MARIAM’S WAY

What a denouement. How absolutely delicious to Mideast theater watchers to see the third act in their lifetime. The show may play in repeats, but for now much of the plot is known. Hamas has won the Palestinian hearts and minds, and for the second time in this century a political party has come to power swearing good riddance and destruction to the Jews. Not since Mein Kampf has a Jew-elimination program been so clearly spelled out by an elected party (remember, Hitler was freely elected in 1932). Netanyahu nailed this one perfectly when he looked at his neighbors and saw the Nazis’ swastika replaced with the green flag. The Hamas party platform—which borrows, according to those that have read it, from every known anti-Semitic theory—has been adopted. Mariam Farhat, who has had three Hamas party “military wing” suicide-bombing sons sent on their missions, is a Palestinian national hero and newly elected representative. Meanwhile, the Europeans have been chased out of and kidnapped in Gaza and Ramallah over a cartoon. Amidst riots from Cairo to Peshawar Jimmy Carter calls on the west not to push the Palestinians towards “irrationality.”

The real clash here is beyond that of civilizations but is that of sanity. Or, if you have read The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes, a fight between two parts of the brain. One is rooted in the ancient belief-experiential past and the other in the rational fact-absorbing present. Every day, Moslems lose their lives in barbaric, brutal, horrific attacks, often while in a mosque or at an Islamic funeral or wedding. Women, children, and the elderly are scorchingly burned by exploding oil trucks. Men and women wear bombs with imbedded shrapnel, designed for maximum pain, to be used against complete innocents… and the imams are silent. Silence also envelops the madrassa students, and the Al Jazeera reporters and commentators are matter-of-fact. Somehow all this in the name of Allah (semtex be upon him) seems normal, another day on the Tigris or in Islamabad. But that cartoon of Mohammed, that’s worse than a hundred pregnant mothers blown to bits looking for some fruit or a hundred fathers butchered while at a funeral.

Speaking of butchers, Al Zarqawi’s recorded remarks calling Bush a butcher for his semi-botched drone missile attack in the Pakistani territories, which killed innocents, were confusing. Was Zarqawi praising Bush or condemning him. For a man who has explored the lexicon of horrific language and utilized the Web to show sawed-off heads in order to warn and threaten his enemies, “butcher” is a sort of praise. It describes one who understands what it takes to do the job. Think about this for a moment: the Bush doctrine now states that if we want to kill you, if you are important enough to us, we will use lethal drones to do so. Anywhere, anytime; if there is collateral damage, as there will always be, frankly, we don’t care. This is beyond global policeman, it’s global sniper, a new and potentially very significant recognition of what it will take to prevent the fundamentalist Moslem enemy from harming us.

Back to Hamas, why is Mariam Farhat alive? If she were the mother of sons who encouraged and promoted attacks against the Egyptians, Syrians, Saudis, Yemenis, Iranians… fill in the names of dozens of other Arab and Moslem countries, she would have been jailed, tortured, and killed long ago. Her body disfigured and dishonored, her remaining sons killed by the state, her house destroyed and, depending on the country, most of her blood relatives would have disappeared. The message sent: do this and we will extirpate your blood lines; your family and near clan will cease to exist. Only in Israel is she able to walk the streets, continue to call for murder, and now win an election. This is perhaps the clearest example of what can only be called “dying for democracy.” When the next nail-studded bomb kills a dozen Israelis at a falafal stand, is she going to be the “get” interview to praise the murder and wish that she had more sons to do the same? What is the policy flaw that prevents a country from protecting itself from murderers like her?

Or is it just a matter of time? Now that the battle lines are clear and the enemy elected, will there be a conclusive battle for Gaza and the West Bank? Clearly the Egyptians think so; that’s why Schulman met with Hamas last week and basically told them to behave. The Egyptians and the Jordanians know, exactly as was predicted in the “to live or die” blog, that the Israelis are done with the cat-and-mouse, rope-a-dope game of Arafat, Al Aksa, and Hamas. There has not as of this posting been a single suicide bomber since the Hamas election. Why? Because they are not ready for the response; they are not yet well fortified against the onslaught headed their way.

Hopefully, however, in the mind of every Dutch, every French, every Spaniard, and every single other European and American there will be silent support and even encouragement for the Israeli counteract. Jyllands-Posten has courageously unmasked the psychotic hypocrisy of Islamic fundamentalism. Imams at mosques throughout the world, even in the heart of London, are praying, preaching, encouraging death, destruction, and jihad against the west, as a duty to God, but a cartoon calling them on it is blasphemous, an insult, and grounds for boycotts and death threats. Even the faint-hearted peace-loving Europeans have had their eyes opened to the ugly illogical degenerate nature of the Moslem fanatics abroad and at home. The ball is in their court to show they are members of a world community. Few people or nations like to be played with, few humans like to be tortured by contradictions and irrationality. When we see the Moslem world recoil in horror at yesterday’s sixteen civilian shoppers blown to bits in Baghdad with the same venom reserved for a cartoon, then we will know they are of the same family of man. Until then, unfortunately, western self-defense will emerge, and a lot of it, in the Le Pen style, will not be pretty.

Perhaps Jacques Lefranc, the fired editor of France Soir, will be offered a job reporting for the Jerusalem Post. Since the Hamas election, the battle lines just got a lot clearer; the blinders are coming off. Mariam’s remaining sons may meet their fate, but not the way she dreamed it.