Killing for Allah

By Alan Caruba

“Schmoozing with Terrorists” is, at first glance, a very odd title for a very serious book by Aaron Klein, an American, orthodox Jew with what has to be either unbelievable courage or a death wish the size of the crater left behind after 9/11. His book ($25.95, WND Books) shares actual interviews he conducted with the leading terrorists of our times.

“We have failed to carry out a coherent policy against terror”, said Klein. “We have failed to understand global terror and how to annihilate it. As a result, the terrorists are much stronger today than before September 11, when our war on terror began.”

While attending Yeshiva University, Klein gave up thoughts of becoming a physician in order to move to Israel and become a journalist. He is the Jerusalem bureau chief for WorldNetDaily.com and writes a weekly column for the Jewish Press, the largest weekly Jewish newspaper. He has been interviewing terrorists since the age of 19.

The result is a window into the terrorist’s minds and motivation. Everything, including both the suicide of the bombers and the murder of civilians is justified by the Koran, the holy book of Islam. It not only absolves the killer, it promises him a life in a paradise filled with wine and women. This has to make Islam the most twisted and most dangerous religion on earth. An estimated 1.3 billion people are faithful to it.

What Klein discovered as a journalist was that, “My colleagues in the news media talk all the time to venom-spewing jihadists, to terrorist-sponsoring dictators and they ask softball questions and give terrorists a platform from which to spew their anti-American propaganda.”

“The vast majority of the news media,” says Klein, “the vast majority of reporters I work with here in the Middle East, are individuals who don’t have the ability to tell good from evil. These reporters have absolutely no moral compass whatever.”

That is why we are not dealing with "insurgents", "militants", or "activists." We are dealing with cold-blooded murderers.

Recent polls indicate that Americans, in greater numbers, are beginning to abandon the notion that Islam as a “religion” should command the respect we give to other major faiths. Painfully, Americans are concluding that cutting Islam slack while it ruthlessly kills anyone, including fellow Muslims, that stand in the way of its quest for worldwide domination, is a very bad idea.

In an interview with Sheik Saleh Faraj, one of the leaders of the Islamic Liberation Party in the West Bank, Klein quotes him as saying, “Islam cannot tolerate any idea or principle or any way of life that does not go with its laws and its visions and its rules.”

What emerges from this interesting book, based on face-to-face meetings with some truly evil men, is the understanding that Israel simply cannot negotiate a path to peace with the Palestinians. A sovereign nation now for six decades, it has fought several wars, including a brief one in 2006 with Palestinians—Hezbollah—based in Lebanon. It signed the Oslo agreements and was rewarded by Arafat with an “Intifada” and, after unilaterally withdrawing from the Gaza strip, the response was to use it to fire rockets every day and launch raids into Israel to kill and kidnap its soldiers.

The lessons that Israelis have learned are those being slowly learned by Americans. There can be no peace with people whose sole aim in life is to kill or enslave you. Nor is this just an Israeli or American problem, it is a global problem. The Spanish and the British have both been subjected to terrorist attacks, as have occurred as well in Bali and elsewhere.

Speaking of the vast divide between Islam and Judaism (and he could have included Christianity as well), Klein writes, “One of the greatest differences between Judaism and Islam is in the religion’s priorities. Jews are taught to serve the Creator in this world to achieve heaven in the next, but also that all Jews merit a place in heaven. The main emphasis in Judaism is life, not death. The Torah only vaguely refers to heaven, with little description of what it is. All Jewish sages agree heaven is for the soul and encompasses spiritual, not physical bliss.”

The ability of jihadists to justify their terrorist acts is astonishing. “There is no violence. This is jihad for God,” said Ala Senakreh, the West Bank chief of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. No violence? Bombing people as they celebrate Passover, sit in a pizza parlor, or are gathered outside a discothèque?

The jihad has visited America once dramatically on September 11, 2001. It will come again if we don’t shake loose of the lethally naïve notion that this war is one being fought only in Afghanistan and Iraq, and that we should leave as soon as possible so as not to anger the jihadists by fighting them on their “sacred sands.”

There is a reason that Israel’s jails are filled with Palestinians. That’s what you do to people who want to kill you.

There is a reason we are in the Middle East and are likely to be for a generation before we, the West, can impose some measure of sanity in a region of the world that has resisted every standard of human rights that has evolved over the centuries.