Same Tired Old Peace Plan?

 

President Trump is unveiling his economic part of the Deal of the Century which, if present rumors are correct, another attempt to send good money after bad. The rumors tell of a plan to economically revitalize the Palestinian Authority and relieve the economic malaise which is Gaza. If this sounds eerily familiar, that is because it is the same plan used by the Bush Roadmap and Clinton’s initial attempts at Oslo. In each case there were millions and billions of dollars flushed down the kleptocratic drain once more. Were these monies used to build someplace new in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt in order to allow the Palestinian Arabs to get out from under the kleptocratic regimes, then it would avoid being a means for wasting away the investments by granting contracts to relatives and friends for buildings which are seldom realized or dedicated to the entertainment and better living of the current elites. The embezzlement of any amount of funds is the norm and will negate any and all attempts at investing for the future. To those at the top of the financial tree, there is no time like the present for stealing from the mouths of the people, especially the poorest so as to keep them agitated and enraged. The same story will be fed to them about how Israel stands between the people and their rightful riches while their actual riches are being stolen. If President Trump and his supposed expert advisors, which include his son-in-law Jared Kushner, Jason Greenblatt, David Friedman and Kushner aide Avi Berkowitz, are the only ones who have seen the plan, then no one knows what is in the plan. For all we know, even President Trump has not been so privileged, though we hope he too has approved whatever plan is going to be presented. The end of the week and the presentation in Bahrain should provide a flurry of excitement followed by inertia setting in until the money disappears.

 

What is troubling is the introduction is to be presented around the concept of, “You can’t let your grandfather’s conflict hold back your children’s future.” The actual name will be the, “peace to prosperity” plan. The implication is for investments to be made financed by an international consortium with the intent of providing employment and economic incentives for building a functioning Palestinian Arab society. This is going forward leaving the same people who have murdered every effort at an economic investment and instead absconding with a percentage of the investments and using the remainder for financing the leaders’ life styles and making more weapons, explosives, incendiary bombs, and for their new program of using drones for targeted attacks upon Israelis, their farms and their communities as well as targeting on occasion the IDF positions. What is the attraction for President after President trying the same policy and expecting different results simply because they are willing to throw even more money than the last try. Believe us when we inform you that there is no amount of money so great that the leadership governing the Palestinian Arabs cannot find alternative pathways for it being spent. This is akin to giving a drug user money to make sure he stops using drugs and instead cleans up and gets a job. There is no amount of money which will survive the tangled finances of the Palestinian governance leaving anything for empowerment. The money will be used principally for paying terrorists and their families, the very first thing on Mahmoud Abbas’s agenda for any funds which are available by his own admission. So, just in case President Trump has other intentions for the United States taxpayers’ money, despite what he may desire, Mahmoud Abbas will use it first and foremost to pay those who have murdered and crippled Israelis and he even has a chart defining how much one receives depending on the number of victims and other variables (see below). With such evidence, we wonder how much more the world requires before they discover that terrorism and the murdering of Israelis (preferably Jewish Israelis) has been made into a profession with a very generous sized renumeration which is promised to continue for as long as the world continues sending the Palestinian Authority, basically meaning Mahmoud Abbas, funding these payments are first to be paid. Let this attitude and the fact that the best paying job is to go into Israel and murder an Israeli and then get arrested and you are now providing your family with economic security for as long as this fiasco is financed. Imagine how many murders Abbas will be able to finance with four or five or even six and a half billion with a ‘B’ dollar gifted intended to provide a better life for the average Palestinian Arab. Abbas is willing to spend the money doing exactly that, as long as the average Palestinian Arab family has at least one member willing to murder another human being, specifically an Israeli, which has shown to have been the incentive for all too many terror attacks.

 

Palestinian Authority Remunerations for Terrorists

 

There may be a real problem with President Trump’s Deal of the Century if it will be based on providing presumably financial incentives and aid for the average Palestinian Arab as attempting another economic build-up in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority ruled regions will take all the funds and nothing will change. The Palestinian Arab ruling elite cannot allow the people to become comfortable as comfortable people are difficult to pressure into committing terrorist acts. The central interest of the payments to those who have attacked and particularly killed Israelis only works if the region is depressed and there are insufficient jobs such that people become desperate and decide to sacrifice their freedom for financial security for their family. The Palestinian Arab governance is based on terrorist actions in the hope that such acts will drive the Jews from Israel allowing them to finally destroy the Zionist entity. What Abbas and the entire Arab world do not understand is that the Jews have waited for over two thousand years to return to their ancestral homelands under their own rule. This is our homelands and we plan on keeping them and really have nowhere else to go. Take the half of the Israeli population descended from the Jews forced from their homes across the Arab world of the Middle East and Northern Africa (MENA) over fifty or even sixty years ago. They are not able to return to their former lands as they would be murdered upon arrival. Then there are those descended from surviving the Holocaust who were unwelcomed in the towns and cities where they had been forced into ghettos or sent to the concentration camps. These also have no other homeland and such is the case for the vast majority of the Israeli population. This is home and the Arabs will never realize their dream of destroying all of Israel and removing the Jews from the land. One reason is that the real occupation is the Palestinian Arabs residing on lands promised to the Jewish People with the signature of King Faisal who headed the Arab League at the time of the signing of the Mandate System derived from the San Remo Conference and other treaties of the day. The lands west of the Jordan River were all set aside for the Jewish State and that is the reality under international law. But then again, the Arabs also believe that Andalusia should still belong to them despite the existence today of Portugal and Spain. But wait a few more years until Arabs and other Muslims start claiming regions of Europe which include entire cities and provinces after they have established Sharia courts and are enforcing Sharia on the populations both Muslim and the remainder who will be endangered. For what they will be facing, read about the spread of Islam across northern Africa and the frightening events which brought on a Christian reaction using similar tactics learned from Islam of convert or die. When it was found that Christians under Islamic rule were being forced to convert, the Spanish responded with the Inquisition. This made the Spanish Jews wanted by both Christians and Muslims so many of the Spanish Jews headed to safer climes accepting an invitation by Poland leading to an enlarged Polish Jewish population until World War II decimated the Jews of Poland.

 

Right now, just looking around the world and it is becoming more clear every week that the only place where Jews are guaranteed to be protected by the government is in Israel. The United States is mostly safe for Jews but that is changing with alarming speed. Europe is close to becoming unsuitable for Jews to reside with any comfort. Should Jeremy Corbyn win the British elections coming up, then there is the possibility that the British Jews will flee the British Isles for places more conducive to their general health and well-being. Some will make the mistake of believing and choosing the United States as their safe port which will only delay the final move which is coming for many Jews, that is to Israel. What will the world say when over three-quarters or even four-fifths of the world’s Jews have returned home to Israel. Will the United Nations still be claiming that we have no attachment to the land? Anybody who has witnessed the reclamation of these lands and the making them productive again from the disaster which greeted the initial Jewish immigrants coming back home in the mid to late nineteenth century, how can they not argue that the Jews and the land being one. Israel has taken a land which for all intents and purposes was forsaken swamps, rock strewn hills and a land devoid of people and spirit and made it into one of the most vibrant and productive societies on the planet. If the way the Jewish People were greeted and accepted by the land itself which had lain barren and undeveloped for two millennia while the Jews were refugees strewn across the face of the earth. The land and the people are one and neither is capable of reaching their ultimate achievements without one another. The Jewish People and the Lands of Israel are intertwined and each without the other are incomplete. Trump’s plan, if it is dependent upon an economic resurgence fueled by billions of dollars, we hope he is ready to watch just that many billions of dollars going completely to waste except for the tunnels, bombs and terrorists that they can purchase. That has been the result before with an uptick in the levels of violence every time the Palestinian Authority or Hamas members in Gaza received an influx of money no matter the source be it Qatar, the European Union or the United States. This is what has occurred every previous attempt to economically revitalize the Palestinian Arab society. Some things are so completely broken beyond the world’s ability to repair such that they would be best forgotten and allowed to finish deconstructing as they would have done long ago without the billions if not trillions or more which have been thrown at the Palestinian Arab societies without a single iota of progress or improvement. Here we go again with increased terrorism until the money runs dry, which it apparently never will until the world has been drained of its capital, and then the Palestinian society will finally collapse.

 

Beyond the Cusp

 

When the World Offers no Solutions

 

Back in the year 2000 the world demanded that Israel surrender the final remainder of the areas liberated when they were captured during the Six Day War in 1967 and defended in the Yom Kippur War in 1973 and suffered numerous terror wars ever since. Israel was pressured to allow the Palestinian Authority to have an opportunity completely free of any and all Israeli support or interference and show their ability to form a functional society with a firm economy in Gaza. In 2005 Israel pulled all Israelis out of Gaza including every settler, every last of their dead were reinterred fearing what would happen if their graves were left behind. History has taught that their bodies would be desecrated if not removed and reinterred safely within Israel. Finally, the final steps were performed in early September of 2005 as the IDF closed their bases and after destroying that which could not be transferred, the final IDF forces left handing the keys, so to speak, to Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority. This was the stagnated state that Gaza remained stuck in as there was little or no effort at development or improving the life of the average Gazan and terrorism continued unabated. In 2007 the tipping point was reached and Hamas declared open warfare with the Palestinian Authority. In bloody fighting, Hamas persevered taking over Gaza and have ruled the region as a dictatorial power appointing each leader rewarding those who were the most active in their war to destroy Israel. Hamas allowed for Islamic Jihad to also set up in Gaza as well as to a lesser degree the Islamic State and a collection of other terrorist entities and criminal gangs. Gaza has remained in this hellish state without any attempts to establish any economic engine other than those necessary for their war on Israel and a small sector servicing the terror leaders and their families and the relative few who have gathered great wealth servicing the terror war or operating the black market.

 

The average Gazan has a bleak outlook of the future as the economic structure of Gaza deteriorates with every offensive against Israel. Hamas and Islamic Jihad always set their rocket launchers in neighborhoods other than their own and thus have slowly destroyed much of the Gaza Strip ruining economic opportunities and making more people destitute without any future worth living. It should be no surprise that the majority of Gazans would prefer nothing more than to relocate and live anywhere that life could approach normalcy. There has been a slow and mostly illegal emigration out of Gaza without any program to aid these Palestinian Arabs in setting up a new life. Currently, the majority of electricity in Gaza is provided by Israel. The majority of natural gas comes from Israel. Much if not all of clean water comes from Israel. The Hamas and Islamic Jihad elite make sure that these provisions power their homes and lives to a far larger extent than that provided the remainder of Gazans. This is the sorry excuse for the governance in Gaza and the economic situation which it has degenerated into threatens to make Gaza into merely a terrorist engine. As far as the Hamas rulers of Gaza are concerned, the lack any semblance of an economic engine for the majority of the entire region forcing more and more Gazans into terrorist ranks is great as makes their breeding of future terrorists a far easier endeavor. For Israel, Gaza is a problem with no easy solutions and one obvious one. The unfortunate reality is the world, led by Europe, refuses to even couch the only solution for the people of Gaza, Israel and Egypt, namely for Israel to sponsor an exit strategy for the Gazans who desire starting their lives elsewhere. The European Union demands that Israel deal with Hamas through Egypt or the United Nations making ceasefire after ceasefire which they know Hamas and Islamic Jihad will break within weeks leading to their demand that a new ceasefire be negotiated with Israel being made to pay an ever greater price in blood, the cost of the interceptors and the death and injury of her people along with the lost economic production. Perhaps the time has come to ignore the United Nations, the European Union, foreign governments and every other busybody and do what will serve both Israel and the Gazan people the most favorable results to solve the situation to the satisfaction of all involved who are not involved with terrorism.

 

The Two Gazas with One Pristine and the Other Ravaged

 

The problem can be permanently resolved but only if the rest of the world simply allow Israel to resolve the challenge in a manner conducive to all involved by removing the terrorist governance and reintegrate the region under Israeli control. The first stage would come in response to the upcoming rocket barrage from either Hamas, Islamic Jihad or whatever Gazan terror outfit which decides to restart hostile action. Israel should provide the United Nations, European Union and the rest of the notable busybodies that the next failure to keep peace in Gaza will result in Israel retaking Gaza as was presumed to be what would be the result of any failure of the Palestinian Authority. As the Palestinian Authority lost control in 2007, Israel was supposed to retake Gaza immediately after Hamas took control. This was the promise of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and United States President George W. Bush when the Gaza pullout was agreed upon by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Well, when Hamas took over Gaza in a coup in 2007, those American politicians apparently had a very serious case of amnesia and Israel was not provided coverage by the American administration to retake Gaza as they had promised. The rest is, as they say, history. One of the problems is that every rocket which is detected and determined to likely strike an inhabited region, the interceptor launched to destroy each one coasts approximately fifty-thousand-dollars in order to prevent what is likely a fifty to five-hundred-dollar rocket. That is another price which Israel could live without its necessity. Every Israeli saved by the Iron Dome is priceless, but there is still a price attached to every interception. This situation as it currently exists is unsustainable for Israel and even worse for the people of Gaza.

 

The solution is to allow Israel to conquer Gaza removing the terror entities forcing their leadership into exile and starting to undo the ecological and economic disasters which have resulted from their terrorist governance and its complete lack of concern for the people and the ecological situation leading to the Gazan groundwater being unfit to drink. The lives of the average Gazan outside the wealthier strip along the Mediterranean Sea, lives in an ecologic disaster area where when the tires are being burned along the border and the wind changes and blows from out of the east, the air is choking, as already stated, the ground water is undrinkable and the economic opportunities are all but nonexistent outside of joining the terrorist armies. The solution is the same as was applied to Eastern Jerusalem where the Palestinian Arabs are permitted all rights outside of political and even there they are permitted to vote in Jerusalem and neighborhood elections. Their sole restriction is from national elections as this will need to await decisions on providing them with full Israeli citizenship at some distant time. The Gazans can be permitted to have political rights within Gaza and its cities but remain under Israeli security with the IDF being fully operational within Gaza. Gaza would be returned to Israeli rule with their former autonomy reversed as was supposed to occur should the experiment fail, which it did in magnificent fashion. As the Palestinian Authority has failed repeatedly to form a unified governance with Hamas and Islamic Jihad, then it should be the right for Israel to retake control over Gaza replacing their terrorist governance. No nation should or is forced to live with terrorist ruling a region on their borders, let alone a region which technically remains part of Israel legally. Once Israel removes Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the first step would be to offer Gazans with an incentive to relocate in such a manner that nations who desire to provide the Gazans with a place to relocate would receive incentives in proportion to the numbers they allow to relocate within their borders. The incentives will overcome the trepidation for some nations and these relocation incentives will be split between the Gazans and the nations accepting them. Then the rebuilding and cleanup of Gaza can begin. With time Gaza will once again become productive. This is the only means by which Gaza can be made livable for those who remain. Why the United Nations, European Union and so many others wish to force the Gazans to live under such oppressive and unhealthy an environment under terrorist rulers just to impose a constant threat against Israel is beyond disturbing. Such disregard for human life is horrifying and just causing Israel difficulties is not sufficient reason that these people to be left at the mercies of such horrific conditions and it does not serve Israel to permit this situation to fester. The time has come for Israel to exercise its rights under the original agreement reached for the Gaza disengagement and reestablish her rule over the region. And if such works in Gaza, then next it should be applied to the Palestinian Authority regions in the Shomron where there already is some level of such cooperation. The Palestinian Arabs should be permitted to enjoy much the same benefits as Israeli Arabs with the possibility of further political rights over time. Israel needs to do what serves her the best and if such improves the lives of Palestinian Arabs, then all the better.

 

Beyond the Cusp

 

Treating Terrorism in a Modern Democratic Governance

 

Terrorism and a Democratic free society pose problems which are not present in any of the totalitarian style governances such as Communism, Monarchies, Fascism or Religious totalitarianism. In these governances the security forces can literally close down almost all activity relegating their populations to carefully orchestrated movements. Work transportation can be set by government, shopping for groceries can be set to limited times and all other such commerce limited extremely or closed for the time period of the emergency. By turning the society into regulated movements with careful choreography then anything not conforming to the plan is immediately obvious and a concentration of forces will quickly return things to the ordered schedule. In such a society the comfort of the people is secondary to security. If a society is prepared to give up all freedoms for the appearance and possibly improved security, then security will be increased, but at what price. In a Democratic form of governance the people’s freedoms come before anything the government desires to do and the people presumably set the level they desire on freedoms and government works around those freedoms.

 

Let’s look at a simply example that any man will understand and women will be amused though they would never admit so. It is Sunday morning and there is a one day sale at the mall and her favorite department store is adding additional savings above those the mall offers on purchases. Of course the Big Game comes on at 2:30 PM in the afternoon and it is approaching 11:00 in the morning and she demands that the two of you go have brunch at the mall and do a “little” shopping. Hopes of seeing the Big Game getting dimmer and dimmer, you do what any husband knows is the less painful thing and ready for the mall as quickly as possible so maybe, just maybe you will catch the last period of the game where you will have to provide your own level of excitement that the rest of the game presumably had generated. In a democracy such a decision would be voted upon and hopefully in the entire community men would all watch the game and the women, or most women, would converge on the mall and all would be happy. The real world is never that smooth and the bumps are always unexpected and raise the ire with government as somebody has to be blamed and they are as good a target as anybody, especially when you are changing the burst tire after hitting a pothole at fifty miles an hour on your way to work. You know the boss will be less than understanding, so the government is all to blame for not repairing the road; and if they are repairing the road, then why during rush hour making you late for work. Face it, government is always wrong, period.

 

So, terrorism, where is it that life sits on this. First thing is we all know that the routine of insanity we go through at the airport with the TSA (Transportation Safety Administration) experts makes life miserable and searchs every octogenarian while ignoring any profiling which might prove effective. This is the very TSA which misses detection of 90% of items in tests run by the agency itself. This government employment boondoggle offers somewhere between none and a miniscule amount of professionalism or competence and adds nothing to the safety of flying. We all know that if each airline was responsible for their own security, then we would see automated detection systems installed around the concourses and they would work together to provide such airtight security systems which have proven well over 90% effective in detecting suspicious persons. One of the, if not the, safest airports in the world, Ben Gurion outside Tel Aviv, has some innovative security as described in this article. But then Israel had little choice but to be on the top of security and anti-terror systems, and there lies one of the greatest terror fighting tools Israel had to develop and was likely the most difficult, but establish this system they have.

 

Israel is the one place you see just as many people running towards the explosion or gunfire of a terror attack as are fleeing. The ones heading towards the attack are IDF personnel with weapons (yes, the IDF soldiers trained in use of their weapon in the public sphere carry their weapons with them 24/7 and consider themselves always on duty), police, security personnel, first responders, health care professionals, emergency care personnel, motorcycle first responders (they treat survivors and perform triage and necessary emergency life-saving treatment such as stopping bleeding and immobilizing injured areas etc.), and armed citizens licensed to carry weapons (in Israel to own a weapon you must pass a course or have proven training in public use of weapons as all owners are encouraged during heightened security times to carry their weapon and these were many of the responders who saved lives during the stabbing intifada recently faced in Israel). People you pass every day on the streets and in the halls in Israel may very well be the person who saves your life in the instance of a terror attack and this does not cover others with military and security expertise who are retired or in new professions who also are likely to run towards the attack instead of away. A trained public is the first and best line of defense but takes decades to get trained and functioning as intended.

 

But Israelis have developed systems which work with minimal input or even independently monitoring entire crowds of people looking for particular actions some of which are subconscious but found by researchers to appear on people who should be suspected and potentially watched more closely. Another system asks each individual four simple questions which are as innocuous as anyone could be asked and upon the facial expressions it picks out things which would be mostly unnoticeable to even a professional but are cues to subliminal indicators and uses these to warn of potential criminal or terrorist activity potentials. These systems have been tested in trials and have proven their effectiveness. Within a couple of years such systems will be placed in airports, malls, movie theaters, at public events, sports stadiums and across the length and breadth of many major metropolitan areas monitoring everything people do throughout the monitored areas. These systems may become so sophisticated as to be capable of using even marginally decent camera images or cities might offer purchase subsidies in exchange to hooking their systems up to the city surveillance systems expanding their web even more intrusively. But currently we need to rely on more basic human fallible systems with people watching and taking off our shoes and who knows what else just to fly off to visit the grandkids or whatever. The United States has established a frequent flier and wealthy folks go around for airport security where one goes through a precheck and is given a biometric card such that a finger print or other measure scanned and matching the card electronic record they pass right through shoes still tied and belts in place without the aggravation and indignity of the TSA rigmarole.

 

Currently most terrorist prevention must be carried out in secret and without the public being aware of their successes. We will most definitely hear about every fail as that will be the headlines for days, possibly weeks. When they fail then their following investigations are often very public which puts the government in a tough spot as the public demands to know what they have discovered and what is being done to assure such an attack never again strikes their fair city and government needs to keep much of what they learn and what they plan to do and change in their techniques known only to them if these changes and new lines of information are to remain effective. New procedures and lines of gathering information and other intelligence gathering systems must remain unknown to the terrorists in order for them to remain viable. That is why much of what we are told after a terror attack seems so lame, lame the terrorists already know or can know and it will not make their operations more efficient and capable of being undetected, everything else must remain hidden for the people to be best protected. Such secrecy is technically undemocratic and more autocratic making those involved in such security aspects of life more informed than the average person on the street. For reasons which are less than logical many people get all forms of upset when they know the government is not being fully open with them, especially on a subject as vitally important as terrorists and the dangers they pose. On another side, would the public expect that every physicist working on the latest nuclear warheads as government workers reveal everything about their work in the New York Times? Of course not, that would be foolish and dangerous. Defending against terrorism is exactly the same, it needs to be kept unknown generally if it is to serve to the advantage of the nation and make everybody that much more safe.

 

That understood, there is still much we can know which will not compromise or stop terrorism. We can know that the Islamic State is not the JV and where the average terror fighter in the Islamic State is not Kobe Bryant, their top planners and bomb makers are Kobe Bryant as far as their line of specialties are concerned. That is important for us to realize as is the fact that they want the entire non-Muslim world to either convert to Islam, pay a special tax to them for the privilege of not becoming a Muslim or dead, and by dead we mean as painfully, embarrassingly, and video-shockingly as humanly possible. Anybody who has watched their videos they chose to showcase to the world realized that they are as imaginative as they are sick and mentally disturbed. What else we need to realize is that these people are considered great minds who are making Muhammad’s and Allah’s dreams for the world be realized. Think Inquisition and you begin to realize that the Western World already survived and moved past the concept of a single world religion. Some religious groups in the West moved beyond that earlier than others, but no need to go into that.

 

The other thing one need realize is there is no such thing as religious terrorism. All terrorism is political. Your religion can drive your politics but terrorism is all about who rules over who and that is political. Catholicism, also known as The Church, was as much a political body as it was religious. Think Cardinal Richelieu against King Louis XIII and Queen Anne (of Austria) and the Three Musketeers? The Church in France had their own armies and the King had two armies, one of the Realm with which he would defend France herself and a royal guard, the Musketeers, who protected the crown mostly from British intrigues and the forces of Cardinal Richelieu. There was another French Monarch who was very well appreciated by the Church; his name eventually became Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne, King of the Franks and protector of the Church. Those were earlier times when a small kingdom could come close to conquering half the known world; think Ottoman Empire where a small tribe from northeastern Turkey conquered much of the Caliphate and held the lands of Middle East and Northern Africa slowly losing ground before being felled during World War I. One could say that the world changed breaking between before and after World War I. Before World War I where the world had empires and royalty ruled absolutely and post-World War I where the Ottoman Empire and Austrian-Hungarian Empire were split into individual countries and the rule of Kings and Queens in Europe gave way to representative governments and the Middle East and North Africa were ruled as colonies presumably to prepare for eventual representative governments which proved expensive and was untenable leading to simply deserting these nations soon after World War II and soon after dictators rose to rule in the vast majority of these countries and their arbitrary borders were much to blame and are now collapsing.

 

What will rise to replace the dictatorial monarchial governances in the Middle East and North Africa will also have much to do with the potential of terrorism growing worse or lessoning into the future. Democratic governance with a separation of Church, Synagogue, Mosque and State will result in a decrease in terrorism as each elected government will face the threat as well as the West and will thus find their bases being destroyed by the governments of the countries they use as their bases currently. On the other side there is a possibility that something of the ilk of the Islamic State could become resurgent and reinstate the Caliphate on the lands which originally constituted the Ottoman Empire and striving to reestablish the entirety of the original Caliphate which at its largest stretched from Spain and southern France ending at Tours, see Charles the Hammer Martel, all the way through then Persia stopping in northern India, see Taj Mahal. The likelihood of an empire rising across the Middle East and Northern Africa are very low as long as there is an elected and largely secular government in Egypt. I would be more concerned with a Muslim Brotherhood ruled Egypt than the Islamic State as Egypt has a very modern and powerful military as far as equipment of arms. They have modern fighter-bombers, tanks, rifles, artillery along with support, control and communications systems. Most of their current systems are from the United States with some older USSR equipment and are contracting for modern, state of the art Russian equipment. The Saudi Royal Family also stand in command of a modern military as does Iran who have the advantage that much of their equipment is manufactured in Iran. Then there is Israel, the cork in the bottle as many a military expert has referred to her. The instability in the Middle East and parts of Northern Africa is rife with terrorist entities, some intertwined fighting one another such as Islamic State, al-Nusra Front (al-Qaeda), Hezballah (Iran/Syria) and numerous smaller terror entities all embroiled in the remains of Syria and into Iraq and then the tribal groups some aligned with Islamic State, some with al-Qaeda and still others Muslim Brotherhood and some just for themselves in the imbroglio formerly known as Libya, aka the mess that Hillary made.

 

Cardinal Richelieu against King Louis XIII and Queen Anne of Austria

 

The solution to bring much of terrorism to an end is not that simple. One of the people at the forefront of this and with the correct idea is the current, as of this writing, President of Egypt Abdel Fattah al-Sisi who has called for a religious reformation of Islam and demanding that a path forward must include the ability for Islam to exist amongst the other religions and under secular governance and end its supremacy complex where it demands it be the sole religion and rule over everything which can be within its domain. Islam currently has no limitations on the extent of its domain and demands at a minimum it rule over the entire earth and that every person be a Muslim, eventually the exact same sect and potentially even learning from the same Imam. Wars in Islamic history have been fought over which leader was the legitimate leader of all Islam and that remains a point of contention to this day. There is the split between Sunni and Shiite which is the largest divide plus there are the Salafists, the Muslim Brotherhood, Islamic State, al-Qaeda and who knows how many other lesser sects or teachings all of which claim to hold the only true and pure form of Islam. As we have said here is the remarkable similarity to Highlander as in the end, there can be only one. Some of this is a direct result of the creed of an old Arab Bedouin saying: “I, against my brothers, I and my brothers against my cousins, I and my brothers and my cousins against the world (the stranger).” This mentality refuses anything or anyone different and is incapable of incorporating anything new or different into their lives or their ethics and politics. This is what has led to centuries of warfare as it was once the belief of humankind the world over. The initial expression of treating the stranger as a welcome guest was formalized in the Old Testament as was exemplified by Abraham and the way he would greet strangers by doing everything to be a gracious host. But such has not become the accepted norm around the globe with many cases as far from the norm as possible. Some areas on the globe have even moved further from such an open and accepting model. Much of the world still sees the other as a threat and as something or someone to be conquered or worse, destroyed completely. Until the world reaches a community of inclusiveness, terrorism will exist as a method to intimidate and destroy the other, the more technologically and often sociologically advanced and accepting ethos from what classically would be called the barbarians at the gates, or within the gates, depending on the realities. Many in the West are not seeing the barbarians at their gates and are opening their gates wide to allow them in in the mistaken belief that their great loving and accepting nature will win them over. History teaches us otherwise. We once before lost the technologically most advanced culture to the barbarians even if Rome had devolved spiritually and socially. The question is will we repeat that history again. The last time it brought on a darker age for much of the globe and allowed another culture to spread across much of the known world stopped only at some of the least expected of areas. Will we watch the world take a huge step backwards? More than likely as there is an entire liberal elite who thinking they know all better than anybody else are rushing headlong to disaster just to prove they were right, what if they are wrong?

 

Beyond the Cusp