Crunchy Con

Educating tomorrow's leaders

Thursday February 8, 2007

A few years ago, I was on a bus in Israel, and struck up a conversation with an American Jew who had moved to Israel to teach in an exchange program at a Palestinian school. It was a post-Oslo program...
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Comments
Bubba
February 9, 2007 12:35 AM
http://concrunchy.blogspot.com/

I wonder what you propose we do to stop the spread of jihadist indoctrination: you think "Wilsonianism" is bad, we get that. What then do you support? Derb suggests that one of the few options available is the, um, "g-word." Do you support that? Or should we just try to contain jihad economically, politically, culturally, and demographically? Shall we deport the imams back to where they came from? "Generational war," "muscular foreign policy," we understand you want these things, but, gosh, you remain quite vague.

Dan
February 9, 2007 1:44 AM
www.themechanicaleye.com

"Generational war," "muscular foreign policy," we understand you want these things, but, gosh, you remain quite vague. I think the solution lies in respecting civilizational borders - prevent radical Islamic expansionism while curtailing our own direct intervention in Islamic countries. This would mean deporting radical imams while following a general policy of containment along the borders of Islam (see Samuel Huntington s zones of conflict on the borders of Islamic civilization.
This means a war of ideas, one we haven t been very good at waging. Our muscularity must be a diplomatic one, one truly for the hearts and minds of potential jihadists.
This, combined with the wars of containment like in Somalia (where U.S. intervention was in the form of assisting a local power with a local threat) will work a lot better than the current disaster of a foreign policy we have.

Eutychus
February 9, 2007 2:19 AM
HASH(0x940ca68)

To date...not ONE of the sons of the Jihadist's or Immam's TEACHING all the little kids to blow themselves up for Allah,, have done so.
No Imam has either. They send their kids to Los Angeles for college, while they teach the poor slobs stuck at home to fight Jihad for Allah. Pure exploitation of poorly educated fools, sending them off to die for THEIR cause, that empowers THEM, and keeps the poor masses in subjegation. Satan himself couldn't have created a better religion...or maybe he has?

Bubba
February 9, 2007 2:21 AM
http://concrunchy.blogspot.com/

The biggest problem I have with idea of containment, Dan, is that I'm not sure that time is on our side -- that containment over X number of years would be helpful, demographically or technologically: after all, Europe's non-Muslim birthrates are falling, and Iran is getting ever closer to having nuclear weapons. The only way I'd see containment working is a near absolute quarantine, deporting at least Arab Muslims to Arab countries, and a full embargo on their oil, whether that means relying on other sources of oil (including drilling in ANWR) or doing without until we can develop alternative energy sources. The problem is, I don't think we have the cultural stomach for deportation (if we did, we wouldn't be having this problem, at least to this degree) and countries like China have no problem buying Arab oil at any rate. There are problems with actively working for regime change and the democratization of the Middle East, I'll admit. I'm not sure that this country has the patience for that process -- at least politically. When Rod refers to one of the lowest historical casualty rates of any military endeavor as a "meat grinder," it's hard to believe that enough of us truly understand that this war will not only be lengthy but also costly. But I appreciate your having the courage to stand behind a somewhat concrete position: would that Rod do the same.

Joey
February 9, 2007 2:28 AM
HASH(0x9411ac8)

A note on context: Part of Muslim eschatology involves Jesus (regarded as a prophet) returning to earth to kill all pigs. Hmm. Also, www.teachkidspeace.org/ has an online petition for stopping this kind of teaching in Palestinian schools, though I don't know enough to say how effective they are. God bless.

Kiril Lakota
February 9, 2007 5:10 AM
HASH(0x9413718)

But I appreciate your having the courage to stand behind a somewhat concrete position: would that Rod do the same.
Amen to that Bubba!

PG
February 9, 2007 2:05 PM
HASH(0x9416ac8)

The Crunchy Con (CC) laments what he sees as the big problem of Palestinian textbooks reflecting their reality instead of his. If that is a problem then consider the one caused by the educational field trip Israel has imposed on the Pals for the last four decades by holding them captives in or exiled abroad from the land of their births. Predictably, CC sees Pals as the victims of their terrorist selves with the real victims being the long suffering Israeli ethnic cleansers who are forced to hold the Pals in S. African style apartheid. This is the typical world-class cynical hypocrisy of willing enablers. CC's sympathies for the Pals would not pass the laugh test of creditability except among the usual necon, ditto head, Zionist and Christian Zionist suspects.
While CC points to his red herring list of textbooks provided by other serial enablers for the continued injustice that Israel alone is responsible, the honorable President Carter has displayed the moral right stuff. He courageously pinned the apartheid tail on Israel's rotten to the core scheme of apartheid in the world s oldest and largest concentration camps since WWII. Seems the CC is perfectly content with Israel following the same path as the good but silent Germans before them who enabled their infamous leader's pursuit of manifest destiny dreams over lands they occupied for lebenstraum. That is a really ugly comparison indeed but isn't that really what the ongoing Israeli state sponsored settlement activity in the occupied territories and the defacto apartheid scheme to protect the settlements is really all about?
Education is the big problem? The CC has his own education problem that has the distinctive ring of pavlovian pro Israel anti Pal/Muslim agitprop.

watsy
February 9, 2007 3:51 PM
HASH(0x941a820)

Just a few comments. Taken from the article on the study: owever, a U.S. academic who specializes in Iran and Islam, and a former Iranian teacher said they believe the textbooks are a reflection of Iran's history and its deep suspicions of the West, not an effort to turn students into terrorists. and
Shireen T. Hunter, a specialist on Islam and Iran at the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University in Washington, said it was a mistake to portray Iranian textbooks as manuals for creating terrorists. "In some ways, they simply reflect the deep distrust of Third World countries about the policies and motivations of the great powers, which they see as neocolonialist," she said. "When such textbooks promote martyrdom they are referring to the sacrifices needed to defend Iran against foreign enemies as Iraq during the Iraq-Iran war." and n Tehran, Mostafa Mirzaian, an Iranian freelance political researcher who worked as a high school teacher in Iran in the 1980s, agreed. "It is natural that a government, formed after an anti-West revolution and an eight-year war with Iraq, inserts such items in school textbooks," he said. History is always written from the perspective of the person writing the tale. The USA, Iraq, and Israel are not the good guys in Iranian history. And we expect the text books to say differently? I would like to compare teachings of WWII from texts taught in American schools with those taught in Japanese schools. We don't view reality in the same way as most in the Muslim world. We aren't the good guys. Israel isn't the good guy. I would be surprised if the texts described us as benevolent and kindly people considering that we've opposed them in just about every major conflict.
PG, I can see that you have strong feelings towards the Palestinians and against Israel. I haven't read Jimmy Carter's book, but I doubt that he compared the occupied territories to a concentration camp. Before you answer, remember that the Jews in Germany didn't have, nor did they ever use, guns or explosives against the Germans. They went to their deaths naked and with nothing. They could plead for their lives, and despite never harming the Germans in any way, they were killed without mercy. Is that really how you see things in the territories occupied by Israel?

St_Irenaeus
February 9, 2007 7:10 PM
pomoconservative.blogspot.com

Fortress Europe, Fortress America. Birthrates in some places of Europe, by the way, are rebounding (France, of all places -- didn't Rod do a post on that?), and governments are encouraging women to have more babies -- time off, etc. Regardless of the discomfort I feel at socialist governments determining population levels through fiscal policy, people in Europe are seeing it as an issue. I don't think we should remove all Turks from Germany, for instance, but I do think western countries should indeed deport any non-citizen who advocates or supports jihad, violence, etc.
For instance, I saw one of the Danish Cartoon protestors in Britain carrying a sign that said "To Hell with Freedom of Expression." OK, since he doesn't see the irony, we'll follow through on that and kick his bloddy arse out.

Marc
February 9, 2007 9:12 PM
HASH(0x9417ce8)

Watsy, I'm sure PG has a final solution for the Jewish problem in the Middle East.

PG
February 11, 2007 3:39 PM
HASH(0x941e424)

Watsy, Marc Watsy, I appreciate your comments. I was reacting to the blame the victim mentality so popular with Israel s so called friends. Waving the old bloody flag of savagery by native peoples is lame. The history of terrorism is that it is usually a reaction by the oppressed while under the heel of their oppressors. It seems to stop when the oppression ends. America has been down this sorry road before with Native Americans and we should know better that be a party to someone else s latter day injustice to other native peoples.
Ranking the relative merits of old and new injustices seems pointless. All are worthy of condemnation. European Jews suffered a grave injustice that was resolved by the defeat of Germany and the Nuremberg trials. How it happened is a cautionary tale about ignoring injustice. Nazi agitprop conditioned Germans to deny the humanity of Jews and then their lives. Marc, you seem very will conditioned to abandon the Pals as easily as the Germans abandoned Jews. That said I fail to see the relevance of the injustice the Jews suffered in Europe and the Israel holding Pals in the dehumanizing captivity of apartheid. Surely you are not suggesting that because the Holocaust happened, Israel is entitled to be above criticism for their everyday Pal human rights abuses, like collective punishment tactics, bull dozing homes of occupation resistor s relatives, check point deadly force summary injustice, torture tactics etc. Making that argument as an excuse or some sort of mitigating circumstance in the current Israeli Palestinian context would seen to dishonor the universal lesson of the Holocaust which is to not tolerate human rights injustice.
The ultimate power to resolve this particular historic injustice is in the hands Israelis and not the Pals. Israelis will have to satisfy the Pal s sense of justice or the matter will not be settled. The Israeli s say they want peace and security as they try in vain to build walls high enough to protect themselves from the revenge their actions provke. The great Israeli hope must be the Pals will finally tire of being brutalized and humiliated, give up a go quietly to their apartheid reservations surrounded by strategically located Israeli settler surveillance forts. How actual Israeli deeds square with their alleged desire for peace and security is another one of those mysteries of faith held dear by apologists for Israel.
The real irony for Americans is that our craven political leaders actually campaign boasting of their servile fidelity to supporting and funding Israel s morally reprehensible ethnocentric apartheid policies. Such thoroughly un-American policies as Israel practices would not be tolerated in the US for a nanosecond without a tsunami of political and moral outrage. The big payoff for giving Israel an American blank check and a rubber stamp has been to make ourselves their full partners as objects of a world wide pandemic of hatred, in particular among the third that are Muslim. We have not only jeopardized our much larger security interests abroad but we have put own homeland at risk and for what? Israel has never been neither more insecure nor a greater parahia state and more unwilling to resolve the injustice that is at the very core of ME instability. My problem with Israel is they keep electing leaders like iron fisted serial war criminal Sharon and his bungling wannabe, Olmert, grand architect of the highly disrespected Lebanon collective punishment campaign to destroy Lebanon s vital civilian infrastructure. Both men have squandered whatever little was left of the good will Israel once had with the rest of the world. Israelis have only themselves to blame for reelecting men fully committed to the apartheid settlement scheme in the same old historical pattern of slow motion ethnic cleansing behavior.
No better friend of Israel than President Carter yet his honesty has elicited smears and character assassination attempts to silence him. Want to be a better friend of Israel? Insist our elected leaders hold Israel s elected leaders to a much higher standard of morality and commitment to make peace or else. Good people need to stop making excuses for the inexcusable and address the gross injustice before their eyes.
PG

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About Crunchy Con

Rod Dreher is an editorial columnist for the Dallas Morning News, and author of "Crunchy Cons" (Crown Forum), a nonfiction book about conservatives, most of them religious, whose faith and political convictions sometimes put them at odds with mainstream conservatives. The views expressed in this blog are his own.

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