Khoury’s “cycle of war” in Mother Jones edition of April 19, 2006 would be laughable were it not so serious. Muslims keep killing Jews, as they have been doing since the 1920's under the then leadership of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, well before Israel even existed. But the Jewish defense of their lives is a “cycle of war”, in Mr. Khoury's biased eyes.

What cockamamie notions he holds. Hamas and the Palestinian government intend to continue bombing and killing Israelis. Khoury acknowledges this in his article, yet according to him Israel should still “negotiate peaceful coexistence”. How does Israel negotiate peace when the aggressor fanatics of this conflict have said constantly, unquestionably, unwaveringly, unmistakably, irremediably, that they will kill the Jews and return the land to Dar Al Islam?

Khoury makes a convincing case that Israel is to blame for this conflict, which of course is the goal of any good propagandist. He refers to Israeli “unilateralism, colonial land grabs, and militarism”. But the reality is that the first three wars against Israel, after she was founded by the UN, were initiated by aggressor Arab states before Israel had captured any significant territory, and before she had any substantial military power. In each of those wars, there was very real question about whether she would survive the attacks by the various surrounding nations. It has only been since the 6-day war that Israel has been forced (under international law, by the way) to administer territories wrested from the aggressor Arabs (territories never referred to as “occupied” when Jordan, Egypt, and Syria occupied them). And it’s clear that Israel would be happy to relinquish territory for peace. She gave back enormous territory, including substantial improvements and oil wells, for peace with Egypt. The fantasy Khoury so deftly flourishes is based on deceptive premises which he skillfully weaves into a falsely sympathetic fabric of anti-Israel lies. That’s what propaganda is all about.

Khoury’s many misrepresentations have a military goal - to make victim Israel appear the bad guy and thus bring more pressure against her from the West. Arab & Muslim irredentists manipulate world opinion to increase pressure on Israel from world bodies already in threat of oil strangulation. They utilize all available resources to improve their ability to extort submission to Arab will.

The problems in the Middle East are much simpler - and at the same time much more complicated - than Khoury admits. The basic problem is Allah, the source of fanatical followers of Islamic concepts of justice. Israel has as neighbors a couple of dozen regimes with populations which have been brain-washed since the time of Mohammed to believe that Allah says that only Islamic Law can prevail in territories once governed by Islam. The corollary and much more complex problem is that these people believe that achieving such theocracy requires murder on scales the West hasn’t seen since... well, as Tom Lehrer put it, “We licked the Germans in 1918, and they’ve hardly bothered us since then.”

On a more complicated level, it is hard for people to be objective about themselves, so the Christian West thinks of themselves as pure and virtuous, while viewing the Arabs as barbaric and beneath contempt. In fact, this arrogance seems to be a source of an odd kind of condescension, where the West overlooks the vicious barbarity of the Arabs while holding other (non-European) populations to a much higher standard of moral behavior. Suicide mass-murders in the Middle East have never even been discussed, much less acted on by the UN, while similar killings in the Balkans have elicited war crimes trials and collective punishment of the Serbs. But I digress.

The basic problem in the Middle East is the special barbarity and the theosophy of world domination espoused by Islam. Powerful as Khoury makes her sound, Israel is basically helpless, knows this, and desperately seeks peace. She is a country of 5 million people, on a tiny patch of largely barren land, facing several hundred million insane Muslims whose philosophy still includes beheading infidels, behanding thieves, murdering wives and daughters who have inadvertently attracted smiles of strangers, and, yes, killing Jews and Christians and Copts, and Hindus, and anyone else - including Muslims of different beliefs - in the name of Mohammed, who thankfully at least isn’t referred to by his followers as “the Prince of Peace”. For Mr. Khoury to publish slick deceptions from highly visible pulpits is to only promote Islamic violence and to further the Arab goal of world conquest. Until such articulate and highly visible spokespeople such as Mr. Khoury can accurately recognize and publicly preach about the real source of conflict in the Middle East - without threat of death for telling the truth - I fear that there is little chance of peace anywhere that Islam holds sway.