Sarkozy-Israel Visit: With Friends Like This…

With Friends like This …

Divide Jerusalem and expel the Jews from Judea and Samaria.

June 23, 2008 | Eli E. Hertz

French President Nicolas Sarkozy asked the Knesset on Monday, June 23, 2008 to recognize that “France will always be Israel’s friend” and then called for the division of Jerusalem and the expulsion of the Jews from parts of their National Home in Judea and Samaria.

* Caroline Glick: What on earth could have prompted the Israeli government to negotiate the current “cease-fire” with Hamas?

*  More Glick: “The Olmert-Livni-Barak-Yishai government’s liquidation sale of Israel’s strategic assets opened officially this week”

* ISRAEL’S HISTORY AND “RIGHT TO EXIST”

The current Israeli government seems to have difficulties educating its guest as to the history of the Jewish people and remind him that on July 24, 1922, France, as a member of the League of Nations recognized

“The historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country.”

 

Our own best friend

Sir – The French president’s address to the Knesset, though friendly and pleasant to hear, somewhat missed the point, I felt. He said that Israel, being the strong and powerful party, should be the one to move the peace process forward. He assured us that France would support us and defend us against all risks.

One ought to remember that the Czechs had a signed treaty in the late 1930s and were betrayed by France.

The lesson is that each country must be its own guarantor, while endeavouring to create as many friends as possible (“Sarkozy to the Knesset: Nuclear Iran is ‘totally unacceptable,'” On-Line Edition, June 23).

NATHAN MAYER
Milan

Sir, – It was good to read about President Sarkozy’s visit to Israel in support of that otherwise beleaguered nation. He and his lovely wife seem to radiate a genuine concern for its problems.

HERB STARK
Massapequa, New York

Sir, – I listened carefully to M. Sarkozy’s address to the Knesset. After the platitudes were removed, what was left was the same old “Israel must be prepared to take dangerous risks for peace.” Vis-a-vis who? Mahmoud Abbas and the PLO?

Abbas is a corrupt politician and, anyway, the Palestinians much prefer Hamas’s Ismail Haniyeh. And a PLO-Hamas agreement would certainly bring about the (possibly violent) end of Abbas.

So putting aside a European or Russian or American-enforced “shotgun marriage” of a peace pact – which would be short-lived – who is there for Israel to enter into “dangerous, risk-taking” discussions with?

Fitzgerald  and the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah

“the Gaza Strip’s ruling Hamas group says it remains committed to the truce.”
— from the article above

What government of Israel will dare to mention the Treaty of Al-Hudaibiyya, first to itself, in its own deliberations, then to its public, and then to other Western leaders, and put it them, chapter and verse, that the model of Muhammad, the very basis of Muslim life — for what is the Sunnah if not, in the main, the example of Muhammad, uswa hasana, al-insan al-kamil — is also the basis of Muslim treaty-making with Infidels, and so, sad to say, Israel can’t put its faith in princes or in fine print, but will have to realistically act on the understanding that the Jihad against it is without end, as the Jihad against all other Infidels is also without end, but entirely manageable, if its promptings in the texts, and its varied instruments, and the attitudes natural to Muslim Man, which are very different from those of Western, non-Muslim Man, for Muslim Man does not accept, as desirable and understandable, the very idea of compromise, but takes all yieldings and surrenders by the other side as a sign that a certain strategy is working, and is impelled to make further efforts, further demands, in other words finds that the appetite is not sated but whetted by what Western Man is accustomed to seeing as a sensible splitting of supposed differences.

The Qur’an, hHdith, and Sira do not say: Accept that the non-Muslims will always have their own lands. The Qur’an, Hadith, and Sira do not teach: claim only this land for Islam, or only this part of this land for Islam. The Qur’an, Hadith, and Sira do not teach: take Gaza, take “the West Bank” for Islam, but leave the Jews their own state in the pre-1967 lines which, of course, Islam happily and forever accepts. No, that is not what the Qur’an, the Hadith, and the Sira say. And the sooner that penetrates the brains of the political and media elites of Israel, and of the entire Western, or entire non-Muslim world, the better for that world, and the happier its future prospects, and the more likely the avoidance of major open war, will be.

The Israelis, and those who push and pressure them from the outside, have always assumed that the same rule of treaty-making, and treaty-observance — the principle of Pacta Sunt Servanda (Treaties are to be obeyed) is a universal principle. It is not. It is a principle of Western international law. See Lauterpacht, see De Visscher. The world of Islam insists on a different rule: the rule based on the model of Muhammad when, in 628 A.D., he made a “hudna” lasting ten years with the Meccans, and within 18 months, once he felt his forces had been sufficiently strengthened, he found an excuse to break the treaty. He is hailed, in the literature of Islam, for his cunning, his ability to do what he famously told Muslims they must understand as their basic principle. “War,” Muhammad said, 
“is deception.” Many of his adherents today, in the Western lands, the lands known as the Bilad al-kufr, are devoutly following his prescription, and are past masters at it. It is the Infidels who need to catch up, and if they need not necessarily practice the same thing in their own treaty-making, at the very least they should understand how pointless, given that melancholy Muslim view, is all that “peace-processing” that provides jobs and a reason-for-being for assorted aaron-millers and dennis-rosses, who have managed the feat — oh, and what a feat — to be deeply immersed in all this stuff without apparently even once stoppiing to consider the relevance of the texts and tenets and teachings of Islam on Muslim minds, on the minds of the Arab and Muslim side that, they keep telling themselvges, will indeed honor a treaty if..if…if only the Israelis give, and give, and give, on the (as Aaron Miller likes to breathlessly put it) “fourcoreissues” which “everyoneknows” are “settlementsjerusalemrefugeessecurity” or possibly “securitysettlementssecurityrefugees” or…well, you get the idea.

Not a hint, in the brains of aaron-mimllers, of Islam and how it affects the Muslim view of the universe. Why, these people have always enjoyed school productions of “Hamlet” without the Prince. Why should they be any different in the hectic vacancy of their pointless professional lives, lives that give them meaning and a false importance, and if they were ever to own up, to admit at this point, to how silly it had all been, based as it all was on a complete misunderstanding of, or rather criminally negligent indifference to, Islam — my, what will others think of them, and their place in history? And isn’t that really what it is all about, for the dennis-rosses and the aaron-millers, and martin-indyks, and all those others who have behaved, when they laid down the law, or tried to, to various Israelis, as shuttle-diplomats, or even diplomats in the American Embassy, behaving like smug satraps (Indyk used to behave, I recall one Israeli columnist writing, like a “Viceroy”), and they are still at it, quite a few of them having found refuge, and a fat regular check, in various Washington Institues for Thisandthat whose donors, I am afraid, from mighty-morph-rangres tycoons to others, if they themselves bothered to find out more about Islam, would realize they are not getting their money’s worth, they are getting the very opposite of value, from those indyks, those millers, those rosses.

Posted by: Hugh  at June 24, 2008 10:19 AM