Feel Good Cease Fires and Islamic Hudnas Produce Future Middle East Wars!
September 26, 2006
http://www.tribulationperiod.com/
The following article by Thomas Sowell, which came from the Jewish World Review, is the best straight forward, historically accurate, and understandable analysis of perhaps the biggest problem in the Middle East, namely, that most Americans do not understand premature cease fires create future wars, not peace. Quick fix, pressure relieving, cease fires are merely leading down a trail to a final world show down where their will be no cease fire, no terrorist hudna, but a fight-to-the-finish in the Middle East. The United States and the other world powers have, in each of the many conflicts between Israel
and the Arabs, called Israel off before they were able to win a decisive victory by conquering Cairo, Amman, Hizbollah, or Damascus, and the cease-fires have kept its Arab enemies in the ball-game for a last-minute, game-saving field goal.
Please read the Thomas Sowell Article and our comments on U.S. Troop withdrawal which follow it.
Begin Thomas Sowell Article
Will Cease-Fires Never Cease?
By Thomas Sowell
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com
How many cease-fires have there been in the Middle East — or is the number too large to remember? Over the past half century, there must have been more cease-fires in the Middle East than in the rest of the world combined.
What will this latest cease-fire do? It will give Hezbollah a breather from Israeli retaliation and allow them time to get new shipments of military equipment from Iran, rebuild their military infrastructure and prepare for the next round of attacks on Israel.
Why do these phony cease-fire scenarios keep getting repeated? Because there are too many people, including many in the media, who take the corrupt windbags at the U.N. seriously — so our political leaders have to act as if they take the U.N. seriously as well.
This is a costly charade. Among its costs are human lives. U.N. cease-fires are the ultimate in feel-good decisions made by people who pay no price for the repercussions.
No one in his right mind believes that either the Lebanese army or the U.N. “peacekeepers” will disarm Hezbollah. The track record of both is virtually a guarantee that Hezbollah will be able to resume war against Israel at whatever time and place it chooses.
Most people have no idea how small Israel is — and therefore how vulnerable every part of it is to its surrounding enemies.
New Hampshire is considered to be a small state but it is larger than Israel. So are 45 other states. Lake Erie is larger than Israel and Lake Michigan more than twice as large.
The Middle Eastern places we hear about are very close to one another. From Israel’s capital in Jerusalem to Bethlehem in the Palestinian territory is only a fraction of the distance from Washington to Baltimore.
Most people are as uninformed about the history of the Middle East as they are about its geography. Supposedly Jews took over the Palestinians’ homeland in order to create the state of Israel.
But there was no Palestinian homeland. That whole region belonged to the Ottoman Empire until the Ottoman Empire was dismembered after its defeat in the First World War.
Christians, Jews, and Muslims had all lived in Palestine for centuries. In the course of carving up the Ottoman Empire to create new nations, the British set aside a small part of it for Jews — and after violent objections from the Arabs, stalled for years on letting this bit of land become an independent nation.
Jews lived in Palestine long before there was a state of Israel and even before there was an Ottoman Empire. In 1939, Winston Churchill commented that Jews in Palestine “made the desert bloom.” The resulting prosperity of the area attracted both more Jews and more Arabs, including some Arabs whose descendants would later claim that Jews took over their country.
After World War II and the Holocaust, Jews seeking refuge turned to their promised home in the Middle East
and battled the British to seize control and proclaim the independence of Israel.
In the face of polarizing hostility and violence in surrounding Arab countries, Jews fled these countries and many were absorbed into Israel. Meanwhile, Arab countries urged Arabs living in Israel to leave before these countries’ planned attacks with the aim of destroying the new state.
It was the Arabs, rather than the Israelis, who created a massive Palestinian refugee problem. While Jewish refugees were absorbed into the general population of Israel, Palestinians in Arab countries were kept in refugee camps for generations — promised a right to return after Israel was conquered and the Jews displaced.
After the most complete failure of the many Arab efforts to annihilate Israel in 1967, the Israelis took over lands of strategic value, such as the Golan Heights, in order to prevent them from being used in future military attacks.
In all the years when these lands had been in the hands of Arab states, no one made them a Palestinian homeland. But now it has become a fervent cause to force Israel to create a Palestinian state that the Arabs never created.
None of this matters to those consumed by hate in the Middle East or those in the West wanting feel-good cease-fires, without bothering to think through the actual consequences.
End Article by Thomas Sowell
The Effect of the Withdrawal of American Forces on the Middle East!
The withdrawal of American forces from Iraq is coming. The political pressure on the candidates of the two major parties is such that I am confident a time table of withdrawal will have been establ
ished prior to the end of 2008.
It is becoming impossible to keep the in-country ethnic groups away from each others throats, and the Turks and Iranians have a great desire to take over the northern oil fields of the Kurds as well as to clear an unblocked zone for troop movements and weapons transport into Syria and Lebanon for a Jihad against Israel.
The withdrawal of American forces from Iraq will leave the door wide open for a Jihad to be launched against Israel from the north by ten Arab nations. There will be no Jihad against Israel as long as American troops are in Iraq, but there will be as soon as they pull out.
The Iraqi democratic government will fall apart in short order, and logistics for the transport of military equipment for the Jihad will then flow freely from Iran across Iraq and Syria to Hizbullah in southern Lebanon. The southern borders of both Lebanon and Syria will be full of equipment and manpower for a lightening Jihad strike against Israel.
U.S. logistics, involved in getting a sufficiently strong American force back in place in the Middle East in time to stop the Arab nations from driving Israel into the Negev, are such that we are talking about several months, and I believe it will take Islam less than a month to push the Israelis south of Beersheba. The Israelis have soundly defeated Egypt, Syria, and Jordan in every war they have fought, which has given them a great confidence to believe they can do the same over and over again.
The United States, Israel’s staunchest ally, has this same confidence in the Israeli IDF and IAF.
This confidence is going to be the undoing of Israel.
The United States politicians and its population will be rejoicing that our troops are finally back safe at home, and will have no desire or will to send them back into the Middle East. They will believe Israel can handle it, and by the time they realize they cannot, Israel will be in the Negev, and a truce will be worked out in the United Nations, just as it was in the 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973 wars in which Israel was involved – But this time it will be Israel who loses the war.
Once Israel is in the Negev, the Arab forces will be delighted to have a truce. They will have the best part of Israel in their possession.
The Bible describes Israel as “the land from Dan to Beersheba,” and that is exactly what the forces of Islam want to conquer.
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