mantra
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You are so wrong Pender.
[[The Zionists harnessed the negative energies of the Western world--its imperialism, its anti-Semitism, its Crusading nostalgia, its anti-Islamic bigotry, and its deep racism--and focused them on a new imperialist project, the creation of a Western surrogate state in the Islamic heartland.
To the West's imperialist ambitions, this new colonial project offered a variety of strategic advantages.
Israel would be located in the heart of the Islamic world; it would sit astride the junction of Asia, Africa and Europe; it would guard Europe's gateway to the Indian Ocean; and it could monitor developments in the Persian Gulf with its vast reserves of oil.
For the West as well as Europe's Jews, this was a creative moment: indeed, it was a historical opportunity. For European Jews, it was a stroke of brilliance. Zionism was going to leverage Western power in their cause.
As the Zionist plan would unfold, inflicting pain on the Islamic world, evoking Islamic anger against the West and Jews, the complementarities between the two would deepen. In time, new complementarities would be discovered--or created--between the two antagonist strains of Western history.
In the United States, the Zionist movement would give encouragement to evangelical Protestants--who looked upon the birth of Israel as the fulfillment of end-time prophecies--and convert them into fanatic partisans of Zionism.
In addition, Western civilization, which had hitherto traced its central ideas and institutions to Rome and Athens, would be repackaged as a Judeo-Christian civilization.
This reframing not only underscores the Jewish roots of the Western world, it also makes a point of emphasizing that Islam is the outsider, the adversary.
Zionism owes its success solely to this unlikely partnership. On their own, the Zionists could not have gone anywhere.
They could not have created Israel by bribing or coercing the Ottomans into granting them a charter to colonize Palestine.
Despite his offers of loans, investments, technology and diplomatic expertise, Theodore Herzl was repeatedly rebuffed by the Ottoman Sultan.
It is even less likely that the Zionists could at any time have mobilized a Jewish army in Europe to invade and occupy Palestine, against Ottoman and Arab opposition to the creation of a Jewish state on Islamic lands.
The Zionist partnership with the West was indispensable for the creation of a Jewish state. This partnership was also fateful.
It produced a powerful new dialectic, which has encouraged Israel, both as the political center of the Jewish Diaspora and the chief outpost of the West in the heart of the Islamic world, to become more daring in its designs against the Islamic world and beyond.
In turn, a wounded and humiliated Islamic world, more resentful and determined after every defeat, has been driven to embrace increasingly radical ideas and methods to recover its dignity and power--and to attain this recovery on the strength of Islamic ideas.
This destabilizing dialectic has now brought the West itself into a direct confrontation against the Islamic world.]]
http://www.radicalleft.net/blog/_archives/2006/11/27/2526566.html
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