Canary in the Mineshaft

Ted Lapkin

Perspective - Radio National, 10 October  2005

[This is the print version of story http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/perspective/stories/s1478788.htm]

The chickens are coming home to roost. The French are finally paying the price for their slavish adherence to the policies of George Bush.

After all, how else can one interpret the arrest in late September of a jihadist cell that was plotting to bomb the Paris Metro? Critics of the war in Iraq tell us that the violence in Falluja has made Australia more vulnerable to terrorism. And the shrapnel had hardly settled in Bali before like-minded pundits began to apply this same argument to the suicide bombing of a week ago. Thus the ANU's Clive Williams was quick to contend that any jihadist threat Down Under was the direct result of the Howard government's "close association with US foreign policies."

By the same logic, it must have been Jacques Chirac's enthusiastic support for the American neo-con agenda that motivated the wrath of the Paris bombing conspirators. The leader of this Islamic terrorist ring, Abu Mussab Abdel-Wadoud, declared in early September: "France is our enemy number one, the enemy of our religion." The conventional wisdom on terrorist root-causes tells us that such Francophobic animus could only be generated by a Gallic endorsement of Yankee imperialism.

Of course, this is utter nonsense. There are no such pro-American attitudes to be found anywhere in official Paris. Not only did Jacques Chiraq oppose the war in Iraq, but the Quai d'Orsay has spent much of the past four years undermining US foreign policy.

Winston Churchill once said, "an appeaser is someone who feeds the crocodile in the hopes of being eaten last." And like the terrorist cells in Madrid that were discovered after Spain's withdrawal from Iraq, the Paris bomb plot demonstrates the futility of trying to propitiate jihadist Islam.

Similarly absurd are the arguments to the effect that sympathy for Islamic terrorism is derived from the festering Arab-Israeli conflict. In fact, Osama bin Laden only first mentioned the Palestinian issue as Afghanistan came under attack by U.S. forces in October 2001. This belated conversion to the cause of Israel's destruction was generally interpreted as a cynical attempt to shore up al-Qaeda's flagging fortunes in the face of an American onslaught.

By contrast, the true stakes in this conflict are quite simple. The Western world is under assault by a ruthless enemy that uses terrorist tactics in pursuit of dystopian war aims.

The attacks of 9/11, Madrid and London all demonstrate that Al-Qaeda views the deliberate destruction of innocents as a legitimate means of making war. bin Laden's global caliphate would relegate women to a sequestered existence of ignorance, illiteracy and servility. And Christians and Jews, if they were permitted to survive at all, would be forced into the subservience of second-class 'dihimmi' citizenship.

Of course, jihadism can never win: unless the incessant carping of our post-modernist elites saps our confidence in the rightness of our cause and our will to fight. Rather than flagellating ourselves over the purported sins of Western democracy, we should spend our time studying the objectives of our enemy in order to prevent him from obtaining them. That is the way wars have been won since the commencement of time.

The worst thing that the West could do would be to exert undue pressure on Israel in an attempt to placate Islamic passions and prejudices. Such a policy would simply reinvigorate the flagging spirits of a jihadist movement that is battered, bruised and on the defensive. Even in Iraq, the bloody insurgency of abu-Musab al-Zarqawi can wreak havoc in Baghdad and elsewhere. But the Arab Sunni Muslim al-Qaeda has no hope of victory in a nation that is dominated by Shia Muslims and Kurds.

Israel cannot be expected to negotiate with the Palestinian jihadists who seek its annihilation any more than Australia could be expected to seek an accommodation with Osama bin Laden. It is a fool's errand to expect that anything other than the peace of the graveyard can be achieved with people who believe that you have no right to exist.

In 2003, former Assistant Secretary of State Richard Armitage described Lebanon's Hizbollah movement as the "A-Team" of Islamic terrorism. But twenty years earlier I was fighting as an Israeli army officer against that very enemy.

Israel serves as a canary in the mineshaft for the democratic world, providing advance warning of threats that later emerge to menace the West. Thus for reasons of pragmatism, as well as principle, Israel should be regarded as a cherished ally in the fight against global jihadism.

This is a war, and we need all the friends we can get.