King Sweeney And The Peace Process

By: Steven Plaut

Published: August 15th, 2003

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One of the unchallenged axioms of American civic
religion is that each and every group of people on earth must
consist of an “overwhelmingly vast majority of decent
hard-working honest people who want peace and are tolerant
and freedom-loving and anti-violence.”

It is an unchallengeable presumption of this theology
that “vast majorities” of not only each and every
racial/religious/ethnic group may be so described, but even vast
majorities of each and any subgroup within society. Hence we
even sometimes hear assertions that the vast majority of
prisoners, prostitutes, drug users, gang members, etc. are also
decent, honest, peace-loving, honorable people.

The one imponderable in American civic theology is the
idea that somewhere there just might be a group of people the
majority of whom are not peace-loving or honest or tolerant.
But the simple fact of the matter is that the overwhelmingly
vast majority of Arabs are not opposed to violence.

Acknowledging this could not be more timely.
Commentator after commentator in

the Western media discuss the reactions in the Muslim world to
the U.S. bombings of terror facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan
with the self-righteous fawning observation that Islam is a
religion of peace, that the terrorists are as unrepresentative of
true Islam as IRA bombers are

of Christianity. Each commentator goes out of his way to
emphasize how we all understand that the vast majority of
Muslims oppose terrorism and violence.

The only problem with this is that it is simply false. The
vast majority of Germans supported Hitler, supported wars of
aggression, and supported genocide. The vast majorities of
Hutus and Tutsis support massacres of the other. Similarly, the
vast majority of Arabs support terror and violence and war.
They do not see anything wrong with the blowing up of
hundreds of

civilians in an embassy of the United States or of an office
building of Argentine Jews. They see any act of force taken
against the perpetrators of such things to be itself a crime. (This
is not to say that the vast majority of each and every subgroup
of Muslims support such barbarism; the

Turks and Malays come to mind as possible exceptions.)

Islam is a religion of peace for Muslims and for
subordinated non-Muslims living

under the clear domination of Muslims.

The vast majority of Muslims do not personally engage
in violence and terror in their daily lives. The vast majority of
Germans did not take personal part in the Holocaust. Indeed,

as a blanket statement regarding Arabs in Israel, I would say
that most Arabs behave in a far more polite daily manner than
Jews, exhibiting on average far better manners and more
consideration than do Jewish Israelis. But of course that is
hardly the point.

The vast majority of Muslims support the random and
indiscriminate use of terror and violence against Jews and
against Americans. The reactions of Muslims everywhere are
there on the TV screens for all to see. The vast majority of
Arabs openly or secretly approved of Bin Laden's campaign of
terror against Americans, including the bombing of the World
Trade

Center. Arab political thought is fundamentally Orwellian:
murder is resistance, prevention of murder or retaliation for
murder is terror. Muslims were outraged by events in the
Balkans because Muslims were being massacred; if Bosnians
and Albanians were massacring Serbs, they would have trouble
hiding their approval.

We have known for decades that the vast majority of
Muslims also approve of Palestinian atrocities and bombings
directly against Jews. There is no act of savagery directed
against Israelis or Jews of which they will not approve by
enormous majorities, and no act of defense by Israel that they
will legitimize.

Public opinion polls are not conducted in most Muslim
countries, but if they were they would no doubt reflect this
popular approval. Polls are conducted among Palestinians and
they show without exception that most Palestinians approve of
suicide bombings and other atrocities committed against Jews.
The vast majority of Palestinians supported Saddam Hussein.
The vast majority support Al-Qaeda. The vast majority would
approve if Iran dumped chemical weapons or nerve gas on Tel
Aviv. The majority think Hitler was a hero. These are the
people with whom Oslo and the road map are supposed to
produce peace.

Oh, you might object, but Arafat denounced Bin laden
and even endorsed the U.S. bombings in Sudan and
Afghanistan. Well, yes he did, no doubt hoping to get the U.S.
to force Israel to make a few more concessions as a quid pro
quo, and he was no doubt as sincere as were the IRA folks who
denounced the bombing of Omagh. But the Palestinian fascist
hordes, taking their signals from the PLO, know he is posturing
and winking and these folks support terrorism by
overwhelming majorities.

The entire Oslo peace process and road map peace
processes are based on the naive American civic dogma
(adopted by Israeli politicians) holding that the vast majority of

Palestinians must want peace with Israel.

They do not.

Unless of course one means the sort of peace that
prevailed and prevails in traditional Islamic societies, where the
non-Muslims live as low-profile minorities with no political
sovereignty. (The vast majority of Germans, one supposes,
would also have favored peace in 1940 if they could have
gotten it on Hitler's terms.)

The vast majority of Palestinians want to see Israel
destroyed, and support violence against Jews. Once Israel is
destroyed and large portions of its population are killed or
dispersed, no doubt the remainder will be permitted to live as a
minority under conditions resembling those of the Copts in
Egypt or the Armenians and Bahais in Iran. That is the only
peace Arabs support by majorities.

Sweeney was the name of an Irish king who believed he
was a bird and spent his life in treetops. (Really.) The Oslo and
road map peace processes are the direct function of the
Sweeneyization of the political establishment of Israel. Peres
Sweeney and Beilin Sweeney and now Sharon Sweeney
adopted the wishful thinking of American civic religion and
presumed that the vast majority of Palestinians preferred peace
and prosperity to continuing war and violence. They took it as
axiomatic that Palestinians would compromise over land and
sovereignty because, after all, they — the Israelis — were
willing to do so. Their evidence that Palestinians would place
peace above land is that Jews do so. Their belief that economic
prosperity would interest Palestinians more so than irredentist
aggression and terror is that decent, honorable people anywhere
should feel this way.

In short, Oslo is the godchild of King Sweeney taking
over the Israeli political establishment.

These Sweeney weenies are the same people who refuse
to even ponder the possibility that the vast majorities of
Palestinians (and other Arabs) not at all peace-seeking (at least
not when it comes to Israel and the U.S.), are not anti-violence,
are not anti-terror. In other words,

Oslo and the road map are based upon a fundamental denial of
empirical reality. Like the old Peter and Gordon song from the
60's, it is based upon the Sweeneyish assertion that “I don't care
what they say / I won't stay in a world without love.”

And what happens to Sweeneys who live in unlit
corners of the earth without love? They pretend to be birds and
rise above such mundane things as reality to live in treetops of
utopian dreams. Leaving the rest of us to face terror, murder,
violence, Arab fascism, and threats of genocidal extermination.

Steven Plaut is a professor at the University of Haifa.
His book ?The Scout? is available at Amazon.com. He can be
contacted at steven_plaut@yahoo.com

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