The Terrorist Next Door

The evangelists captured the incident on video. The clip, which they later posted on YouTube, showed that they never once raised their voices during their discussion with the Muslim youths, nor did they hand out Christian tracts or literature criticizing Islam that could incite an altercation. ¹ Nevertheless, Dearborn police confiscated their cameras and led them from the festival in handcuffs. The four spent the night in jail for preaching the Gospel—in the United States of America. Dearborn Democratic mayor Jack O’Reilly, shamelessly seeking to curry favor with his restive Muslim constituency, later defended the arrests, characterizing the evangelists’ peaceful activities as an “attack on the city of Dearborn.”²

As my interviews with Imam Mohammed Ali Elahi (the Iranian-born, Khomeinist cleric discussed in chapter eight) and Osama Siblani showed, support for Hezbollah is not just endemic among average Dearborners, it is also pervasive among acknowledged leaders of the city’s Muslim community. Yet according to the Arab-American News website, Osama Siblani, the same guy who extolled Hamas and Hezbollah as “freedom fighters” during our interview and accused Israel of surpassing the worst genocide in human history, has been sought out by “successive American administrations” for his “counsel” on the Middle East. He has attended White House lawn picnics for the media and was even present for the White House signing ceremony of the Oslo Accords in 1993.³ And despite his raw Jew-hatred and public praise for Islamic terrorist groups, Siblani has been honored by various educational institutions and media groups in the Detroit metropolitan area.

How deep does Siblani’s support for Hezbollah and hatred of Israel run? As my cameraman and I were packing up our equipment and preparing to leave the offices of the Arab-American News, I asked Siblani his thoughts on Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah and a man devoted to the destruction of both Israel and America. Siblani’s response: “I know of no more honorable man in the world than Hassan Nasrallah.” Mind you, Siblani purports to be a secular Muslim. One can only imagine how the more devout of Dearborn feel about Nasrallah, who commonly refers to the United States as the “Great Satan” and has said of the Jews, “If they all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide.”⁴

My encounters in Dearborn helped shape one of my most tried-andtrue principles in reporting on jihad and Islamism. To gauge whether a Muslim is moderate, I simply ask one question, usually near the beginning of the interview: “Do you recognize Israel’s right to exist?” If I don’t get an automatic, unequivocal “yes,” I know I am dealing with someone who is not only hostile to Western, democratic values, but who is likely sympathetic to our jihadist enemies. It’s simple: no Israel, no moderate. That is the ultimate litmus test, and it has never failed me. The question of Israel and its existence as a Jewish state cuts right to the heart of the matter—and straight through the disingenuous “we respect all religions” platitudes of smooth-talking Islamist mouthpieces in the United States.

Typically, these U.S.-based Muslim spokesmen will unreservedly condemn al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden—but that’s easy. Dig a little deeper and you’ll find they inevitably blame terrorism on America itself—for its “imperialist” Mid-East policies and its support for Israel. Likewise, most American Islamists are shrewd enough to decry 9/11 when asked about it publicly, although one of their favorite lines—that the perpetrators were not “true Muslims”—is always good for a chuckle.

Bottom line: if someone tells you that Hamas and Hezbollah are in a different category than al-Qaeda, and that, unlike bin Laden’s group, those two terrorist organizations are “resisting occupation” and their members are justified in blowing up themselves and Israeli women and children, you know immediately that you’re not dealing with a moderate. In fact, you’re dealing with a willing accessory to the Islamist plan to drive Israel into the sea and, ultimately, to erase the entire Jewish people from the face of the earth. Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and one of the most influential Islamic clerics in the world, articulated that plan in his 2003 book, Fatawa Min Ajl Falastin, or “Fatwas on Palestine”:

[W]e believe that the battle between us and the Jews is coming. ... Such a battle is not driven by nationalistic causes or patriotic belonging; it is rather driven by religious incentives. This battle is not going to happen between Arabs and Zionists, or between Jews and Palestinians, or between Jews or anybody else. It is between Muslims and Jews as is clearly stated in the hadith. This battle will occur between the collective body of Muslims and the collective body of Jews i.e. all Muslims and all Jews.⁵

The hadith that Qaradawi invokes has been cited by jihadists throughout the ages—including by Hamas in their founding charter—to justify Muslim massacres of Jews. According to Islamic tradition, Mohammed told his companions:

The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: Muslim, or servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him. [41:6985]

That infamous hadith may be the most well known of the anti-Semitic references found in Islam’s core texts, but it only scratches the surface. Consider the following sampling of Allah-sanctioned, Jew-hating venom from the Koran and hadiths:

• “Ignominy shall be [the Jews’] portion wheresoever they are found. ... They have incurred anger from their Lord, and wretchedness is laid upon them ... because they disbelieve the revelations of Allah and slew the Prophets wrongfully ... because they were rebellious and used to transgress.” [Surah 111, v. 112]

• “And thou wilt find them [the Jews] the greediest of mankind.” [Surah 11, v. 96]

• “[The Jews] are the heirs of Hell.... They will spare no pains to corrupt you. They desire nothing but your ruin. Their hatred is clear from what they say. ... When evil befalls you they rejoice.” [Surah 111, v. 117–120]

• “Because of the wrongdoing of the Jews. ... And of their taking usury.... and of their devouring people’s wealth by false pretenses. We have prepared for those of them who disbelieve a painful doom.” [Surah IV, v. 160, 161]

• “Allah hath cursed [the Jews] for their disbelief.” [Surah IV, v. 46]

• “[The Jews] will spare no pains to corrupt you. They desire nothing but your ruin. Their hatred is clear from what they say, but more violent is the hatred which their breasts conceal.” [Surah III, v. 117–120]

• “And thou seest [Jews and Christians] vying one with another in sin and transgression and their devouring of illicit gain. Verily evil is what they do. Why do not the rabbis and the priests forbid their evil speaking and their devouring of illicit gain? ... [E]vil is their handiwork.” [Surah V, v. 62, 63]

• “O ye who believe! Take not the Jews and Christians for friends.” [Surah V, v. 51]

• “The most vehement of mankind in hostility [are] the Jews and the idolators.” [Surah V, v. 82]

• “Allah fighteth against [the Jews]. How perverse they are!” [Surah IX, v. 30]

• “[The Jews] spread evil in the land.” [Surah V, v. 62–66]

• “[The Jews] knowingly perverted [the word of Allah], know of nothing except lies ... commit evil and become engrossed in sin.” [Surah II, v. 71–85]

• In addition, Jews are referred to as “apes and pigs” in no fewer than three Koranic verses. [2:62–65, 5:59–60, and 7:166]

In case you still don’t get the picture, consider Mohammed’s own personal example. Although Jews today are banned from entering Saudi Arabia, the Saudi city of Medina, Islam’s second holiest city, was originally a Jewish settlement. Then along came Mohammed. Dr. Andrew Bostom, who’s written two authoritative books on Islamic history, has recounted the behavior of Islam’s prophet and founder following the Muslim victory over the Jewish Qurayzah tribe of Medina in 627 AD:

[S]ome 600 to 900 men from the Qurayzah were led on Muhammad’s order to the Market of Medina. Trenches were dug, and the men were beheaded; their decapitated corpses were buried in the trenches while Muhammad watched. Male youths who had not reached puberty were spared. Women and children were sold into slavery, a number of them being distributed as gifts among Muhammad’s companions. According to Muhammad’s biographer Ibn Ishaq, Muhammad chose one of the Qurayzah women (Rayhana) for himself. The Qurahzah’s property and other possessions (including weapons) were also divided up as additional “booty” among the Muslims.⁶

I did not fabricate the anti-Jewish verses from Islam’s core texts, nor did I create the story of the Medina massacre out of thin air. This is all part of the historical record, no matter how much our elected officials choose to ignore it. So are the various bloody pogroms waged against Jews living in Muslim countries throughout the centuries, not to mention the collaboration of Arab Muslims with the Nazis during World War II—which saw the leader of the Palestinians at the time, Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, personally visit Nazi death camps and live as an honored guest in Berlin.

The first Christians—comprising the first Church—were Jewish. And they all worshipped as Lord and Savior—as Christians do today—a Jewish carpenter from the Galilee region of Israel. So if you’re a Christian with an ounce of anti-Semitism in your body, you’d be well advised to lose it. Needless to say, such feelings are antithetical to the Gospels. But as we’ve seen, sadly, they are not foreign to the Koran or the hadiths, and those Muslim SS units were, in their view, no doubt standing on solid theological ground.

So, too, were Muslims who chased out the nearly 1 million Jews who had been living in Islamic countries like Yemen, Egypt, and Libya before the re-establishment of the state of Israel in 1948.⁸ For instance, that year, there were some 150,000 Jews living in Iraq. Today there are none. Most of these Jewish refugees, from Iraq and elsewhere, fled from persecution at the hands of their Muslim countrymen to the fledgling state of Israel. There, they would no longer be forced to live as tread-upon, second-class citizens, or dhimmis, as mandated by Islamic sharia law.

But even in Israel, Jews have not been able to enjoy a moment’s rest from the murderous ire of their Islamic neighbors, who will not rest until the “sons of apes and pigs,” as they quite commonly call the Jewish people, are driven into the sea once and for all. Incidentally, don’t hold your breath waiting for the UN to begin a push for the hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees from Muslim countries to reclaim the land and property that was stolen from them throughout the twentieth century. When it comes to these Jews run out of Muslim lands, the “international community” does not recognize any “right of return.”

The typical response of my genuinely moderate Muslim colleagues—most of whom, tellingly, do not follow the Koran or hadiths literally—when challenged on Mohammed’s behavior in Medina or the many anti-Jewish verses in Islam’s holy texts is the same one they use to explain away the Verse of the Sword and Allah’s other unsavory injunctions. They argue that Mohammed’s revelations were confined to the milieu of seventh-century Arabia and were never meant to apply to the modern day. But as we’ve seen, that view is not shared by the vast majority of the world’s Muslims and certainly not by the jihadists, who consider the commands of Mohammed open-ended and applicable to contemporary life—and that extends to their treatment of Jews.

Over the past ten years, I’ve covered several dozen cases of homegrown jihad plots on American soil. In every one of those cases, without fail, the jihadists in question held a burning hatred for Jews. Not just the state of Israel, but Jews in general. And Jewish targets were commonly among those being considered for attacks. Additionally, there have been countless instances of old-fashioned, anti-Jewish incitement and blood libels publicly spouted by radicalized American Muslims in recent years. Among them:

• On May 10, 2010, my friend, conservative activist and author David Horowitz, gave a speech at the University of California-Irvine. His appearance there was in response to an event called “Israeli Apartheid Week” that was being held at the same time by the school’s Muslim Student Association. The MSA, as we discussed in chapter eight, is a Muslim Brotherhood-connected group that has seen several former leaders convicted on terrorism charges. During the Q-and-A session following Horowitz’s address, a female MSA member named Jumanah Imad Albahri stood up and began to criticize him. So Horowitz cut to the chase and asked her if she supported the terrorist group Hamas, a question Albahri refused to answer. Their exchange then took an even more chilling turn:

Horowitz: I am a Jew. The head of Hezbollah has said that he hopes that we will gather in Israel so he doesn’t have to hunt us down globally. For it or against it?

Albahri: For it.⁹

• In late December 2008, Israel finally responded to years of lethal rocket attacks launched from the Gaza Strip by conducting a three-week-long military operation against Hamas in Gaza. Operation Cast Lead, which ultimately resulted in a sharp decrease in rocket attacks and a weakening of Hamas’s Gaza infrastructure, sparked worldwide Muslim protests against Israel, including throughout Europe and the United States. As I reported for CBN, shouts of “Allahu Akhbar,” vicious anti-Jewish signs and rhetoric, and even physical violence were all commonplace at these marches, in which radical Muslims were joined by their fellow Israelhaters from the radical Left.

At one such event in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, a group of Jewish activists gathered to stage a peaceful counter-protest in support of Israel. It wasn’t long before a Muslim woman in a hijab began to curse and shout anti-Semitic slurs at them. “Go back to the oven!” she shrieked, referencing one of the more notorious methods in which the Nazis murdered Jews during the Holocaust. “You need a big oven, that’s what you need!” To drive the point home further, another Muslim protestor waved a sign that read, “Nuke Israel.”¹⁰

• Over Labor Day weekend, 2010, the unholy alliance between the hard Left and Islamic supremacists reared its ugly head yet again at a venomous anti-Israel rally in Washington, D.C. The gathering, which featured Hezbollah flags waving side-by-side with banners bearing socialist slogans, was held to mark “Al-Quds Day”—an annual event where Muslims call for the “liberation” of Jerusalem from Israeli hands. And how would such a “liberation” occur if the Islamo-socialist alliance had its way? One speaker named Kaukab Siddique helpfully explained:

We must stand united to defeat, to destroy, to dismantle Israel—if possible by peaceful means. Perhaps, like Saladin, we will give them enough food and water to travel back to the lands from where they came to occupy other people.¹¹

Now, I personally don’t know of any nation in human history that was destroyed “by peaceful means,” but since Islamists always seem to find creative new ways to wreak havoc upon Jews, I suppose anything is possible. It’s more likely, however, that Siddique’s preferred method for destroying Israel is through armed jihad, as he made clear in further statements at the rally:

For the Jews, I would say, see what could happen to you if the Muslims wake up. And I say to the Muslims, dear brothers and sisters, unite and rise up against this hydra-headed monster which calls itself Zionism. ... The Koran says drive them out from where they drove you out. There’s no question of just dismantling the settlements. These settlements are only the tentacles of the devil that resides in Tel Aviv.¹²

This is rhetoric straight out of the Ahmadinejad playbook, delivered just minutes from the White House. And Kaukab Siddique isn’t some young, radicalized Muslim who frequents al-Qaeda websites in his parents’ basement. He is, in fact, an associate professor of English at Lincoln University, a small, historically African-American college outside of Philadelphia. Since 2003, the school has received almost $200 million in Pennsylvania state funds, despite employing a genocidal anti-Semite and unabashed Islamist—Siddique has also voiced support for the Taliban and for convicted al-Qaeda terrorists—as a member of its faculty.

When I contacted Lincoln University for comment about Siddique’s remarks, the school’s executive vice president told me that while Lincoln does not agree with Siddique’s comments about Israel, the professor is tenured and has freedom of speech. He added that the school can’t control what Siddique does or says on his own time as a private citizen. Something tells me Lincoln’s brass would have been slightly more proactive had Siddique called for the extermination of Muslims, blacks, or homosexuals. But since Siddique—whose long track record of anti-Semitic statements includes Holocaust denial—was merely targeting those pesky Jews, Lincoln University continues to treat him as its very own “crazy uncle.”

My story for CBN about Siddique’s genocidal outburst in Washington was picked up by several national and international news outlets in October 2010 and was covered by both Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck on FOX News. In response to the ensuing uproar, the school issued a formal statement of condemnation of Siddique. Nevertheless, he remains on the school’s faculty, comfortably tenured and free to call for Allah’s wrath upon the Jews to his heart’s content—on his own time, of course.

The Islamist onslaught against the Jews is just the beginning phase of a much larger plan. “First the Saturday people, then the Sunday people” has long been a rallying cry of jihadists, from Indonesia to Iran and beyond—meaning that once the Jews are wiped out, Christians will be next in the crosshairs. With Jews already forcibly evicted from Muslim countries, we now see the Christians of the Middle East being targeted for extermination by Islamic supremacists, to the point where the region may very well be nearing a day where it is practically bereft of any Christian presence at all, leaving Islam unchallenged.

Nevertheless, a narrative exists—particularly on the Left but also among the isolationist, Pat Buchanan/Ron Paul wing of the political Right—arguing that an end to America’s support for Israel would mean an end to Islamic jihadists’ war against America. Throw Israel under the bus, they say, and the likes of al-Qaeda and Iran will leave us alone; the jihadists are angry with us because we support their Israeli enemy, the great oppressor of Palestinians and the scourge of the Muslim world. Abandon Israel to its fate, they suggest, cut aid to those troublesome Jews, and eliminate their public support, and the Islamists will be content to remain in the deserts and mountains of the Middle East and South Asia, never to target America again.

This stance is not only immoral, it is inherently destructive to American interests. Above all, it flies in the face of Islamic history and ideology. Since its miraculous rebirth in 1948, the tiny state of Israel has borne the brunt of the fury of Islamic terrorism. And this outpost of democracy, freedom, and human rights has been the canary in the coalmine for the rest of Western civilization. Israel, surrounded by a sea of frothing Islamic radicals, is the first line of defense for the West in the struggle against global jihad. If this lone bastion of Western values in the world’s most violent—and, due to oil, arguably its most strategic—region is overrun, the floodgates are open. Or as the former prime minister of Spain, José María Aznar, told me when I interviewed him for CBN in 2010, “If Israel goes down, we all go down.”

Islamist ideology demands that sharia law be established worldwide, and that any country not living under the banner of Islam is Dar al-Harb, or the land of war. In other words, Islam must be spread to the ends of the earth by any means necessary, as mandated by the Koran. That means, obviously, that the elimination of Israel is only the beginning. The throw-Israel-under-the-bus crowd, if it surveys Islamic history, has to know this. If Israel is indeed the root cause of Islamic rage against the West today, as they argue, then why did Muslims embark on two great waves of conquest against Europe—first in the eighth and ninth centuries and then again in the heyday of the Ottoman Empire—during a period when the state of Israel did not even exist?

Since there was no Israel during this time, the unrelenting jihad against Europe clearly had to be motivated by something else. That something was Islamist ideology. Yet segments of the Left and isolationist Right would have us believe that the third great wave of jihad that began in the latter part of the twentieth century and persists today is due mainly to Israel’s supposed occupation of “Palestinian land.” As for the steady Islamic aggression against the West that transpired over much of the 1,378 years before the state of Israel was reestablished, why acknowledge the facts when you can blame that reliable scapegoat, the Jews?

Surveying the seething cauldron of terrorism and anti-Western animus that is the Middle East, the Obama administration, too, believes it’s all Israel’s fault. The central problem, we’re led to believe, is Israel’s construction of apartments in Jerusalem—for over 3,000 years, the capital of the Jewish people—and its building of additions, like a children’s playroom for a growing family, onto existing homes. The Obamis argue that if only Israel would stop building so-called Jewish “settlements”—in places like East Jerusalem and the biblical heartland of Judea and Samaria, also referred to as the West Bank—then Israel and the Palestinians could finally come to a comprehensive peace agreement and all would be right with the world. They don’t seem to notice that Israel’s so-called “partner for peace,” the Palestinian Authority, has little credibility on the West Bank street and only controls half the Palestinian territories (with the other half, Gaza, controlled by Hamas terrorists), or that Israel’s withdrawal from both Gaza and southern Lebanon has resulted in both those areas becoming permanent jihadist bases used for attacking Israel.

Despite these glaring red flags and the steady diet of anti-Semitic blood libels and incitement broadcast daily by official Palestinian Authority television, the Obama White House believes now is the time for Israel to offer concessions to the Palestinians, cede Israeli territory—including half of Jerusalem—and strike a lasting peace deal. If Israel does so, three things will supposedly happen: 1) Other Arab regimes will be inspired to strike similar peace deals with Israel and will finally recognize the Jewish State’s right to exist. 2) Other Arab regimes will join Israel and the West to form a united front that will successfully dissuade Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. 3) Islamic terrorism against the West will decrease dramatically.

This theory is known inside the Washington beltway as “linkage,” because it directly ties stopping Iran’s nuclear weapons program to establishing a Palestinian state. Give the Palestinians a homeland of their own, the liberal political establishment intones, and Iran and its proxies will be significantly weakened, deprived of the “Palestinian card” they have used as a hammer against Israel for so long. Israeli leaders, quite rightly, would rather deal with Iran’s nuclear weapons program first, and revisit the Palestinian issue down the road.

After all, the Iranian regime, which is devoted to Israel’s destruction, may very well have a nuclear weapon by 2012. Such a development would pose an immediate threat to Israel’s very existence and, in the Israelis’ view, must be countered with the utmost urgency. On the other hand, the Palestinians are ruled by two opposing factions, Hamas and the Palestinian Authority—both of which refuse to recognize Israel’s right to exist—and have shown no desire to renounce terrorism against Israeli interests. In other words, the Palestinians are a disjointed, radicalized mess with zero capability of forming any type of moderate, cohesive state in the near future. Therefore, let’s deal with Iran first, the Israelis reason, and then we can talk about the Palestinian issue later. It makes perfect sense ... unless you are an Obama administration official.

In early February 2011, as Muslim nations like Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, and Yemen, among others, were being roiled by massive protests and civil unrest that had nothing whatsoever to do with Israel, recently retired Obama national security advisor James Jones delivered an address proclaiming—you guessed it—the importance of linkage. To make matters worse, Jones delivered his remarks before an Israeli audience:

I’m of the belief that had God appeared in front of President Obama in 2009 and said if he could do one thing on the face of the planet, and one thing only, to make the world a better place and give people more hope and opportunity for the future, I would venture that it would have something to do with finding the two-state solution to the Middle East.¹³

Something tells me God would not favor giving Palestinian Muslims half of Jerusalem—a city that is never even mentioned in the Koran but is mentioned in the Bible hundreds of times as Israel’s eternal capital. Regardless, the ultimate problem with Jones’s assessment is one of ideology, not theology. He and his former cohorts in the Obama administration have very publicly made “illegitimate” Israeli settlements, not Palestinian terrorism or Iranian belligerence, their core Middle East issue. From the cozy confines of Washington, D.C., they arrogantly dictate to the people of Israel, a sovereign nation, where Jews can and cannot live in the Jewish ancestral homeland.

Meanwhile, they refuse even to mention a fundamental problem with their plans—that Christian holy sites in East Jerusalem and elsewhere are far less likely to remain protected, as they have been for decades by the Israelis, if they are turned over to Palestinian control. Recall the desecration of Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity in 2002, when gunmen from the PLO, Hamas, and other Palestinian groups seized the building to avoid capture by Israeli troops. With the Israelis refusing to storm the church, a thirty-nine-day standoff ensued. During that time, in a house of worship revered as the birthplace of Jesus, the Palestinians held the clergy hostage, set fire to part of the church compound, looted golden icons, tore up Bibles, and most alarmingly, planted around forty bombs throughout the church that the Israelis had to dismantle after the attackers surrendered.¹⁴

The appalling violation of the church was by no means an isolated incident. Indeed, in recent years Middle Eastern Christians have been subject to a concerted attack by their Muslim neighbors. On March 8, 2011, thirteen people were killed in Cairo, Egypt, after a Muslim mob attacked thousands of Christians protesting the burning of a church by another Muslim mob.¹⁵ This came just three months after twenty-one people were killed in a suicide bombing outside a Christian church in Alexandria, Egypt. In light of similar, ongoing attacks on the dwindling Christian communities in Iraq, Indonesia, Pakistan, and beyond, the Obama administration’s enthusiasm for securing Palestinian control of Christian holy sites seems incomprehensible. Yet, in light of Obama officials’ unshakeable belief in the peacefulness and greatness and tolerance of Islam, and their dogged pursuit of Muslim outreach even at the expense of Americans’ physical security, we see that their policy on this issue reflects a ruthless consistency in their agenda.

The Obama administration’s stunning disrespect for Israel reached a low point in March 2010, when Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited the White House. Netanyahu—the elected leader of a steadfast and pivotal U.S. ally—was ushered in the back door of the building and denied even the standard photo opportunity with Obama. The Israeli delegation was not invited to join the president for dinner, and Obama actually left them to dine on his own when they wouldn’t agree to his demands to halt Jewish building in East Jerusalem.¹⁷

Rest assured that Israel’s enemies were overjoyed when details of Obama’s White House snub of Netanyahu emerged. In a vain attempt to appear “even-handed” and court America-hating jihadists, the Obama administration has made a great show of publicly slamming Israel—the only reliable and stable U.S. ally in the Middle East and a bulwark against Islamic terror. Their efforts have left Israelis feeling completely isolated at a dangerous time. Global anti-Semitism is on the rise, as is a movement advocating that nations divest from, boycott, and sanction Israel—the so-called “BDS movement.” Furthermore, the European Union and the UN are applying relentless pressure on the Israelis to throw caution to the wind, surrender territory, and create a Palestinian state right now, current conditions on the ground and potential disastrous consequences be damned. And this solution, mind you, would largely consist of a peace treaty much like the one with Egypt for which Israel gave up the Sinai Peninsula—a treaty that leaders of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s possible future rulers, are already declaring “null and void.”¹⁸

Israel surveys its immediate neighborhood and sees, aside from the looming threat of a nuclear-armed Iran, a Turkey that has gone from an ally to a heated Islamist adversary; an Egypt that has gone from friend (in relative terms) to possible Muslim Brotherhood-run foe; another relatively friendly country, Jordan, that is facing its own serious internal unrest, led largely by the Brotherhood; and nasty possible outcomes of revolutions in other Middle Eastern states where fanatical, anti-Israel Islamists could come to power. For Israel, circa 2011, the only thing that is 100 percent certain is that Iran, Syria, Hamas, and Hezbollah are licking their chops and waiting for the right moment to strike—we should take these entities’ own word on that. Unwavering American support used to be a certainty as well, until President Obama decided to throw it out the window in favor of hopeless “engagement” with the sworn enemies of Israel and America.

One such example occurred in February 2010 when, just days after the Obama administration announced it was appointing an ambassador to Syria for the first time in five years—effectively rewarding a state sponsor of terrorism for continued bad behavior—Syrian president Bashar al-Assad held a public dinner meeting in Damascus with Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. In flaunting his relationship with Iran and Hezbollah, Assad delivered a message to Obama that was deliberate and clear: you can engage us all you want, but we will never respect you nor cease our quest to destroy the Jews. The next time the Obama administration accuses someone of “folly,” it may want to look in the mirror.

As I write this, I’m sitting in a hotel room overlooking the Old City of Jerusalem. In my conversations with Israeli government officials, they keep their thoughts on the damaged relationship with America—damaged through no fault of Israel’s—close to the vest, revealing precious little, and understandably so. Average Israelis that I talk to are a different story, however: practically everyone here expresses grave concern about the Obama administration, for the reasons outlined in this chapter and throughout this book. At the same time, they display an upbeat attitude of pride and perseverance. As a people who have survived countless centuries of murderous pogroms, persecution, and discrimination culminating in the horrors of the Holocaust, Jews have learned to deal with whatever is thrown their way. Through it all, Israel not only survives, it thrives.

Despite the wedge the Obama White House has attempted to drive between the United States and Israel, poll after poll shows that an overwhelming majority of Americans stands solidly behind the Jewish State, as does a majority of Congress on both sides of the political aisle. The reasons for that support are varied; for many Christians and Jews, it is a religious duty, as they take quite seriously the precept in the Book of Genesis that God will “bless those who bless [Israel] and curse those who curse [Israel].” Others see Israel as an emerging scientific, technological, and economic juggernaut that is in America’s best interests to cultivate. Still others see Israel as an ocean of democratic stability and pro-American sentiment as well as a strategic asset in a region inherently hostile to the United States.