Two Germans vs. Islamism

by Daniel Pipes
New York Sun
January 3, 2006
http://www.danielpipes.org/article/3242" title="http://www.danielpipes.org/article/3242" target="_blank"http://www.danielpipes.org/ar...

The interior ministers of two German states have recently advanced important measures for containing radical Islam. They bear close attention across the West.

In Baden-Wurtenberg, Heribert Rech of the ruling Christian Democratic Union party has overseen the administering of a 30-topic loyalty test for applicants to become naturalized citizens. Following an intensive and sophisticated study by the Baden-Wurtenberg government of Muslim life, it developed a manual for the naturalization authorities explaining that applicants for citizenship must concur with the "free, democratic, constitutional structure" of Germany.

Because survey research finds that 21% of Muslims living in Germany believe the German constitution irreconcilable with the Koran, the written yes-no questions of yesteryear are history for Muslim applicants for citizenship. As of January 1, 2006, immigration officers who suspect Islamist leanings are instructed to probe further. Personal interviews will now last an hour or two and will be given to an estimated half of naturalization applicants.

The questions amount to a summary of Western values. What do you think of democracy, political parties, and religious freedom? What would you do if you learned about a terrorist operation underway? Views of the attacks of September 11, 2001, are a "key issue," the director of the alien registration office in Stuttgart, Dieter Biller, said: Were Jews responsible for it? Were the 19 hijackers terrorists or freedom fighters? Finally, nearly two thirds of the questions concern gender issues, such as women's rights, husbands beating wives, "honor killings," female attire, arranged marriages, polygyny, and homosexuality.

Responding to critics, the Interior Ministry denies discrimination against Muslims, insisting on the need to find out whether the applicants' expressed views on the German constitution correspond to their real views. Applicants who pass the test and are granted citizenship could later lose that citizenship if they act inconsistently with their "correct" answers.

Adding extra requirements of Muslim applicants for citizenship is not unique to Germany; in Ireland, for example, male candidates are made to swear they will not marry more than one wife.

The second initiative originates in Lower Saxony, where the interior minister, Uwe Schünemann, also a CDU member, has stated he would consider making radical Islamists wear electronic foot tags. Doing so, he says, would allow the authorities "to monitor the approximately 3,000 violence-prone Islamists in Germany, the hate preachers [i.e., Islamist imams], and the fighters trained in foreign terrorist camps." Electronic tags, he suggested, are practical "for violence-prone Islamists who can't be expelled to their home countries because of the threat of torture" there.

The electronic tagging of terror suspects is also not unprecedented. In Britain, the method has been used since March 2005 and, other than a glitch-plagued start, it has been applied to ten suspects with reasonable success. In Australia, counterterrorism measures implemented last month permit tagging for up to a year.

But Mr. Schünemann's proposal goes well beyond these applications, tagging not just potential terrorists, but also "hate preachers" who break the law not by personally engaging in violence but by articulating beliefs that encourage others to terrorism. Tagging them breaks new conceptual ground by aggressively going to the ideological source of violence.

It has potentially large implications. If hate preachers are tagged, why not the many other non-violent Islamists who also help create an environment promoting terrorism? Their ranks would include activists, artists, computer gamers, couriers, funders, intellectuals, journalists, lawyers, lobbyists, organizers, researchers, shopkeepers, and teachers. In short, Mr. Schünemann's initiative could lead ultimately to the electronic tagging of all Islamists.

But electronic tags reveal only a person's geographic location, not his words or actions, which matter more when dealing with imams and other non-violent cadres. With due allowances for personal privacy, their speech could be recorded, their actions videoed, their mail and electronic communications monitored. Such controls could be done discreetly or overtly. If overt, the tagging would serve as a modern scarlet letter, shaming the wearer and alerting potential dupes.

The Schünemann proposal points to the urgent need to develop a working definition of Islamism and Islamists, plus the imperative for the authorities to explain how even non-violent Islamists are the enemy.

Messrs. Rech and Schünemann have presented two bold tactics for the defense of the West, premised in each case on an understanding that culture and ideas are the real battleground. I salute their creativity and courage. Who will next adapt and adopt these initiatives?

Two Germans vs. Islamism

by Daniel Pipes
New York Sun
January 3, 2006
http://www.danielpipes.org/article/3242" title="http://www.danielpipes.org/article/3242" target="_blank"http://www.danielpipes.org/ar...

The interior ministers of two German states have recently advanced important measures for containing radical Islam. They bear close attention across the West.

In Baden-Wurtenberg, Heribert Rech of the ruling Christian Democratic Union party has overseen the administering of a 30-topic loyalty test for applicants to become naturalized citizens. Following an intensive and sophisticated study by the Baden-Wurtenberg government of Muslim life, it developed a manual for the naturalization authorities explaining that applicants for citizenship must concur with the "free, democratic, constitutional structure" of Germany.

Because survey research finds that 21% of Muslims living in Germany believe the German constitution irreconcilable with the Koran, the written yes-no questions of yesteryear are history for Muslim applicants for citizenship. As of January 1, 2006, immigration officers who suspect Islamist leanings are instructed to probe further. Personal interviews will now last an hour or two and will be given to an estimated half of naturalization applicants.

The questions amount to a summary of Western values. What do you think of democracy, political parties, and religious freedom? What would you do if you learned about a terrorist operation underway? Views of the attacks of September 11, 2001, are a "key issue," the director of the alien registration office in Stuttgart, Dieter Biller, said: Were Jews responsible for it? Were the 19 hijackers terrorists or freedom fighters? Finally, nearly two thirds of the questions concern gender issues, such as women's rights, husbands beating wives, "honor killings," female attire, arranged marriages, polygyny, and homosexuality.

Responding to critics, the Interior Ministry denies discrimination against Muslims, insisting on the need to find out whether the applicants' expressed views on the German constitution correspond to their real views. Applicants who pass the test and are granted citizenship could later lose that citizenship if they act inconsistently with their "correct" answers.

Adding extra requirements of Muslim applicants for citizenship is not unique to Germany; in Ireland, for example, male candidates are made to swear they will not marry more than one wife.

The second initiative originates in Lower Saxony, where the interior minister, Uwe Schünemann, also a CDU member, has stated he would consider making radical Islamists wear electronic foot tags. Doing so, he says, would allow the authorities "to monitor the approximately 3,000 violence-prone Islamists in Germany, the hate preachers [i.e., Islamist imams], and the fighters trained in foreign terrorist camps." Electronic tags, he suggested, are practical "for violence-prone Islamists who can't be expelled to their home countries because of the threat of torture" there.

The electronic tagging of terror suspects is also not unprecedented. In Britain, the method has been used since March 2005 and, other than a glitch-plagued start, it has been applied to ten suspects with reasonable success. In Australia, counterterrorism measures implemented last month permit tagging for up to a year.

But Mr. Schünemann's proposal goes well beyond these applications, tagging not just potential terrorists, but also "hate preachers" who break the law not by personally engaging in violence but by articulating beliefs that encourage others to terrorism. Tagging them breaks new conceptual ground by aggressively going to the ideological source of violence.

It has potentially large implications. If hate preachers are tagged, why not the many other non-violent Islamists who also help create an environment promoting terrorism? Their ranks would include activists, artists, computer gamers, couriers, funders, intellectuals, journalists, lawyers, lobbyists, organizers, researchers, shopkeepers, and teachers. In short, Mr. Schünemann's initiative could lead ultimately to the electronic tagging of all Islamists.

But electronic tags reveal only a person's geographic location, not his words or actions, which matter more when dealing with imams and other non-violent cadres. With due allowances for personal privacy, their speech could be recorded, their actions videoed, their mail and electronic communications monitored. Such controls could be done discreetly or overtly. If overt, the tagging would serve as a modern scarlet letter, shaming the wearer and alerting potential dupes.

The Schünemann proposal points to the urgent need to develop a working definition of Islamism and Islamists, plus the imperative for the authorities to explain how even non-violent Islamists are the enemy.

Messrs. Rech and Schünemann have presented two bold tactics for the defense of the West, premised in each case on an understanding that culture and ideas are the real battleground. I salute their creativity and courage. Who will next adapt and adopt these initiatives?

Europe's "Good Jews"
Emanuele Ottolenghi
Isralert.com source: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article.asp?aid=12005044_1" title="http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article.asp?aid=12005044_1" target="_blank"http://www.commentarymagazine...

It is common knowledge that anti-Semitism in Western Europe has been on the rise for the last five years. Its frequency and intensity have coincided for
the most part with the curve of violence in the Middle East, and with the
incendiary and openly slanted way that this violence has been covered in the
European media. But expressions of anti-Semitism have also taken on a life, and a momentum, of their own. Of course, Jews in Europe have not been deprived of property, expelled, or deported; but they have been subjected to physical violence, insults, libelous attacks in the press and in intellectual circles, accusations of disloyalty, and much else besides.

All of this has been thoroughly documented. Known, too, are the factors that
have contributed to the astonishing recrudescence of a hatred thought to have been long uprooted from pluralist, tolerant Europe. Those factors include the open hostility of some European governments to the state of Israel and their active sympathy with the Arab and Palestinian "cause," even to the point of justifying Arab terrorism against civilian Israeli Jews; the felt need on the part of European elites to accommodate the often murderous anti-Semitism within the immigrant Muslim community; and the alignment of European leftist and "progressive" opinion behind the idea of Israel as the new Nazi Germany, according to which those European Jews who support Israel are relegated to the category of racists until proved otherwise.

To be sure, it is regularly and vigorously denied that contemporary hostility
to Israel and its Jewish supporters is itself in the least bit anti-Semitic;
rather, it is held to be solely an expression of disagreement with particular
policies of the Israeli government. To draw a parallel between this and past
variants of European anti-Semitism, especially of the Nazi type, is thus
dismissed as a species of moral blackmail.

There is something to this argument, although not much, and then only when it is couched in such extreme terms. The Nazi card is a powerful rhetorical
weapon, no matter who plays it-as the anti-Israel side, quick to condemn
Israel itself as a replica of Nazi Germany, knows better than anyone. But to
help put matters into historical perspective, I want to focus here on a
particular feature of the new European anti-Semitism that has been less
commented on. This is the crucial role played by some European Jews
themselves, mostly intellectuals or academics, who have responded to the
latest assault on the Jewish people by excusing it, justifying it, and in
effect joining it.

In October 2002, a number of leading European authors discussed Israel's
conduct in the pages of the London Independent. For one of these writers, it
was plain that Israel had "adopted tactics which are reminiscent of the
Nazis." For another, it was no less plain that the Israelis "were educated by
the Nazis." And so it went. Such assertions, staples of Arab and Palestinian
propaganda, have by now assumed canonical status in liberal European opinion..

But what, aside from rhetorical bombast, is meant by the term "Nazi" in such
statements? Ultimately, the evil that Israel is said to embody is the evil of
an extreme, aggressive, and racially exclusive nationalism-that is, the very
same disease that Europe, in the aftermath of Hitler and the Holocaust, has
sought so strenuously and with such success "to limit, transcend, and
overcome" (in the flattering words of the historian Anatol Lieven). Now this
great sickness is alleged to have returned in the lurid form of present-day
Israel, throwing the whole world into turmoil and disturbing the hard-won
tranquility of post-nationalist Europe by inflaming the passions of its rising
Muslim population.

Hence the obsessive intensity with which European elites have focused on a
territorial conflict that, in the scale of the world's problems, would seem
rather less worthy of their concern, let alone of their one-sided rage, than
many another. For, in the end, this is their conflict as well, involving as it
does their own twisted and morally compromised history with the Jews.
Involving-and perhaps mitigating. As I am hardly the first to have observed,
Europeans have seized upon the Palestinian intifada, or rather upon Israel's
determined response to it, as an opportunity at last to turn the moral tables,
a chance, however specious, to hold not themselves but the Jews to account.

The Italian columnist Barbara Spinelli, writing in La Stampa, spelled out the
charge a few years ago. Today's ultra-nationalist Israel, she wrote,
constitutes nothing less than a "scandal." And it is a scandal, above all, for
Jews themselves-since, as every European knows, Jews are the quintessential victims of modern nationalism (nationalism being, for Spinelli as for many other Europeans, virtually coterminous with Nazism). It follows, then, that Jews everywhere have a special duty to speak out against Israel, to apologize to its victims, and to do so in public.

"If one thing is missing in Judaism," Spinelli wrote in late 2001, "this is
precisely it: a mea culpa vis-à-vis the peoples and individuals who had to pay the price of blood and exile to allow Israel to exist." She called upon world Jewry to undertake such an act of contrition forthwith:

If the initiative does not come from Jerusalem then it should start in the
Diaspora, where so many Jews live a double and contradictory loyalty: to
Israel, and to the state they belong to and vote in. A solemn mea culpa,
proclaimed from the scattered communities in the West. . . .

This call to Europe's "good Jews," as they might be called, has in fact been
answered. For the most part, those answering it have been not the long-term, all-out, rabid haters of Israel of the Harold Pinter or (in American terms)
Noam Chomsky stripe, who need no excuse and waste no pieties in reviling the Jewish state. Pinter, for example, who has termed Israel "the central factor in world unrest," and has accused it of using nuclear weapons against the Palestinians, hardly stoops to identifying himself as a Jew concerned for the welfare of his fellow Jews. Most "good Jews" are of a somewhat different
complexion. Not only do they tend to speak more circumspectly but, with
whatever degree of disingenuousness, they cloak their hostility to Jewish
nationalism (i.e., Israel) in the mantle of solicitude for, precisely, the
good name of Jews and Judaism.

Thus, writing in Britain's weekly Spectator earlier this year, one Anthony
Lippman issued just such a mea culpa as Barbara Spinelli may have dreamed of.. Himself the son of a Holocaust survivor, albeit a convert to Christianity and an active member of the Church of England, Lippman was moved temporarily to reclaim his patrimony. Writing under the title, "How I Became a Jew," he averred that the "little band" of Holocaust survivors in Europe

has a terrible responsibility-to live well in the name of those who did not
live and to discourage the building of walls and bulldozing of villages. Even
more than this, they-and all Jews-need to be the voice of conscience that will
prevent Israel from adopting the mantle of oppressor, and to reject the label
"anti-Semite" for those who speak out against Israel's policies in the
occupied territories.

Similarly responding to the claims of an awakened Jewish conscience has been the British academic Jacqueline Rose. In her book, The Question of Zion (2005), Rose undertakes to save Judaism itself from the curse of its movement of national liberation. "What is it," she asks, "about the coming into being of this nation [Israel] and the [Zionist] movement out of which it was born, that allowed it-and still allows it-to shed the burdens of its own history, and so flagrantly to blind itself?" Zionism, she concludes, has to be seen not as the fulfillment of an age-old Jewish dream but as the out-and-out betrayal of Jewish history and the Jewish heritage, an adoption of all that is,
historically and morally, un-Jewish.

Can the disease that is Zionism be cured? Yes, Rose and others assure us, but only by a thorough-going renunciation. In the pre-Israel past, she writes,
"dissident voices" in the Jewish world warned against the terrible
consequences that would flow from the effort to win a state for the Jews;
although silenced and repressed then, they are needed more then ever today, during the Jews' "dark night of the soul."

No one can say that such voices have not been forthcoming. In the August 8,
2002 Guardian, 45 Jewish signatories, in a widely hailed act of public
abjuration, repudiated their right of return to the Jewish state on account of
its racist policies. Since the statement's original publication, it has been
signed by over 80 more individuals from around the world. One of the
organizers subsequently explained that what motivated him to act was the
"pitiless violence" of his "blood relatives," i.e., the Israeli people-the
"violence," as he put it, of the "traumatized former victim, clinging to past
wounds from generation unto generation."

The publicity attending this and similar initiatives by European Jews, abetted
in some cases by their Israeli counterparts, has been very great. There was
tremendous excitement in Europe over the declaration by 99 Israeli academics that their government was planning an imminent "full-fledged ethnic cleansing" of the Palestinian people (a charge that was not withdrawn when the alleged genocidal atrocity failed to occur), and again over the refusal of a few hundred Israeli army reservists to serve in the administered territories. There was even greater excitement when several European Jewish academics turned up among the instigators of a movement to boycott Israeli academic institutions, and yet again when a number of Jewish politicians called for the boycott of Israeli commercial products.

Among the latter group was the British parliamentarian Oona King, who in June 2003, comparing Israel's treatment of Palestinians in Gaza with the Nazi treatment of Jews in the Warsaw ghetto, spoke of her personal "shame" as a "Jewish person" (her father is Jewish). A year later, Gerald Kaufman, another member of the British Parliament, called for a boycott of Israeli goods on similar grounds, as, in South Africa, did Ronnie Kasrils, a government minister: "As a person who was born Jewish, I am morally obliged to speak out against what is being done by the Zionist state of Israel to the Palestinian people."

Many others have likewise seen it as their specifically Jewish duty to
denounce Israel. Their ranks include all three proponents of a motion,
"Zionism is the real enemy of the Jews today," aired at a public debate in
London early this year. One of them was the historian Avi Shlaim. Like others before him, he too felt the need to advertise his Jewish virtuousness by writing about it for publication. In a subsequent op-ed in the International
Herald Tribune, he justified the implacable anti-Zionism on which he has based his academic career by appealing to a faith he does not appear ever to have practiced: "One of the greatest accolades in Judaism," he instructed his readers, "is to be a rodef shalom, a seeker of peace."

The assertions of Jews like these are often buttressed by a particular
narrative of the history of Zionism. The narrative itself has been thoroughly
debunked,* but here I want to concentrate less on its veracity or rather lack
of it than on the terms in which its main thesis is often expressed. These are
revealing.

According to this reconstruction of the past, the achievements of Zionism
involved, for the Jews, a fatal loss of moral and historical innocence. In
order for the state of Israel to be born in 1948, unspeakable crimes were
committed against the Palestinian people. Zionist leaders then entered into a conspiracy of silence to conceal these awful events from the Jewish public..
Not until the 1980's did a small, intrepid band of scholars-Israel's so-called
New Historians-emerge to uncover the evidence and expose the hidden truth.

Zionism's precipitous descent, from the noble liberal vision of Theodor Herzl
to the obloquy of mass expulsions and worse, was characterized in 1988 by
Benny Morris, a leading New Historian, in striking language:

How one perceives [Israel's war of independence in] 1948 bears heavily on how one perceives the whole Zionist/Israeli experience. If Israel, the haven of a much-persecuted people, was born pure and innocent, then it is worthy of the grace, material assistance, and political support showered upon it by the West over the past 40 years-and worthy of more of the same in years to come. If, on the other hand, Israel was born tarnished, besmirched by original sin, then it was no more deserving of that grace and assistance than were its neighbors.

"Grace," "purity," "original sin"-Christological vocabulary of this kind
recurs frequently in the rhetoric of certain scholarly and journalistic
discussions of Israel's birth. Avi Shlaim, for instance, has mocked those who
persist in conceiving of Israel's War of Independence as a struggle against
Arab aggression. They hold, he writes with savage sarcasm, to the idea of "an immaculate conception." Worse, they do so perfidiously, for both material and moral gain, thus aspiring to the roles of Judas and Jesus simultaneously:

[They] put so much store by Israel's claim to moral rectitude that they cannot
face up to the evidence of cynical Israeli double-dealings or brutal dispersal
and dispossession of the Palestinians. It is an axiom of their narrative that
Israel is the innocent victim. Not content with the thirty pieces of silver,
these people insist on retaining for Israel the crown of thorns. [emphasis
added]

But, if the brutality with which Israel is charged was indeed inherent to the
project that led to its creation-as the notion of original sin suggests-how
can it possibly be made good? That European Jews should wash their hands of the Jewish state goes without saying. But what is required of Israel itself? For this there is an answer as well. Both logically and, as it were,
theologically, the only remedy lies in the political equivalent of conversion.

For Israel, in this analysis, entrance into a new life of grace is contingent
on shedding its identity as the Jewish national state. Instead, it must agree
to a unitary, binational arrangement with the Palestinians. Only thus might
the state of the Jews yet wash away the stain of its original sin.

The signatories of the 2002 letter in the Guardian were explicit on this
point. No mere condemnation of Israel's allegedly brutal behavior would
satisfy the demands of their Jewish conscience. What was necessary was the dissolution of Israel itself, its place to be taken by a new entity that would
no longer be ruled by Jews but in which Jews and Palestinian Arabs would at last live together peacefully as equals.

Of course, this is absurd-a fancy-dress re-wording of longstanding Arab
propaganda about the illegitimacy of Israel's national existence. It is also
hypocritical: Europeans who expend such vast quantities of energy lecturing
Israel on its supposed hypernationalist instincts give no thought whatsoever
to ridding the Arabs of their own, rather more vivid, forms of nationalist
sentiment. But for those European Jews who embrace the modish conviction that nationalism is not just a sin but the root of all modern evil, the fantasy of
Israel's de-nationalization serves another purpose. It ensures their own
conformity with the latest European thinking on the best way for human beings to organize themselves in society-namely, as good Europeans.

Such, at any rate, was the burden of a notorious 2003 essay by Tony Judt, a
British historian now living in the U.S. For Judt, writing in the New York
Review of Books, contemporary European anti-Semitism, insofar as it exists, has been the wholly foreseeable result of bad Jewish (that is, Israeli)
behavior. And just as the Jews of Israel have only themselves to blame for the fact that the enlightened world condemns them, so they can relieve their
suffering, and incidentally that of their fellow Jews around the world who
have been implicated in their black deeds, through compensatory acts of
self-effacement and re-dedication.

Here, in Judt's words, is the root sin of which Israel is guilty:

In a world where nations and peoples increasingly intermingle and intermarry
at will; where cultural and national impediments to communication have all but collapsed; where more and more of us have multiple elective identities and would feel falsely constrained if we had to answer to just one of them; in
such a world Israel is truly an anachronism. And not just an anachronism but a dysfunctional one.

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And here, again in Judt's words, is the path to remission from sin:

To convert Israel from a Jewish state to a binational one would not be easy,
though not quite as impossible as it sounds: the process has already begun de facto. But it would cause far less disruption to most Jews and Arabs than its religious and nationalist foes will claim.

The use of the word "convert" is again no accident.

In seeking to explain the seemingly obsessive need for Jewish self-negation
that is on display in examples like these and others, psychologists of the
future will have their work cut out for them. And if we were dealing with only
a few anti-Zionist Jews impelled to act out their personal identity problems
in public, we could safely leave them to those future psychologists.
Unfortunately, even though such individuals are not many in number, and even though their arguments are invariably mendacious and easily refuted, they, and the many grouplets that have sprung up to represent them, enjoy great acclaim in today's Europe, and together they have done incalculable damage by lending a Jewish imprimatur to the anti-Israel cause.*

One evening last spring, the UK branch of Peace Now hosted a debate on the Israel-Palestinian conflict at London's School of Oriental and African
Studies. Taking the Israeli side, ironically enough, was Benny Morris, the
pioneer New Historian. (In recent years Morris has found himself at odds with some of his colleagues since he still supports Israel's right to exist; he has also begun to entertain second and third thoughts on the issue of Zionism's "original sin.") Opposing him was Ahmed Khalidi, a Western-educated scion of Palestinian aristocracy and a "moderate" who is willing to negotiate Israel's demise diplomatically rather than advocating its destruction through violence.

During the question-and-answer period, a frail student stood up to make an
impassioned plea. "I want to express my gratitude to you, Dr. Khalidi," said
this young woman, "for your willingness to share Palestine with the Jews as a common patrimony." ("Common patrimony" was the anodyne catchphrase Khalidi had coined to promote his one-state solution, i.e., the dissolution of Israel.) Such conspicuous, large-hearted charity, the student went on, heedless of her choice of ancient religious antinomies, stood in sharp contrast to the miserly approach of Benny Morris, who had insisted on Israel's right to continue its national existence. "As a Jew," she concluded her address to Khalidi, "I feel ashamed that your land was taken away from you in my name and that of my ancestors. It is my duty as a Jew to stand up for justice." If indeed she stood up in shame, she sat down to thunderous applause.

In statements like this, one cannot but notice the recurrence not only of
those enduring theological tropes but of a certain very dangerous dance in
which European Jews have long participated. Today, as yesterday, Jewish
"particularism," then religious, now national, remains a thorn in Europe's
side. Today, as yesterday, removing the thorn involves a renunciation of
particularism followed by an espousal of the regnant form of universal
salvation-then Christianity, now the tenets of humanistic liberalism.

This is not 1930's-style anti-Semitism; in that narrow sense, anti-Israel
Europeans are correct in protesting that they are not anti-Semites.
Nevertheless, it is an age-old form of anti-Semitism, and one that has always
called forth a typical pattern of response on the part of the Jews under
scrutiny. For most, the choices are to lie low in hopes that the trouble will
pass, to pick up and seek life elsewhere, or to resist and oppose to the
extent they can. We have seen all three responses in European Jewish society over the last years, each bearing its cost. Some, however, take a different route, finding favor and reward by exerting every effort to assimilate
themselves to whatever is required of them, including to the point of publicly
dissociating themselves from their people's history and fate. As ever with
such maneuvers, exculpatory rationalizations must be found, and are readily at hand.

Unlike the case in pre-Enlightenment Europe, present-day anti-Semitism does not expect Jews to abandon their religion. Today's Europe is a
self-consciously multicultural society. Although it cherishes secularism above
all, it respects, if somewhat warily, religious pluralism. What the
enlightened sector of today's Europe would like Jews to do, in exchange for
fully approved membership in the circle of approved opinion, is to renounce a core component of their identity: that is, their sense of Jewish peoplehood as expressed through their attachment and commitment to the democratic state of Israel and to the Zionist enterprise.

What remains constant is that, as in both pre- and post-Enlightenment Europe, today's European elite has its good Jews and its bad Jews. There are the Jews whom it embraces, encourages, and celebrates; and then there are the Jews whom it castises and condemns. For the former, there will always be a place of honor in the European sun. On the latter, today's officially pluralist and tolerant Europe has turned its back. Is it any wonder, then, that some "good Jews" have chosen to live in the light, stopping only to burnish their qualifications by noisily joining the chorus that has consigned their fellow Jews to the dark?

Emanuele Ottolenghi, who was born in Bologna, Italy, is a research fellow at
St. Antony's College, Oxford University, where he specializes in Israeli
politics and the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. This is his first
appearance in Commentary.

* For example, see, in Commentary, Shabtai Teveth, "Charging Israel with
Original Sin" (September 1989) and Efraim Karsh, "Were the Palestinians
Expelled?" (July 2000) and "Revisiting Israel's 'Original Sin'" (April 2003)..

* The groups, with names like Jews for Justice for Palestinians (UK), Jewish Union for Peace (France), Network of Jews against Occupation (Italy), Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East (Germany), New Outlook (Denmark), Another Jewish Voice (Netherlands), and so forth, even have their own umbrella organization, European Jews for a Just Peace.

Shalom Everyone,

It is not often that we send out an Extra Alert, but we feel that the following testimonies are important to share with you who are praying to show you how God has answered your prayers.

The first testimony comes from a believing female soldier in the IDF. The second is an analysis from Jerusalem Post. It points out that the defeat has been so severe for Hizb'Allah this week that they predict there will be another round.

So, let's be encouraged. Let's continue to thank the Eternal and let's keep up the prayers! It works and it is necessary. There is more coming on the northern front.

God bless you as watchmen on the walls of Jerusalem!

Lars and Harriet Enarson

"Dear praying friends of Israel,

"The Lord has done many wonders in these war days, 21-22 of November, in northern Israeli-Lebanonise border.

"I am a soldier and as part of my job I visited one of the places attacked only a few hours since it all started. I was shocked to see the heavy damage caused to this place, but I knew it was God's hand that protected the soldiers there, and even they admitted that it was indeed very unusual that no one was killed in such damage!

"I myself worked there to help get damages tanks out. All night I and my people worked there, and in the morning we had to get out of that place for a reason. An hour later we were back, and were amazed to find 3 bombs lying exactly where we were standing! No doubt God's angels were very busy protecting us.

"Many more miracles took place, and as one of the very fighting forces there I thanked the Lord for you guys and many more praying warriors who fought for us in the heavenlies while we fought our earthly enemy! Thank you and God bless you!

"Shlomit (I am a 20-year-old Jewish girl who is a commander in the military for the last 2 years.)" (End quote)

"Analysis: Bad week for Hizbullah By ARIEH O'SULLIVAN

"It was condemned by the United Nations, dozens of its fighters were killed or wounded in a botched assault on Galilee, a chance to nab an Israeli hostage slipped through its fingers and a local spy was captured.

"All in all it was a bad week for Hizbullah. So bad, that the IDF remains on alert for another attack.

'Hizbullah is in distress,' was the mantra repeated this week by senior IDF officials and Lebanon watchers.

"If Hizbullah wanted to divert the spotlight from Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime over involvement in the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri, it only ended up putting Lebanon's plight more in the news.

"If it hoped to be able to score beauty points at home on Lebanon's national day by presenting itself as national protector against the Zionist aggressors, it only succeeded in exposing itself as a fraud.

"And it suffered one of its most significant military defeats in its history of daring clashes with the IDF. Military sources said that Hizbullah had been planning Monday's assault for months with the aim of a highly visible victory - either killing many Israeli soldiers or more likely kidnapping them and parading them in Beirut.

"For this purpose it brought in its elite fighters, equipped with motorbikes and all-terrain vehicles, and struck at 20 IDF outposts nearly simultaneously with scores of mortar shells and anti-tank rounds. The result? A few wounded Israeli soldiers.

"The butcher's bill? Seven Hizbullah fighters dead and dozens wounded, and it is begging for the return of the bodies of three gunmen Israel is holding. It abandoned all of its border outposts in southern Lebanon, and the IDF, taking advantage of the opportunity, destroyed 13 of them, including its brigade-level headquarters, military sources said.

'We know they were in distress because their initial statements were so outlandish, downright lies,' said a senior officer.

"Sheikh Nabil Kauq, head of Hizbullah in south Lebanon, boasted on TV that his fighters had destroyed Israeli tanks and armored vehicles and inflicted heavy casualties. 'Crack Israeli troops were slaughtered,' he said. Their biggest lie was their claim Israel had started it by entering Lebanon first.

"What was Hizbullah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah thinking he could gain by launching this attack? 'They wanted to show there was still Israeli aggression that requires defense on the border and that they were the defenders of the border. They wanted to quash talk of disarming them,' said Lt.-Col. (res.) Moshe Marzuk, a former head of the Lebanon desk in IDF intelligence.

'But it boomeranged. Not only did the UN Security Council condemn them for starting the attack, but so did Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Saniora,' said Marzuk, today a researcher at the International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism.

"Caught so brazenly in its own lies, Hizbullah started to do damage control to its credibility and for the first time retracted an earlier statement that Israeli warplanes had struck again in Lebanon. It said an explosion had been caused instead by a previously unexploded artillery shell.

"Military sources note there is increasing support in Lebanon to take on Hizbullah's armed militia. They noted that Saniora has asked the Europeans to help him strengthen his army to face Hizbullah.

'This week has weakened Hizbullah. It demonstrated them as liars to the Lebanese people and troublemakers to the world,' Marzuk said.

"But he predicted that in the short run, Hizbullah was likely determined to keep the fire burning with Israel to justify its arms.

'The moment they are disarmed, they will be severely weakened,' Marzuk said." (End quote)