Washington Follies
Reader comment on item: [The Road Map:] Learning from Oslo

Submitted by Henry Thorndike (United States), Jun 10, 2003 at 23:04

Any infidel state within Dar al-Islam, whatever its dimensions, according to central tenets of Islam cannot be tolerated. Any peace with Israel will be a "truce treaty" lasting about ten years, on the model of Muhammad's Treaty of al-Hudaibiyya (628 A.D.). Military attack by the Arabs -- obviously including Egypt -- can only be avoided if Israel is not only stronger, but seen to be obviously, overwhelmingly stronger. Then Arab rulers can invoke the doctrine of necessity, darura, to explain failure to go to war.

The road map is not only morally unacceptable, but strategically idiotic. And it does something still worse: it diverts attention from the problem of Jihadi Islam world-wide. For Muslims bent, through military means, or use of wealth (boycots, bribery), or propaganda, or migration to the lands of the Infidels, to win pieces of Dar al-Harb, can only welcome such a naive belief that this or that issue is discrete, and unrelated to the larger picture: so let us throw Israel to the wolves, give Pakistan Kashmir, reward the Moro Liberation Front in the Philippines, give Islamic warriors what they want in Chechnya and Central Asia -- and then what?

The struggle does not and cannot end, until Islam covers the globe. .

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