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Israel Changes Its Role in Mideast Script

[Seattle Post-Intelligencer] Amotz Asa-El - Having just endured 4,000 rockets that smashed 6,000 of their homes, displaced 300,000 of their countrymen and sent another million of them into bomb shelters, Israelis are amused by the attempt to portray this frontal and unprovoked attack on innocent civilians and what came in its wake as all kinds of things except what it really was: an Islamist assault on freedom. A European-led effort to change the subject in the debate over Lebanon's future is well under way and Westerners who care for their own future had better resist it. What is immediately at stake in Lebanon is not the Islamist Revolution's desire to expunge Israel, which its leaders are leaving for later, but their designs on Lebanon, the Arab world's most Westernized enclave, which they judge as ripe for the picking. The conquest by Islamism of Beirut, once known as the Paris of the Middle East, would be the equivalent of the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453 and would inspire and embolden Islamists wherever they may be. Why are so many Europeans so reluctant to face up to the Islamist menace, which, frankly, threatens them even more than it threatens Israel? How can Spanish Prime Minister Zapatero not understand what an Iranian conquest of Beirut would do to European Islamists who say Muslims should wrest all former Muslim domains, which happen to include Spain? The answer is: They suffer from a denial syndrome. And so, when Islamism peeks through the horizon, they run home, lock the door, and scream, "I am not home." Back in the 1930s, most Europeans remained deaf to warnings that Hitler was after them, preferring to delude themselves he was "merely" after the Jews. When Europe understood, well after Kristallnacht, that the Jews were merely Fascism's warm-up act, it was too late. Today a very clever Islamism is also telling Europe it merely wants the Jews, and, unfortunately, many Europeans still respond with the same moral understanding and political appeasement that only a few decades ago set their continent ablaze. But the Jews - that stiff-necked lot - are no longer prepared to play their part in the script: They fight.
2006-08-30 01:00:00
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