Appeasement and Extremism

The following was my contribution to a Facebook discussion that started with the allegation that Obama is following a Chamberlainesque policy of appeasement with Iran.  While I won't address that issue directly, I felt the need to comment on the confrontation of Extremism and its consequence in the middle east.  The antagonist in that discussion suggested that his Israeli friend should put his efforts toward confronting Israeli extremism as the Islamic variety would never be quelled.

The alternative to working for an end to Islamist extremism is acceptance of the end of Israel, extermination of the Jews and an eventual world-wide caliphate.  This is what the extremists of Islam want.  Israel is just the small Satan, while America is the big.

I would like to share an anecdote that has stuck with me.  I tutored the children of a well-off family in Kfar Kana in English.  I like this family.  I drop in for coffee, we chat.  As a radical well-educated Jewish teacher, I really do love all my students.  I am patient and forgiving, try to see the best in my students and treat my students as the thinking, feeling individuals they are.  I was talking with one of the parents, was sharing my outlook, and was told "You must treat a child with a strong hand; it is the only thing a child understands."  This unfortunately, is the understanding of the Arab world, and it holds at all levels.

There is an understanding and respect for power and the use of it.  There is a concept of honor.  We have no sense of the Arab sense of honor, and therefore they see us as having none.  When we do not use the strong hand when attacked and threatened, we abet Islamist extremism.  No hate spewing Muslim would accept his child speaking toward him with even half the venom he expresses toward other people.  These are people who kill their own daughters for honor, and their own brothers over land, and who punish recalcitrant donkeys by amputating a leg.

When we understood what this means, we will react to every affront to our own "honor" much differently.  Until we do, we will be seen as an unworthy people deserving of destruction.

I have no doubt that there are those in the Islamic world who would cheer the atomic annihilation of Israel - without a thought to the millions of Arabs that would be simultaneously destroyed - and the return of the "refugees" to this nuclear wasteland, and probably similar conditions to those which were here when the Ottomans neglected this area a hundred and fifty years ago.  This is the logical outcome of pandering to Islamist extremism, which unfortunately is quite common.

If we take the most extreme of the Israeli positions to their logical endpoint, we end up with a transfer of certain non-Jewish populations to states of identical ethnicity, culture and religion.  If we go beyond where any Israeli is talking and impute an added insidious level of extremism, we might imagine that the Israeli need for lebensraum will extend to what was supposed to be the original mandate.

It was suggested that it is Israeli extremism that we - I and my friend and fellow American and Israeli - should address instead of the stated existentialist threat that a nuclear Iran would bring.  At what cost?

Yes, Rabin was wrong, as was Begin for that matter, and Sharon, and every American administration - which is all of them - that pandered to Arabs for oil, that listened to Arab ministrations for peace in the West, ignoring simultaneous calls to revolution by the same people in Arabic, that accepted extremists because they were ours or because we thought we could control them, or that thought that extremists might subscribe to our western values and see our pleas for peace and compromise as something other than weakness.