Dwelling in Denial

By Prof. Paul Eidelberg

While Ariel Sharon and his colleagues dither about "disengagement," and thus dwell in denial, the enemy from which the prime minister wants to distance Israel is accumulating long-range missiles.  What is the nature of this denial?  To answer this question I turn first to the recently deceased Edward Said, an Arab professor at Columbia University.  Said admitted that "The Arab world is a sink of corruption and mediocrity and the most appalling and murderous tyrannies."  Said did not dwell in denial.  Contrast Israel's ruling elites.

These elites refuse to take the murderous tyranny of the Arab world seriously, a world steeped in hatred of Jews and Israel.  Devoid of Jewish pride, they long to "negotiate" with a tyranny called the "Palestinian Authority," which uses Arab children as human bombs to kill Jews.

The denial in which Israel's political and intellectual elites dwell is pathological. This pathology is fostered by the moral neutrality of contemporary education.  Politicians like Ariel Sharon and Shimon Peres persist in the mindless policy of surrendering Jewish land to Arab terrorists primarily because Israeli universities are silent about the monstrous evil that animates the Arab world.  They speak of the Arab-Israel conflict which, in fact, is nothing less than an Islamic war against Jews, Judaism, and the Jewish state.  And to further obscure the implacable nature of this "conflict," Israeli universities have imported factitious programs in "conflict resolution."  Political scientists see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil, and politicians inhale this immoral atmosphere.

Denying the enormity of evil, they refuse to take the relentless hatred of Arabs seriously.  Accordingly, Israeli political scientists have never formulated, and prime ministers have never pursued, a national strategy commensurate with the tyrannical and bellicose nature of Israel's enemies.

Wandering in the make-believe world of "peaceful coexistence," no Israeli government has ever taken the ideological offensive against the Arab world described by professor Said, who, by the way, despised Jews and Israel.  To expose the malignant nature of Islamdom would not be "politically correct," especially in the academic atmosphere of cultural relativism.

Seven centuries ago, the Arab historian Ibn Khaldun wrote that Arabs are a savage people: "Savagery has become their character and nature," which means that the horror of bloodshed and therefore the sanctity of human life is foreign to Islam.  How diametrically opposed to Judaism!  For the Jew, the sanctity of human life derives from the Torah concept of man's creation of the image of God.  That verse in the Torah speaks to us of free will and simultaneously teaches us the idea of the human community.  Contrast Islam's affinity to fatalism, its division of mankind into "believers" and non-believers," and its treatment of "non-believers" as subhuman.

While Islamic fatalism facilitates or reinforces Islamic tyranny, Islam's  contempt for "infidels" encourages Islamic savagery.  No wonder jihad is a basic Islamic principle, and no wonder Islam is the world's seed bed of terrorism! 

Armed with weapons of mass destruction, Islam is the most dangerous enemy of mankind.  

Such weapons may soon be in the hands of the Palestinian Arabs.  Dwelling in the denial of evil can only lead to disaster. It took 9/11 to prompt President George W. Bush to speak of an "axis of evil."  He nonetheless obscured the identity of that evil by referring to America's enemy as "international terrorism."  Mr. Bush dwells in and out of denial.  However, thanks to the 9/11 Congressional Commission, the president has come around to the position of Daniel Pipes who defines the enemy as "militant Islam."  Of course, the intrepid Dr. Pipes prudently distinguishes militant Islam from Islam per se.  I ask: when has Islam not been "militant"?

One can appreciate Dr. Pipes reticence  in this matter. Limiting the enemy to militant Islam or “Islamism") has not saved him from the charge of "racism."  But what shall we say of Israel's political leaders, its judicial leaders, and its intellectual leaders?  They dwell in denial of the evil confronting their country, an evil born or magnified in the Quran, whose almost every page consigns "infidels" to hell?  What shall we say of Israeli non-believers who, despite the overwhelming power of the IDF, have allowed the disciples of Muhammad to stain the streets of Jerusalem with Jewish blood?  What shall we say of a prime minister anxious to sign an agreement with these Janus-faced murderers in order to co-author the fiction of a non-bellicose Palestinian state?

We look in vain for a political leader with courage enough to say that signing agreements with Arabs may be "politically correct," but hardly conducive to peace.  Does not Egypt, in violation of its peace treaty with Israel, supply arms to terrorists in Gaza, while its government-controlled media spew Nazi-inspired hatred of Jews and thus prepare Arabs for the final war against the Jewish state?  Even Israel's peace treaty with Jordan has not prevented the "moderate" King Abdullah from stoking the fires of the intifada, thereby encouraging Arabs to hasten Israel's politicide.

Dwelling in denial, silent about the evil permeating Islam, Israel's ruling elites undermine the moral sensibilities and vigilance of Jews on the one hand, and incite Arab contempt and murder on the other. 

This denial, this silence, is sanctioned by Israeli law! Two decades ago a Labor-Likud government enacted legislation that prohibits Jews from telling the truth about the Arab ethos.  Hence no one should expect the government to declare: "Israel's Arab enemies, like the Assassins of a thousand years ago, are unrivaled in racism, hatred, and murder.  When these Arabs kill Jews, they feel they are killing not human beings but noxious insects.  Israel is confronted by unmitigated evil."  Such a statement, however, would make utter nonsense of Sharon's policy of self-restraint toward Arab terrorism.