'There is no shame in being a strong nation'
Former Defense Minister Moshe Arens, the original "Mr. Security," believes Israel's aerospace industries are at the top of their game • The volatile regional changes are tragic for the Arab world, but they will see Israel emerge stronger, he says.Lars Hedegaard: Jihad: "All the Fault of the West!"
At 90, Arens has a unique perspective on life, politics and Israel's future.
When looking to Israel's future, one must also look at its past, he says.
"And looking back we've made amazing progress," he says.
"The State of Israel was a country fighting for its life, a poor country, budgeting for every citizen. Today Israel is very strong militarily, and economically it's a rich country. That's nothing to be ashamed of. We're a high-tech state with robust exports.
"Between the [1948] War of Independence and the [1973] Yom Kippur War, we felt we were fighting for our lives. Until that glorious victory [in 1973] we were under the constant threat of an attack by an Arab coalition, and we needed 48 hours to call up the reserves and counter the attack. This threat no longer exists. The Arab armies are deterred. Some of them no longer exist, and we have peaceful relations with Egypt and Jordan, including close defense ties. No one can predict the future, but if we look at where we were and where we are today, there's definitely reason to be optimistic."
As long as we in the West are not prepared to take Muslims at their word when they claim to be waging bloody jihad because it is their religious obligation, we have no chance of repelling the current onslaught on the West.Sorry Revisionists, Joseph and Mary were Jews, Herod was an Arab
First to go will be the welfare states. Shrinking native populations cannot generate enough taxes to accommodate masses of immigrants with so few skills as to be effectively unemployable, or who do not want to contribute to "infidel" societies. Well before mid-century, the number of Muslims in Denmark will be large enough irreversibly to have changed the composition and character of the country.
In the United States, a House of Representatives bill, H. Res. 569, has been sponsored that would censor one of the few countries left with freedom of speech. The bill, in accordance with the 10-year plan of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), would criminalize all criticism of Islam, worldwide.
Will Muslim non-integration spell the end of the secular state as we have known it? Probably. Religion – or more accurately, Islamic ideology, which knows no distinction between religion and politics – is on the ascendant.
The Roman Empire brought in Arab soldiers as mercenaries to slaughter much of the Jewish population. The slow collapse of the Empire made further Arab and eventually Arab Muslim invasions possible.
Trying to depict the Arabs as Jews and the Jews as Herod is Orwellian stuff when Herod was an Arab and Arab invaders have been terrorizing Jews in Israel since his day.
Joseph and Mary trying to visit Bethlehem would be at risk, not from Israeli soldiers who would be protecting them, but from Herod's Muslim kinfolk, who would try to kill them. If they tried to live in the area, they would be denounced as "settlers". Obama would demand that they leave, the EU would fund "human rights" activists to harass them and the media would dehumanize them.
That is the real outrage and the real apartheid.