We Are All Israelis Now, and All Americans

The Saudis are furious! They don’t like their women and children being blown up, particularly not by Moslems during Ramadan. Similarly, the Red Cross moaned that its “neutrality” should have protected it from the bombing that killed scores of its people in Baghdad. Neither victim group seems outraged by bombings per se, only that their status (not Americans?) should have made the bombers choose someone else. But if not them, who?

Israeli children, perhaps? American soldiers?

The Saudis are furious! They don’t like their women and children being blown up, particularly not by Moslems during Ramadan. Similarly, the Red Cross moaned that its “neutrality” should have protected it from the bombing that killed scores of its people in Baghdad. Neither victim group seems outraged by bombings per se, only that their status (not Americans?) should have made the bombers choose someone else. But if not them, who?

Israeli children, perhaps? American soldiers?

This is a misunderstanding about the enemy in the war against terrorists and the states that harbor and support them, about who they are and what they want. The terrorists are Moslem totalitarians – like Nazi and communist and Palestinian totalitarians. Anyone insufficiently enthusiastic about the agenda is the enemy, including other Moslems. The Nazis killed Germans, the communists killed Russians, and Mussolini’s fascists killed Italians. Palestinians kill Palestinians all the time. We just tend not to notice when people are killing their own, and notice more when they kill us.

When the Red Cross provided aid and comfort to Iraqis who are not fighting the Americans, the Red Cross became the enemy and Iraqi civilians who took their help became the enemy as well. When the Saudi government backed the liberation, Saudis became the enemy. Doctors, relief workers, women and children – they are all the enemy of both religious and secular Islamic totalitarians.

So are Jacques Chirac, the Germans, the Belgians, most of the rest of the UN and the EU, regular Arabs including regular Palestinians, and the American anti-war crowd – all of whom consider an American failure in Iraq to be tolerable because they think it will be the failure of President Bush. They think they will be safe because they are not he. They are wrong. Mr. Bush said, “You are with us or you are with the terrorists,” and the terrorists hold the principle in the obverse. If you are not with them, you are with “us”; and if you are with “us,” you can die.

To simplify the syntax, we ask, “Who are the ‘we’ that ‘they’ would kill?”

First, “we” are people who are sorry Saudi children died – while “they” are people who hail the death of Israeli children. “We” are the liberal, small-d democratic world that believes in human rights, liberty and the rule of law. “We” are the multiple coalitions fighting the totalitarians of the 21st Century. America and the governments of Israel, Britain, Italy, Spain, Turkey, Japan, Hungary, Poland and more.

Failure in Iraq is not an option for us, for the Iraqis or for millions of people in many, many countries who understand that in the eyes of the fascists, “we” are all Americans now and “we” are all Israelis.

Even the Saudis and the Red Cross.