Two women of valor

In his excellent Jerusalem Post column column, Saul Singer takes a look at two gallant ladies, Wafa Sultan and Irshad Manji. In the course of explicating Sultan and Manji, Singer takes a whack at Mearsheimer and Walt:

The paper, by John Mearheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard, is really beneath rebuttal – some 40 pages of Pat Buchanan with footnotes. If anything, the two have probably done the world a favor by exposing, with a baldness bordering on parody, views widely held in academia. Already on the first page, we see the tautological premise that clearly drove this Protocols (i.e. the Jews run the world) remake: “Why has the US been willing to set aside its own security in order to advance the interests of another state?”

The paper goes on to argue that the “so-called rogue states… are not a dire threat to vital interests, apart from the US commitment to Israel itself… Even if these states acquire nuclear weapons – which is obviously not desirable – it would not be a strategic disaster for the US.” Iranian nukes, in other words, are no biggy; what will really make America safe is to drop Israel so Muslims will stop hating the West.

My hunch is that Sultan and Manji felt they had to go so far as defending Jews and Israel because they recognize that it is impossible to fight the Islamist jihad without exposing its Jew-hatred in an unapologetic manner. They realize that we – Jews, Christians, and non-jihadi Muslims – are in this together.

As Muslims, these women understand that jihad is seamless. Christian Westerners are deluding themselves if they think that, by jettisoning the Jews, they will slake Islamist hatred, rather than simply whetting its appetite.

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