BETWEEN THE LINES
GIVE ISLAMISM AN INCH, IT TAKES A MILE
Exclusive: Joseph Farah warns against notion Muslims will assimilate peacefully in West
I just got back from an amazing WND Israel tour with messianic rabbi Jonathan Cahn, the New York Times best-selling author of “The Harbinger,” “The Mystery of the Shemitah” and “The Book of Mysteries,” with some observations about Israel’s strengths and weaknesses.
Over the next few days, I expect we will be reporting on some of the specifics of what we saw, but here’s the big picture.
Things are relatively quiet in Israel right now.
There are no rocket attacks from Hamas in Gaza.
There are few acts of terrorism taking place inside the Jewish state – an absolute vindication of Israel’s decision to build walls to control the infiltration of crazies from the Palestinian Authority and Hamastan.
Israel’s natural enemies are all fighting each other – from Hezbollah and Iran to ISIS and al-Qaida to Fatah and the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade.
Israel’s economy is growing. It is using its technology to overcome shortages of water and oil. A huge natural gas discovery should provide the country with most of its energy needs for the next 50 years.
Its agricultural production is strong. Tourists are coming. The housing sector is booming.
Yet, true peace remains elusive.
The international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement is taking a toll, and there is an underlying current of appeasement within the Jewish state that permits – and even condones – hostile behavior on the Temple Mount, the holiest site within Judaism.
It all comes down to this: Israelis act primarily in their short-term interests in preventing uprisings and violence rather than in their long-term interests of establishing true peace and justice.
Let me give you an example.
Harassment of Jews and Christians praying on the Temple Mount is tolerated on a daily basis. This is the same Temple Mount captured in a costly military war of self-defense in 1967. There’s no question about Israeli control of the Temple Mount within its own capital of Jerusalem, but it doesn’t exercise its authority to promote religious freedom and tolerance.
In Gaza and the Palestinian Authority, meanwhile, anti-Semitism is taught in the schools, promoted in the media and practiced in the form of its continuing demands of ethnic cleansing of Jews.
You can’t argue with the results on a day in and day out basis, but what is the effect over the long haul?
What is clear about the history of Islam over many centuries is this: Islamism respects power and it disrespects any sign of weakness.
Give Islamism an inch and it takes a mile.
The U.S. has been at least equally guilty of not recognizing this fact in recent decades.
The world at large seems to be under the delusion that if you give up religious freedom and women’s hard-fought rights and permit legal double-standards for Muslims, somehow Islamism will assimilate peacefully.
It has never happened yet, as Europe and the West have begun to understand.
In contending with Islam, we must never make the mistake of compromising our values of equality, religious freedom and social justice. Once we do, the Islamic world sees such actions as indications of weakness – weakness that encourages more bad behavior, more violence, more intimidation, more terror.
Israel and the West put far too much stock in the carrot and not enough in the stick.
Good behavior should be rewarded. But bad behavior must be punished. We seem to understand these simple facts in dealings with pushy nations, but we don’t comprehend that diluting and compromising our own national and spiritual values is counter-productive.
In so doing, we’re inevitably just putting off problems for another day – and quite possibly exacerbating them at the same time.
Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2016/11/give-islamism-an-inch-it-takes-a-mile/#ILVwgUrC6HQP13fV.99
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