Shackled Warrior: Israel and the Global Jihad | Caroline Glick

Shackled Warrior: Israel and the Global Jihad | Caroline Glick | A SUPERB EFFORT BY A BRILLIANT WRITER

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Shackled Warrior: ...

	Shackled Warrior: Israel and the Global Jihad Caroline Glick Gefen Publishing House, 2008 - 448 pages average customer review:based on 8 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Islamic supremacism, European cultural disaggregation, American vacillation, and Israeli timidity and confusion. These are the main social contexts that inform political and strategic developments of global and national affairs in our times. In her biweekly commentaries, Caroline B. Glick, the formidable Jerusalem Post columnist, highlights these underlying trends while analyzing events as they unfold both globally and in Israel. This extraordinary collection of her probing and eloquent work is a must read for all who care about winning the war against the multifarious forces of global jihad.

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Words that illuminate like torches

The redoubtable Caroline Glick is an outspoken commentator with profound insight into cultural currents, political trends and strategic developments in Europe, North America, Israel and the Middle East. In this collection of columns written from 2002 to 2007 she identifies and analyses the major threats facing Israel and the West. She insists that security, not peace, should be Israel's priority. Considered confrontational by some, Glick boldly challenges wishful thinking, duplicity and denial. The reader is immediately struck by her earlier predictions and conclusions that time has proved correct.

Arranged by theme, the chapters cover the war against the West and against Israel as its frontline representative, all aspects of the global Jihad, the Iranian threat plus the sinister nature of both the Jihadist & the Western appeasement ideology. Israel is the warrior shackled internally by a weak government, subversive political elite and treasonous academics & externally by its indecisive ally the USA, a hostile Europe and the international mass media that overwhelmingly subscribe to political correctness, moral relativism and multiculturalism.

Glick highlights the gravity of the menace on the cultural, economic and military fronts, fearlessly charging Europe with betrayal, exposing the naivety of public discourse in the West and truthfully reporting the real goals of the Palestinian and Arab leadership as they themselves articulate it. In the war of ideas, academia is the source & the mass media the disseminator of anti-Western pieties du jour of which the seeming benevolence masks a toxin of self-loathing, she argues convincingly. Amongst the most informative and insightful chapters are those on the media war against Israel and the USA, including analyses of the techniques. The double standards of certain "human rights" organizations are likewise exposed.

One example of the West's loss of confidence & fragmenting psyche is the divergence of rhetoric from reality. In the first place this phenomenon manifests in Western & Israeli gullibility - taking seriously the words of the enemy while turning a blind eye to its deeds. Secondly, the trajectory of Left-Liberal rhetoric on the terrorist threat has removed this ideological cluster so far from reality that people are noticing as evidenced by imploding newspaper sales, public distrust reflected in opinion surveys and the proliferation of dissenting voices in the blogosphere and other media.

In Europe, those who dare warn of the threat are demonized by the consensus-über-alles elites or intimidated like Geert Wilders and Ayaan Hirsi Ali who courageously defy the fate of Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh. The media habit of lending equal weight to the statements of Western leaders and totalitarian monsters under the pretense of "objectivity" is offensive but overt moral relativism. When the media present opinion as fact or slant the news by selective reporting, deceptive headlines & the use of scare quotes, they cross the line into propaganda. When organizations like the BBC insidiously demonizes particular groups and undermines western values in its entertainment programs the process becomes downright sinister. And when western media knowingly disseminate Palestinian propaganda they become complicit in evil.

Amongst her more disturbing observations are those - shared by French philosopher Chantal Delsol and authors like Bruce Bawer & Claire Berlinski - on Europe's rejection of the lessons of the Holocaust. The simplistic fallacies of nationalism being the ultimate evil & of war never being justified distort reality. The nature of nationalism, a neutral concept, must be judged by the manner of its expression. Pacifism permits evil to flourish; it is neither pious nor benevolent as it denies the concept of justice and even holds it in contempt.

The lesson of the Holocaust is that each individual is obliged to distinguish between good & evil and then to fight evil. Those who refuse to oppose beasts like Hitler, Stalin, Milosevic, Saddam, Bin Laden, Nasrallah and Ahmadinejad are not good people. Indifference in the presence of evil is passive endorsement. How often must history repeat itself before people realize that they have a responsibility to oppose it, that neither they nor their children are immune to its destructive effects? The warning in an old song: "What comes to one must come to us all", remains true.

The widespread cult of victim worship together with the projection of guilt has led to Holocaust fetishization in Europe. Glick contrasts the memorials to the dead with the anti-Zionist agenda of the intelligentsia and the political elites. The dead are cherished whilst the sins of their murderers are being projected onto their surviving descendants. She is aware that the contemporary Antisemite is sophisticated, often a left-leaning academic who views crude expressions of his obsession with distaste.

Unmoved by Darfur, Tibet or Zimbabwe, he displays extraordinary fervor when it comes to the plight of the Palestinians. He heatedly defends Iran's right to acquire nuclear weapons (Israel has them!), and considers a unitary state the only solution to the ME conflict. He resents American hegemony whilst the idea of an "Israel Lobby" with undue influence on US foreign policy enchants him with an attraction erotique. Consciously or subconsciously, the existence of the Jewish State gnaws at his soul.

Robert Kagan's The Return of History and the End of Dreams brilliantly complements Glick's work in which she considers the most critical perils to be Iran's ambition for regional hegemony through its nuclear program & support of terrorists like Hezbollah and Hamas, the spread of a totalitarian Islamist ideology, the West's vulnerability arising from its dependence on Arab oil and the role of worldviews that undermine our capacity for self-defense. She sees signs of hope in rising public awareness, the sober outlook of some western political leaders and religious figures like Pope Benedict, the dedication of individuals who speak out in defiance of the consensus and the internet's abolition of media monopolies. Glick's is a voice of wisdom that shatters delusion, appealing to the civilizational foundations of justice, reason, truth and mercy that survive within us.

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A SUPERB EFFORT BY A BRILLIANT WRITER

Israel is America's canary in the coal mine. No one does a better job of demonstrating this canary's importance to World Peace, in general, and to America's well being, in particular - and to the danger to both should this canary be extinguished. Caroline Glick is both brilliant and acutely perceptive. She also has a writing style that is easy to read, which makes the depth of her thinking and the accuracy of her observations that much more readily available to her readers. Glick is one of my favorite observers of the turnoil in the Middle East, whose problems have been made to appear much more complex than they really are. The only real question - which most try to obscure, and which Ms. Glick places in relief - is Does Israel Have the Right To Exist? On a scale of 5 stars, Ms. Glick is a 10-star author with a 20-star mind. KEN ELIASBERG

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Wow!

I'm gonna treasure this book and this author. Man, she can write! She's got the strength, the talent, the courage and the spirit of a warrior, a poet, a decent patriot and freedom lover. She's the best of Israel and the West. This American-Israeli young woman has been on the ground, she knows the people she talks about, she lived what she talks about. She's got the strength of Sampson and the wisdom of Samuel. And the heart of Ruth. I love her.

The themes she writes about are:

-How the Democratic Party has turned to Radical Left positions;
-the de facto existence of the State of Palestine and hos it is run by thugs and heartless criminals, worse than mafia-like;
-the astronomic corruption they have with the billions given them by the UN (the West);
-Israel's political landcape, the names, the facts, the stories;
-the state of affairs in relevant countries like Nigeria, Philippines, Irak, Somalia;
-the Anglican church;
-how US foreign policy is being hijacked by the Saudi family and friends like Condoleeza Rice and Robert Graves;
-constructive feedback on how to win the peace in Irak;
-Vietnam revisited in brief;
-anti-Jewish media in America and how they operate;
-the Iran threat;
-the social landscape of Israel, the state of their freedoms, the tyranny of their Supreme Court, a who's who in Israel;
-the role of the press in Irak, undermining America's effort, causing more lives to be lost than saved by their stupid falling in for the enemy's propaganda;
-the intelligentuse of propaganda by the Palestinians and how their willing serfs in the leftist media in America succumb to their deathly charm;
-the totalitarian state of the Academia in Israel and America, a de facto harakiri of Israel. Asked about the rampant anti-semitism on European campuses, the president of the University of Paris says: "What do you want from us? All we are doing is repeating what we hear from Israeli profesors." Absolute intolerance for the notion that professors with right-wing or even centrist views should be allowed to teach in their departments (of Tel Aviv University): "Over my dead body!" said one professor;
-how Al-Hurra Television started out, financed by American tax-payer money, as a liberal, pro-American alternative to Al-Jazeera, and soon allowed itself to be used as a platform by terrorists from Hezbollah right after former CNN producer Larry Register took control;
-testimonies from the troops on the ground in Irak, the humble silent heroes of the West: "No matter what you do for these people they are going to hate us because they are jealous of what we have. These people haven't made a decent contribution to humanity for over a thousand years. They hate us for our accomplishements.", "hopefully, she'll understand (the soldier's little daughter) that America doesn't exist because of selfishness, but because of individuals who made sacrifices for the greater good." Regretfully, many adults in the Left don't want to understand it.

About the author's stay with the Army in Irak: "I don't know what made me decide to come here, when the opportunity arose, I said yes without a second doubt. But I do know what I am getting out of this experience. I have found my America. And I have discovered that I can never leave Israel. It sits inside of me, stengthens me, and comforts me to the center of my soul."

This girl is too much to be true, but thank God she is true! Boy, she can write, poetically and patriotically.

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An Excellent examination

This exciting and mesmerizing read is a represents a collection of writings spanning the years 2002 to 2007 analyzing Israel, the global Jihad, Europe, America and the Middle East. These were originally columns written by Caroline Glick, a veteran commentator on Israel who served in the IDF, as an advisor to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and reported on the Iraq war. She provides excellent and jarring critiques of many of the issues facing Israel and the West today. Her viewpoints are both original and incisive.

The writings are divided into ten themes including the Iranian threat, the Islamist threat to the world, the Iraq war and Disengagement. The critiques provided offer a very rich collection of assaults on the kinds of opinion that are either mainstream or `right minded'. Fania Oz-Salzberger of Haifa University is taken to task for her comparison of the situation of Muslims in Europe today with the situation of Jews in Europe in the 1930s. The article notes that "drawing parallels between the subjugation and genocide of European Jewry during the Holocaust and the treatment of European Muslims today runs dangerously close to Holocaust denial." Another article once again sheds light on the Kastner affair and shows that any attempt to rehabilitate his name (Kastner was a Hungarian Jew who saved the lives of 1,600 Jews but did not warn other Jews of their fate and saved people due to family and financial connections) constitutes an assault on history. Another excellent article dares to examine the media's role in creating various `blood libels' to implicate Israel and the U.S in `war crimes'. Glick is at her best excoriating `human rights' organizations such as Hamoked and Machsom Watch for their double standard of only caring for Palestinian Human Rights and never proving any help to Israeli victims, who also deserve human rights. In one the best and perhaps controversial articles the reader is shown how Europe has turned the Holocaust into a fetish, building memorials while working to destroy the present Jewish state.

Collections of published essays tend to make weak reading. They often lack context since they were originally published just after an event and thus provide no historical view and assume the reader recalls the event, which at the time seemed important. Although this collection suffers slightly from this it makes up for it due to the level of intelligence and depth displayed in the writings and it serves as an important testament to the threats to Israel that exist today.

Seth J. Frantzman

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shackled warrior

great book, wonderfully sagacious and intelligent author, is she single, i think i have found my "beshert" oh if she could only say hello to me. but seriously, this is a deeply thoughtful book about what i fear is happening to Israel and the Jewish people. should be read by all who truly care about peace and justice in the middle east.

reviews: page 1, 2

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