Mugging Syria for Israel 2

Still don't get who's behind the 'get Syria' push? Still don't see who's had it in for Syria for decades. Clearly, you haven't done your homework. Specifically, by reading John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt's seminal 2007 study, The Israel Lobby & US Foreign Policy:

"It is worth recalling that some important figures in the lobby had their sights on Syria well before the Twin Towers fell. Damascus was a prominent target in the 1996 'Clean Break' study written by a handful of neoconservatives for incoming Prime Minister Netanyahu.* In addition, Daniel Pipes and Ziad Abdelnour, the head of the US Committee for a Free Lebanon (USCFL), had coauthored a report in May 2000 calling for the United States to use military threats to force Syria to remove its troops from Lebanon, get rid of its WMD, and stop supporting terrorism. The USCFL is a close cousin to the lobby, numerous neoconservatives are among its major activists and supporters, including Elliott Abrams, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle, and David Wurmser. In fact, all of them signed the 2000 report, as did pro-Israel Congressman Eliot Engel (D-NY), another core USCFL supporter.

"This proposal, and others like it, did not gain much traction in Washington during the Clinton years, mainly because Israel was committed to achieving peace with Syria during that period. Apart from these hard-liners, most groups in the lobby had little incentive to challenge Clinton's policy toward Syria, because the president's approach tended to mirror Israel's. But when Sharon came to power in 2001, Israel's thinking about Syria changed dramatically. Reacting to this shift, a number of groups in the lobby began to press for a more aggressive policy toward Damascus.

"In the spring of 2002, when Iraq was becoming the main issue, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) was also promoting legislation to formally place Syria on the 'axis of evil' and Congressman Engel introduced the Syria Accountability Act in Congress. It threatened sanctions against Syria if it did not withdraw from Lebanon, give up its WMD, and stop supporting terrorism. The proposed act also called for Syria and Lebanon to take concrete steps to make peace with Israel. This legislation was strongly endorsed by a number of groups in the lobby - especially AIPAC - and 'framed,' according to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 'by some of Israel's best friends in Congress.' JTA also reported that its 'most avid proponent in the administration' was Elliott Abrams, who, as we have seen, is in frequent contact with [Israeli PM Ehud] Olmert's office.

"The Bush administration opposed the Syria Accountability Act in the spring of 2002, in part because it feared that the legislation might undermine efforts to sell the Iraq war, and in part because it might lead to Damascus to stop providing Washington with useful intelligence about al Qaeda. Congress agreed to put the legislation on the back burner until matters were settled with Saddam.

"But as soon as Baghdad fell in April 2003, the lobby renewed its campaign against Syria. Encouraged by what then looked like a decisive victory in Iraq, some of Israel's backers were no longer interested in simply getting Syria to change its behavior. Instead, they now wanted to topple the regime itself. Paul Wolfowitz declared that 'there has got to be regime change in Syria,' and Richard Perle told a journalist that 'we could deliver a short message [to other hostile regimes in the Middle East]: 'You're next.' The hawkish Defense Policy Board, which was headed by Perle and whose members included Kenneth Adelman, Eliot Cohen, and James Woolsey, was also advocating a hard line against Syria.

"In addition to Abrams, Perle, and Wolfowitz, the other key insider pushing for regime change in Syria was Assistant Secretary of State (and later UN Ambassador) John Bolton. He had told Israeli leaders a month before the Iraq war that President Bush would deal with Syria, as well as Iran and North Korea, right after Saddam fell from power. Toward that end, Bolton reportedly prepared to tell Congress in mid-July that Syria's WMD programs had reached the point where they were a serious threat to stability in the Middle East and had to be dealt with sooner rather than later. The CIA and other government agencies objected, however, and claimed that Bolton was inflating the danger. Consequently, the administration did not allow Bolton to give his testimony on Syria at that time. Yet Bolton was not put off for long. He appeared before Congress in September 2003 and described Syria as a growing threat to US interests in the Middle East.

"In early April, WINEP [Washington Institute for Near East Policy] released a bipartisan report stating that Syria 'should not miss the message that countries that pursue Saddam's reckless, irresponsible and defiant behavior could end up sharing his fate.' On April 15, the Israeli-American journalist Yossi Klein Halevi wrote a piece in the Los Angeles Times titled 'Next, Turn the Screws on Syria,' while that same day neoconservative Frank Gaffney, the head of the Center for Security Policy, wrote in the Washington Times that the Bush administration should use 'whatever techniques are necessary - including military force - to effect behavior modification and/or regime change in Damascus.' The next day Zev Chafets, an Israeli-American journalist and former head of the Israeli government press office, wrote an article for the New York Daily News titled 'Terror-Friendly Syria Needs a Change, Too.' Not to be outdone, Lawrence Kaplan wrote in the New Republic on April 21 that Syrian leader Assad was a serious threat to America.

"The charges leveled against Syria were remarkably similar to those previously made against Saddam. Writing in National Review Online, conservative commentator Jed Babbin maintained that even though Assad's army was a paper tiger, he is still 'an exceedingly dangerous man.'  The basis for that claim was an 'Israeli source who had told Babbin that 'Israel's military and intelligence arms are convinced that Assad will take risks a prudent leader wouldn't' and therefore, 'Assad's unpredictability is itself a great danger.' Marc Ginsberg, former US ambassador to Morocco, warned of 'Syria's secret production of weapons of mass destruction and its weaponization of missile batteries and rockets.' And like their Israeli counterparts, American supporters of Israel suggested that Syria was hiding Saddam's WMD. 'It wouldn't surprise me,' Congressman Engel remarked, 'if those weapons of mass destruction that we cannot find in Iraq wound up and are today in Syria.'

"Back on Capitol Hill, Engel reintroduced the Syria Accountability Act on April 12. Three days later, Richard Perle called for Congress to pass it. But the Bush administration still had little enthusiasm for the legislation and was able to stall it again. In mid-August, Engel and a group of politicians and Jewish leaders from New York traveled to Israel and met for ninety minutes with Ariel Sharon in his Jerusalem office. The Israeli leader complained to his visitors that the United States was not putting enough pressure on Syria, although he specifically thanked Engel for sponsoring the Syria Accountability Act and made it clear that he strongly favored continued efforts to push the legislation on Capitol Hill. The following month, Engel, who announced he was 'fed up with the... administration's maneuvering on Syria,' began pushing the bill again. With AIPAC's full support, Engel began rounding up votes on Capitol Hill. Bush could no longer hold Congress back in the face of this full-court press from the lobby, and the anti-Syrian act passed by overwhelming margins (398-4 in the House; 89-4 in the Senate). Bush signed it into law on December 12, 2003." (pp 273-76)

[*See my posts Absent-Minded Professors Inadvertently Set Iraq Ablaze (22/12/08) & Netanyahu & the Cauldronization of Iraq & Syria (14/3/13).]

Daniel Pipes: Jabotinsky Lite

Foaming Islamophobe Daniel Pipes, grand mufti of the US Zionist website, Middle East Forum, recently visited Australia as the guest of the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC).

So what did he tell the AIJAC crowd?

Well, here's the gist, taken from his near full-page screed in Murdoch's Weekend Australian:

"The moment is right for fresh thinking to dispatch the old and stale Palestinian-Israeli conflict... I shall propose an entirely different approach to resolve the conflict, a reversion to the strategy of deterrence and victory associated with Zionism's great strategist, Vladimir Jabotinsky (1880 - 1940): Israel should aim not to please its enemies but to defeat them." (All-out Israeli victory vital for peace, 24/3/18)

The obvious point to make at the outset, of course, is to ask: since when has Israel's aim EVER been to please the Palestinians, their fellow Arabs or anyone else for that matter?

But it's Pipes' embrace of Jabotinsky, the father of Zionist Revisionism, that I wish to explore here. (Just to contextualise him, remember that Jabotinsky begat Menachem Begin's terrorist Irgun, which begat, post Nakba, Begin's Herut Party, which, with the election of Begin as Israel's 6th PM (1977-83), begat the Likud Party, led today by Benjamin Netanyahu, whose father was Jabotinsky's secretary.)

Pipes, of course, presents what he euphemistically terms Jabotinsky's "strategy of deterrence and victory" (which terminology I shall return to later) as though it were some great break in Zionist strategy, but as Jabotinsky himself wrote in 1923: "There are no meaningful differences between our 'militarists' and our 'vegetarians'. One [Jabotinsky] prefers an iron wall of Jewish bayonets, the other [Weizmann] proposes an iron wall of British bayonets... but we all applaud, day and night, the iron wall."*

Got it? Zionism is Zionism is Zionism, and we waste our time differentiating between its different strains as though one is somehow more palatable than the other, because, whatever the strain, it is simply incompatible with the idea of Israeli Jews living alongside Palestinian Arabs as full and equal citizens in the same land.

To move on. Here's how Pipes packages Jabotinsky for AIJAC and the readers of The Australian: "To gain Palestinian acceptance [of Israel], Israel must return to its old policy of deterrence, of punishing Palestinians severely when they aggress... That's deterrence. It's more than tough tactics, which Israeli governments already pursue: it means developing consistent policies to break rejectionism and encourage Palestinian acceptance of Israel. It implies a strategy to crush irredentist Palestinian ambitions, to finally end the demonising of Jews and Israel, recognise historic Jewish ties to Jerusalem, normalise relations with Israelis, close the suicide factories and shutter the entire machinery of warfare... it requires Palestinians to suffer the bitter crucible of defeat, with its attendant deprivation, destruction and despair."

Putting to one side Pipes' demonising constructions - Palestinian resistance to occupation, colonisation, and apartheid (aggression); Palestinian refusal to accept Israel's bulldozing of their homes and rights (rejectionism); Palestinian international law-backed critiques of Israel's illegal occupation and behaviour (demonisation) etc  - what Pipes is really saying here is that Palestinians must, in effect, become Zionists - but without, of course,the benefits!

And if his appalling genocidal reference to the Palestinians' need to suffer "deprivation, destruction and despair," as if this is something new for them, weren't bad enough, he actually has the gall to state that "If Palestinian defeat is good for Israel, it is ironically even better for Palestinians, who will finally be liberated from ugly irredentist ambitions, revolutionary rhetoric, and genocidal fantasies," and so free to build their "polity, economy, society and culture."

But it gets worse with this demonisation of the Palestinians as the heirs of the Nazis: "Think of a miniature version of post-1945 Germany." And don't you just love the implications of that word "miniature"!

Jabotinsky, of course, was far more honest than Pipes about Zionism's SETTLER-COLONIAL status than Pipes, and never tried to dress up the fate of the Palestinian Arabs at the hands of the Zionist project: "Zionist colonization... must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population. This colonization can, therefore, continue... only under the protection of a force independent of the local population - an iron wall which the native population cannot break through."

You can see why Jabotinsky's actual words are nowhere to be found in Pipes' rendering of Jabotinsky: "Zionist colonization"; "iron wall"; "native population."

And again: "We can talk as much as we want  about our good intentions; but they understand as well as we what is not good for them. They look upon Palestine with the same instinctive love and true fervor that any Aztec looked upon his Mexico or any Sioux looked upon his prairie."

And again: "Every indigenous people will resist alien settlers..."

And again: "Colonization can have only one goal. For the Palestinian Arabs this goal is inadmissible. This is in the nature of things. To change that nature is impossible."

And Pipes, the son of Polish Jews, expects the Palestinians to "recognise historic Jewish ties to Jerusalem"!

But there's more. Integral to Jabotinsky's thinking is that Jordan is also Palestine/ Eretz Israel. Not, of course, that Pipes lets his readers in on that thorny aspect of the master's thought.

[*All Jabotinsky quotes from his essay The Iron Wall (We & the Arabs).]

He Who Pays the Piper

"There was applause when [Wilders] explained his platform. 'No sharia... No more mosques. No more immigration from Islamic countries.' But he received his loudest applause when he slammed as 'most dangerous of all are the attempts of governments all over our Western societies to draft bills that restrict our freedom of speech under the pretext of discrimination or hate speech... The second loudest applause came when he praised Israel." (Free speech stoned to death, Miranda Devine, Sunday Telegraph, 24/2/13)

And why might Wilders be praising Israel? Read on:

"As I've written before, Geert Wilders is one of the scarier politicians out there. And yet a number of Australian politicians have flirted with supporting him, or causes similar to his own. They've got nothing, however, on prominent Jewish thinkers David Horowitz and Daniel Pipes, the latter of which is a regular guest to Australia, and their funding of his legal defence - and who knows what else. Reuters has this exclusive:

'Anti-Islam groups in America have provided financial support to Dutch politician Geert Wilders, an anti-immigration campaigner who is seeking re-election to the Dutch parliament this week... The Middle East Forum, a pro-Israeli think tank based in Philadelphia, funded Wilders' legal defence in 2010 and 2011 against Dutch charges of inciting racial hatred, its director Daniel Pipes said. The MEF has a stated goal, according to its website, of protecting the 'freedom of public speech of anti-Islamist authors, promoting American interests in the Middle East and protecting the constitutional order from Middle Eastern threats'. It sent money directly to Wilders' lawyer via its Legal Project, Pipes said... David Horowitz, who runs a network of Los Angeles-based conservative groups and a website called FrontPage Magazine, said he paid Wilders' fees for making two speeches, security costs during student protests and overnight accommodation for his Dutch bodyguards during a 2009 US trip.'

"It baffles me that Jews - as people who have been subjected to horrible instances of oppression and antisemitism over the years - feel that it's OK to align themselves with such virulently racist and unapologetically anti-Islam politicians like Wilders. By extension is the support, very clear in Australia, for groups like the Q Society, which espouse almost verbatim Wilders' views, which is equally repugnant..." (How prominent Jews are funding and supporting anti-Muslim MP Geert Wilders, Liam Getreu, liamgetreu.com, 12/9/12)

The Incredible Flakiness of Being Martha Nussbaum

There's no shortage whatever of new books which put the case for Palestine, but try finding a relevant book review or author interview in the books section of the Sydney Morning Herald's weekend Spectrum supplement and you'll be wasting your time.

Space, however, can always be found for a spread on people like Martha Nussbaum, Professor of Law & Ethics at the University of Chicago, author of a new book, The New Religious Intolerance: Overcoming the Politics of Fear in an Anxious Age, and over here for the Melbourne Writers Festival.

In interview with Fairfax senior writer, Ray Cassin, in last weekend's Spectrum, we learn that Nussbaum is a supporter of religious freedom and cultural diversity: "[T]he nations that have most successfully embraced religious freedom are those that derive their sense of nationhood from political ideals and constitutional arrangements that support them, not from ethnic homogeneity." We learn also that she values "the spirit of individual dissent," advocates "critical thinking," and enjoins "speak[ing] up for what's right, even if it costs you something."

Nothing exceptional there, of course, but then these ideas do need all the support they can get. But, I wonder, does Nussbaum practice what she preaches?

As a convert to Judaism (which she has elsewhere defined as a "moral identity, connected to the love of justice"), the obvious test for her credibility in speaking on these matters, given Zionism's conflation of the faith with itself, and its projection of Israel as a 'Jewish state' for 'the Jewish people', is surely where she stands on the subject of Israel.

Sadly, far from distancing herself from the Zionist project and its crimes, or better, speaking out against it as one of the greatest injustices of modern times (in addition to being the most protracted: 1917-2012), Nussbaum really cannot see what all the fuss is about.

In fact she travelled to Israel in 2002 to receive an honorary degree from the University of Haifa, and although "many people urged me not to go," she wrote in an account of her trip, she was "determined to affirm the worth of scholarly cooperation in the face of the ugly campaign, waged mostly in Europe, to boycott Israeli scholars and refuse cooperation with them." (A different Israel, The Nation, 18/7/12)

It is telling that nowhere in her account of a visit she claims was motivated by opposition to an "ugly [boycott] campaign" are the horrors of Israel's Operation Defensive Shield mentioned. From March 29 to April 21, 2002, Israel used Merkava tanks, Apache attack helicopters and F-15 fighter jets to kill 220 Palestinians and injure hundreds more. Thousands were arrested, and Palestinian economic, social and residential infrastructure was devastated.

Apparently, Nussbaum was too busy soaking up imagined good vibes at the university to notice anything untoward on the other side of the Green Line: "Campus life seemed remarkably peaceful, as Arab and Jewish students continued to learn side by side and interact without suspicion." In fact, come the award ceremony, so "relaxed in my moralistic heart" was she that "I gave my speech about global justice and the limits of nationalism, and then I sang 'Hatikvah' like everyone else. And for the first time that sort of speech and that song did not seem to be so ill-suited to each other."

And,  from the same essay, how's this for our champion of critical thinking? She finds Israel "a source of much embarrassment" because Zionism "seems in tension... with the cosmopolitan goals of justice for all that... ought to be the goal of a good Jewish life." Seems!

Years later, writing in Dissent Magazine, Nussbaum still had it in for any initiative to boycott Israeli universities, this time invoking the McCarthy era (Against academic boycotts, Spring 2007) to bolster her case. Try as I might, however, I could find no murmur of protest from her at the McCarthyesque activities of the Middle East Forum's Daniel Pipes and his notorious Campus Watch website which compiled 'dossiers' on American Middle East studies academics who were in any way critical of Israel or US policy in the Middle East and encouraged students to dob them in, a process which led to the victims being bombarded with hostile spam, having their names hijacked in bogus emails, and receiving death threats. Nor to my knowledge did Nussbaum bat an eyelid at Pipes' campaign to have Middle East area studies programs defunded.

One of Pipes' targets was Palestinian-American scholar Rashid Khalidi, a professor of Middle Eastern history and director for the Center for International Studies at the University of Chicago, Nussbaum's own university. Did she, I wonder, speak up for him? I doubt it.

What a flake!

Muslim Extremists?

"Size of Islamist menace" read the headline on the opinion(ated) page of The Australian 9/10/08). "About 150 million Muslims worldwide are extremists, calculates Daniel Pipes," read the sub-heading. That allegedly meant that "10 to 15% of Muslims worldwide support militant Islam." Zounds! Head for the hills, NOW! How does Pipes, "director of the Middle East Forum," arrive at such a figure? Let me count the ways, says Pipes, but here's one:-

"Gauge voter intentions: Elections measure Islamist sentiment untidily, for Islamist parties erratically win support from non-Islamists," he says. "Thus, Turkey's Justice & Development Party won 47% of the vote in the 2007 elections and 34% in the 2002 elections... Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist organization, won 44% 0f the vote in the Palestinian authority [sic: Palestinian Legislative Council] elections in 2006. Which number does one select?"

Of course, those who swallow Dr Pipes' snake oil - and they can't get enough of it over at News Limited - take in his them & us, clash-of-civilizations worldview. With one caveat, however: although Muslims are natural born extremists, if tactics dictate, some can be deemed moderates. It goes without saying, of course, that we are natural born moderates -although again, if tactics dictate, some of us can be labelled extremists.

That's Pipes' ideological context in a nutshell. Then, to take Hamas as our example, there's his sly little syllogism: Hamas is an extremist ("terrorist") organization. 44% of Palestinians voted for Hamas. Therefore, 44% of Palestinians are extremists.

For that to work, however, you have to swallow the Hamas = extremism premise. But, if you're flexible enough to subscribe to the proposition that extremism, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder, you'd perhaps be interested to know what was in the eye of those Palestinian beholders back in 2006:-

"The primary reason for casting a vote in favour of Hamas was Hamas's fidelity to the Palestinian dream. Most Palestinians, including those who have at various stages expressed their readiness to settle for less, dream of seeing Palestine, all of it, completely free. They imagine the day when millions of Palestinians will return to the towns and villages from which they were driven out when Israel was created in 1948. Hamas, which believes that the State of Israel is an illegitimate political entity that will one day disappear, just as the 11th century Crusader Kingdoms in Palestine and Syria disappeared, keep the dream alive. The 1988 Fatah-dominated PLO's decision to recognise Israel's right to exist in exchange for being recognised as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people was the turning point for many Palestinians. It was from then on that Hamas, which had been in existence for no more than a year, began to be perceived by an increasing number of Palestinians as the alternative to Fatah, which, they believed, had lost its way.

"The second reason for preferring Hamas relates to the record... of Hamas... as a provider of services to the population. Many Palestinians would scarcely be able to manage without the social, educational and medical services provided by the United Nations and an army of NGOs, the most efficient of which have been the ones set up and run by Hamas. As Israel collectively punished the Palestinians, destroying the infrastructure of their society and its organisation, it unwittingly provided Hamas with the greatest of opportunities. Many Palestinians compared the rampant corruption that had spread throughout the Palestinian Authority and amongst the rank and file of Fatah with the clean hands of Hamas's officials. The Palestinian people could not help but admire the decency, honesty and transparency with which Hamas conducted its affairs and provided its services to the public. Hamas officials channelled millions of dollars worth of aid to those in need every year, but continued to live as they had always done. They lived like ordinary Palestinians and many had their homes inside refugee camps. They were part of the people, close to their minds and hearts. Sheikh Yassin passed his whole life in a refugee camp, with a standard of living scarcely different from that of his neighbours. His way of life offered a stark contrast to the leaders of Fatah, many of whom had made fortunes and built empires in the margins of the peace process with the Israelis.

"The third reason for voting Hamas was its Islamic ideology, which, unlike Fatah's secular nationalism, was in sympathy with the powerful inclination toward Islam within Palestinian society. Since the early 1970s, Palestine has seen a massive Islamic revival that was in part a reaction to the failure of secular Arab nationalism, which Palestinians blamed for the loss of the remainder of Palestine to the Israelis in 1967...

"The fourth reason concerned the failure of the peace process. Rather than deliver the Palestinians from their misery, the apparently endless process seemed only to have aggravated their suffering. Hamas had predicted all along that Israel would not fulfil its bargain, and that it was using peace-making in order to expropriate more land. The Hamas view was that only jihad would force the occupation to come to an end. Israel proved Hamas right when it turned against its own partners in the peace process, destroying the Palestinian Authority's institutions and literally besieging Yassir Arafat, whom many Palestinians believe eventually met his death by poisoning. Israel's unilateral withdrawal from Gaza served only further to vindicate Hamas, which claimed that it was its efforts which had [forced] Sharon unconditionally to withdraw the settlers and troops." (Hamas: Unwritten Chapters, Azzam Tamimi, pp 220-221)

Now how would you have voted?

The Pundit's Pundit

US scholera Daniel Pipes is in town. We are are honoured. The Man is a scholera's scholera. His profound insights into what makes Muslims tick(ing bombs), drawing on only the most scholeraly of sources, is not for the layman. They require explication by one who has studied for years in The Master's madrasa. As it happens, I am one such. I can read his runes and tease out his subtleties. Hence this post.

Daniel Pipes, I should explain, is director of Islamofabulism Forum and is in Australia for the Intelligence Insulted debate, sponsored by the Sydney Morning Herald and the St James Ethics Centre this very evening (15/4/08) in Sydney. So sought after is he that the SMH's cunning competitor, The Australian, actually mounted a pre-emptive coup, prevailing upon The Master to allow the publication of a talk he had delivered to assorted worshipful Quadranters at a Quadrant soiree the night before.*

Here are excerpts from The Master's message to the Quadrant faithful, published under the title: Europe or Eurabia? Peaceful integration is the least likely way Europe will cope with Islam. My exegesis follows each precious pearl of wisdumb.

"I foresee potentially one of 3 paths for Europe: Muslims dominating, Muslims rejected or harmonious integration."

In his discussion of the first - "Eurabia" - option, The Master quotes the very creme de la creme of Western scholeraship on Islam, the late Oriana (Ignorantissima) Fallaci (Europe as "a colony of Islam") and Mark Steyn-Gang (Europe will "disappear" this century). These two, along with The Master himself of course, constitute the very doyen of the Islamofabulist school of hysterical scholeraship. I should add that, in invoking them, the master was obviously mindful of Quadrant's requirement for the kind of intellectual rigor mortis so prized by the eminent scholeras who write for that 'steamed journal.

"The secularism that predominates in Europe, especially among its elites leads to alienation from the Judeo-Christian tradition, empty church pews and a fascination with Islam."

Precisely! What the Master means by this is that because our political and cultural movers & shakers are so pissed off with JC (Judeo-Christianity that is), they are therefore magnetically drawn, as it were, to Islam. The Master's failure to cite any evidence whatever for this profoundly counter-intuitive insight is deliberate. I should point out that what constitutes the bleeding obvious for him invariably has to be spelt out for lesser mortals. And that is what I am here for. The evidence is there for all to see. Just open your eyes. Are you aware for example that Blair, Sarkozy and Berlusconi, to name but three of Europe's political elite, have all converted to Islam? No? Typical! Blair, in the grip of his "fascination with Islam" has tossed in his job and left Londonistan for Hamastan on a Jihad Airways jet. Sarkozy has just fallen under the spell of that bewitching houri Khalida Baroudi, and Berlusconi has just re-emerged from a period of political Shia-style occultation and re-taken the Italian presidency, sporting (at least Oriana's unfortunate demise spared her this horror) new, black locks!

"Muslims display a religious fervour that translates into jihadi sensibility, a supremacism towards non-Muslims and an expectation that Europe is waiting for conversion to Islam."

The Master is telling us here that French Muslims, to take but one example, are in the process of losing the little Garlic sangfroid that might have rubbed off on them over their civilizing years in France and are willy nilly foaming at the mouth as their once latent inner jihadi terrorists, conjured up by the Terrorist Masters of 9/11, take over. They are, even as my trembling fingers type, roaming the effete streets of gay Paris with a superior air, knocking on the doors of its unsuspecting citizens and tempting the unfortunates within (who, if they'd only known what was coming, would've been out packing the pews!) by proposing a date with 72 virginal Khalida Baroudi look-alikes.

"The contrast in faith also has demographic implications, with Christians having on average 1.4 children a woman...and Muslims enjoying [wink, wink, nudge, nudge, you bet they're enjoying it, the randy buggers!] a dramatically higher...fertlity rate... Russia could become a Muslim-majority country in 2050."

This means that because a European woman only has 1.4 kids, the .4 kid is well, pretty much a dud and has to be discarded. But your randy Muslim, he's fairly pumpin' 'em out, know what I mean? None of this .4 nonsense or anything like that! And as for Russia, there's only one explanation for its "fascination," first with Afghanistan and now with Chechnya. As The Master has pointed out, it's that "fascination with Islam" which comes over any European whose bum is not firmly planted on a pew.

"To employ enough workers to fund existing pension plans, Europe needs millions of immigrants, and these tend to be disproportionately Muslim due to...the turmoil in majority-Muslim countries."

I hasten to point out here that The Master is not, repeat not, implying that said "turmoil" has anything whatever to do with those millions of Iraqi and Afghan refugees liberated from their countries by the his uncle, Sam.

"In addition, many Europeans no longer cherish their history, mores and customs. Guilt about fascism, racism and imperialism leaves many with a sense that their own culture has less value than that of immigrants."

Yes! Yes! The Master is spot on here. If only the real Europeans would cast aside that burdensome, self-hating (The Master calls it "self-disdain") "guilt" and once more return to their fascist, racist, imperialist roots! Unleash their inner Hitlers, Mussolinis and Francos! Cleanse Europe of the Muslim enemy within! And then, and then, take the fight to the Muslim hordes without!

And now for the second option: what might be termed the Reconquista option, or in terms most Australians can understand - Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Oi, Oi, Oi. Why dontcha go back where ya came from, Leb! "Indigenous Europeans could resist... they can at any time reassert control should they see Muslims posing a threat to a way of life. This impulse can be seen at work in the French anti-hijab legislation or in Geert Wilder's film, Fitna."

The Master is positively Churchillian, is he not? Can't you see his subtle call to arms? We shall fight them in the high schools! We shall fight them in the cinemas!

"Anti-immigrant parties gain in strength; a potential nativist movement is taking shape across Europe as political parties opposed to immigration focus increasingly on Islam and Muslims."

Now I know what you're thinking, but your wrong. The Master's wording is perhaps too subtle for you ignoramuses. The word he used was "nativist", not Nazi. The Master knows full well that the only Nazis in the world today are among the Muslim untermenschen. Just because "the British National Party, Belgium's Vlaamse Belang, France's National Front, the Austrian Freedom Party, the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands and the Danish People's Party" will (should they gain power) "reject multiculturalism, cut back on immigration, encourage repatriation of immigrants, support Christian insitutions, increase indigenous European birthrates and broadly attempt to re-establish traditional ways," does not mean that they are Nazi, merely "nativist."

The Master does, however, make clear that that's a most unlikely scenario. As our Israeli friends never tire of reminding us, the fascist virus has decamped from Europe to the Middle East where there are now more Hitlers than you can poke the proverbial stick at. The Europeans are now mere pussy cats, and The Master lets us in on this terrifying little secret: "If anyone is likely to initiate violence, it is the Muslims. They have already engaged in many acts of violence and seem to be spoiling for more."

The third, or "harmonious integration," option is just not on according to The Master. And here he quotes with approval yet another in his suite of impeccably authoritative (and versatile)scholeras, "American columnist [& radio talk show host & pro-war Republican spruiker of American exceptionalism and Judeo-Christian values] Dennis Prager," as saying "It is difficult to imagine any other future scenario for western Europe than its becoming Islamicised or having a civil war."

The man's a genius.

*"St James Ethics Centre director Simon Longstaff was faced with an ethical dilemma of his own making yesterday. Longstaff has set up a forum for live debate called IQ2Oz to raise the level of public discourse on challenging issues. But Longstaff did his best to shut down debate yesterday when he discovered one of his participants, respected Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes, had been invited by The Australian's opinion page editor Rebecca Weisser to submit for publication an extract of his address to a Quadrant dinner last night. Longstaff asked Pipes not to publish anything in The Australian before Thursday. When asked how this would foster debate and whether it was ethical behaviour, Longstaff asked for more time to think about it. After a couple of hours, he relented." (Strewth, The Australian, 15/4/08)