Some Hope For The Canary In Europe

This is not another "Canary-In-The-Coal-Mine" report about anti-Semitism in Europe. On the contrary, there is an element of hope in this report from Barcepundit. 10,000 Italians demonstrated in Rome in support of Israel. He links to this article by Michael Ledeen, which yields this:

That would be extraordinary enough, but they have done far more than that. They have lifted the taboo on the discussion of Islam itself, and of the way the Islamic world has dealt with Israel since it creation. You know the taboo has been shattered when Magdi Allam, the (Muslim) deputy editor of the Corriere della Sera, Italy's leading newspaper, writes a front-page editorial of the sort that was published earlier this week. Many Muslims, he began, are against the existence of Israel, and many others are afraid they will be called traitors if they approve of it. Allam asks, What will they have betrayed?

The Palestinian cause? But the Palestinians themselves recognized Israel's right to exist in Oslo in 1993. Islam? Which Islam? Bin Laden's, that mainly kills Muslims in addition to non-Muslims all over the world? That of the Muslim Brotherhood which has laid its hands on most Italian mosques, exploiting our democracy to propagate a fundamentalist and criminal ideology?

Allam, who has written an important book about the Muslims in Europe, knows that only a minority of them have "the intellectual lucidity and the human courage" to recognize Israel's right to exist. But he insists that they should, and that if they had done so at the beginning, the Palestinians would have had their state. He explodes the most cherished myth of the anti-Semites, the myth that Israel alone is guilty of the miserable state of the Palestinian people. Allam rightly holds the anti-Semites primarily responsible:

Precisely those who do not recognize Israel's right to exist have been opposed to the birth of an independent Palestinian state. Such as happened in 1948 when, in order to prevent the Jewish state from seeing the light of day, they only prevented the creation of the Palestinian state foreseen in 1947 by UN Resolution 181. And why did Jordan, instead of annexing Cisjordan in 1949 and Egypt, instead of governing the Gaza Strip in 1967, never agree to have a Palestinian state in those territories?

Once the taboo is broken, you can see the world plain, and recognize something that President Bush, to his historic credit, intuited several years ago when he was being stampeded toward a premature embrace of Arafat: If you don't embrace freedom whole, for everyone, you end up oppressing the very people you claim to be defending. Palestinian freedom depends on Israeli freedom, as Natan Sharansky has so eloquently reminded us. If there is no Palestinian state today, it is primarily the fault of groups like Fatah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad, and their Iranian terror masters, who delight in sacrificing the Palestinians in order to destroy Israel, just as the mullahs take great pleasure in sending Arabs to die in jihad against us. Allam lays it out with brutal precision: "There is a manifest connection between the recognition of Israel's right to exist and the acceptance of the value of one's own life and that of others. . . . today the true divide between civilization and barbarism is the recognition of Israel's right to exist."

The West, especially the cynical West European politicians, will deny this moral algorithm, but the terror masters know it is true. They know that the real menace of Israel is the threat of the spread of freedom — and thus their own doom. That is why they react with predictable venom to events like the Rome demonstration. The Iranian regime has targeted the demonstrators for the same obliteration it has so loudly proclaimed for Israel. The Fars Agency in Tehran, notoriously linked to President Ahmadi Nezhad, declared that "the Italians who participate in the demonstration against the Islamic republic are all Zionists," and called for a counterdemonstration in front of the Italian Embassy on the same day.

Here is a weird twist in the story. QuickRob, in a comment on Roger L. Simon, points us to this story about Michael Ledeen's involvement in planning the Iraq War. Italian trickery, Iraqi treachery, Iranian chicanery, and Neocon duplicity - what could be better? This is part one of a series. Read QuickRob's condensed version here.