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All Along the Watchtower

~ A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you … John 13:34

All Along the Watchtower

Tag Archives: Israel

Israel, America, and Europe

20 Wednesday Aug 2014

Posted by Neo in Church/State, Commentaries, Politics

≈ 2 Comments

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Ahmed Jabari, Anti-Zionism, Antisemitism, École Normale Supérieure, Europe, Israel, Jews, University of Cambridge

iStock 20492165 MD - American and Israeli flagsLike many Americans, I am an unabashed and vocal supporter of Israel.

Also like many Americans, I tend to equate support for the Palestinians with not only anti-Zionism but also with Anti Semitism. Is this fair? I doubt it but, it’s the common feeling in America.

The friendship here for Israel, is very much like the friendship for Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. We know we have a lot of allies, who will be with us, when it is in their interest. We feel much the same about them, we will support them in cases where we have given our word.

But those five countries above, they are more than allies, they are our friends, our buddies, that we will willingly run into a burning building for, and we suspect (with cause) that they will for us as well.

Whatever faults Blair had as Prime Minister, we pretty much fell in love with him after 9-11, with his steadfast support. There are those, and I’m occasionally one of them that refer to him as Uncle Tony.

We feel that way about Israel as well. We take pride in their successes and grieve in their losses. Note that this isn’t always, or even usually, a government to government thing, any more than it is with Britain, it’s a deep and abiding liking, and love for the people.

When the terrorists refer to Israel as ‘Little Satan’, we over here in ‘Great Satan’ take pride in it. That’s just how we see it. We know our friends, like us, make mistakes, and hope they don’t make many, but hey, they’re our buds, you know, we take care of each other.

And that’s one of the reasons, you get such a reaction from us when you have anti-Israel or pro Palestinian demonstrations, and especially when they take on an anti-Semitic tone.

But we judge through American eyes, and so maybe we’re unfair, because Europe is quite unlike us. Jonathon Bronitsky recently wrote in The Daily Caller about this. It’s a good article that you should read.

There are certainly people in Europe, particularly within the continent’s Muslim communities, who despise Jews and wish them harm, and they frequently display their noxious beliefs while pounding the pavement. But the intellectual and motivating facet of the pro-Palestinian, anti-Zionist, and BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movements, at least as I witnessed it firsthand, was predominantly white, left-wing, and educated. The majority of Europeans who disparage Israel do so, not because they dislike Jews, but because Israel embodies and exudes principles they unequivocally reject as “enlightened” social-democratic multiculturalists: spirituality, individualism, and patriotism. If the character of Israel was not insulting enough, Europeans have becoming gradually aware that the European Union, their ambitious attempt to transcend the aforementioned principles, has resulted in their continent’s demise whereas the Jewish state’s embrace of them has yielded prosperity.

Elites, by virtue of their elevated positions, chiefly shape the conversation about Israel, in addition to other lofty matters, in Europe. By “elites,” I am referring to the self-proclaimed highbrows who have slogged away at, or will go on to slog away at, institutions like Chatham House, the United Nations, the BBC, and the European Parliament and have blathered at, or will go on to blather at, universities like Oxford, Cambridge, Erasmus, and École Normale Supérieure. As a postgraduate at the University of Cambridge, I had the opportunity to interact with — or, rather, was unable to escape from — throngs of them. Very few, if any of these elites, that is except for the occasional self-hating Jewish professor or student, were anti-Semitic. That being said, I was in England in 2012 during Operation “Pillar of Defense,” which involved the killing of Ahmed Jabari, chief of Hamas’ military wing, whenever the conversation turned to the Middle East, a torrent of vitriol was unleashed against Israeli society.

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2014/08/19/europes-projection-problem/#ixzz3AwTaZjD6

And here’s the rub with that, those characteristics that the European elites so detest in Israel, are exactly the ones that we most admire, and not only in Israelis, they are also our core values. Which is why you’ve seen America bifurcate in the last half-dozen years. Your elites love Obama because he is one of them. Many of us detest him because of the same thing.

You see we, as Americans, rejected European elites long ago, that’s one of the main reasons that our ancestors came to America. After their horrible experience seventy years ago, so did Israel. We really are sisters, and we are the European elites worst nightmare. A pair of countries that are successful simply because we rejected them.

And yes, there is a warning to Britain in this. If you continue to follow your elites and drift more and more into Europe’s sway, inevitably you will begin to lose the friendship of the American people. We’ve been friends and allies now for an entire century, and we cooperated long before that but, we do not deviate from our core values, they are more important to who we are, than any friend is.

And so, at some point, you will have to choose between life with America and Israel, and death with Europe. It’s your choice.

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The Advance of ISIS

05 Tuesday Aug 2014

Posted by chalcedon451 in Islam, Persecution, Politics

≈ 30 Comments

Tags

controversy, Iraqi Christians, Israel, Middle East

ISIS imageRecovering from a bout of pneumonia in North Africa in 1943, Churchill mused aloud to Harold Macmillan, who was Minister Resident with Eisenhower’s HQ in Algiers, that he was not sure that history would judge him well. This was an echo of a comment he had made a little earlier at Tehran where he had said history would judge him kindly – because he would write it. Startled, Macmillan asked him why he thought that. In typical fashion, Churchill’s mind went back to English history, and he pointed out that Cromwell had been so obsessed with fighting England’s old enemy, Spain, that he had missed the rise of the new one, the France of Louis XIV; he wondered whether men would say that he had been so obsessed with Germany that he had missed the rise of Soviet Russia? There’s a case to be made for that, but Churchill at least tried to make up for any error. Our current generation of politicians have been so obsessed with winding down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and obtaining the ‘peace dividend’ that they have missed the dangers that those wars helped make far more serious. Not even in his wildest dreams could Osama bin Laden have imagined that the evil acts he planned for 9/11 would end by radicalising so much of the Muslim world in an arc from Algeria through to Afghanistan and beyond. The news that ISIS forces have now captured territory in the Lebanon, and that they have made gains in Kurdistan ought to be causing more concern in Whitehall and Washington than appears to be the case. It may be that the influx of help from the Syrian Kurds can help stabilise the situation, but if not, then we may see in Kurdistan on a larger scale what we have seen in Mosul.

Whether we like it or not, the only effective armed forces in the region who are capable of dealing with ISIS are controlled by the Butcher of Aleppo, Bashar al Assad. Quite at what point the West is going to say of him as Churchill did of Stalin, that if Hitler invaded hell, I should at least make a friendly reference in the House to the devil, in not at all clear. Churchill saw the need for a pretty ruthless Realpolitik. Few had been more critical of Soviet Russia than he had, but he knew that needs must when the devil drives. Our leaders appear to imagine they have the luxury of a variety of options; they also have elections coming up, and they have been busy reducing the size and cost of the armed forces; they also have public opinions thoroughly war-weary and distrustful of any ‘crying wolf’ over anywhere east of Suez. ISIS is troubled by none of these things and, at the moment, is on a roll. That will continue until it meets with a check. Only then will we get some idea of how stable this organisation is; at the moment it is unclear where the check will come from.

We have a generation and more of politicians and advisers shaped by either the Cold War or its aftermath. They are not used to thinking of the world in terms of religious affiliation, and tend to regard ‘faith’ as either a private matter or an irrelevance. The first step they could take is to begin to remedy this situation. Beyond that, the options are stark. We have ruled out working with Putin and Assad, and we don’t want to work with Iran either; but we are best friends with the Saudis, who are, shall we say, no opponents of the sort of Wahhabite Islam preferred by ISIS. In the meantime the Kurdish forces are finding it difficult to cope, and we are doing precisely what to help? Any policy towards Israel needs to bear these things in mind. We are not dealing with Nasser and the old Arab league here. If the Kurds are defeated by ISIS then our options are few, and none particularly attractive.

This morning Baroness Warsi resigned over the Government’s policy on Gaza; some were amazed there was one; there appears to be none on Mosul.

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