West Bank As Security Buffer

Why Israel Can't Walk Away from the West Bank 

- Lt.-Col. Peter Lerner

Topography and geography play a key role in the strategic debate about peace with the Palestinians. The West Bank is a mountain ridge that Israel requires in order to safeguard its civilians. In the shadows of the West Bank's hills, between Haifa and Ashkelon, lies 70% of Israel's population and 80% of its industry. Anyone who controls that mountainous area controls everything beneath it. 

With Iranian leaders calling Israel a cancerous tumor and eyeing Jordan as its next playground, can any Israeli leadership relinquish security control over such a strategic asset?
    

The writer served for 25 years in the IDF as a spokesperson and liaison officer to international organizations in the West Bank and Gaza.

(Ha'aretz)
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Jihadists Are Neo-Barbary Pirates

Recalling Western-Muslim History - Raymond Ibrahim 

• From Islam's first contact with Western civilization and for more than a millennium thereafter, Muslims behaved not unlike the Islamic State and on the same conviction: that Islam commands war on - and the enslavement or slaughter of - non-Muslims.
• During this perennial jihad that began in the seventh century, almost 3/4 of Christendom's original territory was permanently swallowed up by Islam. European nations and territories were attacked and/or came under Muslim occupation (sometimes for centuries). An Islamic army of 200,000 martyrdom-seeking jihadis came as late as 1683 to conquer Vienna, but failed.
• Between the 15th and 18th centuries alone, approximately five million Europeans were abducted and enslaved in the name of jihad. Muslim slavers of the Barbary States of North Africa wreaked havoc all along the coasts of Europe; America's first war was against these Islamic slavers.
• In short, for well over a millennium - punctuated by a Crusader rebuttal - Islam posed an existential threat to Western civilization. Yet today, the predominant historic narrative is that Muslims are the historic victims of intolerant Western Christians.
• But all this is history, it might be argued. Why not let it be and move on, and begin a new chapter of mutual tolerance and respect?
• This would be a somewhat plausible position if not for the fact that, all around the globe, many Muslims are still exhibiting the same imperial impulse and intolerant supremacism of their forbears.
• In classrooms all across the Islamic world, Muslim children are taught to glorify the jihadi conquests of yore - while despising infidels.
  
  The writer, a former Arabic language specialist at the Library of Congress and editor and translator of The Al Qaeda Reader, is a fellow at the Middle East Forum.

(Jerusalem Post)
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Understanding Anti-Semitism

Scholar Dr. Ruth Wisse

The Many Faces of Jew-Hatred - Ruth Wisse

Instead of prompting a serious inquiry into the ideology that fuels the murder of Jews, the atrocity in Pittsburgh seems to be reinforcing a misconception that can only worsen the problem. Anti-Semitism is a politics of misdirected blame, and Americans must be sure to avoid its trap.
    

Anti-Semitism becomes truly dangerous to a society only when espoused by its leaders and politicians. But unlike in Germany, where the attacks on Jews were launched by the Fuhrer, our head of government ordered the full press of law enforcement to prosecute the sole gunman. Unlike in Germany, where the SS directed and fomented the attacks on Jews, here four policemen were shot trying to save the Jews. Moreover, the American people are united in horror at this atrocity.
    

That a single shooter wants to kill the Jews is less dangerous to this country than Louis Farrakhan's smiling designation of Jews as "termites," broadcast to a vast audience, or the vicious movement to boycott Israel - an extension of the Arab boycott launched in 1945. 

The writer, a senior fellow at the Tikvah Fund, is a former professor of Yiddish and comparative literature at Harvard. 

(Wall Street Journal)

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