pipes for believing that Muslims harbor such ambitions.  An answer to the Philadelphia City Paper is online and called What the Philadelphia City Paper Didn't Write.

   Pipes is attacked as anti-Muslim when in reality he is just anti-Islamist.   In the same article in which he criticized CAIR he was careful to point out that:

Moderate Muslims, of course, reject CAIR's representing them.

* The late Seifeldin Ashmawy, publisher of the New Jersey-based Voice of Peace, dismissed CAIR as the champion of "extremists whose views do not represent Islam."

* Tashbih Sayyed of the Los Angeles-based Council for Democracy and Tolerance accuses CAIR of being a "fifth column" in the United States.

* Jamal Hasan of the same organization discerns CAIR's goal as spreading "Islamic hegemony the world over by hook or by crook."

   The publishers of Islamic Voice state that they do:

not believe in being controversial sensational, grievance-minded or simply a spokesman of the community.

   They state their goal is to combat malicious propaganda directed against Islam and Muslims.  They combatted the malicious propaganda that Moslems were behind the attacks of September 11th by featuring a review of the book L'effroyable Imposture (The Horrible Fraud) which dismisses the whole episode as "a loony fable" patched together by the White House and the U.S. Department of Defense."  This is inspite of admissions of guilt by Osama bin Laden and his people as well as acknowledgement by Islamic leaders such as Hosni Mubarak that bin Laden and al-Qaeda were responsible fo the acts.

   Islamic voice has a link to A Chronology of Muslim History which is part of a Muslim produced website hosted by the University of Southern California.  That chronology instead of highlighting Islamic accomplishments to civilization has an extensive list of all the wars, destruction, violence and murder that Muslims have enaged in for about 1,500 years.  (The Jewish Press, Firday August 2, 2002)

   School textbooks in the United States whitewash Islam. For example the 7th grade textbook "Across the Centuries" (Houghton Mifflin 2nd edition 1999) omits anything negative about Islam and treats the Koran like a factual document. 

   The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill requires new students to read Michael Sells' "Approaching the Qu'ran: The Early Revelations" (The Buffalo News 8/15/02).  The book excludes passages that call for the death of non-Muslims or the rejection of friendship with Christians and Jews.  Sell's excuse for excluding those passages was that they were "too complex" and would "confuse those unfamiliar with Islam and the history of the Middle East".  Sells said that many Americans cling to the idea that most Muslims are eager to exterminate Americans -- particularly Christians.   He compares it to the backlash of the Pearl Harbor attack that resulted in many Americans of Japanese ancestry being sent to internment camps during World War II.

(Those beliefs) can be really dangerous if we don't find out who the enemy is.   If we think the enemy is really Islam, we're going to be fighting on a thousand fronts.

   Is we are to believe Michael Sells his motive is to prevent us from fighting on a thousand fronts.  This is a strange argument.  The number of fronts shouldn't determine whether we fight an enemy.  To consider how ridiculous this argument is we can apply it to the war against Nazi Germany.  The United States had to fight Germany on many fronts.  The same argument could have been made regarding Germany that we must not believe that the Nazis are the enemy or we will have to fight them on many fronts. 

Daniel Pipes in an article called Islam's Future made a similar argument to that of Michael Sells.  He wrote:

if one sees Islam as irredeemably evil, what comes next? This approach turns all Muslims - even moderates fleeing the horrors of militant Islam - into eternal enemies. And it leaves one with zero policy options. My approach has the benefit of offering a realistic policy to deal with a major global problem.

   Douglas Skinner in a commentary on Pipes article wrote:

I used to be a minor-league Beltway wonk and I remember hearing State Department types using similar logic a decade ago the first time we were facing down Saddam Hussein. The prospect of Saddam Hussein being an evil man was completely ruled out because there would be no opportunity for dialogue--no options. The unpleasant consequence of a premise doesn't mean it is not true and if Islam really is irredeemably evil then, yes, we face a problem of much larger proportions that will be terribly difficult to deal with in the future. We shall have to find a way to shine the light of good in an otherwise dark world.

  What will allow us to improve the situation we face with Islam is whether we face the reality of it is, not try and pretend it is something that it is not.

  Michael Sells whitewashing of Islam did not stop with his book.    After Americans liberated Iraq in 2003, Iraqis looted their own museums, libraries and archives.  Instead of blaming Iraqis, Michael Sells blamed American political leaders saying that they are "barbarians" whose "criminal neglect" makes them comparable to Nero.  Other "scholars" did as well.   Hamid Dabashi of Columbia University said that U.S. political leaders are "destroyers of civilization" like Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan and Tamerlane.   Said Arjomand of the State University of New York at Stony Brook said that the U.S. government's "war crime" renders it akin to the Mongols who sacked Baghdad in 1258.  (An Iraqi Tragedy, New York Post, Daniel Pipes April 22, 03)

    Martin Kramer wrote a book called Ivory Towers on Sand in which he critiques Western academia's illusions about the benevolence of Islam. 

   There is a lot of whitewashing of Islam in the American press, and in American Academia this is discussed in detail in the web page, Why is the Press So Anti-Israel?

   One motive for whitewashing a group who has done evil actions against another group is to justify more evil actions against the victimized group.  For example Iran's Ayatollah Khameini said, "There are documents showing...exaggerated numbers relating to the Jewish Holocaust were fabricated to solicit sympathy of world opinion, lay the ground for the occupation of Palestine and to justify the atrocities of the Zionists." 

   Egypt's leading newspaper, Al-Liwaa Al-Islami, published an article titled 'The Lie About The Burning of the Jews' that denies the Holocaust.  According to the article:

"What interests us here is that this lie [about] the burning of the Jews in the Nazi crematoria has been disseminated throughout the world until our time in order to extort the West.

(Egypt Newspaper: Holocaust a Lie, Wnd.com 8/8/04)  Those who deny the Holocaust know that the Holocaust elicits sympathy for the Jews, and that if they can convince the masses that the Holocaust is a Zionist lie, they can turn that sympathy into hate.

    After Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's denied the Holocaust, Hisham Abd Al-Rauf wrote in the Egyptian newspaper Al-Masaa, that Hitler was not against Jews and that: (Official Egyptian Paper Denies Holocaust, wnd.com 12/20/05)

 "The famous execution chambers were no more than rooms for disinfecting clothing." 

  Another motive to whitewash a group is to show them you are on their side so that they will like you.  Mimi Stillman and Daniel Pipes wrote an article The United States Government: Patron of Islam (Middle East Quarterly Winter 2002) in which they document how members of both the Clinton and Bush administrations whitewash Islam.  They explain the motive as follows:

This exercise has a patently practical objective: it is designed to lessen Muslim hostility to the United States. The chain of reasoning goes as follows: (1) Many Muslims crave Western respect for Islam and recognition of its virtues. (2) The U.S. government in turn yearns for acceptance by Muslims. (3) Therefore, Washington gives Muslims the acknowledgment they seek. (4) Grateful Muslims diminish their hostility to the United States. (5) Washington can realistically demand that those same Muslims come to the defense of the United States against the more radical Muslims who still oppose it. (In addition, some of this rhetoric serves domestic purposes, to assuage the U.S. Muslim population.) 

   Jonathan Rosenblum in an article "My Country, always wrong" (Jerusalem Post Dec. 21? 01), wrote how Before Sept. 11, many American Middle East scholars poo pooed the Islamic threat.  John Esposito, head of Georgetown's Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding and a past president of MESA, dismissed the fear of terrorism as a throwback to Cold War paranoia and a form of thinly veiled anti-Islam prejudice.

   Prof. Paul Eidelberg in his article "Wishful Thinking About Islam" (Freeman Center Broadcast Dec. 30,2001) explained that Muslims portray Islam as peaceful when it is in their interest to do so (when they are weak).  He wrote that:

Even after September 11 many American academics soft-peddled Islam as a peaceful religion, and of course politicians hewed the academic line.  This is not to suggest that expressions of peace and benevolence will not be found in Islamic sources.  But such expressions are not distinctive of Islam, which divides the world into believers and non-believers, and whose adherents are theologically required to spread the faith throughout the world WHEN THEY HAVE THE POWER TO DO SO.  Until then, Muslims may engage in peaceful relations with "infidels."   Meanwhile it serves their interests to be portrayed as "moderate."

        The press when it reports on atrocious Islamic behavior is usually careful to point out that, real Islam doesn't condone it.   For example Diane Sawyer in a report from Afghanistan (I saw this on TV in NY on 2/27/02) spoke about how the Taliban would club the knees of women in the street and said something to the effect that real Islam doesn't condone this.  Yet Sura 4:34 of the Koran says, “Men are the managers of the affairs of women . . . Those women who are rebellious — admonish them, banish them to their couches, and beat them.”

  Professor Fawaz Gerges accused those who warned of the terrorist threat of "feeding irrational fear of terrorism by focusing on farfetched horrible scenarios.''

          After the first World Trade Center bombing, The New York Times featured an article by Edward Said, a Columbia University professor and member of the Palestine National Council, entitled "The Phony Islamic Threat.'' Said attained oracular status among Middle Eastern scholars for his 1978 book Orientalism, in which he argued that all Western scholarship on Islam was inherently colonialist and that Westerners are incapable of understanding Muslims or Islam.

Martin Kramer has written a book about the distortions propagated in American Academia called Ivory Towers in the Sand: The Failure of Middle East Studies in America.

   Another motive to whitewash a group is if it is in your interest to support that group.  Serge Trifkovic in what is my opinion the best book about Islam, The Sword of the Prophet writes:

The British, in pursuing their policy of divide and rule colluded to whitewash the atrocious record of the Muslims so that they could set up the Muslims as a strategic counterbalance to the Hindus.  During the freedom struggle, Gandhi and Nehru went around encrusting even thicker coats of whitewash so they could pretend a facade of Hindu-Muslim unity against British colonial rule.  After independence, Marxist Indian writers, blinkered by their distorting ideology, repeated the big lie about the Muslim record.

   The British whitewashed Ibn Saud, the first king and founder of today's Saudi Arabia probably because they wanted his help against Turkey.  Said Aburish in his book: The Rise, Corruption and Coming Fall of the House of Saud, writes how the British intelligence agent Philby, described Ibn Saud as:

the greatest Arab since the prophet Muhammad.

Ibn Saud writes:

In 1915... the British gave him the title Sir...and again in 1935 he was awarded the Order of the Bath.

and that:

There is a disturbing absence of judgement, moral or practical, which ignores the abuse of his wives, slaves and concubines.  Overlooked are the fact that he roared with laughter when he told stories about hacking his enemies to death; his abuse of his personal drivers and domestic servants to the extent of regularly using the stick on them in the presence of guests; how he squandered his country's wealth ...

Ibn Saud's political emergence begain in 1902 when he reclaimed Riyadh, the city where his family had been local sheikhs in their own right or sheikhs appointed by the local emirs. His first merciless act was to terrorize the population by spiking the heads of his enemies and displaying them at the gates of the city.  His followers burned 1200 people to death.  When conducting a raid he and his followers were very much in the habit of taking young maidens back to enslave them or make gifts of them to friends.  

When the British gave Ibn Saud money he used much of it:

to mould the Bedouin into a bloodthirsty monster, to expand and subsidize the loss-making colonies of soldier-saints of the Ikhwan, or 'brothers'.  The latter were fanatics of the Wahhabi sect to which Ibn Saud belonged, who were to provide the backbone of his conquering forces and whose savagery wreaked havoc across Arabia...

To subdue the population of Ibn Saud's conquered realm, the fanatical Wahhabi Ikhwan committed serious massacres in Taif, Bureida and Al Huda among other places, but, when their brutal ways remained unchecked, they went further and tried to destroy the tomb of the Prophet and remove the domes of major mosques because of their anti-Wahhabi ostentation.  For the same reasons, they even desecrated the Mecca graveyards of the Sunni Muslims...

Between 1916 and 1928 there were no fewer than 26 anti-House of Saud rebellions by the Bedouins and each of them ended with the Ikhwan-led forces of Ibn Saud indulging in mass killings of mostly innocent victims including women and children....

Ibn Saud created the Ikhwan-run Committee for the Advancement of Virtue and the Elimination of Sin (CAVES)...In the cities, CAVES ran riot.  Equipped with sticks to administer on the spot justice, its puritan Ikhwan members flogged its victims at random.   People were punished for wearing Western clothes, gold, perfume or silk, for smoking and the men for not wearing a moustache or a beard.  Singing was completely forbidden, the work of the chief devil, flowerpots were too decorative and were destroyed...Naturally nobody dared turn down a proposal of marriage by a CAVES member, and as a result people took to keeping their women indoors...

He (Ibn Saud) confided to Philby and others that he had had several hundred virgins and he was in the habit of deflowering young girls then giving them away as presents.   Philby was on the receiving end of this largesse; nor did his Westminster and Oxford education stand in the way...

Not a penny of the $400 million paid to Ibn Saud between 1946 and 1953 was used for development.  In 1946 the country's record of expenditure showed a mere $150,000 for building schools and $2 million for the royal garage...Outside of his immediate entourage the country remainded poor and there was at least one incident when beggars who tried to accost his motorcade to ask for money were beaten to death.

With the death of Ibn Saud, Philby spoke of 

the passing of a brilliant chapter in the history of the Arabs.

   Another motive to whitewash a group is to make peace with that group.   The following are paragraphs from the Trends section of the International Bulletin of Political Psychology 2/16/01, Peace, Peace of Mind, and Mideast Mindlessness.

Clinton administration's negotiator, Dennis Ross, in the Arab-Israeli conflict recently has provided public guidelines for the Bush administration and other interested parties. Unfortunately, the guidelines are characterized by language subverted by wishfulness more than strengthened by a pathway to make wishes a reality.

Mr. Ross states that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian National Authority (PNA) President Yasir Arafat both want peace but define their "central needs in a way that conflicts with those on the other side." ...

   On what grounds does Mr. Ross base his assumption that Arafat wants peace?  Charles Krauthammer in his article The New Middle East, the Return of Ariel Sharon, The Weekly Standard 2/19/2001 argues that the opposite is true.   He writes that Arafat did not reach an agreement with Barak knowing that it would bring in Sharon.  He writes: 

Indeed, the Palestinian Authority broadcast instructions to Israeli Arabs to boycott the election, thus assuring Sharon's victory, even had the election been close.  With Sharon, Arafat will meet resistance. And that resistance may spark international pressure on Israel and, perhaps better, a regional war.

As pointed out by Ehud Ya'ari, a leading Israeli journalist who has known and studied Arafat for over 30 years, a regional war has long been Arafat's fondest dream. He knows the Palestinians will always be too weak to fight the Israelis head on. And he knows that the best he can get from any peace agreement is a small Palestinian state, perhaps with part of Jerusalem. The only way to achieve the real dream of conquering all of Palestine, which would make him Saladin, would be to trigger a replay of 1948 with five Arab states invading Israel, but this time with modern armies, modern weapons, modern leadership, and massive oil wealth behind them.

    Before the Israeli "occupation" of the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) Arafat tried to ignite an all-Arab offensive to destroy Israel.  In his book Six Days of War : June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East, Michael Oren, writes how on December 31, 1964, a squad of Palestinian guerrillas crossed from Lebanon into Northern Israel.

Armed with Soviet made explosives, their uniforms supplied by the Syrians, they advance toward their target: a pump for conveying Galilee water to the Negev desert.   A modest objective seemingly yet the Palestinian objective is immense....Their action they hope will provoke an Israeli retaliation...igniting an all-Arab offensive to destroy the Zionist state. 

    The Americans have pressured Israel to whitewash Arafat.   Senator Mitchell and CIA director George Tenet both proposed confidence building measures (i.e. concessions) for Israel to make to the Arabs in order to bring quiet to the region.   Sharon's prerequisite to any concessions was 7 days without Jews being attacked by Arabs.  Israel Television Channel One diplomatic correspondent Karen Neubach reported on July 24, 2001 that the U.S. was seeking a "formula" that would allow for the the current situation to be considered the 7 days of quiet that Israel requires before moving down the Tenet/Mitchell timeline. Neubach explained that the Americans are exasperated by the situation since the continuing Palestinian violence has caused a stalemate.

   It is clear that the Americans wanted the Israelis to make concessions whether or not the Arabs stop shooting at them.  One possible reason is that the Americans were suffering from the delusion that such appeasement would quiet the situation when as a general rule appeasement in response to terror encourages more violence.  In order to get Israel to appease the Arabs, the Americans were trying to create another delusion that the 7 days of quiet existed when it did not.  Another possible reason was given in an article in the Jerusalem Post online edition 7/27/01 called "US Pressing Israel to Begin Counting", which quotes an Israeli official saying that:

Iraq is at the top of the US's list of foreign policy priorities, and since its policy of "smart sanctions" against Iraq has failed, the US is thinking ahead to the need to rebuild an alliance with the Gulf States in the struggle against Saddam Hussein. The US is under pressure from its Arab allies to give something in return, namely to begin the Mitchell plan now.

  The United States wanted Israel to count days full of violence as quiet days so that they would make the concessions promised by the Mitchell plan so that the Arab nations would ally themselves with the United States once again against Iraq.  

   According to the Ashcroft-Salmon bill, passed by Congress in November 1999 the State Department is required to deliver a reports twice each year to Congress on efforts to capture Palestinian Arab killers of Americans.  As of November 01 it is 5 months overdue.  A ZOA news release (Oct 24, 01) reported that ZOA National President Morton A. Klein said:

The State Department does its utmost to keep the issue out of public view, because it fears publicity about Arafat harboring killers of Americans will make it harder to put pressure on Israel to keep making concessions to Arafat.

  Avi Davis, in his article Making Arafat Kosher (Freeman Center Broadcast, Sept. 20, 01) wrote how in a speech after the World Trade Center bombing President Bush:

Cataloged obscure terrorist groups from Uzbekestan to
Egypt but failed entirely to list the regime that has, over the past 12
months, perpetrated more terror than any other group in the world.
Forgotten was the fact that during the past year over 7,000 individual
acts of Palestinian violence, together with the deaths of 170 Israelis,
have occured in Israel  - which locates the Palestinian Authority as
oscillating dangerously close to the hub of world terrorism.

Yet if Yasser Arafat ever had any fears that the terrorist attacks on
the World Trade Center  were going to coat him with the same blanket of
grey ash, he needn’t have worried.  One of Colin Powell’s first acts
following the bombing was to coral the aging chairman together with
Ariel Sharon and Shimon Peres, into observing a truce. Powell, of
course, knew what was coming.  The coalition that he expected to forge
to combat Islamic extremists  would require both the military and
intelligence cooperation of several Islamic states.  From his previous
experience in the Gulf War, he understood immediately that there would
be no such cooperation if  the United States continued to be perceived
as exhibiting  partiality toward the Israelis or if there was no further
progress toward addressing Palestinian concerns.  Bowing to U.S pressure
Arafat, whose own efforts to ameliorate the Americans had risen to the
ludicrous heights  of calling for the establishment of  an
anti-terrorism  Arab coalition, declared a cease fire. The ever-cautious
Sharon responded with a pullback of Israeli troops. And so, President
Bush was happy to report on Wednesday, Israeli-Palestinian rapprochement
is the first signal that there is now actually something positive to
emerge from the disaster.

Or is there?  Anybody expecting a cease-fire to take permanent force,
shouldn’t  hold their breath. On Wednesday afternoon Sarit Amrani an
Israeli mother of three from the settlement of Nokdim on the West Bank,
was killed in a drive-by shooting.    Already some of Arafat’s key
lieutenants are disavowing the cease-fire altogether.  Reports from both
Hebron and the Gaza Strip indicate that gunfire there has only
intensified since the declared ceasefire and that Jewish life has become
increasingly endangered...

Therefore, while the attempt to neutralize Arafat’s ability to disturb
the status quo may give the United States some temporary tactical
advantages, its represents an abysmally poor long term strategy.   Talk
of involving either Syria, Iran or the Palestinian Authority in a broad
international coalition will leave the United States with partners who
pay lip service to American war aims while continuing to foment
terrorism and harbor terrorists within their own borders. Under these
circumstances, the United States’ own strategy against international
terror may well be transformed from elimination to containment to
inadvertent encouragement...

What will it take for the U.S. to learn that serving up Arafat as some
kind of palatable dish only encourages and rewards a source of terror
who may ultimately poison, not aid, efforts to rid the world of the
terrorist scourge?

  Moshe Feiglin in an article called "Why America has Already Lost the War" (Freeman Center Broadcast Sept. 26, 01) explained that the war being waged against Israel is not about territories but rather about our very existence as a Jewish nation. He wrote:

This is a war against our message and our mission. That is what our enemies are fighting against, while we reply to them through our own subjective interpretation of reality: we speak of security and of territories. We fail to understand why they refuse to accept even all the territory.

"The Emperor has no clothes!" Arafat shouts at us, and murders three people
in Netanya.

"Do you want us to wear something else in your honor?", Peres asks.

"He's naked!", shouts Arafat, and murders a young mother from Alfei Menashe.

"Perhaps we'll wear red for you?", asks Beilin.

Arafat continues to attack us, and we continue to propose solutions that fail
to admit the naked reality.

It is no wonder we are losing the war.

  Feiglin than continues to explain why America has already lost the war against terror.  He tells how he was listening to George Bush's speech on the radio while in a store.  He wrote:

"Go to church, to the synagogue, to the mosque, and pray", ended the
President.

"Did I hear right?" I ask the storekeeper. "Did he say mosque?" She nodded.

"At this very moment you've lost the war", I say to the astonished
storekeeper, and start looking for what I need on the shelves.

America has lost the war. The Americans have made the same mistake as the
Israelis, and just as Israel is retreating from one defeat to the next, so
the Americans are now lined up on the track to disintegration.

When the black boxes of the hijacked airplanes are recovered, we will hear
the pilots screaming "Allah Achbar" in the last moments before the crash.
They slaughtered you in the name of Allah, and now the President calls on you
to pray to him...

The American President was busy running after the countries of the world,
trying to set up a strange coalition against a few cave dwellers in
Afghanistan, while senators explained on live television to the American
people that "we must remember that the enemy is the terrorists, not Islam".

America...is ... incapable of identifying the enemy and fighting it. Consequently, America will lose the battle, in the same way Israel is losing it.

Why do the terrorists hate the US so much? Why are they prepared to commit suicide
in order to kill Americans? After all, America has not conquered their
country. On the contrary, many of them receive generous aid from the US. How
strange that even Arabs in New Jersey, who are actually living in the
flesh-pots of America, and were liable to have suffered physically from the
terrorist attack, rejoiced at the sight of the horrible massacre.

Why this hatred?...

"Why are they bringing their wars here?", a soot-covered broker shouted into
a CNN reporter's microphone. He didn't understand that he was conquering, not
territories, but the opposing culture, straight from here -- from the twin
towers.

But every Moslem child understands it clearly. What the political
commentators and senato