The following editorial is the complete version of a much condensed Letter to the Editor that was submitted to the Scranton Times-Tribune, the Pocono Record and the News Eagle on the visit of Iranian President Ahmedinejad to Columbia University last month.

As Bernard Lewis and other historians of Islam have pointed out, Muslim states have historically tended to be far more tolerant of Jews, their fellow people of the Book, than have, for example, most Christian polities, if one accepts "inferior status" in the mediaeval Muslim world as "acceptable." Traditionally, Islam believed in co-existence with the Jews whose religion, unlike Christianity, was not considered a competitor threatening Islam. Because Judaism was a monotheistic religion, the prophet Mohammed attributed an inferior status to it.

Haim Harari, an Israeli scientist who has taken a keen interest in world affairs once commented that “dealing with suicide murderers and with their dispatchers by current international law is like filing a malpractice suit against a poisonous snake.” Harari was referring to the fact that changes in international law are absolutely critical if the war against Islamic terrorism is to be won.

"Tell you what, if you recognize Israel as a sovereign state in the Middle East, prove you are dismantling your terrorist infrastructures, stop sending your suicide bombers into our cities, towns and marketplaces, stop inciting hatred and spreading blood libels through your media, your mosques, your educational system and throughout your society, stop brainwashing your children into believing that the fast track to virgins in Paradise requires them to become human grenades, and stop firing missiles at us, we'll come to the table with a settlement offer that will bring both our societies peace and prosperity."

(This speech was delivered to the audience who attended the B’nai B’rith brunch honoring David Fallk on Sunday morning, November 16, 2003 at the Scranton JCC)

With all the indignation shown over allegations that Israel is causing a humanitarian crisis and exercising “collective punishment” on Gaza’s Palestinians, few have stopped to consider the possibility that this “crisis” has been engineered by Hamas to score a propaganda victory against Israel using the gullible Western media as its vehicle.* This “crisis” has all the markings of a pre-arranged publicity event - skillful manipulation of the Western media, the use of falsehoods and selective information, staged atrocities, and all the other time-honored methods used by unscrupulous propagandists. Since the Palestinians staged the death of the child Mohammed al-Dura in his father's arms back in September 2000, Palestinian propaganda has not enjoyed such international success as it is enjoying today in Gaza.

The French playwright Moliere once wrote that hypocrisy is a vice that often passes for virtue. The 2001 Durban Conference was such an example. Three days prior to 9/11, the first World Conference against Racism (WCAR) organized by the United Nations in Durban, South Africa ended. Its stated intention was to promote tolerance between nations. Instead, it became a festival for promoting hatred of Israel and the West by some of the most repressive, dictatorial regimes in the world encouraged by European and American NGOs.

On February 1st, the Winograd Commission issued its long-awaited report in the Second Lebanon War. The Report Summary notes that “the unclassified Report does not include the many facts that cannot be revealed for reasons of protecting the state's security and foreign affairs”, yet much analysis on the classified aspects of the Report has been leaked out over the past year and a half. While the Report attacked the mismanagement of the War from both the political and military perspectives, it does not detail the disclosures that could represent an embarrassment to both the Olmert administration and Bush administrations were they to be delineated. In the end, the Commission noted that “the 2nd Lebanon war as a serious missed opportunity” and that “this outcome was primarily caused by the fact that, from the very beginning, the war had not been conducted on the basis of a deep understanding of the theatre of operations, of the IDF's readiness and preparedness, and of basic principles of using military power to achieve political and diplomatic goals.” The only consolation is that significant military, political and scientific changes and advances have been undertaken in the time that has passed. Should another such confrontation take place in the near future, it can be fairly assumed that both Hezbollah and Hamas will be vanquished.

U.S. foreign policy in the Arab Middle East is now shifting from actively promoting democratic change to the previous policy of realpolitik - a policy based on the appeasement of dictators and despots that was discredited in the post 9/11 world because it had failed to secure American interests and security even in its heyday in the 1980s and early 1990s.

The recent meeting between former President Jimmy Carter and Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal in Damascus has once again highlighted the perils of negotiating with terrorists. Carter emerged from that meeting and declared that Hamas, under certain conditions, was prepared to recognize Israel. Like so many other naïve idealists, he does not understand that Hamas was, is and remains an uncompromising jihadist organization bent on the conquest of its neighbor, regardless of what it says.

When prisoners in New Folsom State Prison near Sacramento become adherents to the political ideology of radical Wahhabi Islam, form a terrorist cell while in prison (Jamat Ul-Islam Is Saheeh) and plot terrorist acts against three National Guard facilities, the Israeli Consulate and several synagogues in the Los Angeles area; when accused "Dirty Bomber" Jose Padilla (a.k.a. Abdullah al-Muhajir) a former Chicago street gang member converts to Islam during a term at a Broward County, Florida jail and falls in with terrorist recruiters after his release; when Aqil Collins, a self-confessed jihadist turned FBI informant, converts to Islam while doing time in a California juvenile detention center and later trains with one of the men accused of kidnapping and beheading Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl; when convicted terrorists from the 1993 World Trade Center bombing are put into their prison's general population and proselytize other inmates in radical Islam because prison officials fear being accused of "religious profiling"; or when Muslim inmates are allowed to conduct radical Islamic, virulently anti-American and anti-Western services in loosely monitored prison chapels across our nation........there is something going on in our prison system that relates directly to our current war on Islamic radicalism.

According to the first-ever Pew Global Attitudes Survey of the American Muslim community, Muslims in the United States are much more assimilated into society than Muslims in Britain and elsewhere in Europe. The detailed survey conducted by the Washington-based Pew Research Centre found that American Muslims tend to have a better standard of living than their counterparts in Europe and are more comfortable with a society in which a majority believes in God compared with secular Europe. The study found that Muslims, by and large, share American values including "outlook and attitudes." And "overwhelmingly, they believe that hard work pays off." These are all positive signs.

Mark Silverberg Lecture at the University of Florida: Saudi Arabia and the War on Terror. Sponsored by the Lubavitch Chabad Stundent Group at the University of Florida and the Lubavitch Jewish Center in Gainesville Florida.

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