The Thomas Chronicles

Here’s something to ponder when we think about the vitriolic hatred Arabs have toward Israelis.

One might say that our current troubles in the Mideast could be traced to a single, seemingly insignificant event in history. Thousands of years ago, before nation-states existed and the wars fought between humans were fought with rocks and pointy sticks, there lived a righteous man called Abraham to whom God chose to make His Covenant. Abraham had a wife, named Sarah, and he had two sons: Ishmael and Issac.

The problem was that Ishmael was not Sarah’s son. He was actually the son of Sarah’s Egyptian handmaiden, Hagar.

Without getting into the details of this tragic story, Sarah eventually drove Hagar and Ishmael from Abraham’s tent and into the wilderness. Little did she know that Ishmael would be the father of all the Arab nations, and the bane of the Jews to this day. In fact, when you ask Arab Muslims why they are anti-Semitic, they would protest the question.

They would say they are Semitic. They share the same father as all the nations of Israel… Abraham.

And so, the ripple effects that one act of injustice thousands of years ago continue on today. Of course, I’m not saying that the Arab Muslims are justified in their actions. Not in the least. I just find it ironic, in a dark sort of way, that the conflict between two half-brothers and their descendants might cause the eruption of the world thousands of years after the actual injury .

Somehow I don’t think telling the Arab Muslims to get over it will help. I don’t think telling them they’re mad to hold such a vehement grudge for thousands of years will help either.

I don’t think there is much we can do to abate their hatred. I think the string is just going to play itself out, but there is no moral equivalence. As far as I’m concerned, Israel has been extremely benign to their neighbors, despite their neighbors fictitious propaganda about Israeli atrocities and their incessant attacks upon Israel.

(Let’s get rid of one fiction now. After the 1967 war, they invited all the displaced Palestinians back to their homes. When they refused to return, the Israeli government paid for every piece of land they “conquered” by depositing the market-value sum into individual Palestinian bank accounts. Isn’t ironic that the most affluent, educated Arab Muslims are the Palestinians that did return to their homes and are still living peacefully in Israel?)

I don’t think Israel has infinite patience for the seemingly infinite temper tantrums of their neighbors. We all know what we would do if such attacks showered on us for the better part of forty years…

In a European poll, 44% believe that Jews have too much say in international markets. 58% of the Polish people believe that it’s “probably true” that “Jews still talk too much about what happened to them in the Holocaust”. The poll was done in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Poland, and overall, those countries averaged at 47% in agreement to that last question that Jews talked too much about the Holocaust…

Even as Anti-Semitism is rising worldwide to unprecedented levels, a shadow of war looms over the embattled state of Israel. Aside from the near-daily rocket fire they absorb from the Palestinian Gaza Strip, Syria is also reported to be conducting a quiet arms build up. According to the chief of the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, for the moment Syria’s military is in a defensive posture.

This, however, doesn’t inspire me to warm fuzzy feelings. The fact is these countries are close enough to smell each other’s bad breath in the morning. They’ve only to roll over and look at each other. The further fact that Syria is cavorting with hardened terrorists should give both Israel and us pause. We should trust them just about as far as we can sling a piano— without the use of hydraulics and a crane, of course.

And I’m pretty sure Speaker Pelosi’s shenanigans with Syria didn’t help matters much. The fact that a member of the US House of Representative behaved like a direct Presidential legate to a foreign power without the authority a Presidential legate can only be described as muddling the waters at best. Treasonous at worse.

I do note, however, the sequence of events following Pelosi’s visit. She visits Syria’s Assad. She comes home and rams through the bill calling for the withdrawal of American troops despite Bush’s assured veto. Iran declares that there will be no peace with the United States unless we repent of our “Satanic” ways. (This, of course, echoes al Qaeda’s terms for peace, which is to either kill all our Jews or to hand over all our Jews to them for them to kill.)

The Iraqi government goes on recess in the middle of our troop surge and leaves their entire agenda dangling. (Who wants to stick around? Aren’t we handing them over to terrorists like we handed the Kurds over to Saddam?)

Our domestic Muslims demand ceremonial foot basins at airports. They can’t use the same ones as the infidels apparently. Our domestic Muslims are also demanding separate schools, separate restrooms, separate everything… like they already received from Europe. They wouldn’t have dared to issue demands for fear of our reaction just a few months ago, and now they are doing it wholesale. Islamophobia, indeed. Then, there’s that attack on Fort Dix…

All this followed within just a MONTH of Pelosi’s trip to the Mideast and our increasing calls for retreat… draw from these events what you will. Her statement when she was in Syria, that “The road to Damascus is a road to peace,” is becoming more ridiculous by the day.

Then, there is Israel’s problem with Syria…

Here is what Mossad chief Meir Dagan said:

“Anyone who thinks that our talking with Syria would sever them from Hezbollah is mistaken,” Mossad chief Meir Dagan told a closed forum last week. However, he added, “I do believe Syrian President Bashar Assad could agree to expel Hamas and Islamic Jihad from Damascus and stop supporting them.”

Nevertheless, Dagan issued a clear warning about the dangers of talks with Syria: “If we enter negotiations with Assad and they fail, the danger of war will be greater than if there were no negotiations at all,” he said.

In the discussion, Dagan laid out his views on the Syrian issue in detail. Yet sources who were present at the meeting said that his bottom-line position remained unclear, and at times, he even contradicted himself. This may have been related to his belief, as he put it, that “the decision on whether to resume negotiations with Syria should not be the business of the intelligence agencies.”

“I’m not a politician,” he said. “I’m an intelligence person, and it’s not my job to say whether we need to negotiate with Syria; that is the job and the decision of the prime minister and the government. My job is to present assessments and risks.”

Nevertheless, these sources said, their general impression was that Dagan, one of the most dominant figures in the security establishment, believes that talks with Syria would do more harm than good.