That’s For Starters

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I will tell you the tale of the mafioso and the car. A mafia don approached an average Joe and said to him, “Nice car you got there, it’d be a shame if something happened to it. Pay me a grand each month and it’ll be all OK”. Joe pays. However, a few days afterwards, he comes back home to see his car burned. After the trauma, he saves for buying another one, and finally he does. Then the mafia don comes back and says the same words he did last time.

What is Joe to do? In both instances, paying the protection money would be injustice. However, in the first instance, though it is injustice, it could be considered an act of wisdom—a result of pragmatic calculation of the cost vis-à-vis the value. In the second instance, in contrast, for Joe to pay the mafioso the money would not be even wise. For now that he had seen that paying the protection money had not kept his car safe, now that he had seen that the mafioso was not willing to hold to his side of the deal, Joe would have nothing to lose by refusing to pay and finding some way to fight the mafioso instead. Injustice can be barely tolerated by excusing it as pragmatism; but if there is no pragmatism in the miscarriage of justice, then the excuse of pragmatism should be thrown away, and justice be vehemently pursued, for there is now nothing to lose and everything to gain from that.

Joe is the Jews, and by extension the whole non-Muslim world. The mafioso is the “Palestinians”, and by extension the whole Muslim world. So far, the proverbial Joe has been paying protection money in the face of the plain fact that the proverbial mafioso has no intention of keeping his part of the deal—not permanently, anyway (pace Robert Spencer, Islamic law stipulates that a peace treaty with non-Muslims can last 10 years at most, and then it’s back to warfare). What, then, is the gain in continuing the concessions of land or culture to the Muslims? It is not only unjust (caving in to intimidation) but also unwise, because any concession merely postpones, not cancels, the enemy’s goal of full takeover. Your car will be burned down, in the end, no matter how much you pay, so it’s better, more pragmatic, to resist than to keep paying.

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In full on Our Children Are The Guarantors »