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Zionism's Bleak Present ->by Daniel Pipes, Jerusalem Post,
October 11, 2007
"We are all Keynsians now," Richard Nixon famously asserted just as
the economic theories of John Maynard Keynes fell into disrepute.
Likewise, one could have said with similar confidence in 1989, as
Israel's existence reached wide acceptance, "We are all Zionists
now." No longer.
Count the ways Israel is under siege: from Iranians building a
nuclear bomb, Syrians stockpiling chemical weapons, Egyptians and
Saudis developing serious conventional forces, Hizbullah attacking
from Lebanon, Fatah from the West Bank, Hamas from Gaza, and
Israel's Muslim citizens becoming politically restive and more
violent.
World-wide, professors, editorialists, and foreign ministry
bureaucrats challenge the continued existence of a Jewish state.
Even friendly governments, notably the Bush administration, pursue
diplomatic initiatives that undermine Israeli deterrence even as
their arms sales erode its security.
Let's suppose, however, that the country muddles through these many
problems. That leaves it face to face with its ultimate challenge: a
Jewish population increasingly disenchanted with, even embarrassed
by, the country's founding ideology, Zionism, the Jewish national
movement.
As developed by Theodor Herzl (1860-1904) and other theoreticians,
Zionism's call for a sovereign Jewish state fit the political
context and mood of its time. If Chinese, Arabs, and Irish sought to
establish a national state, why not Jews?..."
How the West Could Lose -> by
Daniel Pipes, New York Sun, December 26, 2006
After defeating fascists and communists, can the West now
defeat the Islamists?
On the face of it, its military preponderance makes victory seem
inevitable. Even if Tehran acquires a nuclear weapon, Islamists
have nothing like the military machine the Axis deployed in
World War II, nor the Soviet Union during the cold war. What do
the Islamists have to compare with the Wehrmacht or the Red
Army? The SS or Spetznaz? The Gestapo or the KGB? Or, for that
matter, to Auschwitz or the gulag?
Yet, more than a few analysts, including myself, worry that it's
not so simple. Islamists (defined as persons who demand to live
by the sacred law of Islam, the Sharia) might in fact do better
than the earlier totalitarians. They could even win. That's
because, however strong the Western hardware, its software
contains some potentially fatal bugs. Three of them – pacifism,
self-hatred, complacency – deserve attention.
Muslim Countries Need Civil Society Before Elections
-> Daniel Pipes (FrontPage Magazine)
- Rather than passively accept decades of totalitarian
rule, Washington should actively help Muslim countries
navigate from autocracy to democracy without passing through
an Islamist phase. This is achievable.
- As I wrote a decade ago in response to the Algerian
crisis, instead of focusing on quick elections, which almost
always benefit the Islamists, the U.S. government should
shift its efforts to slower and deeper goals: "political
participation, the rule of law (including an independent
judiciary), freedom of speech and religion, property rights,
minority rights, and the right to form voluntary
organizations (especially political parties)."
- Elections should only follow on the achievement of these
steps. Realistically, they could well take decades to
achieve.
- Elections should culminate the democratic process, not
start it. They ought to celebrate civil society successfully
achieved. Once such a civil society exists (as it does in
Iran but not in Algeria), voters are unlikely to vote
Islamists into power.
What Can Go Wrong - Daniel
Pipes (Jerusalem Post), March 8, 2005
- While I too welcome recent developments in the region,
having been trained in Middle Eastern history makes me
perhaps more aware of what can go wrong.
- Yes, Mahmoud Abbas wishes to end the armed struggle
against Israel, but his call for a greater jihad
against the "Zionist enemy" points to his intending another
form of war to destroy Israel.
- The Iraqi elections are bringing Ibrahim Jaafari, a
pro-Iranian Islamist, to power. Likewise, the Saudi
elections proved a boon for the Islamist candidates.
- Mubarak's promise is purely cosmetic; but should real
presidential elections one day come to Egypt, Islamists will
probably prevail there too.
- Removing Syrian control in Lebanon could well lead to
Hizballah, a terrorist group, becoming the dominant power
there. Eliminating the hideous Assad dynasty could well
bring in its wake an Islamist government in Damascus.
- Note a pattern? Other than the Palestinian case, one
main danger is that a too-quick removal of tyranny unleashes
Islamist ideologues and opens their way to power.
by Daniel Pipes
New York Sun
February 15, 2005
Anti-Semitism may seem to be a static, unchanging phenomenon but
in fact the obsessive hatred of Jews has a history that goes back
millennia and continues to evolve.
Developments since World War II and the Holocaust have been
especially fast-paced and portentous. Here are four of the most
significant shifts:
- From right to left: For centuries, anti-Semitism was
the hallmark of the right and merely episodic on the left. To
take the ultimate examples of these trends, Stalin's Judeophobia
was peripheral to his monstrous project, but Hitler's was
central to his. Even a decade ago, this pattern still basically
held true. But recent years have witnessed a rapid and global
realignment, with the mainstream right increasingly sympathetic
to Jews and Israel and its leftist counterparts cooler and more
hostile.
- From Christian to Muslim: Christians developed the
abiding tropes of anti-Semitism, (such as greediness and
ambitions to world domination), and historically Christians
killed most Jews. Therefore, Jews regularly fled Christendom for
Islamdom. In 1945, this pattern abruptly changed. Christians
came to terms with Jews, while Muslims adopted both the old
Christian themes and murderousness. Today institutional
anti-Semitism is overwhelmingly a Muslim affair. One result has
been a steady reverse exodus, with Jews now fleeing Islamdom for
Christendom.
- From religious to secular: What began as a rejection
of the Jewish religion evolved over the centuries into a bias
against the supposed Jewish race, (thus, our continued use of
the nonsensical term anti-Semitism) and lately has
evolved into anti-Zionism, or hatred of the Jewish state. An
astonishing 2003 poll in which
Europeans found Israel to be the leading threat to world peace
indicates the depth of this new sentiment.
- The conflation of anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism:
Jews and Americans, Israel and the United States – they have
merged in the
minds of many around the world, so that one prejudice
routinely implies the other one too. The two hatreds also share
a basic feature: neither is susceptible to rational argument, so
each is better understood as the symptom of a psychological
disorder than of some arcane political logic.
Combining these developments prompts several reflections on the
parlous future of three major Jewish communities.
Israel faces
the most extreme danger, surrounded as it is by enemies who in
the past generation have dehumanized Jews in ways reminiscent of
Nazi Germany in the 1930s. In both cases, governments have engaged
in a systematic campaign to transform the Jewish next-door neighbor
into a beast-like threat that can only be controlled through his
destruction. In Nazi Germany, this outlook culminated in the death
camps; today, it could, and I stress could - I am not
predicting it will - end up in a hail of nuclear bombs descending on
Israel, a prospect that
one powerful Iranian leader has publicly mused on. This in turn
could result in a second Holocaust, again of six million Jews.
European Jewry is next most in danger, though in a more mundane
way: Political and social isolation,
depredations by
Islamists, Palestinian radicals, and other hotheads, and a
growing sense that
Jews have no future in that continent. An exodus may take place
in the near future that replicates the post-World War II exodus of
Jews from Muslim countries, where the Jewish population has
collapsed from about a million in 1948 to 60,000 today.
And finally, the United States: American Jews may not have been
conscious of it, but they have lived these past 60 years in one of
Jewry's golden ages, arguably more brilliant than those in
Andalusia, Aragon, Germany, Hungary, Lithuania, and Prague. But
now, in a milder form than in Europe, Jews face similar currents
swirling through American life, especially the Islamist surge
coddled by leftists. The
golden age of
American Jewry, therefore, is ending. American Jews have had the
relative luxury of worrying about such matters as intermarriage,
coreligionists around the world, school prayer, and abortion; if
current trends continue, they increasingly will find themselves
worrying about personal security, marginalization, and the other
symptoms already evident in Europe.
As the 60th anniversary of V-E and V-J days approach,
it is clear that problems apparently buried in the crematoria of
Auschwitz and Birkenau have revived and are increasingly with us.
This article follows the outline of a recent lecture
delivered at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.
The Future of
Judaism
"...Holocaust, caused the ranks of the Orthodox to be reduced to
a small minority. Their percentage of the total world Jewish
population reached a nadir in the post-World War II era, when it
declined to about 5%.
The subsequent 60 years, however, witnessed a resurgence of
the Orthodox element. This was, again, due to many factors,
especially a tendency among the non-Orthodox to marry non-Jews
and have fewer children. Recent figures on America published by
the
National Jewish Population Survey also point in this
direction. The Orthodox proportion of American synagogue
members, for example, went from 11% in 1971 to 16% in 1990 to
21% in 2000-01..." -> by Daniel Pipes
New York Sun January 25, 2005
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