Prof. Paul Eidelberg

… Unbeknownst to the West, and unacknowledged by Israel’s ruling elites, the 1948 War of Independence was a civilizational war, one that has been going on to this day.  Thus, in a lecture sponsored by the Arab League in Cairo, ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Bazzaz, Professor of Law at the University of Baghdad, who later became Iraq’s Prime Minister, declared in 1962:  “The existence of Israel … is a flagrant challenge to our philosophy of life and the ideals for which we live, and a total barrier against the values and aims to which we aspire in the world.”

Islam perceives Israel both as a Jewish and secular democratic state that threatens the religio-political power structure of the Islamic world. Tyrannies do not like democracies on their borders.  But let us probe a little deeper into the conflict between the East (here limited to Islam) and the West, with which Israel finds itself precariously aligned.

The West exalts the individual, and the state exists to maximize his comfort.  Accordingly, the function of the state is not to cultivate virtue or morality but to promote freedom and material prosperity.  In the West, therefore, religion is a private matter.  Contrast the fatalistic world of Islam.  There personal and political freedom is unknown.  There the state is all-powerful.  Its primary function is to serve Allah by imbuing people with the moral and religious teachings of the Koran.   There poverty is the rule.

The World Trade Center represented the pinnacle wealth.  Like the Tower of Babel, it symbolized the exaltation of man.  The Twin Towers were monuments of scientific technology in stark contrast to pre-industrial, feudal Islam.

The destruction of the Twin Towers by suicide bombers reveals the unbridgeable gap between the West’s preoccupation with this world and Islam’s concern with the afterworld.  While America pursues a life of pleasure here and now, Islam is infatuated with death as the entry to eternal Paradise.  Can mundane life defend itself against death?

The World Trade Center’s destruction was an act of revenge—revenge against centuries of Western domination of the East—intolerable to Muslims.  The West is the home of Christianity, hated by Islam.  Also, the U.S., by supporting Israel, is the Great Satan.  Hence the Mufti of Jerusalem urges Muslims to kill Americans as well as Jews.

Multicultural, relativistic America is incapable of waging war against this totalitarian enemy.  It lacks the concepts, the understanding, required to wage such a war.  President Bush called the destruction of the World Trade Center a “cowardly” act, when, in truth, it was an act of dauntless courage.  He called this act “senseless,” when in fact it was well calculated to humble America, to uplift Islamic pride, to glorify Allah.

Moreover, responsibility for this monstrous act was attributed to “Islamic fundamentalism,” or to a network of terrorists led by Osama bin Laden.  True, Islamic states were held responsible for harboring these terrorists.  But this tacitly indicates that the so-called war against international terrorism involves Islam as a whole: there is hardly an Islamic state that does not provide a haven, to say nothing of financial support, for Arab terrorists.  Yet, to make a mockery of the World Trade Center disaster, the U.S. invited Islamic regimes and even arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat to join the war against international terrorism!  Nor is this all.

President Bush called this a war between good and evil.  And so it is.  But the United States and the West have long been silent about evil, indeed, have honored the personification of evil, again, Yasser Arafat.  Hence the U.S. is far from being simply good.  Besides, American cultural imperialism is vulgarizing much of the world, undermining moral and religious values.   We see this in the Americanization of Israel.  True, Israel is indebted to the United States and is itself to blame for the vices it has imported from America.  Some may also blame Washington for Oslo, which has resulted in thousands of Jewish casualties—an enormous number for a small country like Israel.  But Oslo is primarily the product of Westernized or secularized Jews.  Indeed, the Israeli architects of Oslo were animated by one ultimate objective, and that is to destroy Israel as a Jewish state and to transform it into miniature, multicultural America!