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June 22, 2007
Knowing our enemies
The key is to isolate Islamic regimes, says Frisch.
KELLEY KORBIN
Recent events in Gaza would seem to be playing right into Israel's
hands, according to Prof. Hillel Frisch, who spoke at Schara Tzedeck
Synagogue last week in a lecture sponsored by Canada-Israel Committee,
Pacific Region.
Frisch, who has been hailed as one of the world's top experts on
Palestinian and Arab politics and who is the senior research associate
at the Begin-Sadat Centre for Strategic Studies, talked about the
prospects for peace in Israel and responded to a special screening
of the controversial documentary Obsession: Radical Islam's War
Against the West.
The screening was the first time Frisch and most of the local audience
had seen director Wayne Kopping's film, which uses footage from
Arab television to paint a harrowing picture of radical Islamic
sects across the Arab spectrum and their professed desire for terror,
global jihad and world domination. The film also links radical Islamists
and their methods to Hitler and Nazi Germany.
In response to the inflammatory nature of the documentary, Frisch
said that the movie underlined the fact that Jews must always have
awareness about "enemies that lurk beyond our tent" in
a world where the Jewish people have ceaselessly faced persecution.
However, overall, he characterized the film as "a bit amiss."
Frisch said that, by focusing on non-state groups of admittedly
highly motivated, extremist groups, Obsession creates a false
representation of the threat to Israel and the West. He said that
even the most devastating attack by one of these extremists groups
– al-Qaeda's 9/11 assault – didn't demonstrate anything
like the kind of "persistent, cumulative damage that states
have managed to inflict upon either the Jews or the West."
He continued, "As an isolated event, al-Qaeda can be likened
to Nazi Germany, to Japan; but over the long term, can we really
compare the threat al-Qaeda poses, even to the Jews or to the West,
to that of Nazi Germany and Japan? ... Six years after the al-Qaeda
attack on the Twin Towers, the threat is simply not comparable."
To Frisch, the most lethal danger lies not with non-state extremist
movements, but with states that are governed or highly influenced
by Islamist extremists. "In my mind," he said, "the
true threat that the West and Israel and the Jewish people are facing
is a nuclear Iran ... and in Pakistan, where there is a real danger
that the bomb will fall into the hands of an Islamist regime."
In order to combat this threat, Frisch said that Israel and the
West must conduct an "anti-Islamist ideological war."
The key to winning this war, he argued, is to dilute the fundamentalists'
ultimate power, which is Islamic unity.
Frisch said it is in Israel's interest to specifically name its
enemies and to encourage differences between the fundamentalist
Hamas and the more moderate Fatah. Furthermore, he said that Jews
should promote the fact that there are Islamist conflicts in the
world, like in Darfur, that have nothing to do with Israel or Judaism.
He advised that we remind the world that Muslims, most of whom are
peaceful non-extremists, are usually the ultimate victims of illegitimate
uses of violence by fundamentalist Islamists. In fact, Frisch said
that Muslims make up 95 per cent of the people killed by these militants.
The recent violence perpetrated by Hamas in Gaza is a reminder of
this fact, he added. However, according to Frisch, the unrest, bloodshed
and governmental instability there may actually lead to peace in
Israel.
Frisch believes that Israel has two main objectives on its road
towards peace. In the short term, he said, Israel seeks to divide
and conquer its enemies by increasing the differences between Gaza
(Hamas) and the West Bank (Fatah).
In the long term, Frisch said, he does not think the Palestinians
would ever be content with a two-state solution that gives them
a state comprised of only 20 per cent of the land mass of Israel
and, therefore, he believes Israel hopes to "bring an end to
the Palestinian state option ... draw in the Jordanian and Egyptian
states and restore, more or less, the political order that prevailed
before 1967."
Kelley Korbin is a freelance writer living in West Vancouver.
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