Since jihadist ideology is what makes the Palestinian war against the Jews intractable and vests it with its central importance to the global jihad, the defeat of this ideology in the marketplace of ideas will go a long way toward defeating the global jihad as a whole. And the ideology of jihad is far from indestructible.
The unattractiveness of the notion of jihad is most apparent to the jihadists themselves. This is why they spend billions of dollars on a never-ending stream of propaganda aimed at brainwashing as many people as possible. The aim of the jihadist mosques, television and radio stations and Internet sites is twofold. First they work to indoctrinate and mobilize supporters. Second they serve to demonize anyone who fights them – be that George W. Bush, Tony Blair, Salman Rushdie, or Israel. The Olmert government’s inability to recognize the actual state of Palestinian society and act accord-ingly has two major sources. First, the government is incompetent. As with the Palestinians, so with Iran, Syria, and Hizbullah. The Olmert government is simply incapable of conceptualizing policies capable of de-fending Israel.
In addition to its incompetence, the Olmert government is little different from Western governments from Washington to Brussels in its inability to con-tend with the ideological nature of the war being waged against it. Six years after the Palestinians launched their jihad, and five years after the jihadist attacks on the U.S., the governments of the free world remain deeply hesitant about engaging in a true ideological struggle with jihad.
It is not merely that fearing accusations of racism, the leaders of the world’s democracies are averse to noting the monstrous nature of an ideology that marginalizes life and embraces death. Terrified of be-ing falsely labeled fascists, Western leaders, held intellectually hostage by the multicultural police, refuse to assert what ought to be obvious: Free societies that uphold human freedom and sanctify life are superior to jihadist societies that do the opposite. Not only must the free world win the war against the global jihad, we deserve to win it, because we are the good guys and our enemies are the bad guys.
If our leaders are incapable of conceiving a policy for victory or of explaining to either themselves or to our enemies why we must win and they must lose, is there any reason to hope that we can survive, let alone emerge victorious in this war?
Last week we received a clear sign that indeed we can win. Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu embraced an initiative launched by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. Led by former UN ambassador and Netanyahu adviser Dore Gold, the JCPA launched an effort to have Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad indicted under the Genocide Convention and tried as a war criminal at the Hague for his calls to annihilate Israel.
This is the first constructive Israeli public relations campaign against Iran. If backed by mass protests of Jews in Israel and in international capitals calling for the overthrow of the genocidal mullahs in Teheran, this initiative could form the basis for an effective Israeli political campaign against Tehran. And it is a completely private initiative.
What the JCPA campaign shows us clearly is that just as private groups can wage political war against Iran even if Olmert is too incompetent to do so him-self, so too private groups and individuals can wage an ideological war against the ideology of jihad far more effectively than our governments can. For while the Olmert government and its Western counterparts are at the mercy of the multicultural commissars, private citizens are under no such constraints. And Israelis are better positioned than any Western society to launch such a war.
Tens of thousands of anti-jihadist Israelis – Jewish and Arab – are completely fluent in Arabic, con-temporary culture and the Internet. A private initiative to operate hundreds of Arabic language websites with anti-jihadist, liberal, pro-American and (dare we say) Zionist messages would constitute a serious challenge to jihadist predominance over Palestinian and pan-Arab consciousness.
Philanthropists in Israel and worldwide should have no difficulty investing a few million dollars for a project that would do nothing more than state the patently obvious: The path of jihad is immoral, inhuman, and no fun at all while the path of human freedom is moral, just and can be highly enjoyable.