January 11, 2005
A couple of mistakes
Earlier, I took issue with Biur Chametz over his positive spin on Mahmud Abbas's "Great Jihad" comment. In order to bolster my argument, I quoted Daniel Pipes. But as Biur shows, I quoted Pipes somewhat selectively. (i.e. I found what I was looking for so I didn't read the whole article.)
Today in "Which Way Will Abbas Go?", Pipes supports Biur's reading of the Jihad comment:
He no more accepts what he so charmingly the other day called the "Zionist enemy" than Arafat did (or Hamas, or Palestinian Islamic Jihad), but he is open to a multiplicity of means to destroy it. As he announced after his electoral victory this week, "the lesser jihad is over and the greater jihad is ahead." The form of jihad must change from violent to nonviolent, but the jihad continues.(Go to the Pipes article for the whole thing as well as the links he provides.)
However, Pipes sees the non-violent Jihad as having the same goal as the violent Jihad, the destruction of Israel. So it's non-violent, but not very comforting.
Also earlier I condemned Sri Lanka for refusing Israeli personnel from helping. According to Andrew Silow-Carrol it's not so clear that Sri Lanka refused, it jsut wanted to limit the size of the Israeli contingent:
Note that “IDF”: An Israeli military team made it to Sri Lanka after all. And while some unnamed Israeli sources were criticizing the Sri Lankans, the Israeli government refused to be dragged into a cat fight at time when tens of thousands of bodies were still awaiting proper burial. Earlier this week, the Israeli Consulate in New York even made available a press release it had received from Sri Lanka’s embassy in Washington.(Silow-Carrol's snideness in the beginning of the article is quite unattractive though.) Although this report from the BBC still leaves me smelling a rat. So if I was wrong about Sri Lanka, I apologize.
However the disgraceful charge coming from the PA that Israel caused the tsunami should disabuse Silow-Carrol of any notions that Islamic hatred are figments of our imagination.
Crossposted on Israpundit and Soccer Dad. Posted by SoccerDad at January 11, 2005 07:18 PM | TrackBack