My response to "Anonymous"

I received the following comment from Anonymous, who responded to my post "Video: Stand up to Ahmadinejad":

Your blog said I might contact you and that if I were nice you would be nice back. I need some counseling.

I am a Jew. My father was a cantor. My brother is a cantor. And I studied, albeit only for a while, for the rabbinate. I was raised a Zionist. I went to many Zionist camps and sang all the joyous Zionist songs. I loved being a Zionist and a Jew.

As I grew up, my family, though they never had much money, always saved and each year sent whatever they could to Israel.

I even thought of "returning" to Israel, emigrating there, and making my home there. On my way back from serving in Vietnam, I traveled to Eretz Yisrael; it was 1968, not long after the 6-Day War...and what I saw in Israel made my heart stop, and then break. I saw the way the Jew treated the Arab: there was an arrogance and a racism.... I didn't want to believe what my eyes saw.

So, I came home and started studying...and I haven't stopped studying this subject since.

Israel exists. There is no turning back. (The U.S. exists; there is no way we can give it back to the natives.) We must figure out the right thing to do now...the just thing to do now...the thing that will bring us all back to justice...and do that now.

But Israel and the U.S. have got to stop terrorizing their "enemies". They have got to start a real peace process. How? It seems to me the right thing to do is apologize. Whatever my feelings are regarding the Holocaust and the ancient longing for the Jews to return to Israel someday, the truth is both the U.S. and Israel stole land from people who lived there. That is a truth which we must all accept, or there will never be peace.

Are there racists on both sides? Of course. Are there people who live and breath only for the destruction of the other? Of course. Do not think that only Arabs are haters and destroyers and racists; that kind of thinking will lead you astray. It led me astray for years!

No sensible person I know of wants to give "a pass" to anything immoral that Hezbollah has done. But I know way too many Jews who want to look the other way when it comes to all the immoral things Israel has done. And that is a SHANDA! Doing immoral things in the name of national security can never be right or just.

I am much more critical of myself, my family, and my friends...as well as my tribe...than I am of others. If others want to kill, that is their business and I will do whatever I can to protect myself...and my people. But when my people want to kill, then I step in and say NO! Not while I have breath left in me.

I was brought up to believe that it is better to suffer a wrong than to commit one. How do you feel about that?

When a Jewish friend of mine recently wrote: "Muslims are committed to the absolute and complete destruction of the State of Israel, and all Jewish people," I had to point out to him that this is racism, pure and simple. It is ignorant and wrong to say it. He said it, I realize, out of fear; but that does not make it right. I know too many beautiful Muslims who make this a lie. Alas, he has bought into the propaganda.

I want your advice, but I fear that by questioning you and what you say, you will do what so many others are doing: calling criticism of Israel "anti-Semitic". Some Arabs hate Jews. Some Jews hate Arabs. Those haters happen to be in power today.

When you say, "The truth is that Arabs have been trying to kill Jews since the 1880s." This is true, sort of.... But why didn't you say "Some Arabs..."? That would have been more accurate and less provocative; i.e, less "racist". When you say, "The truth about the war against the Jews is that it's a symptom of the greater goal of Islamic global imperialism," I say you are right, but the war by some Arabs in power against the Jews is indeed about "Islamic global imperialism". Still there are many Arabs who believe in a separation of church and state; they're not in power today.

Here in the U.S., the neocons are in power. They believe in pax Americana and that bringing "American-style democracy" to the world is a good vision. I don't; it is imperialism neocon-style.
My friend says, "I will never turn my back on the children of Israel, nor it's state!" Good. I tell him that "...now is the time for all good men and women to stop Israel from committing more crimes against humanity, crimes that ultimately will be paid for. If you love Israel and want to protect it, save it from itself. Ask yourself, dear friend, is Israel safer today, after all its actions to protect itself? No. It has waged FIVE WARS against Lebanon, and it has lost almost all of them. Israel is less safe today than it would be if it had shown humility and rachmones to the Palestinians."

So, Smooth Stone, if you have any rachmones for me, what is your advice? Do you ever have these kinds of thoughts and quandaries? What if your son came home from college with such questions? What would you tell him?

Yours, b'Shalom,

Lanny Cotler
Willits, CA

Here is my reply:

Lanny, I don't believe you're Jewish, and I have some solid evidence for that, but even if you were Jewish, I will take your bait. So, on with it:

Please keep the following in mind, because it is very important to understand the key concept here, that all peoples deserve to live peacefully with a succinct quality of life - but - when the quality of one's life determines who gets to live or who gets to die, then the rules change.

In order to have discussions about Palestinians, one must have a discussion about Islam and it is imperative that you learn immediately that the political aspect of Islam makes it less a religion and more of an ideology. Most of all, because unlike the political pan-Arabian nation, the Zionist movement to the land of Israel represents a return, not an invasion. Get that fact straight.

So, if we talk about Islam, then let's look at Palestinianism which is, one could say the mirror image of Zionism, which you mention several times in your comment, which leads me to consider that you might have a seemingly more-than-average knowledge of what Zionism is. Palestinianism is an offshoot of Islam. Palestinianism is the belief that Palestinians are entitled to self-determination. But, Zionism is also self-determination, which leads to the basic question: What is self-determination?

The right to self-determination as outlined in generic international law is often referenced by both sides; the Palestinians insist on a right to self-determination and so does Israel. Israel was restored under the right to self-determination as outlined in the U.N. Charter and that's when on November 29, 1947, the UN General Assembly passed resolution 181 recommending division of the land given to Jews under the Mandate. From a political and practical point of view, the 1947 U.N. partition plan served as reason for the legal declaration of a Jewish State. Read more about the history, here.

The claim that the Arabs were being driven out was raised as early as the 1930s. This claim was investigated by the British, and rejected almost completely - and this at a time when British policy in Palestine was clearly moving from a pro-Zionist to a pro-Arab position.

Two official British documents from the year 1937 deal with this claim. One is the report of the Peel Commission (Chapter 9, Par. 61), which relates that during the years 1920-1939, 688 Arab tenant farmers were removed from their land as a result of purchases made by the Jews. Five hundred twenty-six of the Arab farmers remained in some agricultural occupation, and four hundred received alternative plots of land in other locations.

The second document is one of a series of memoranda prepared by the mandatory government and published in London (Colonial No. 133, p. 37). It contains the findings of the 1931 investigation of Lewis French, which totally refute the claim that the Zionist undertaking in Palestine caused the creation of "an entire landless people among the Palestinian Arabs". The memorandum notes that the total number of applications of registration as landless Arabs reached 3,27 1. Of these, the claims of 2,607 were rejected as not belonging to this category, and only 664 heads of families were recognized as having legitimate claims. Approximately half this number - 347 - agreed to accept the government's offer of resettlement. The rest refused, either because they had found employment elsewhere, or because they were unaccustomed to the agricultural methods, such as irrigation, employed in the new locations, or because of other reasons. In his investigation of the hill country, where the Jewish purchases were minimal, French found that out of seventy-one Arab claims of eviction, sixty-eight were rejected (The Esco Foundation for Palestine, Inc., Vol. II, p. 716).

And finally: What was the land ownership situation when the State of Israel was established in 1948? According to the official data published by the outgoing British mandatory administration before the establishment of the State (Survey of Palestine, 1946), only 8.6% of the land was in fact owned by Jews, while over 70% was state land, which had passed from British to Turkish authority and now to Israel, the legal heir of the British mandate. The remaining lands - 33% belonged to Arab landowners, and 16.9% were abandoned by the Arab owners who hastened to obey the call of their leaders "to clear the way for the Arab armies which would annihilate the Jewish State". These landowners did not consider the possibility that the Jewish State would remain.

The key to the entire problem lies in that large percentage of state land, most of which was in the Negev - an unsettled area of approximately 12,557,00 dunams, or close to 50% of the entire area (26,320,000) of mandatory Palestine. These lands had never been under Arab ownership, neither during the period of British rule nor even during the preceding Turkish regime. The contention heard time and again from Arab propagandists - that 95% of the territory of Palestine had belonged to the Arabs - is, therefore, entirely without basis in fact.

Now, let's briefly talk about Islam. One of the more important precepts here is that Islam is not the religion of peace President Bush has claimed since 9-11. A majority or substantial minority of Islams do support suicide terrorism. We have the right to criticize his characterization of Islam as the religion of peace. We have the responsibility to point out that societies built on Islamic values are not "just like us", and they do not have the same goals as us. I expect you, if you really are a Vietnam vet, to realize that you cannot take concepts such as democracy, that come out of Judeo-Christian values of equality of all men before their G-d, and simply graft that onto another culture where it has never existed.

[By the way, why did you stop off in Israel on the way home from Vietnam? Weren't you anxious to be back in the US with your family?]

We really need to drop the jingoist support of particular U.S. political parties, Republicans or Democrats, and realize it is all Americans who need to understand and focus on the words of the Koran and the jihadists. As far as I can tell, both parties are blind to the problem.

But, why bother with usual politically correct explanations of why Arabs do what they do. Very simply they burn synagogues, kill Jews and others, kill each other, rip the clitoris from their daughters, kill family members for inappropriate affairs, and make this world a hell hole, because their culture has been a destructive and death oriented culture for the past one thousand years. And, they have been given license by liberals and leftists to act as savages because the mental disease of liberalism thinks it is multicuturally quaint to act out your culture, no matter what it is.

See, you don't have to like the way Israel fights her wars. Have you considered that Israel was attacked by Arab armies five times since Israel became a legitimate and sovereign nation in 1948? Arabs chose war. Arabs suffer the consequences. Nobody likes it. But the enemy knows that they can count on people like you to object, which helps them. But the fact remains that, like it or not, these people want you dead. Useful idiots that some Leftists may be, they will kill you as fast as they will kill me.

Clearly I don't buy the old "small minority of extremists" argument. "Islam is really quite peaceful, honest!". Don't buy it for a minute. In May 2005, following alledged incidents of Koran abuse at Guantanamo Bay publicized in the Leftist media, caused widespread outrage, protests, and anti-American demonstrations in the Muslim world. In Oct 2005, Feb 2005, Muslim jihadists blew up mosques in Iraq and Afghanistan in multiple attacks, destroying hundreds of ancient Korans, not to mention the dozens of innocents that were murdered in the process. The response from CAIR and other alleged 'moderate Muslims'? Not a peep, not even a press conference.

What about the leadership of the Islamic world? Certainly they are voices for moderation and reason. Like this man, the Sheikh Abd Al-Rahman Al-Sudayyi, Chief Imam of the Holy Mosque in Mecca, the epicenter of Worldwide Islam, approved by and appointed to the position by the Saudi Government. Here's what he had to say in a televised sermon in July 2005:

"Oh Allah, Liberate Our Al-Aqsa Mosque... Punish the Occupying Zionists and Their Supporters Among The Corrupt Infidels... Oh Allah, Scatter and Disperse Them"

Yep, those words sound very 'moderate' and 'peaceful' to me. I'm feeling much better now. Nice to know the man is setting a 'moderate' example for Islam.

With all the terrorists coming from Saudi Arabia nowadays, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia must be a very poor country, because everyone knows that poverty breeds terrorism. I havent heard of any terrorists coming from Honduras lately, however.

School kids murdered in Beslan, stockbrokers in lower Manhattan, tourists in Bali, restaurant goers in Israel. All murdered by Muslims waging violent Jihad, a doctrine no Muslim group has ever disavowed or repudiated.

Courtesy of www.answering-islam.org, here are the top ten reasons why Islam is not the "Religion of Peace". These commandments and events are exhaustively documented in the Koran, Hadith and other authorative Islamic sources:

10. Mohammad nicknames his weapons.

9. Mohammad commands in his Quran that adulterers and adulteresses should receive a hundred lashes.

8. Mohammad in his Quran permits husbands to beat their wives.

7. Mohammad in his Quran commands that the hands of male or female thieves should be cut off.

6. Mohammad assassinated poets and poetesses.

5. Mohammad in his Quran commands death or the cutting off of hands and feet for fighting and corrupting the land.

4. Mohammad aggressively attacked Meccan caravans.

3. Mohammad in his Quran promises sensuous Gardens for martyrs dying in a military holy war.

2. Mohammad unjustly executes around 600 male Jews and enslaves the women and children.

1. Mohammad launches his own Crusades (centuries before the more well-known Christian Crusades took place).

"The world's most inflamed conflict" is a good deal larger than that particular theatre of Hot Jihad, where open warfare is the vehicle of choice, that in which the "Palestinian" Arabs are merely the shock troops, whose own lives, and their quality, are inconsequential, and the real battle is to deny Infidels the possession of any territory once held by Muslims, or for that matter, where Muslims now exist in sufficient number not to deny outright the Infidel possession, but to whittle away at, and weaken the hold of, those Infidels over what they thought was theirs, but not all those now living in their lands agree.

Islamic rules are not native to the West. There is a great deal of brazen chutzpa, contempt and provocation for a person who was graciously granted sanctuary in a foreign country, received all possible assistance and access to all its wealth, to demand that the host accommodates himself to that person’s alien and often distasteful customs. It is an attitude of a conqueror - not of adoptive son. This is what is happening in Europe.

Islam at its core is lethally militaristic and institutionalizes homicide.

Muslims are anti-West, anti-Democracy, anti-Christian, anti-Jewish, anti-Buddhist, and anti-Hindu. Muslims are involved in 25 of some 30 conflicts going on in the world: in Afghanistan, Algeria, Bangladesh, Bosnia, Congo, Cote d'Ivoire, Cyprus, East Timor, India, Indonesia (2 provinces), Kashmir, Kazakastan, Kosovo, Kurdistan, Macedonia, the Middle East, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Sudan, Russia-Chechnya, Tajikistan, Thailand, Uganda and Uzbekistan.

Doesn't this mean that extremist Islam is the norm and normal Islam is extremely rare?

So, let's be honest. You are a member of the Baby Boomer generation, and mainly because of your need to see yourself as modern, progressive and tolerant, I'd say you enjoy wearing anti-Israel eyeglasses.

I don't understand how you have been able to invest in the pretense that Islam has something more to offer us than just terrorism, rioting, the death of free speech and artistic expression, homophobia, Jew-hatred, female genital mutilation, limb amputation, gang rape, stoning to death for victims of gang rape, hanging underage girls from cranes in public parks etc.

Have you read the PLO Charter and the Hamas Covenant?

Have you read about the waves of violence during the British Mandate period initiated by the Arabs? The riots of September 1937, the result of the Arabs' disappointment with the Peel Commission's recommendations of partition? The riots in April 1936, when Jews were murdered near Tulkarm, in Jaffa and on the outskirts of Tel Aviv because the Arab Higher Committee, established to lead the Palestinian struggle and headed by the Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, demanded a cessation of Jewish immigration, a ban on the sale of land to Jews, and Arab independence in Palestine?

Evidently land was being sold to the Jews as I stated above, or the Mufti wouldn't have been protesting about it.

Now, Lanny, what is your opinion about the 1.5 million Armenians massacred by the Ottoman Turks, or the 6 million Ukrainians slaughtered by Stalin, or the tens of millions of other Soviet citizens killed by Stalin's Soviet Union, or the 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis and their helpers throughout Europe, or the 60 million Chinese butchered by Mao, or the 2 million Cambodians murdered by Pol Pot, or the millions killed and enslaved in Sudan, or the Tutsis murdered in Rwanda's genocide, or the millions starved to death and enslaved in North Korea, or the million Tibetans killed by the Chinese, or the million-plus Afghans put to death by Brezhnev's Soviet Union?

Do these issues bother you as much as Israel defending herself against Islamic armies intent on her destruction?

Lanny, if the 1.3 million Israeli Arabs are a model of peaceful coexistence, why are the 250,000 Jews living in Judea, Samaria, and the Golan Heights an obstacle to peace?

If the uprooting of Arab communities within the Green Line constitutes a blatant human rights violation, why is the uprooting of Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria viewed as a contribution to peace?

Don't be a hypocrite.

Watch this video The Islamic Mein Kampf, again. Speak out, along with other people of good conscience, to put an end to the brutal terror of the Palestinian Authority complicit in the ethnic cleansing of indigenous Jews from their homeland of Israel.

Jews are entitled to self-determination, to live freely in their homeland. Zionism is just as valid as Palestinianism, even moreso.

There is not, nor has there ever been, a distinct "Palestinian" culture or language. Further, there has never been a Palestinian state governed by Arab Palestinians in history. Nor was there ever a serious Arab-Palestinian national movement, until 1964, which was three years *before* the Arabs of "Palestine" lost the West Bank [Judea and Samaria] and Gaza as a result of attacking Israel during the 1967 Six-Day War (which the Arabs started). Even the original so-called leader of the "Palestinian" people, Yasser Arafat, was Egyptian. In short, the so-called Arab Palestinians are a manufactured people. They are a people with no history and no authenticity whose sole purpose for existence is to destroy the Jewish State.

As a "Zionist" you should have known all this.

I will publish your reply, if you have one.