RE: Benjamin Netanyahu on Bush's Speech

[Baardwijk, J. van DTO/SLBD/BGM/SVM/SGM]

> -----Oorspronkelijk bericht-----
> Van: Ronn Blankenship
> [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> Verzonden: Saturday, September 22, 2001 10:55 AM
> Onderwerp: Fwd: Benjamin Netanyahu on Bush's Speech

>      I have absolute confidence that if we, the citizens of the free
> world, led by President Bush, marshall the enormous reserves of power
> at our disposal, harness the steely resolve of a free people, and
> mobilize our collective will - we shall eradicate this evil from the 
> face of the earth.

Has anyone bothered to tell Netanyahu that this is impossible if you do not
eliminate everyone who *might* be or *might* become a terrorist?


>      Iran, Libya, and Syria call the US and Israel racist countries
> that abuse human rights?

According to Amnesty International, the US and Israel *do* abuse human
rights. It is not just countries like Iran, Libya and Syria that make that
claim.


>      Finally, the creation of Yasser Arafat's terror enclave gave a
> safe haven to militant Islamic terrorist groups such as Hamas and
> Islamic Jihad.

Spoken like a true anti-Arab warmonger.


>      Under Arafat's rule, these Palestinian Islamic terrorist groups
> made repeated use of the technique of suicide bombing, going so far as
> to run summer camps in Gaza that teach Palestinian children how to
> become suicide martyrs.

Can Netanyahu (or anyone else) provide evidence for the existence of those
summer camps, or is this just more Israeli rhetoric to "prove" their
"superiority" over Arabs?


>      Though its separate parts may have local objectives and take part
> in local conflicts, the main motivation driving the terror network is
> an anti-Western hostility that seeks to achieve nothing less than a
> reversal of history.
>      It seeks to roll back the West and install an extremist form of
> Islam as the dominant power in the world.
>      It seeks to do this not by means of its own advancement and
> progress, but by destroying the enemy.

Whereas the US only seeks to roll back Islam in the Middle East and install
their own system and believes as the dominant power in the region, and seeks
to do this by destroying its enemies.


>      And Israel, the Middle East's only democracy and its purest
> manifestation of Western progress and freedom, must be wiped off the
> face of the earth.

Does Netanyahu know that "Western freedom" includes freedom to freely cross
the borders of the land where you live, and includes the freedom to publicly
protest when you disagree with those who rule your land, without being shot
at?


>      But reestablishing a resurgent Islam requires not just rolling
> back the West; it requires destroying its main engine, the United
> States. And if the US cannot be destroyed just now, it can be first
> humiliated -- as in the Teheran hostage crisis two decades ago -- and
> then ferociously attacked again and again, until it is brought to its
> knees.

I will remember that when I see the footage of the US Armed Forces
ferociously attacking US-unfriendly Islamic countries in the Middle East
until those countries are brought to their knees.


>      When in 1996, I wrote a book about fighting terrorism, I warned
> about the militant Islamic groups operating in the West with the
> support of foreign powers-- serving as a new breed of "domestic-
> international" terrorists, basing themselves in America to wage Jihad
> against America:
>      Such groups, I wrote then, nullify in large measure the need to
> have air power or intercontinental missiles as delivery systems for an
> Islamic nuclear payload. They will be the delivery system. In the worst
> of such scenarios, I wrote, the consequences could be not a car bomb
> but a nuclear bomb in the basement of the World Trade Center.

Nice to see Netanyahu actually making sense for a change. I did not know he
had it in him.


>      Well, they did not use a nuclear bomb. They used two 150 ton fully
> fueled jetliners to wipe out the Twin Towers. But does anyone doubt
> that given the chance, they will throw atom bombs at America and its
> allies?

If the US does indeed start a major war in the Middle East, I do not give it
ten years before the first nuclear bomb goes off in the US.


>      First, as President Bush said, we must make no distinction between
> the terrorists and the states that support them. It is not enough to
> root out the terrorists who committed this horrific act of war. We must
> dismantle the entire terrorist network.
>      If any part of it remains intact, it will rebuild itself, and the
> specter of terrorism will reemerge and strike again.

And it most certainly will. Let's assume for a moment that all currently
known Islamic fundamentalist groups are destroyed. There may (and probable
are) similar groups in several countries that have not yet attacked anyone
or anything, and are not yet known. If their existence is not known, they
cannot be destroyed. But these groups will eventually strike back to avenge
the deaths of their Islamic brethern.

I still cannot figure out why there are still people (such as Netanyahu and
GWB) who believe terrorism *can* be eradicated completely. Wishful thinking,
I suppose.


>      If we begin to distinguish between acts of terror, justifying some
> and repudiating others based on sympathy with this or that cause, we
> will lose the moral clarity that is so essential for victory.
>      This clarity is what enabled America and Britain to root out 
> piracy  in the nineteenth century. This is how the Allies rooted out
> Nazism in the twentieth century.

Unfortunately, Nazism was NOT rooted out -- it still existed by the end of
the 20th century, and still exists today. Only now we call it Neo-Nazism.


>      When the British bombed a Gestapo headquarters in 1944, and one of
> their bombs unintentionally struck a children's hospital that was a 
> tragedy, but it was not terrorism.
>        When Israel fired a missile that killed two Hamas arch-
> terrorists, and two Palestinians children who were playing nearby were
> tragically struck down, that is not terrorism.

Yet, if Islamic fundamentalists would fire a missile that kills an Israeli
government official or some Israeli soldiers, and two Israeli civilians who
just happened to be there also get killed, it *will* be considered an act of
terrorism.

Whether an act is an act of terrorism is not only defined by the nature of
the action, but also by who was attacked.


>       These regimes, like all terrorist states, must be given a
> forthright demand: Stop terrorism, permanently, or you will face the
> wrath of the free world - through harsh and sustained political,
> economic and military sanctions.

Ah yes, economic sanctions. A method Western governments love, but also a
method that usually only hurts the population of a country, not its leaders.


> Israel's policy of preemptively striking at those who seek to murder
> its people is, I believe, better understood today and requires no
> further elaboration.

Oh, we understand alright. Only problem is, Israel believes it is justified
in their "preemptive strikes" but will play the poor, oppressed nation if
one of its neighbours would do the same against Israel.



Jeroen

_________________________________________________________________________
Wonderful World of Brin-L Website:                    http://go.to/brin-l