WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Dore Gold warned more than a decade ago, citing Afghanistan [n.b.] as a Jerusalem precursor, that Islamists’ appetite for non-Muslims’ religious and historical places grows with the eating. So famous American Jewish ice cream merchants Ben & Jerry recently calling the Temple Mount, Western Wall, etc., “occupied territories” has become an enticing feeding frenzy appetizer.
Reflections on Shaner Yid Kids’ Op-ed After Afghanistan
At the time, what riled me most about Shaner Yid Kids Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield’s op-ed, We’re Ben and Jerry, Men of Ice Cream, Men of Principle, on July 28 in America’s Newspaper of Rectum was their arrogance and hypocrisy. What non-immeasurably egotistical writers would caption an essay explaining their position on an important issue with the self-extolling title “We’re Men of Principle”? And pat themselves on the back as Jewish “supporters of the State of Israel,” who merely “oppose some of its policies,” in the very text of an article disowning historic Jerusalem – Temple Mount, Western Wall, City of David and host of other core embodiments of Jewish homeland history and peoplehood – not as “disputed” between Jews and Arabs, but as “occupied territories”?
What riles me further now, given Afghanistan’s takeover by the Taliban, the dynamiters in 2001 of almost two thousand year-old statues of Buddha in that country’s Bamiyan Valley (Gold, The Fight for Jerusalem, p. 20), is our lack of connecting these Afghanistan developments with Islamic ambitions regarding Jerusalem. Israeli diplomat Dore Gold was not being fanciful back in 2007 in connecting Afghanistan with Jerusalem on eleven pages of his knowledgeable The Fight for Jerusalem book. E.g.,
p. 8: “For the leading architects of al-Qaeda’s strategy, other stages in the battle against the West would precede the jihad against the Jewish state. For example, Abdullah Azzam, Osama ben Laden’s Palestinian mentor, argued in his book From Kabul to Jerusalem that the liberation of Afghanistan was a precursor to the war for Jerusalem.”
On the jacket of his 2007 book, Dore Gold ominously warned of the danger then, thanks to Afghanistan an even greater danger now, of Islamic victories:
“Jerusalem is under assault. The attack on the veracity of its biblical past is only a prelude for compromising its political future. In Western diplomatic circles it is now being argued that by pushing hard for a Middle East settlement, with a redivision of Jerusalem at its core, the flames of radical Islamic rage will be lowered, stemming the tide of al-Qaeda’s ideological spread. Yet the exact opposite is true. In the last decades, radical Islam has been fed by its sense of victory in the face of repeated withdrawals; a redivision of Jerusalem would not only endanger its holy sites, but also unleash new jihadist momentum, on a scale that most political leaders have not begun to consider.”
It’s beyond inconceivable to me, and I think to any reader of an honest book about the Six Day War, that Israelis, having fulfilled the dream of generations for our homeland’s sovereign redemption with Jerusalem now for the third time as its capital, would meekly walk out of historic Jerusalem in a “peace” settlement with Palestinian Arabs who’ve never ruled an inch of it (or Judea-Samaria either).
But the international pressure on Israel to do so, from the day after the Six Day War, during and after the Yom Kippur War, in UNSC 2334, through the ruling U.S. Democratic Party’s “consensus” for “a two-state solution along the 1967 [i.e., 1949] lines with mutually agreed land swaps” has not just been out there but growing. For not just openly “anti-Zionist” [i.e., anti-Jewish homeland] American Jews, but for self-proclaimed American Jewish “supporters of the State of Israel” like Cohen and Greenfield to parade, in a New York Times “Men of Principle” op-ed, their own support for surrendering historic Jerusalem, as I said above, is arrogant and hypocritical. But now, with victorious Islamists’ Afghanistan takeover, it goes beyond that, feeding the flames of a Jerusalem-coveting fervor that, as Dore Gold warned back in 2007, intensifies with victories elsewhere, not irrelevantly in Afghanistan.