Peace at any price - Bernard Lewis would disagree!

Is it unreasonable to expect truth in Palestinian textbooks? Particularly from those with whom you are negotiating peace? (See 1 below.)

Apparently there are those who think it does not matter as long as you negotiate and give in to the opposition. Peace at any price! (See 2 below.)

Certainly we can depend upon the media to mis-characterize facts. (See 3 below.)

According to some experts we left one Cold War and are now entering another. (See 4 below.)

More on Sec. Rice's trip and our State Department's approach. (See 5 below.)

Professor Bernard Lewis, a man still worth listening to. (See 6 below.)

Dick







1) Melchior: Raise PA textbooks with Abbas
By HAVIV RETTIG


"You can't have agreements while this kind of hatred is inculcated in the children," Knesset Education Committee Chairman Michael Melchior (Labor-Meimad) said on Tuesday after seeing new 12th-grade textbooks published by the Palestinian Authority late last year.

"I intend to demand from Prime Minister [Ehud Olmert] that he present the findings [of a new report on the textbooks] to Abu Mazen [PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas] at their next meeting," Melchior said.

Melchior's statements at the Knesset followed the presentation of Palestinian Media Watch saying that Palestinian 12th grade textbooks teach that hating Israel and pursuing its destruction are religious duties.

PMW director Itamar Marcus told the Education Committee it was the first time the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been depicted in Palestinian schoolbooks as a religious, rather than a territorial, conflict.

"According to these books," Marcus told the MKs, "the war over this land is a war for Muslim land, and will end only with the resurrection of the dead." The books teach that "recognition of Israel is forbidden by religion," he said.

Committee members promised to pressure international donors, particularly Belgium, whose contributions receive specific mention in the textbooks, to suspend their aid as long as such incitement continues in PA textbooks.

According to the report, the schoolbooks, the products of the official education arm of the PA, written by Fatah-appointed officials at the Center for Developing the Palestinian Curricula and published by the PA Ministry of Higher Education, are also used by schools in east Jerusalem that are under the jurisdiction of - and receive funding from - Israel's Education Ministry.

Shlomo Alon, deputy head of the Pedagogic Secretariat in the Education Ministry, told the lawmakers the ministry would investigate whether the books were distributed in east Jerusalem schools and would cut funding for schools found using them.

According to Melchior, the report's findings indicate a trend from "a conflict over land, which can be resolved by partition, to an existential religious conflict that cannot be resolved."

MK Zeev Elkin (Kadima) called on the government to put in place "sanctions against the PA for such violations [of the Oslo Accords]," which he called "more dangerous than security violations in the long run."

2) An imaginary announcement
By GERSHON BASKIN


Israeli cabinet statement, March 25, 2007 regarding the Arab summit in Riyadh:

'The government of Israel convened this morning in regular session. The prime minister presented to the members of the government a new Israeli peace initiative - "The Ten Points Plan."

"The government debated the initiative and then voted overwhelmingly in favor, with only th e Yisrael Beitenu faction voting against the decision. Minister Lieberman submitted his resignation following the vote. His resignation will come into effect in 48 hours.

"The Government of Israel (GOI) calls for direct face-to-face negotiations with the governments of the Palestinian Authority, Syria and Lebanon in order to bring an end to the Israeli-Arab conflict.

"The GOI asserts that a full peace agreement with diplomatic and normal relations between all states in the region is the ultimate goal of the Israeli peace initiative.

"Israel recognizes that the convening of direct bilateral negotiations for peace constitutes explicit recognition of Israel's right to exist in peace with secure and recognize boundaries. Israel calls on the Palestinian Authority to undertake the utmost efforts to ensure that all acts of aggression will cease once the negotiations have ensued. On its part, Israel will continue to adhere to the cease-fire in Gaza and will extend the cease-fire to the West Bank.

"The GOI recognizes the right of the Palestinian people to have an independent sovereign state of their own living side-by-side with Israel in peace and in mutual security.

"While recognizing the need for mutually-agreed adjustment to the boundaries between Israel and the future State of Palestine, Israel recognizes that the basis for negotiations over boundaries is the Green Line armistice agreement of 1949.

"While Israel rejects the resettlement of Palestinian refugees within the territory of the State of Israel, the GOI recognizes that the refugee issue is one of the most important and sensitive issues for both sides and is committed to negotiating in good faith with the Palestinian leadership to find the most just and agreed-upon solution possible that will put an end to the suffering of the Palestinian refugees, wherever they are.

"The GOI is committed to resolving all of the other outstanding permanent status issues with the Palestinians including the future of Jerusalem, borders, water and economic issues, and mutual security arrangements.

The GOI is prepared to return to negotiations on all fronts based on understanding reached in previous rounds of negotiations.

"Israel has no conflicts with the other states and peoples in the region and calls upon all of the leaders of those states to assist in the process of reaching agreements toward full peace in the region, including supporting constructive ideas and steps regarding the sensitive issues of Jerusalem and of refugees.

"The GOI welcomes the assistance of the Quartet and others in helping to bring about a speedy and successful conclusion to negotiations. The GOI recognizes that substantial financial assistance will be required to provide for security and stability in the region, and calls upon the international community to actively engage in the process of rebuilding the Palestinian economy and the infrastructure of the West Bank and Gaza."

THE ABOVE does not have to be an imaginary report. Everything written above is acceptable to almost all of the ministers of the Israeli government.

While Yisrael Beitenu would probably quit the government, Ehud Olmert could rest assured that Meretz and the Arab parties would support the plan even without joining the coalition. Olmert's popularity would take a sudden surge, but this is not the reason why he should adopt this 10-point plan.

Every prime minister promises his people that he will do the utmost to ensure the stability and security. Like most other prime ministers, Olmert has done almost nothing to fulfill this promise. According to all forecasts and analyses, he does not have much time left in office to even try.

But the urgency facing Olmert is not solely one of Israeli domestic politics. The clock is ticking rapidly on the very viability of the two-state solution.

The correct reading of the preceding sentence should be that the clock is rapidly running out on the viability and the feasibility of the Zionist enterprise. Without fulfilling the two-state solution, there will be no Jewish State of Israel.

The ticking clock is not solely because of the physical realities on the ground in the West Bank and Gaza, which impede the possibility of creating a Palestinian state there. The main factor accelerating the clock is the rapid movement of Palestinian intellectuals away from the idea of a separate Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. It was the Palestinian intellectuals who led their national movement to support this solution from the 1970s onward, and it is today the Palestinian intellectuals who are the driving force toward adoption of the South Africa model for Palestine.

Should the Palestinian masses reject the solution of two states in favor of one democratic state from the river to the sea, it is only a matter of time before the entire international community comes to their support, and then the end of the Zionist dream is in sight. If the Palestinian masses adopt the one-state democratic solution, Israel cannot win that battle. And although an unimaginable amount of blood would be spilled, in the end Israel would no longer be the state of the Jewish people.

Those Israeli nationalists and their supporters abroad - Jews and non-Jews alike, who reject peace with our neighbors - are nothing less that suicide bombers aiming to destroy Israel. This may seem to some to be a gross exaggeration, but it is not. Those who reject the risks of making peace are guaranteeing the demise of Israel by their blindness and failure to understand that time is not in our favor.

Arguing about the virtues of recognizing the new Palestinian government is a waste of time. Wasting time now is criminal. Now is the time for an Israeli peace initiative.

Olmert, kadima! - forward. Your time is running out.

3) The Palestinian Government: "All Forms of Resistance"

Some of the international media attempts to whitewash the new Palestinan unity government.

Palestinian PM Haniyeh has stated that the new Palestinian unity government will support "all forms of resistance". Only days after the establishment of the unity government, Hamas has demonstrated exactly what this means.

The terror organization has claimed responsibility for a shooting attack which wounded an Israeli near the Karni border crossing. On the same day, the Egyptians have arrested a would-be Hamas suicide bomber next to the Israeli border awaiting instructions to carry out a terror attack inside Israel.

It is becoming apparent that Hamas intends to continue advocating terror, violence and the refusal to recognize Israel. Some of the international media had, however, fallen over itself in whitewashing the new Palestinian unity government.

Credit to CNN, which refreshingly includes some important context:

Historically, Haniya's Hamas party's use of the term "occupation" does not only refer to Israel's occupation of the West Bank and, previously, Gaza. The group uses the term to characterize Israel's existence, contending that the Jewish state occupies the Palestinian territories.

Compare this with the BBC, which in typical fashion analyzes the Palestinian PM's comments:

The BBC's Matthew Price says that while Mr Haniya's speech will not go far enough for Israel, it is important that a senior member of Hamas has again called for the establishment of a Palestinian state on land occupied by Israel since 1967.

Our correspondent says that some see this as an implicit recognition of Israel's existence.

AFP refers to US reaction to the unity government as "hardline":

The United States on Sunday said it will deal with the new Palestinian government only if it agrees to forgo violence and fully recognize Israel.

US national security adviser Stephen Hadley laid down that hard line [emphasis added] in remarks on US television, after Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniya, in a speech to parliament, insisted on his new government's right to all forms of resistance, rejecting a key international condition for acceptance.

"This government needs to renounce terror and violence," Hadley told CNN.

Does the AFP regard a call to renounce terror and violence as "hardline"? What would the AFP consider to be moderation? Why are Hadley's comments, which reflect the position of the Quartet, regarded as such while Haniyeh's do not merit any similar judgment? After all, the demands of the Quartet that the Palestinian government renounce violence, abide by previous agreements and recognize Israel can hardly be considered to be extreme in the lexicon of international diplomacy.

Please ask the AFP why it disagrees - http://www.afp.com/english/afp/?pid=contact - and send us any feedback you may receive.

Media outlets are not representing the reality of the new Palestinian unity

4) 'Islamic world in cold war'
by Yaakov Lappin
Israeli experts: Shiite-Sunni conflict dramatically escalated in recent months, Sunnis obsessed with Iranian threat




The Islamic world is entering a cold war period as the divide between Shiites and Sunnis escalates, Israeli experts said during a conference at Tel Aviv University on Tuesday afternoon.



Dr. Uzi Rabi, of the Department of Middle Eastern and African History at Tel Aviv University, said both Iran and Sunni nations were sending envoys to battle it out in Iraq.



"There are many reports of Saudi Arabia indirectly supporting al-Qaeda, in order to prevent a Shiite takeover of Baghdad," Rabi said.



"There is a cold war going on in the Middle East between the agents of Iran and Sunni states," he argued, adding: "pragmatic Arab states, such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, and the small Gulf states, have recently joined into a bloc aimed at checking the Shiite phenomenon sweeping the Middle East."



He added that for the first time in Israel's history, there was a possibility for the country to "partially join this Sunni strategic alliance."



Rabi cited Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who said in a speech that Shiites that live in Arab states were disloyal to their home countries, and saved their allegiances for Iran. "Jordan has also warned of the Shiite axis stretching from Iran to the Mediterranean that could split the Arab Muslim heart of the area," Rabi noted.



He stressed a massive growth of anti-Shiite reports in the Sunni media, and an "obsessive" level of coverage on the alleged attempt by Shiites to convert Sunnis to Shiism. "I am amazed by the volume of reports on this," Rabi said.



"There is a sea of articles on the Shiite danger. Sunni states have called for collective action to stop the Shiites, and may even begin nuclear programs to counter the Iranian threat," he added.



Rabi said the Sunni states also used the pretext of a Shiite threat to crack down on radical Sunni opposition groups at home.



"The conflict between Shiites and Sunnis is not a passing phenomenon. This conflict has crossed the borders of Iraq," he concluded.



Iran seeking access to border with Israel

Earlier, Professor David Menshari, an expert on Iran at Tel Aviv University, said
the Islamic Republic was seeking to spread its influence to any area in the Middle East that was not strong enough to repel it, with the Palestinian Authority being a prime example of such a region. "Hamas can help Iran link up to the border with Israel," Menshari said. "Wherever the ground gives way, Iran can be found. They go after the soft targets, such as Lebanon, Gaza, and Iraq, but stay away from the strong countries," he stressed.



Menshari added that "to believe that there was homogenous body of Shiites, a unified axis, would be doing ourselves an injustice."



He cited many voices within Iran that were opposed to the government of the ayatollahs, saying: "There is a series of religious leaders in Iran opposed to clerical control of the state."

5) Rice's ME trip approaches amidst diplomatic questions

US State Department supports decision to meet with non-Hamas ministers in PA government, while some Congress members objects.

The United States government indicated Tuesday that it is unwilling to sever ties with Palestinian officials with whom it has a history of contact, and unlike Israel, will not shun non-Hamas ministers in the new Palestinian unity government. But some Congress members have expressed support for a harder-line policy.



In response to a question about a recent meeting between Palestinian Finance Minister Salam Fayyad and the US consul-general , State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said that the US has "settled on what we thought was an appropriate and right contact policy. I know the Israeli Government has a different view in this regard."



Nonetheless, he emphasized that "we and the Israelis are absolutely on the same page on the need to fight terror and the principles that any Palestinian government with which the rest of the world and the Israelis could work need to meet the Quartet principles. Everybody agrees on that."



Meanwhile, leading members of the House and Senate are circulating letters urging the United States and its European allies not to relax their standards and to adhere to the three basic conditions demanded of a Palestinian government.



The House letter urges the European Union not to give aid or grant recognition to the Palestinian Authority until the PA recognizes Israel, renounces violence and accepts past Israel-Palestinian agreements. The Senate letter urges Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to resist pressure from other countries to grant aid and recognition to the PA before it meets the three international conditions.



Rice coming for another visit

In this midst of these diplomatic decisions, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's is scheduled to visit on Friday Egypt, Israel, the West Bank and Jordan in an effort to make progress on Middle East peace.


The trip's timing appears less than ideal given Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's announcement that he plans to shun the entire Palestinian unity government because it has not fully accepted three international conditions.


While the government pledged to respect past peace deals, it has not recognized Israel or renounced violence, the two other conditions set by the Quartet (the European Union, Russia, the United States and the United Nations) for lifting a Western aid embargo imposed after Hamas won elections last year.



McCormack told reporters Rice's trip would begin with a stop in the southern Egyptian city of Aswan, where she will meet ministers from the so-called Arab "quartet" of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates as well as Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.



She will then travel to Jerusalem and Ramallah, to Amman for talks with Jordan's King Abdullah, and then back to Israel for more contacts with Israeli and Palestinian officials. The spokesman said she plans to return to Washington on March 27.

6)The 2007 Irving Kristol Lecture by Bernard Lewis.

Introductory remarks by Christopher DeMuth, Reuel Marc Gerecht, and James Q. Wilson


Thank you, Vice President and Mrs. Cheney, ladies and gentlemen. As you have been told, I have studied a number of languages, but I cannot find words in any of them adequate to express my feeling of gratitude for the honor and appreciation which I have been shown this evening. All I can say is thank you.

My topic this evening is Europe and Islam. But let me begin with a word of personal explanation. You are accustomed for the most part to hearing from people with direct practical involvement in military and intelligence matters. I cannot offer you that. My direct involvement with military and intelligence matters ended quite a long time ago--to be precise, on 31 August 1945, when I left His Majesty's Service and returned to the university to join with colleagues in trying to cope with a six-year backlog of battle-scarred undergraduates.

What I would like to try and offer you this evening is something of the lessons of history. Here I must begin with a second disavowal. It is sometimes forgotten that the content of history, the business of the historian, is the past, not the future. I remember being at an international meeting of historians in Rome during which a group of us were sitting and discussing the question: should historians attempt to predict the future? We batted this back and forth. This was in the days when the Soviet Union was still alive and well. One of our Soviet colleagues finally intervened and said, "In the Soviet Union, the most difficult task of the historian is to predict the past."

I do not intend to offer any predictions of the future in Europe or the Middle East, but one thing can legitimately be expected of the historian, and that is to identify trends and processes - to look at the trends in the past, at what is continuing in the present, and therefore to see the possibilities and choices which will face us in the future.

One other introductory word. A favorite theme of the historian, as I am sure you know, is periodization--dividing history into periods. Periodization is mostly a convenience of the historian for purposes of writing or teaching. Nevertheless, there are times in the long history of the human adventure when we have a real turning point, a major change--the end of an era, the beginning of a new era. I am becoming more and more convinced that we are in such an age at the present time--a change in history comparable with such events as the fall of Rome, the discovery of America, and the like. I will try to explain that.

Conventionally, the modern history of the Middle East begins at the end of the 18th century, when a small French expeditionary force commanded by a young general called Napoleon Bonaparte was able to conquer Egypt and rule it with impunity. It was a terrible shock that one of the heartlands of Islam could be invaded, occupied, and ruled with virtually no effective resistance.

The second shock came a few years later with the departure of the French, which was brought about not by the Egyptians nor by their suzerains, the Turks, but by a small squadron of the Royal Navy commanded by a young admiral called Horatio Nelson, who drove the French out and back to France.

This is of symbolic importance. That was, as I said, at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century. From then onward, the heartlands of Islam were no longer wholly controlled by the rulers of Islam. They were under direct or indirect influence or control from outside.

The dominating forces in the Islamic world were now outside forces. What shaped their lives was Western influence. What gave them choices was Western rivalries. The political game that they could play--the only one that was open to them--was to try and profit from the rivalries between the outside powers, to try to use them against one another. We see that again and again in the course of the 19th and 20th and even into the beginning of the 21st century. We see, for example, in the First World War, the Second World War, and the Cold War, how Middle Eastern governments or leaders tried to play this game with varying degrees of success.

That game is now over. The era that was inaugurated by Napoleon and Nelson was terminated by Reagan and Gorbachev. The Middle East is no longer ruled or dominated by outside powers. These nations are having some difficulty adjusting to this new situation, to taking responsibility for their own actions and their consequences, and so on. But they are beginning to do so, and this change has been expressed with his usual clarity and eloquence by Osama bin Laden.

We see with the ending of the era of outside domination, the reemergence of certain older trends and deeper currents in Middle Eastern history, which had been submerged or at least obscured during the centuries of Western domination. Now they are coming back again. One of them I would call the internal struggles--ethnic, sectarian, regional--between different forces within the Middle East. These have of course continued, but were of less importance in the imperialist era. They are coming out again now and gaining force, as we see for example from the current clash between Sunni and Shia Islam--something without precedent for centuries.

The other thing more directly relevant to my theme this evening is the signs of a return among Muslims to what they perceive as the cosmic struggle for world domination between the two main faiths--Christianity and Islam. There are many religions in the world, but as far as I know there are only two that have claimed that their truths are not only universal--all religions claim that--but also exclusive; that they--the Christians in the one case, the Muslims in the other--are the fortunate recipients of God's final message to humanity, which it is their duty not to keep selfishly to themselves--like the Jews or the Hindus--but to bring to the rest of humanity, removing whatever obstacles there may be on the way. This self-perception, shared between Christendom and Islam, led to the long struggle that has been going on for more than fourteen centuries and which is now entering a new phase. In the Christian world, now at the beginning of the 21st century of its era, this triumphalist attitude no longer prevails, and is confined to a few minority groups. In the world of Islam, now in its early 15th century, triumphalism is still a significant force, and has found expression in new militant movements.

It is interesting that both sides for quite a long time refused to recognize this struggle. For example, both sides named each other by non-religious terms. The Christian world called the Muslims Moors, Saracens, Tartars, and Turks. Even a convert was said to have turned Turk. The Muslims for their part called the Christian world Romans, Franks, Slavs, and the like. It was only slowly and reluctantly that they began to give each other religious designations and then these were for the most part demeaning and inaccurate. In the West, it was customary to call Muslims Mohammadans, which they never called themselves, based on the totally false assumption that Muslims worship Muhammad in the way that Christians worship Christ. The Muslim term for Christians was Nazarene--nasrani--implying the local cult of a place called Nazareth.

The declaration of war begins at the very beginning of Islam. There are certain letters purported to have been written by the Prophet Muhammad to the Christian Byzantine emperor, the emperor of Persia, and various other rulers, saying, "I have now brought God's final message. Your time has passed. Your beliefs are superseded. Accept my mission and my faith or resign or submit--you are finished." The authenticity of these prophetic letters is doubted, but the message is clear and authentic in the sense that it does represent the long dominant view of the Islamic world.

A little later we have hard evidence--and I mean hard in the most literal sense--inscriptions. Many of you, I should think, have been to Jerusalem. You have probably visited that remarkable building, the Dome of the Rock. It is very significant. It is built on a place sacred to the Judeo-Christian tradition. Its architectural style is that of the earliest Christian churches. It dates from the end of the 7th century and was built by one of the early caliphs, the oldest Muslim religious building outside Arabia. What is significant is the message in the inscriptions inside the Dome: "He is God, He is one, He has no companion, He does not beget, He is not begotten." (cf. Qur'an, IX, 31-3; CXII, 1-3) This is clearly a direct challenge to certain central principles of the Christian faith.

Interestingly, they put the same thing on a new gold coinage. Until then, striking gold coins had been an exclusive Roman privilege. The Islamic caliph for the first time struck gold coins, breaching the immemorial privilege of Rome, and putting the same inscription on them. As I said, a challenge.

The Muslim attack on Christendom and the resulting conflict, which arose more from their resemblances than from their differences, has gone through three phases. The first dates from the very beginning of Islam, when the new faith spilled out of the Arabian Peninsula, where it was born, into the Middle East and beyond. It was then that they conquered Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and North Africa--all at that time part of the Christian world--and went beyond into Europe, conquering a sizable part of southwestern Europe, including Spain, Portugal, and southern Italy, all of which became part of the Islamic world, and even crossing the Pyrenees into France and occupying for a while parts of France.

After a long and bitter struggle, the Christians managed to retake part but not all of the territory they had lost. They succeeded in Europe, and in a sense Europe was defined by the limits of that success. They failed to retake North Africa or the Middle East, which were lost to Christendom. Notably, they failed to recapture the Holy Land, in the series of campaigns known as the Crusades.

That was not the end of the matter. In the meantime the Islamic world, having failed the first time, was bracing for the second attack, this time conducted not by Arabs and Moors but by Turks and Tartars. In the mid-thirteenth century the Mongol conquerors of Russia were converted to Islam. The Turks, who had already conquered Anatolia, advanced into Europe and in 1453 they captured the ancient Christian citadel of Constantinople. They conquered a large part of the Balkans, and for a while ruled half of Hungary. Twice they reached as far as Vienna, to which they laid siege in 1529 and again in 1683. Barbary corsairs from North Africa--well-known to historians of the United States--were raiding Western Europe. They went to Iceland--the uttermost limit--and to several places in Western Europe, including notably a raid on Baltimore (the original one, in Ireland) in 1631. In a contemporary document, we have a list of 107 captives who were taken from Baltimore to Algiers, including a man called Cheney.

Again, Europe counterattacked, this time more successfully and more rapidly. They succeeded in recovering Russia and the Balkan Peninsula, and in advancing further into the Islamic lands, chasing their former rulers whence they had come. For this phase of European counterattack, a new term was invented: imperialism. When the peoples of Asia and Africa invaded Europe, this was not imperialism. When Europe attacked Asia and Africa, it was.

This European counterattack began a new phase which brought the European attack into the very heart of the Middle East. In our own time, we have seen the end of the resulting domination.

Osama bin Laden, in some very interesting proclamations and declarations, has this to say about the war in Afghanistan which, you will remember, led to the defeat and retreat of the Red Army and the collapse of the Soviet Union. We tend to see that as a Western victory, more specifically an American victory, in the Cold War against the Soviets. For Osama bin Laden, it was nothing of the kind. It is a Muslim victory in a jihad. If one looks at what happened in Afghanistan and what followed, this is, I think one must say, a not implausible interpretation.

As Osama bin Laden saw it, Islam had reached the ultimate humiliation in this long struggle after World War I, when the last of the great Muslim empires--the Ottoman Empire--was broken up and most of its territories divided between the victorious allies; when the caliphate was suppressed and abolished, and the last caliph driven into exile. This seemed to be the lowest point in Muslim history. From there they went upwards.

In his perception, the millennial struggle between the true believers and the unbelievers had gone through successive phases, in which the latter were led by the various imperial European powers that had succeeded the Romans in the leadership of the world of the infidels--the Christian Byzantine Empire, the Holy Roman Empire, the British and French and Russian empires. In this final phase, he says, the world of the infidels was divided and disputed between two rival superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. In his perception, the Muslims have met, defeated, and destroyed the more dangerous and the more deadly of the two infidel superpowers. Dealing with the soft, pampered and effeminate Americans would be an easy matter.

This belief was confirmed in the 1990s when we saw one attack after another on American bases and installations with virtually no effective response of any kind--only angry words and expensive missiles dispatched to remote and uninhabited places. The lessons of Vietnam and Beirut were confirmed by Mogadishu. "Hit them, and they'll run." This was the perceived sequence leading up to 9/11. That attack was clearly intended to be the completion of the first sequence and the beginning of the new one, taking the war into the heart of the enemy camp.

In the eyes of a fanatical and resolute minority of Muslims, the third wave of attack on Europe has clearly begun. We should not delude ourselves as to what it is and what it means. This time it is taking different forms and two in particular: terror and migration.

The subject of terror has been frequently discussed and in great detail, and I do not need to say very much about that now. What I do want to talk about is the other aspect of more particular relevance to Europe, and that is the question of migration.

In earlier times, it was inconceivable that a Muslim would voluntarily move to a non-Muslim country. The jurists discuss this subject at great length in the textbooks and manuals of shari`a, but in a different form: is it permissible for a Muslim to live in or even visit a non-Muslim country? And if so, if he does, what must he do? Generally speaking, this was considered under certain specific headings.

A captive or a prisoner of war obviously has no choice, but he must preserve his faith and get home as soon as possible.

The second case is that of an unbeliever in the land of the unbelievers who sees the light and embraces the true faith--in other words, becomes a Muslim. He must leave as soon as possible and go to a Muslim country.

The third case is that of a visitor. For long, the only purpose that was considered legitimate was to ransom captives. This was later expanded into diplomatic and commercial missions. With the advance of the European counterattack, there was a new issue in this ongoing debate. What is the position of a Muslim if his country is conquered by infidels? May he stay or must he leave?

We have some interesting documents from the late 15th century, when the reconquest of Spain was completed and Moroccan jurists were discussing this question. They asked if Muslims could stay. The general answer was no, it is not permissible. The question was asked: May they stay if the Christian government that takes over is tolerant? This proved to be a purely hypothetical question, of course. The answer was no; even then they may not stay, because the temptation to apostasy would be even greater. They must leave and hope that in God's good time they will be able to reconquer their homelands and restore the true faith.

This was the line taken by most jurists. There were some, at first a minority, later a more important group, who said it is permissible for Muslims to stay provided that certain conditions are met, mainly that they are allowed to practice their faith. This raises another question which I will come back to in a moment: what is meant by practicing their faith? Here I would remind you that we are dealing not only with a different religion but also with a different concept of what religion is about, referring especially to what Muslims call the shari`a, the holy law of Islam, covering a wide range of matters regarded as secular in the Christian world even during the medieval period, but certainly in what some call the post-Christian era of the Western world.

There are obviously now many attractions which draw Muslims to Europe including the opportunities offered, particularly in view of the growing economic impoverishment of much of the Muslim world, and the attractions of European welfare as well as employment. They also have freedom of expression and education which they lack at home. This is a great incentive to the terrorists who migrate. Terrorists have far greater freedom of preparation and operation in Europe--and to a degree also in America--than they do in most Islamic lands.

I would like to draw your attention to some other factors of importance in the situation at this moment. One is the new radicalism in the Islamic world, which comes in several kinds: Sunni, especially Wahhabi, and Iranian Shiite, dating from the Iranian revolution. Both of these are becoming enormously important factors. We have the strange paradox that the danger of Islamic radicalism or of radical terrorism is far greater in Europe and America than it is in the Middle East and North Africa, where they are much better at controlling their extremists than we are.

The Sunni kind is mainly Wahhabi and has benefited from the prestige and influence and power of the House of Saud as controllers of the holy places of Islam and of the annual pilgrimage, and the enormous oil wealth at their disposal. The Iranian revolution is something different. The term revolution is much used in the Middle East. It is virtually the only generally accepted title of legitimacy. But the Iranian revolution is a real revolution in the sense in which we use that term of the French or Russian revolutions. Like the French and Russian revolutions in their day, it has had an enormous impact in the whole area with which the Iranians share a common universe of discourse--that is to say, the Islamic world.

Let me turn to the question of assimilation, which is much discussed nowadays. How far is it possible for Muslim migrants who have settled in Europe, in North America, and elsewhere, to become part of those countries in which they settle, in the way that so many other waves of immigrants have done? I think there are several points which need to be made.

One of them is the basic differences in what precisely is meant by assimilation and acceptance. Here there is an immediate and obvious difference between the European and the American situations. For an immigrant to become an American means a change of political allegiance. For an immigrant to become a Frenchman or a German means a change of ethnic identity. Changing political allegiance is certainly very much easier and more practical than changing ethnic identity, either in one's own feelings or in one's measure of acceptance. England had it both ways. If you were naturalized, you became British but you did not become English.

I mentioned earlier the important difference in what one means by religion. For Muslims, it covers a whole range of different things--marriage, divorce, and inheritance are the most obvious examples. Since antiquity in the Western world, the Christian world, these have been secular matters. The distinction of church and state, spiritual and temporal, lay and ecclesiastical is a Christian distinction which has no place in Islamic history and therefore is difficult to explain to Muslims, even in the present day. Until very recently they did not even have a vocabulary to express it. They have one now.

What are the European responses to this situation? In Europe, as in the United States, a frequent response is what is variously known as multiculturalism and political correctness. In the Muslim world there are no such inhibitions. They are very conscious of their identity. They know who they are and what they are and what they want, a quality which we seem to have lost to a very large extent. This is a source of strength in the one, of weakness in the other.

A term sometimes used is constructive engagement. Let's talk to them, let's get together and see what we can do. Constructive engagement has a long tradition. When Saladin re-conquered Jerusalem and other places in the holy land, he allowed the Christian merchants from Europe to stay in the seaports. He apparently felt the need to justify this, and he wrote a letter to the caliph in Baghdad explaining his action. I would like to quote it to you. The merchants were useful since "there is not one among them that does not bring and sell us weapons of war, to their detriment and to our advantage." This continued during the Crusades. It continued after. It continued during the Ottoman advance into Europe, when they could always find European merchants willing to sell them weapons they needed and European bankers willing to finance their purchases. Constructive engagement has a long history.

One also finds a rather startling modern version of it. We have seen in our own day the extraordinary spectacle of a pope apologizing to the Muslims for the Crusades. I would not wish to defend the behavior of the Crusaders, which was in many respects atrocious. But let us have a little sense of proportion. We are now expected to believe that the Crusades were an unwarranted act of aggression against a peaceful Muslim world. Hardly. The first papal call for a crusade occurred in 846 C.E., when an Arab expedition from Sicily sailed up the Tiber and sacked St. Peter's Rome. A synod in France issued an appeal to Christian sovereigns to rally against "the enemies of Christ," and the Pope, Leo IV, offered a heavenly reward to those who died fighting the Muslims. A century and a half and many battles later, in 1096, the Crusaders actually arrived in the Middle East. The Crusades were a late, limited, and unsuccessful imitation of the jihad--an attempt to recover by holy war what had been lost by holy war. It failed, and it was not followed up.

Here is another more recent example of multiculturalism. On October 8, 2002--I insist on giving the date because you may want to look it up--the then French prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, who I am told is a staunch Roman Catholic, was making a speech in the French National Assembly and talking about the situation in Iraq. Speaking of Saddam Hussein, he remarked that one of Saddam Hussein's heroes was his compatriot Saladin, who came from the same Iraqi town of Tikrit. In case the members of the Assembly were not aware of Saladin's identity, M. Raffarin explained to them that it was he who was able "to defeat the Crusaders and liberate Jerusalem." Yes. When a French prime minister describes Saladin's capture of Jerusalem from the largely French Crusaders as an act of liberation, this would seem to indicate a rather extreme case of realignment of loyalties.

I was told this, and I didn't believe it. So I checked it in the parliamentary record. When M. Raffarin used the word "liberate," a member--the name was not given--called out, "Libérer?" He just went straight on. That was the only interruption, and as far as I was aware there was no comment afterwards.

The Islamic radicals have even been able to find some allies in Europe. In describing them I shall have to use the terms left and right, terms which are becoming increasingly misleading. The seating arrangements in the first French National Assembly after the revolution are not the laws of nature, but we have become accustomed to using them. They are difficult when applied to the West nowadays. They are utter nonsense when applied to different brands of Islam. But as I say, they are what people use, so let us put it this way.

They have a left-wing appeal to the anti-U.S. elements in Europe, for whom they have so-to-speak replaced the Soviets. They have a right-wing appeal to the anti-Jewish elements in Europe, replacing the Axis. They have been able to win considerable support under both headings. For some in Europe, their hatreds apparently outweigh their loyalties.

There is an interesting exception to that in Germany, where the Muslims are mostly Turkish. There they have often tended to equate themselves with the Jews, to see themselves as having succeeded the Jews as the victims of German racism and persecution. I remember a meeting in Berlin convened to discuss the new Muslim minorities in Europe. In the evening I was asked by a Muslim group of Turks to join them and hear what they had to say about it, which was very interesting. The phrase which sticks most vividly in my mind from one of them was, "In a thousand years they (the Germans) were unable to accept 400,000 Jews. What hope is there that they will accept two million Turks?" They used this very skillfully in playing on German feelings of guilt in order to inhibit any effective German measures to protect German identity, which I would say like others in Europe is becoming endangered.

My time is running out so I think I'll leave other points that I wanted to make. [Shouts to go on.] You don't mind a bit more?

I want to say something about the question of tolerance. You will recall that at the end of the first phase of the Christian reconquest, after Spain and Portugal and Sicily, Muslims--who by that time were very numerous in the reconquered lands--were given a choice: baptism, exile, or death. In the former Ottoman lands in southeastern Europe, the leaders of what you might call the reconquest were somewhat more tolerant but not a great deal more. Some Muslim minorities remained in some Balkan countries, with troubles still going on at the present day. If I say names like Kosovo or Bosnia, you will know what I am talking about.

Nevertheless, I mention this point because of the very sharp contrast with the treatment of Christians and other non-Muslims in the Islamic lands at that time. When Muslims came to Europe they had a certain expectation of tolerance, feeling that they were entitled to at least the degree of tolerance which they had accorded to non-Muslims in the great Muslim empires of the past. Both their expectations and their experience were very different.

Coming to European countries, they got both more and less than they had expected: More in the sense that they got in theory and often in practice equal political rights, equal access to the professions, all the benefits of the welfare state, freedom of expression, and so on and so forth.

But they also got significantly less than they had given in traditional Islamic states. In the Ottoman Empire and other states before that--I mention the Ottoman Empire as the most recent--the non-Muslim communities had separate organizations and ran their own affairs. They collected their own taxes and enforced their own laws. There were several Christian communities, each living under its own leadership, recognized by the state. These communities were running their own schools, their own education systems, administering their own laws in such matters as marriage, divorce, inheritance, and the like. The Jews did the same.

So you had a situation in which three men living in the same street could die and their estates would be distributed under three different legal systems if one happened to be Jewish, one Christian, and one Muslim. A Jew could be punished by a rabbinical court and jailed for violating the Sabbath or eating on Yom Kippur. A Christian could be arrested and imprisoned for taking a second wife. Bigamy is a Christian offense; it was not an Islamic or an Ottoman offense.

They do not have that degree of independence in their own social and legal life in the modern state. It is quite unrealistic for them to expect it, given the nature of the modern state, but that is not how they see it. They feel that they are entitled to receive what they gave. As one Muslim friend of mine in Europe put it, "We allowed you to practice monogamy, why should you not allow us to practice polygamy?"

Such questions--polygamy, in particular--raise important issues of a more practical nature. Isn't an immigrant who is permitted to come to France or Germany entitled to bring his family with him? But what exactly does his family consist of? They are increasingly demanding and getting permission to bring plural wives. The same is also applying more and more to welfare payments and so on. On the other hand, the enforcement of shari`a is a little more difficult. This has become an extremely sensitive issue.

Another extremely sensitive issue, closely related to this, is the position of women, which is of course very different between Christendom and Islam. This has indeed been one of the major differences between the two societies.

Where do we stand now? Is it third time lucky? It is not impossible. They have certain clear advantages. They have fervor and conviction, which in most Western countries are either weak or lacking. They are self-assured of the rightness of their cause, whereas we spend most of our time in self-denigration and self-abasement. They have loyalty and discipline, and perhaps most important of all, they have demography, the combination of natural increase and migration producing major population changes, which could lead within the foreseeable future to significant majorities in at least some European cities or even countries.

But we also have some advantages, the most important of which are knowledge and freedom. The appeal of genuine modern knowledge in a society which, in the more distant past, had a long record of scientific and scholarly achievement is obvious. They are keenly and painfully aware of their relative backwardness and welcome the opportunity to rectify it.

Less obvious but also powerful is the appeal of freedom. In the past, in the Islamic world the word freedom was not used in a political sense. Freedom was a legal concept. You were free if you were not a slave. The institution of slavery existed. Free meant not slave. Unlike the West, they did not use freedom and slavery as a metaphor for good and bad government, as we have done for a long time in the Western world. The terms they used to denote good and bad government are justice and injustice. A good government is a just government, one in which the Holy Law, including its limitations on sovereign authority, is strictly enforced. The Islamic tradition, in theory and, until the onset of modernization, to a large degree in practice, emphatically rejects despotic and arbitrary government. Living under justice is the nearest approach to what we would call freedom.

But the idea of freedom in its Western interpretation is making headway. It is becoming more and more understood, more and more appreciated and more and more desired. It is perhaps in the long run our best hope, perhaps even our only hope, of surviving this developing struggle. Thank you.