What Do You Believe In?

Not since the 1970's and the Vietnam era , have I seen such polarization of the masses in this country. The divide between the two camps is ever widening and the outcome will have everlasting ramifications that most in this debate can't comprehend. In an era when most adolescents get their daily dose of current events from "The Daily Show", gives cause for concern.

• The question is "What Do You Believe In?"

Our great grandfathers fought a war in Europe that was initiated by a disturbed radical, Gravilo Princip, who assassinated Archduke Ferdinand of Austria. Princip was not the cause of this "Great War to End All Wars" but merely the catalyst. Princip was a member of Young Bosnia, a group that wanted the unification of the South Slavs and independence from Austria-Hungary. This war ended the Old World Order that had begun after the Napoleonic Wars and set in motion the shaping of the modern world.

More than 9 million soldiers died during that war. Millions of civilians died and suffered as well and millions more died as a result of influenza outbreak after the war. The Treaty of Versailles solely accused Austria-Hungary and Germany as the culprits for the outbreak of this war. The reparation costs to Germany led to nationalistic fervors that infused the emergence of the fascist Nazis and Adolph Hitler.

Once again our fathers and grand fathers went to war. For years, Hitler defied the rest of Europe and massed weapons to get revenge on the countries that imposed such harsh conditions on Germany. Governments looked the other way while Hitler built an offensive army to be reckoned with. Most pacifist believed they could trust Hitler, among them Neville Chamberlain the British Prime Minister who in 1938 claimed "Peace for our time" with the signing of the Munich Agreement. One year later, Germany invaded Poland and WWII begun.

Today the west faces a dilemma, how to deal with modern day Anarchists, Islamic Fundamentalist who aim to end life as we know in the west. Nations in the west are divided in two factions, one side wants to deal head on with the issue, no negotiations with terrorist groups. The other side wants to negotiate. Some believe that by having an even handed diplomatic approach in the Middle East we could appease the radical groups in the Arab world.

This is not a question of fighting for Danzig or fighting for Poland. We are fighting to save the whole world from the pestilence of Nazi tyranny and in defense of all that is most sacred to man. This is no war of domination or imperial aggrandizement or material gain; no war to shut any country out of its sunlight and means of progress. It is a war, viewed in its inherent quality, to establish, on impregnable rocks, the rights of the individual, and it is a war to establish and revive the stature of man. Perhaps it might seem a paradox that a war undertaken in the name of liberty and right should require, as a necessary part of its processes, the surrender for the time being of so many of the dearly valued liberties and rights. In these last few days the House of Commons has been voting dozens of Bills which hand over to the executive our most dearly valued traditional liberties. We are sure that these liberties will be in hands which will not abuse them, which will use them for no class or party interests, which will cherish and guard them, and we look forward to the day, surely and confidently we look forward to the day, when our liberties and rights will be restored to us, and when we shall be able to share them with the peoples to whom such blessings are unknown.

Speech excerpt delivered September 3, 1939 by Winston Churchill

Churchill stood alone after the fall of France. Britain was being threatened with invasion and constant air bombardment. Hitler kept sending U2 rockets in its air blitz against Britain. If you omit certain indicators, the above speech could apply to current events. WWII was the last great war. The strategy in that war was simple, Destroy your enemy. Prevent that (The Axis) entity from ever coming back. Fighting your enemy until they say "enough, we give up." Not since that war, have we fought an enemy and demanded those terms. A clear example is the war in Iraq. The US decision not to take Iraq from Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf War delayed the inevitable return. Afghanistan and Korea are other examples. The victor always dictates the terms of surrender. In modern time, the west is not capable of dictating terms. Are we bound by political correctness? Israel is constantly condemned for defending itself from aggression. Due to outside pressure, Israel always stops short of attaining total victory from its enemies. Inherently Israel always comes back to fight that fight again.

Imagine, if due to world condemnation for the way it conducted the war, what would the outcome of WWII have been if the west would have stopped short of total victory against Germany and Japan, allowed these two nation to remain, perhaps architecturally destroyed, but with their political structure intact? Would the west be harvesting 61 years of peace and prosperity? Or perhaps have fought WWIII?

"History repeats itself." We've heard this phrase before, but never learned from it. Why? In the US we quickly forget the pains we suffered in times past; WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam and Iraq. We are facing an enemy such as we've never seen before. It doesn't have a flag, a country or a uniform. It's an ideology masked as a religion. Islam has been hijacked by a fascist ideology that is based on hate for all that is not Islamic. Islam is the second largest religion in the world and the fastest growing. Assalamu Alaikum "Peace be upon you" and Ma' as-salamah "Go safely", common greetings in the Islamic world.

Islam was the religion, and people, that took Europe out of the middle ages, it introduced modern math and propelled in the Renaissance. While Europe emerged, Islam remained. How ironic and sad. Wahhabi Muslims or Salafis as they wish to be called, view how the first three generations of Muslims lived, should be how Islam is practiced everyday.

The Taliban movement in Afghanistan is a prime example of this practice. Under this regime, Islamic law was instituted and punishment was administered by a religious police force that included stoning for adultery and amputation of one or both hands for theft. They banned all forms of television, video games, computers, music, dance and sports. The Mujahideen were notorious for beating and throwing acid in the face of women who didn't use the burqa. All religious statues and monuments were forbidden. Two Buddha statues dating back more than 1800 years were destroyed by the Taliban. Religious minorities had to wear labels on their clothing identifying them as non-Muslims. Not all Muslims believe in this concept of Islam, but the fundamentalists do and they are the ones who advocate the destruction of other Islamic sects, of Israel, the US and the western cultures as we know them today. They advocate the martyrdom of those who'll strap a bomb in their chest and detonate it in a crowded place, they would bomb a church, a crowded plane, train or bus. They would behead a non believer in the name of Allah, call Jews pigs and monkeys.

They rejoiced in knowing that 3000 civilians perished on 9/11. This is the world they believe in and there is no room for other beliefs. Is this the kind of society you'd rather live in?

Sumayyah binte Khabbab was an old woman and the first martyr in Islam. She died at the hands of Abu Jahl. She did not strap a bomb in her chest and commit suicide, it's forbidden in the Islamic religion to commit suicide. Islamic teachings punish those that murder innocent people. There's no "Istish-haad" Heroic martyrdom in killing innocent people. Nevertheless, the fundamentalist promote it and teach it to their followers. The breeding ground for the Jihadist is the local mosque. It's the recruiting station for the next suicide bomber. Most members and Imans are well aware of this practice, but there are no condemnations demonstrated anytime a bomber sets himself off. In every case you see so called Arab leaders explaining the rationale behind the attack, blaming the west and the support for Israel and Arab dictatorships or the US involvement in Iraq. There are those westerners who immediately jump in and condemn their governments, specially the US, for these attacks. Justifying them because we support Israel by supplying weapons and billions of dollars in aid. The fact is that we give more aid to the world than any other country. According to OECD, in 2005 the US contributed 27.4 billion dollars to world aid, far behind the US in 2nd place is Japan with 13.1 billions in donations. Those are your tax dollars which this government allocates for world aid, it doesn't take into account the billions, we as individuals, give to the world every time there's a disaster. As of 2005, there were 1,010,395 charities in the USA.

Meanwhile every time someone we've helped commits an atrocity, the US government is the culprit. The apologists, swiftly condemn this government. The weapons we sell don't kill people any more than club wielding fanatics do.

Wars are horrible. The innocent, the child, the woman and the elder are the ones who pay the ultimate price for its outcome. The one who threw the first stone is usually hiding in the shadows or is the first one to blame the other for the incident. As horrible as wars are, worst is going to war and putting your nation through its horror and just stopping short of total victory, only to come back to fight that war again.

In Lebanon, we have a defacto militia, Hezbollah, controlling a border with another nation. The Lebanese government, for years, reneged on its responsibility to maintain its own army in that region and to disarm Hezbollah. The outcome was one that was long overdue. An attack across the border by Hezbollah killed 8 Israeli IDF members and kidnapped 2. No country on earth would've accepted this act.

United Nations Security Council Resolution 1559. Was adopted on September 2, 2004 and never implemented. At that time it had been 4 years since the Israeli withdrawal from south Lebanon. Syria still had 14,000 troops deployed in Lebanon. Hezbollah was striving in its control of the southern and northwestern regions of Lebanon. With the Syrian backing, the Lebanese puppet regime had no complaints. The assassination of Rafik Ariri on February 14,2005 hastened Syria's departure once it became obvious that it had a heavy hand in Hariri's death. It's obvious that Lebanon never had the fortitude to exert it's sovereignty over Hezbollah's territorial domain. Hezbollah clearly is a dominating force in that country, change does not seem evident, not even by the recent outcome of the Hezbollah-Israel war. People who are not willing to shake hands will never be neighbors. Rockets being fired from one side to the other side of a border, has always led to war, in any society, and this one is no different.

"The only foreign forces existing in Lebanon are the Israeli forces which occupy the farms of Shebaa. Whereas the Syrian forces are friendly Arab forces which entered Lebanon according to the Lebanese government's demand and their existence is regulated by the convention of brotherhood and coordination and cooperation between Lebanon and Syria." Excerpts from the official Lebanese response to Resolution 1559. It goes on; "The national resistance [Hezbollah] which is confronting the Israeli occupation is not a guerilla and it has no security role inside the country and its activities are restricted to facing the Israeli enemy. This resistance led to the withdrawal of the enemy from the bigger part of our occupied land and is still persistent to free the farms of Shebaa. Preserving this resistance constitutes a Lebanese strategic interest with the aim of relating the struggle with the enemy and regain all the Lebanese legitimate rights achieving and at the forefront the withdrawal of Israel from the farms of Shebaa and the return of the refugees to their land." Clearly, you can rationalize from these two statements, which path was being chosen: Conflict on one side, Peace on the other, obviously not the latter.

The so called "Farms of Shebaa" is a bogus claim set forth by Syria and Lebanon as a means to the continued struggle with Israel. Israel took possession of this land back in the 1967 war to which Lebanon was not a part of. Nancy Soderberg, a former United States Ambassador to the UN, stated on July 21, 2006: "When it was clear the Israelis were going to withdraw fully from Lebanon, Syrian and Lebanese officials fabricated the fiction that this small, sparsely populated area was part of Lebanon. They even produced a crudely fabricated map to back up the dubious claim. I and United Nations officials went into the map room in the United Nations and looked at all the maps of the region in the files for decades. All showed the Shebaa Farms clearly in Syria."

I believe that this struggle will not end in my time. Too much hatred has been fermenting in young Islamic minds. When governments decide to become civilized and teach tolerance and respect for others, then perhaps we can build a new generation that will not espouse to terror as a means to an end. Civilized societies do sit down and negotiate differences. There is a place called the UN that is supposed to deal with these issues. I believe that this body has failed as an entity, it's corrupted, tilted and inefficient in it's duties. Millions die throughout the world due to famine, natural disasters and regional conflicts that are left unattended and practically ignored. It's inefficiency is appalling.

Today we hear that Hezbollah and the Arab world are claiming victory against Israel in the Lebanese conflict. I believe they are right. This conflict is one that will be fought again in the near future. Unfortunately the two brawlers destroyed the bar, perhaps a bloody nose, but none went down to plead "Stop, I had enough. I give up." And that is why they keep coming back.

What do you believe in?