Doctor Michael Phelps once said, "The trouble with heart disease is that the first symptom is often hard to deal with: sudden death." Likewise it is difficult for Israel to deal with what is always the first symptom of war with her Muslim neighbors: their intended genocide of every living Jew residing in the Middle East. Iran's "Supreme Leader" Ayatollah Ali Khamenei recently had his "strategy specialist" Alireza Forghani compose a document declaring that it would be a "jurisprudential justification" for the Iranian military to wipe out the nation of Israel and all its Jewish inhabitants. Aside from even touching on the subject of Islamic-incited, anti-Jewish hatred and genocide as being somehow connected to any type of "jurisprudential" philosophy other than the various kill-the-Jews themes found in the Koran, one has to wonder at how the Jews of Israel, especially women and children, go about their daily business after hearing the news that their Persian neighbors are keen to stomp their guts into the sand. And this is not a new thing. Israel's Jews hear I'm sure every other day from some Arab-Muslim sage how it should be the dream of every devout Muslim to kill Jews and to remove the "cancerous tumour" (Khamenei's words) Israel and all her Jews from off the face of the earth. Same old, same old for Jews living in the Muslim Middle East.

The thing I find most bizarre about this peculiar Islamic constant (Islamic death threats against Israel and her Jews) is that Western journalists continue to exculpate Islam the religion as being innocent of such malefic proclamations. The UK tabloid Daily Mail even referred to the Iranian web-site (Alef), from whence the document was first released, as "conservative." Conservative? If issuing genocidal death-threats against the Jewish people and the nation of Israel is "conservative," then a majority of Western journalists are not to be trusted when it comes to their take on any subject relating to the Jewish people and the State of Israel. A website that insouciantly releases a document justifying the extermination of the Jewish people and the destruction of their sovereign state is a racist or "extremist" website. Period. It is not "conservative." Not as we understand "conservativism" in the Western world.

But even conclusive evidence on a variety of subjects can be grossly transmogrified when observed through the dark lens of Islam. On January 26, 2004 Israel's Representative to the Fourth Stockholm Conference On the Prevention of Genocide remarked that "we must be prepared to honestly report that which will be invariably evident. States which respect themselves cannot and should not evade the obvious by requiring field reports to be phrased euphemistically." The "Arab Spring" has been sweeping though the Middle East, and the Western media to this day is reluctant to call it what it really is: a resurgence of Islamic extremism. Darfur has in recent years been in the news because of the atrocities committed there by Arab militias. The UN was sent there to find for certain whether or not genocide was being committed. The UN? That's like sending a fox on a fox hunt. And this blatant posturing only after the Western world had seen tv images of smouldering desert dwellings and charcoaled human remains laying nearby. The UN could have saved a lot of time and money by reading Gerald A. Honigman's brazingly honest summation on the issue: "The atrocities committed in Darfur are Arab racism and chauvinism, pure and simple, being conducted by those very same folks who like to lecture the rest of the world about 'racist Zionism'." I've never read the UN report. Why would I? The world knew already that there was a genocide happening in Darfur, only the world chose not to recognize it as such. The same psychopathic quiescency sealed the fate of the Jews of Europe during the Holocaust, but on a much larger scale. An immeasureably larger scale.

How can the State of Israel therefore, a second time around, expect such a wilfully blind and callous world to publicly recognize the stark reality of the religiously-inspired genocide being impatiently dreamed about by her Muslim neighbours? Israel would be imprudent and foolishly naive to entertain such an expectation. At this time in history, Israel's Jews remember, as do probably most Jews outside of Israel, that when things cannot get any worse for the Jews, it's almost always because things cannot get any better. This is an exclusively Jewish impasse. Ask the Jewish fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Ask the Jewish Partisans of Eastern Europe. Ask any Jew who survived the death camps. This impasse is situated on the brink of total extermination. Where the Jews of Israel exist today.

So please don't talk to me about "disproportionate response." Don't talk to me about "Israeli aggression." When your country exists proximate to an enemy whose first symptom of war is a complete and infrangible genocide, there can be no trust, no abatement of military deterrence. The unenviable conundrum facing the Jews of Israel today is that if at first they don't succeed, they are dead. All of them. Simple as that.

Regardless all the excoriations hurled at her, Israel has no choice but to survive. There is no other path of resistance for her Jews. Gershom Gorenberg and all unctuous fools like him can pretend Israel is nothing but an "accidental empire," but the Jew who remembers correctly and deeply enough into history knows that the State of Israel is no accident. It was a neccesity become a life-saving reality. Jews did not survive all their horrors by making themselves door mats for madmen. They survive today because they know how to deal with the first symptom most commonly displayed by their enemies, which is the threat of genocide. Israel can be peaceful and diplomatic better than any other nation on the planet. Read the news. Think "land for peace." What other country gives away conquered land for the sake of peace? I know Canada doesn't. But this peculiar type of diplomacy is maintained only until she's pushed to the edge of extinction, where she now dwells. It's then that Jewish experience comes to the fore. Enter the Israeli Defence Force. Or as Damon Runyon wrote long ago: "The race may not be to the swift nor the victory to the strong, but that's how you bet."

Michael Devolin