Is it too late to stop this train?

Barbara Lerner, writing in National Review Online, posts an urgent warning on the implications of an Israeli pullout from Gaza. In the excerpt below, I highlight Lerner's descriptions of what our enemies know in contradiction to what some of us think we know (Italics and emphasis mine):

We think Gaza is all about Israel and the Palestinians; our enemies know it's mainly about us. We think we are encouraging Israel to hand Gaza over to Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah party, local Palestinians with purely local ambitions — ambitions that encompass the whole of Israel, perhaps, but nothing beyond it — ambitions that have nothing to do with us. Our enemies know that behind a Fatah fig leaf, we are handing Gaza over to Hamas, an international terrorist organization of global reach and ambition that is one of America's deadliest enemies. We think Hamas only attacks Jews. They know that Hamas is a main recruiting agent for Arab jihadists, not just from among the 2.4 million Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank and from the much larger numbers of Palestinians scattered in strategic enclaves throughout the region and the world, but for other Arabs too. We think Hamas sends all these jihadists only to Israel. They know Hamas sends a never-ending stream of them to Afghanistan, Chechnya, the Balkans, Kashmir, Lebanon and, most critically for us right now, to Iraq. And when our press insistently refers to Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the master terrorist who directs the foreign jihadists in Iraq, as "a Jordanian," our enemies laugh. They know Zarqawi has always called himself a Palestinian, and is recognized as such, in Jordan and throughout the Middle East.

It is so long past time that we emphasize that one of Saddam Hussein's primary lines of attack against the U.S. was his very active support of Palestinian terrorism and terrorists. From $25,000 death gratuities for Palestinian homicide bombers, to terrorist training camps, to safe haven, to Iraqi efforts to gain WMD that could be used against Israel in supposed sympathy to the Palestinian cause -- Saddam Hussein viewed the Palestinians as useful stooges in his ongoing vendetta against America and his competition with Iran as the pre-eminent Middle Eastern power.

As Lerner notes, "This is the reality we face: The "Palestinian democracy" we rattle on about is a mirage no desert-dweller is seduced by." We ignore the continued threat of the Palestine terror groups at our peril.

Is it too late to stop this train from leaving the Gaza station?

(Courtesy of Powerline)

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