A Critical Analysis of 'Real Islam'. Its People ... - Bukti dan Saksi

neighbors, … but time has proven that Mr. Arafat never, ever did. While accepting aid, Nobel peace
prizes, and red carpets from governments around the world, he has remade the Palestinians in his own
terrorist image. The Oslo Accords, crafted by naïve well-meaning State Department officials in 1993,
have proven to be a complete failure (18,000 terrorist attacks including 270 suicide bombings since then).
The State Department, unable to reconcile fact with Oslo fantasy, continues to churn out variants of the
same thinking. But the Palestinians continue to choose conflict and despair over autonomy or statehood as
fatah (the violent conquest of Israel) continues to be the chosen path, despite mounting evidence of its
inherit hopelessness and failure.
It has been a long intellectual and moral path to finally arrive at an inescapable and very distasteful
conclusion; that before it can possibly all end, the poorly led Palestinian people with their murderous
intents will likely need to be forced at bayonet point to abandon their despicable actions and to kick out or
jail the murders from amongst them. The same is true for all Islamic militants everywhere who practice
terrorism for political gain. Osama and his ilk (read: sympathetic governments, cultures, societies, friends,
financiers, enablers and, yes, even families) will never voluntarily change their tactics; they can only be
beaten into submission or swept away. To criticize Israeli responses to attacks on her, is to join
Palestinian leaders and their deranged supporters against all that we value the most. Most thinking
Americans are disgusted with shortsighted criticism by Arab and some European countries to actions the
US has taken against terrorists and their enablers in Afghanistan and Iraq. We should not adopt that same
pose against Israel when she does the same thing, for the same reasons, against the same enemy.
Note: In a recent article for The American Political Science Review, Robert Pape rigorously researched every
suicide-terrorist attack in the world from 1980 to 2001 from Lebanon, the West Bank, Sri Lanka, Chechnya, India,
Turkey and points between. He shows how suicide terrorism operates, and why it became a growth industry over the
last several decades. His work dispels the widespread notion that suicide terrorism is incomprehensible and without
possible remedy. One of Pape’s most important finding is that suicide terrorism is guided by clearly identifiable
strategic goals. Suicide terrorism occurs in clusters, and it is nearly always deployed as part of a larger politicalmilitary
campaign, carefully calibrated to accomplish the political goals of nationalists groups. Of suicide-terrorist
strikes from 1980 to 2001, a whopping 95 percent were undertaken as part of an organized political campaign, and
interestingly every suicide attack in the period under study was launched against a democracy. Hezbollah used this
weapon to force the United States and France from Lebanon in 1983; Hezbollah and Hamas have used it repeatedly
to force concessions from Israel; Tamil terrorists have used it against the Sri Lankan government; the Kurds against
Turkey; the Chechen rebels against Russia; the Kashmir rebels against India. This is an extraordinarily important
finding. Clearly, the terrorists have reached certain conclusions about democratic regimes. They think we are
"soft," and they surmise that democracies in particular are vulnerable to nihilistic coercion. Sadly in this regard
terrorists are not entirely wrong, for another pattern Pape unearths is that suicide terrorism against democracies is
largely effective. It is also more destructive than regular terrorism –from 1980 to 2001 suicide attacks made up 3
percent of total terrorist attacks but produced 45 percent of all casualties (and that’s not counting the carnage of
September 11). Moreover, of the eleven separate major suicide campaigns from 1980 to 2001, six produced
significant policy changes by the target state toward the terrorists’ major political goals. So suicide terrorism more
often than not achieves its strategic goals, which bodes ill for the future of democracy and free western societies in
general.