Excerpt from a larger article, written by Moshe Feiglin soon after the Attack on the Twin Towers (World Trade Center).
Excerpt from a It was impossible to get away from the reports of the massacre in downtown Manhattan. The news was everywhere: on the air, at home, in the car, in the shops. I entered the neighborhood grocery store. The storekeeper’s radio was on. President Bush was speaking to the American people:
“I declare tomorrow to be a day of prayer”, said the President.
Now that’s interesting, I think to myself, I can’t recall an Israeli Prime Minister who declared a day of prayer. Even when the Yom Kippur War broke out, Golda Meir was shocked, but I don’t remember her asking anyone to pray. After all, I thought, America’s national anthem is directed to G-d and Americans sing “G-d bless America”. Even the British maintain close contact with the Almighty: “G-d save the Queen”. But the Israelis have lost their connection to G-d in their anthem and all that remains is a dismal hope for a meaningless sort of freedom. To whom precisely should they pray?
“I ask every American,” the President continued, breaking into my train of thoughts, “during lunch time tomorrow [not on the employer’s time, like a good Histadrut worker] to pray for all the injured, their families, and the American nation.”
Go to church, to the synagogue, to the mosque and pray, ended the President.
“Did I hear right?” I ask the storekeeper, “Did he say mosque?”
She nodded.
“At this very moment you’ve lost the war,” I said to the astonished storekeeper and start looking for what I need on the shelves.
America has lost the war. The Americans have made the same mistake as the Israelis and, just as Israel is retreating from one defeat to the next, so the Americans are now lined up on the track to disintegration.
When the black boxes of the hijacked airplanes are recovered, we will hear the pilots screaming “Allah Akbar” in the last moments before the crash. They slaughtered you in the name of Allah and now the President calls on you to pray to him.
The American giant received a far more serious knock-out blow than that which brought America into the Second World War. Those who gave the Americans the knock-out blow at Pearl Harbor received in two atomic bombs in return. The latest knock-out blow has no return address. During the first hours, it seemed that the American revenge would be horrifying and terrible. US Jews thought that now Sharon could “finish off” the Arabs, blow up the al-Aksa mosque, expel them all and do as he wished. In light of the pictures of horror from the World Trade Center, and the television coverage of the spontaneous celebrations from Ramallah, Sharon would only receive words of thanks from the Americans. The Americans’ revenge would be dwarfed by Israel’s reprisal. The hours passed, and the days, and the American tiger turned out to be a helpless kitten.
The American President was busy running after the countries of the world, trying to set up a strange coalition against a few cave dwellers in Afghanistan, while senators explained on live television to the American people that “we must remember that the enemy is the terrorists, not Islam.”
America has been trapped by the same weakness that has visited Israel in recent years. It is entrapped in a notion of power and is therefore incapable of identifying the enemy and fighting it. Consequently, America will lose the battle, in the same way that Israel is losing it.
The State of Israel was founded on the notion that the Jewish people is a “normal” people like all other nations. One that has to establish a normal state, based on Western cultural values, and be accepted into the family of nations. If these premises are valid, Israel’s disputes with its neighbors are also “normal”, rational, territorial issues that may be resolved in a logical manner.
Yet the Jewish people is not a “normal” nation and its conflicts are not “normal” ones. The war being waged against us is not about territories but rather about our very existence as a Jewish nation. This is a war against our message and our mission. That is what our enemies are fighting against, while we reply to them through our own subjective interpretation of reality: we speak of security and of territories. We fail to understand why they refuse to accept even all the territory.
“The Emperor has no clothes!” Arafat shouts at us and murders three people in Netanya.
“Do you want us to wear something else in your honor?” Peres asks.
“He’s naked!” shouts Arafat and murders a young mother from Alfei Menashe.
“Perhaps we’ll wear red for you?” asks Beilin.
Arafat continues to attack us, and we continue to propose solutions that fail to admit the naked reality. It is no wonder we are losing the war.
The same is now happening to America. The Americans are in fact the children of Christianity. While America is not a Christian country, it is the standard-bearer of Western culture which draws from Christian culture. Why do the terrorists hate the US so much? Why are they prepared to commit suicide in order to kill Americans? After all, America has not conquered their country. On the contrary, many of them receive generous aid from the US. How strange that even Arabs in New Jersey, who are actually living in the flesh-pots of America and were liable to have suffered physically from the terrorist attack, rejoiced at the sight of the horrible massacre.
Why this hatred?
Two deviant daughters came forth from Judaism but left the fold to conquer the world: Christianity and Islam. Both hate their mother and both fight each other.
Judaism integrates the qualities of strict justice and mercy, in harmony and in proper measure. Christianity took only the quality of mercy while Islam took the quality of strict justice.
The Moslems see with jealousy how the culture based on Christian mercy succeeds in gaining control over the world. Let everyone come and benefit from the cornucopia open to all — to everyone we proffer the other cheek, and the whole body, in fact. Come and take your part in the wealth, come and enter the gates of the World Trade Center. We aren’t conquering you with the sword, but with gold.
“Why are they bringing their wars here?” a soot-covered broker shouted into a CNN reporter’s microphone. He didn’t understand that he was conquering, not territories, but the opposing culture, straight from there – from the Twin Towers.
But every Moslem child understands it clearly. What the political commentators and senators in the US fail to realize is crystal clear to the other half of the world. America is not at war with a single individual – Bin Laden – but with every child that will be born tomorrow in Cairo, Amman, Beirut, Gaza and, if he is a Moslem, even in New Jersey.
America will never admit that it is involved in a war of cultures, in fact in a religious war. Such an admission implies that, as in the case of Israel, American values are fundamentally at question. They are not as universal as Americans would like to believe. The happiness they pursue in the name of all humanity may be happiness for a specific group based on Christianity, but it means hell for another group that is just as large.
It is entirely possible that the balance has changed and the other half of the world is now beginning to realize its aspirations for happiness (and woe to such a culture immersed in rivers of blood). America will never admit it, and consequently will be unable to fight back. Just like the Israelis. They fail to identify the enemy. They seek the terrorists just as Sharon is pursuing individual terrorists. They are pursuing the wasps instead of destroying the nest, because they are afraid of the nest. They are afraid of a real confrontation between their values and those of Islam.
They want a coalition with moderate Arab countries. They have to prove that neither Islam nor the Arabs, but terrorism, is their enemy. The situation is so ludicrous that even Arafat is being wooed – Arafat, who invented hijacking; Arafat, the father of 20th century terrorism. They want to make a coalition with him, if only to avoid facing reality.
They will in fact catch the wasps. Bin Laden doesn’t stand a chance. He won’t be able to escape the power of the US. And then what? Today every Arab child wants to be a Shahid, a martyr for Islam. Bin Laden will enter the pantheon of the Shahids, but another million are waiting their turn and they are impatient. America is waging a physical war against a metaphysical enemy. They are incapable of understanding what we in Israel witness every day — overjoyed parents of suicide bombers.
In the coming months, we will see a lot of military planes take off and land. We will see destroyers and missiles and millions of tons of TNT exploding in the Iraqi desert and in Afghanistani caves. They will kill thousands of innocent people and in the end America will lose — because it failed to identify the true enemy.
Comment by Vilnagaon.org June 2024 / Sivan 5784
The soft-right views “Denazification of Gaza” as their ideal solution to the conflict.
For many reasons “Denazification” is a recipe for failure. One of the reasons alluded to by Feiglin in the article quoted above is that it fails to identify who is attacking us.
Furthermore both internal pressure from the disloyal left and external pressures from countries who are hostile to Israel will deny Israel the necessary time and influence to “re-educate” the population.
Furthermore when the Nazis lost, they lost without hope of being “saved” by outside allies. Currently, Gazans believe even if they are in the short-term conquered by Israel, their Muslim allies outside of Gaza will enable a comeback and will finance a war of attrition.
I will end these comments with a quote from another post: The Kfar Darome Miracle Was Not Enough To Save the Jewish Communities in Gaza From the “Deep State” and A Biblical Curse
When the Deep State Was Weaker, General Ariel Sharon Had the Ability To End An Early Version of the Intifada in Gaza. It Would Be a Stronger Deep State That Would Compel the Same General Ariel Sharon to Destroy the Jewish Communities of Gaza
During the Early 1970’s when the “Deep State” was weaker and had not yet decided to destroy Israel’s control of Gaza (part of Biblical Israel) General Ariel Sharon successfully ended an early version of the intifada. In 1970 {approx. Jewish year, 5730}, it was General of the Southern Command Ariel Sharon who tasked General Meir Dagan with establishing the Rimon Special Unit. The activities of this unit led to eliminating terror in the Gaza Strip in the 1970’s.
Sharon and Dagan just solved the symptoms of the problem. They did not solve the core problem.
It would be the same Sharon under blackmail for corruption charges by the Deep State coupled with pressures from foreign sources and a hostile media that led to Sharon’s breaking of his explicit election pledge and the expulsion of all the Jews from Biblical Gaza.
The Biblical Curse As Explained By Ohr Hachaim Hakadosh
He thus without realizing it, fulfilled the Biblical Curse in Bamidbar/Numbers 33 as explained by Ohr Hachaim Hakadosh:
33:55
ואם לא תורישו את יושבי הארץ, “And if you will fail to drive out the inhabitants of the land, etc.” According to Megillah 10 which says that wherever the word והיה occurs it alludes to something joyful, the meaning of the word here would be that although the reason the Israelites would decide {with joy} to allow some of these inhabitants to remain for the performance of menial duties, etc., i.e. in order to enjoy their services, G-d would see to it, that instead, these remaining inhabitants would prove to be thorns in their eyes and pricks in their sides and that these foreigners would harass the new owners.
וצררו אתכם על הארץ, “and they shall harass you in the land, etc.” The Torah means that not only will they harass you in the part of the land that you did not drive them out of, but they will harass you even in the parts of the country which you have conquered and driven them out of and which you have settled. They will challenge you to leave what they consider to be their country. The meaning of the word על in this context is similar to Numbers 20,24: על אשר מריתם את פי, “because you have rebelled against My word.” We have a similar meaning of the word על in Deut. 32,51.
33:56
כאשר דמיתי לעשות להם, “as I meant to do unto them, etc.” My commandment was meant for your benefit. Seeing you have not fulfilled it, My commandment remains unfulfilled; I therefore have no choice but to fulfill it in respect of these people you have left in the land.
Note: Elsewhere in his commentary, Ohr Hachaim indicates that the curse is not limited to the situation where Canaanites are left in parts of Biblical Israel.