The Peace Process and Islam: Quintessentially American Notions?
By Robert J. Loewenberg, President, IASPS 

This is the last of this series for the present Quarter. The peace process has plainly “come to America.” There is not a single point of Israel’s policy or what we describe as the advanced case of Western afflictions, that America is not following. We have documented them in this series ---security, statist empowerment, punishment of citizens who are the victims while bestowing protection on the Arabs or those who are, with or without their consent, deeply implicated against us. U.S. policy at home and in the  Middle East is Israel’s peace process policy all over again, grotesque undertakings in hypocrisy that doom all military response to certain failure at the same time contributing the lion’s share to national misery and endangerment.  Headlong in its rush for cover, American policy makers are preparing a heavy dose of peace-process medicine for Israel itself.  A planned PLO state is being served up by America’s  Swiftian bureaucrats –say Reeker and Peeker, and Boucher and Tchchooker –directing Israel’s distracted leaders “immediately” to vacate the West Bank.  As for Mr. Sharon’s protestations that he will not do so for he must “defend Israeli citizens,” they ring hollow. He will do what his predecessors have done over 50 years, which is to trade land for peace to feed the State’s socialist albatross or what leaves Israeli citizens or the nation defenseless.

America’s own down-spiraling will be as fast and as fateful as Israel’s has been if things don’t come about soon. In Israel the predictions for a worst case were painful but easy to make: opposition to national existence is part and parcel of Jewish life and culture over centuries. Here, in the U.S., there is room for hope. But the Israelis who fashioned Israel’s peace process are on the way here to teach our own deracinated policy makers the Israeli “lesson.”

Dan Meridor, for example, is on the way to explain about “terrorism.” It’s something new under the sun, and  we cannot defeat it. We’re in a “war of civilizations” that compels a facing of new truths. But there is nothing new.  Whether he and others are out to vindicate their failure at home or if they are only fools, in fact terrorism and all the rest is nothing new or undefeatable or is Islam militant alien or even unWestern in its bloodthirsty universalism. Israeli experts, for example, General Itzhak ben Israel will be proved right if we believe such things. He says: “America is not strong enough to defeat Islam.”

There is a world of decadence and defeatism in this observation. Still, so far as it reflects the essential expression of what powers the peace process it is true. What powers it is a radical abandonment of national life by the rulers of a nation itself.

“A…ruler that does not exercise its power [to prevent or stop the murder of its people when the enemy is actively firing is]…called the extreme case by Aristotle in which the common good is most apparent because the national body’s reason for existing at all is being challenged. This is illegitimate. Far from possessing a ‘right’ to make peace meaning the authority to permit this challenge or to permit ‘sacrifices for peace,’ the ruler has no choice but to go to war….”

There is no conspiracy in this and it is not driven by Westerners who are too rich and guilt-ridden or by Moslems who are poor and who hate America. Stating a truth does not explain why it is one, but it clears the air. The truth is man is the political animal whose highest creation is national life. Those men who are lucky enough to live in nations or even to live in good ones, cling to them as they cling to life while in doing so they may be brought to hate them because they are not more than life. But this impulse, in the peace process but also in Islam, is negation: its means and is always murder.

That Islam or what we are calling the present version of it is murderous is not easily denied. Moslems are spread across the world today, dedicating life and living to murdering non-Moslems. Call this the convex side of the hatred of national existence; their own and ours. In this respect it is essential to see the more than mysterious pre-established harmony between the dream of Islam and its European and American colonies of operatives and friends, and the peace process. This “politiburo” of the post-communist era is the “Islam” of European and American political intellectuals and their “colonies;” the converts and seminarians of the Western institutions that prompt an Israeli general to say America cannot defeat Islam.

These two blocs, coming from the civilizations of Islam and the West, are a single bloc. There is no impending war of civilizations. The peace process or Western side of this bloc, call it the concave side of the hatred of national existence, is murderous, too. Rulers abandoning their people, abandoning nations which is to say the people in them to a policy of peace based upon “sacrifices for peace” is murder. What authorizes this murder is exactly not seeing it as murder at all, by a peace process or by Islam. Or is the religious motive in one or the secular motive in the other the relevant thing. What drives the convex hatred and also the concave hatred of life in national bodies or what we call the human condition, is another impulse or dream which is also the human condition but the attempt to escape it and kill it –particularly to kill national life or the man who is the political animal and who controls his bad impulses by war. But his worst impulse is not war. 

The more than pre-established harmony I mentioned is the murderous seeking to break free of national life, actually of life. Islam and Western policy makers are together seeking the single universal and homogeneous world state. Bin Laden, and vast parts of the Arab world with its heart in Saudi Arabia, seek to rid the world of “unbelievers” and to people it with “believers.” And the West? Brotherhooders and communists, the former assistant secretary of state and advocate of “a single global authority?” These are not primitive and direct or do the proponents have a military bearing. But the effect is the same. More to the point, the end is the same. The Arabs look their dream in the eye and murder with relish. The Western intellectual looks the Jews and the “bourgeois” America “racists” and so forth in the eye and tells him to understand that sacrifice for peace is right for them. America is evil. Israel is racist. The West is capitalist.

So far as the peace process has come to America, hiding now publicly behind a debate whether freedom and civil rights can be balanced with security, we are on course to hide the truth. It is that not one person can be sacrificed for peace. The great human thing that exists to prevent this, national life and order (and good ones are rare and the worst ones cannot be sacrificed for the fact that universal ones, “one world,” are murder machines in the nature of things) has a single “choice.” It is to force surrender in the manner indicated and implied in the quoted segment above. Victory is required or war in the normal way. The peace process is not an option because national life is not an option and war is not an option after September 11, 2001. But so far, America is only talking, and bombing (the wrong people). Wars are fought on the ground and, unlike American wars since the end of WWII, they have to be fought by the class of people who make the policies, who learn in the schools, who learn what is worth fighting for.

In fact Americans came upon the peace process by way of its post-WWII response to the aims of WWI: to fight wars to end war. The U.S. response to what was called the Absolute Weapon, missiles, prepared our response to the peace process on U.S. soil that came last month.

Missile defense and the ABM Treaty came 29 years ago.

The strategy of missile defense is indistinguishable from the peace process; its most literal and literary expression. It is the principle of “sacrifices [of citizens by the state to be murdered by the enemy] for peace.” MAD, mutual assured destruction, might have been devised by Shimon Peres, by today’s supine Europeans and the international academic and political classes for Yasir Arafat or Bin Laden. Its principle strategic mechanism, the “cornerstone” of our security and of arms control according to the New York Times, is that we may not attack our enemy with nuclear missiles or effectively attack him at all except we agree that the price of an attack will require of us that we retaliate on our own people and upon national existence in the most literal sense. We must respect the enemy’s right to murder our populations. 

The outward aim of the ABM Treaty was to signal that the world had changed. Dan Meridor will make this point on the authority of Martin Van Creveld. The change was that war had become too horrible. So horrible that nations were now outmoded. Coalitions or not-quite-war until peace or Not Victory and Not Surrender, in a word, the peace process was fastened upon America at that point.

But war is what men risk because national life is what men live. They have no option and this option is the means of human goodness and greatness. Nations thought to be no more precious than what our Washington bureaucrats suppose they can create --“nation building”—is to be avoided because it is horror. But the “war to end wars” or peace processes are things different in kind from war. The secretary of state who helped bring the ABM Treaty into existence, and who also had to do with the peace process, has discovered, at least about the treaty, that it is “nihilism.”

Nihilism is today mostly just a word used by college professors, an inconvenience of their science or politics worth living with for as long as it takes to rid the world of racism and the rest. We have read about the responses of many of these people to the attacks. But the action of nihilism is a real thing, namely murder. If we will strip away the language and the longings, Israel’s peace process has to do with Jews giving weapons to Arabs who then kill Jews whose deaths are called sacrifices for peace. Mr. Reeker (of the State Department mentioned above) gives the American position on this today as different from the terrorism of September 11, 2001. But the lie in this is not the physical demonstration or in the hypocrisy many have pointed to, for example, people like Dan Meridor who urge America to follow Israel’s example. The lie is that a U.S. preoccupation with a coalition (essentially composed of terrorist states) will have the effect that Americans will not be protected. I mean they will be murdered because America does not do its duty by them. They will be subject to terror in Anthrax phases and to what comes next in other things that will bring America to its knees. That is the strategy the other side is following. The “terrorists” are out to bring America down. Nothing will stop them unless they are dead. If they send up more, our choices will not be different from what they are today. They do not want food or cars or are they otherwise curable. America is not at fault. Motives are beside the point in any case. A convex universal state –everyone is a Moslem, or a concave universal state –everyone is a heretic is the end sought. 

But then the point is if America pursues the peace process it will be pursing the same goal as Islam. Or to say it another way, it will amount to Western constituencies in support of Islam’s ultimate goal which is the universal and homogeneous state; an end to dreadful nationalism.

The terrorists count on the New York Times. Supporter of the peace process through every phase, a saintly policy that must not fail or cease, this coalition of all of the elements that make up the Western version of Islam say this: “Last week, census data released for California confirmed that non-Hispanic whites have dipped below the 50 percent mark. The same is expected to happen nationwide within the next half-century. Then everyone will be a minority [italics added]. Some may differ, but that strikes us as a quintessentially American notion.”

Printer-Friendly Version

  Click here to return to the Strategic Division homepage