If you go to Wikipedia (not my favorite source, but sometimes a good source of basic information), you can find a list of aircraft hijackings from the 1940’s through June 2012. It’s a rather long list, and what is noteworthy on that list is the fact that during that time there has only been one successful hijacking of an El Al airlines airplane. If you understand that Israel is the target of numerous terrorist organizations, this is a somewhat amazing statistic. Obviously Israel understands some things about preventing terrorism that the rest of us need to learn. Well, that may be true, but don’t tell the Obama Administration.
Yesterday Breitbart.com reported that the Obama Administration launched the Global Counterterrorism Forum in September. The article mentions the film ‘Hear their Voices’, which tells the stories of eleven survivors of terrorist attacks from Pakistan, Jordan, Northern Ireland, Uganda, Turkey, Indonesia, India, Spain, Columbia, and the United States. When the plans for the Global Counterterrorism Forum were announced in June, there were some questions as to why Israel was not included (the supposition was that Israel was excluded at the request of Turkey). The Obama Administration promised that they would be included, then reneged on their word.
The article reports:
Jonathan Schanzer, vice president for research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said:
“What we’re seeing is a trend of Israel being left out of the global discussion on terrorism, while Israel was extremely helpful during the beginning stages of this conversation. The [Obama] administration is downplaying the struggle that Israel has been enduring. I believe to a certain extent, this is due to regional politics, and it’s disconcerting to see this change. It just looks like a quiet effort to downplay the issue.”
Maybe we need to look at who is doing the terrorist attacks to see if there is a pattern. Who is training the terrorists? Who is teaching the hatred that encourages terrorism? I’ll give you a hint–it’s not Israel. As I write this, Muslims are killing Christians in Nigeria, and Muslim jihadists are killing people in the Philippines. Since the fall of the government in Egypt, Coptic Christians are being routinely killed. There is a pattern here. The Obama Administration is working very hard to ignore that pattern. As Sun Tzu stated, “Know your enemy before going into battle.” The Obama Administration does not want to know their enemy and is taking the world down the same errant path. Any serious effort to fight terrorism would include Israel–they have suffered the highest number of terrorists attacks and have learned how to prevent many of them and how to deal with them when they happen. It is foolish to omit Israel from the community of nations attempting to fight terrorism.
