Scheuer is 100% against mixed blessings...

This pretty much sums up where former CIA superspy Michael Scheuer's heart is....

The nation-state of Israel is an intolerable burden to the treasury and security of the United States, and Washington's current relationship with Israel – sanctioned by the AIPAC (American Israeli Political Action Committee)-funded political leaders of bo
th parties – is one of several factors that are leading to full-scale American participation in other peoples' religious wars, religious wars that David Horowitz's recent "Islamofascist Awareness Week" manifestly wants to bring to the streets of the United States.

That's the final paragraph of an article he wrote this week and posted on antiwar dot com (can't make myself link it here, google it if you must).

A couple of thoughts--

1) There is ample evidence in the form of Osama's prior comments that he is not, specifically, all that interested in our support of Israel. He believes that we are evil, not because of that, but because of our decadence and godlessness, and that we must be destroyed or subjugated. At least Scheuer calls our relationship with Israel "one of several factors" and not THE cause, but still he ignores what Osama has already said is the prime cause.

2) It is entirely possible (I cannot know for sure, from my vantage point as an ordinary guy in Texas) that our relationship with Israel has PREVENTED not only attacks on the USA, but perhaps even a full scale war or two. Scheuer does not offer even the slightest possibility of a mitigation here, a mixed blessing, through that relationship. And history shows, I think, that it has been at least that.

And what with the recent destruction of the Syrian nuclear facility (a facility that Scheuer doubtless will explain away, one way or the other), the positive contributions of this mixed blessing could be said to be continuing up 'til this very day, and perhaps will be made manifest even more clearly in the coming adventures with Iran. Just because Israel might act to protect itself does not mean the US does not benefit from the act.

3) Mr. Scheuer positively VIBRATES with his dislike of the whole notion of the Jewish state, and it blinds him to the truth; these are not 'other peoples' religious wars', as he puts it, but war made on US, against US, with dozens of attacks on US down through the past decades, and loud and forthright declarations that the war is against US.

Perhaps if there had never been a modern Israel, the Muslim fundamentalists would have been inflamed by something else; perhaps not. But it is possible, and if it had happened, who would Scheuer and his kind blame?

The Islamists say its a war of God against godlessness. They intend to subjugate the entire world under their culture, their religion. They've dreamed about this for hundreds of years, planned it for almost that long. They have long term goals and are not afraid to spend generations of their young people in the doing. Jews were a dying people, a shadow, completely irrelevant, when the Islamist fever began to burn. As far back as the 1880's, local Indonesian muslims were sending their imams to Saudi Arabia to study Wahabism; believe it or not, they feared that Allah was angry with them over their laxity of observance, and that the Krakatoa eruption in 1883 was a manifestation of that anger. Saudi traveling preachers were in Indonesia, and began to encourage the pilgrimage; the rest is history.

The first 'attacks on the west by Islamic radicals' were in the form of a couple of public murders in Dutch towns in Indonesia in 1886, wherein turbaned muslims rushed into shops shouting 'Allah hu akbar' and killed the first white people they found. Such attacks have been steady, if not constant, since.

It almost seems to me, after a quick scan of history, that Israel is a tangent, a sort of inflamed pustule on the thigh of the strider who steadily walks forward, toward the light of worldwide sharia. He'll lance the boil in due time, but first he must endure it on the ground that larger goals require his full attention.

(The above paragraph illustrates why I've never seriously tried to become a writer. Ugh.)

Sure, the Muslims are mad about Israel, which they call "the catastrophe", but are they not on the course they'd have followed anyway?

Thanks again to the senior editor at Commentary Magazine, Gabriel Schoenfeld, for working so hard on puncturing the Michael Scheuer gasbag....

Read "Connecting... the Dots", Schoenfeld's blog, for all the scoop.