SITH PEACE

You know a movie is in trouble when during the most emotionally dramatic scenes, the kids are ROTFLMAO*. Star Wars III, for all its special effects eye candy, is pathetically written and acted. Even more pathetic are George Lucas’ values.

In 1977, the original Star Wars morality play of heroes fighting for freedom against the evil Galactic Empire resonated with millions of people struggling for their own freedom against the Evil Empire of the Soviet Union. Now Lucas wants folks to associate the Galactic Empire with America and the freedom-destroying dictator Palpatine with George Bush.

So it was gratifying to see both adults and kids in the audience not taken in by this stupidity, and howl with derisive laughter when Anakin Skywalker becomes Darth Vader and wails “Noooooooooooooooooooo!” upon learning his wife has died. The movie is a joke.

It does, however, contain one supremely educative moment. It’s not when Obi-Wan blurts out unintelligibly, “Only the Sith deal in absolutes” (as if the whole point of all six movies isn’t about the absolutes of the Sith as evil bad guys and the virtue of fighting against them). It’s Palpatine’s rationale for suppressing rebellion against his tyranny: When the rebels are defeated, there will be “peace.”

Let’s hope Star Wars III teaches lots of people the difference between the “peace” that comes from submission and the peace that comes from freedom. Thus, lots of Moslems should see it. So should Laura Bush.

This past Saturday, May 21, Mrs. Bush stood at the ruins of the 8th century Hisham’s Palace in the ancient Biblical city of Jericho, now populated by Palestinian Arabs, and pronounced:

We’re reminded again of what every one of us would want. … What we all want is peace and the chance that we have right now to have peace, to have a Palestinian state living by a secure state of Israel, both living in democracy, is as close as we’ve been in a really long time.

Mrs. Bush is undoubtedly a sincere and honest person who genuinely desires real peace between Jews and Moslems, Israelis and Palestinians – just as are the sellers of this t-shirt on an Israeli website:

Such honesty and sincerity is dangerously na�ve – for it assumes an identity of meaning between “shalom” (in Hebrew above Peace on the shirt) and “salaam” (in Arabic underneath). Mrs. Bush assumes what she means by “peace” is the same as what Palestinians do. But this is wrong. Mrs. Bush and the Israelis mean real peace. The Palestinians, like all Moslem radicals, mean Sith peace.

Earlier this month in The Golden Fleece of Freedom, we discussed how there was no word for peace in Russian. It turns out there is no word for peace in Arabic either.

Just as the Russian word mir, especially as the Soviets used it, means not peace but order, the Arabic word salaam means not peace but submission. There is peace, salaam, among Moslems when they submit to Allah and the teachings of the Koran. The very word “Islam” means “submission to Allah,” while “Moslem” means “one who submits.”

Thus there is peace, salaam, between Moslems and infidels, kafirs, non-Moslems, only when the latter submit to the rule of the former.

Soviet peace, Moslem peace – both are Sith peace, peace as submission. For the Soviet Communists just as for traditional Moslems, peace is not the absence of violence, as it is for us, but the absence of disobedience – the absence of disobedience to them. In Lenin’s words:

As long as capitalism and (Soviet) socialism exist, we cannot live in peace. In the end, one or the other will triumph – a funeral dirge will be sung over the Soviet republic or over world capitalism.**

Or, as the Soviet Military Encyclopedia states it:

Peace is impossible without Soviet socialism� A truly lasting peace is impossible and cannot be achieved without a proletarian revolution.***

In the words of Allah, dictated to Mohammed in the Koran:

Fight and slay the unbelievers wherever you find them. Seize them, confine them, lie in wait for them in every place of ambush. (Sura – verse – 9:5)

Believers! Do not befriend your fathers or your brothers or your sons if they choose unbelief in preference to belief in Allah. (Sura 9:22)

Fight those who do not believe in Allah, those who do not forbid what Allah and his apostle have forbidden, fight them until they pay tribute to the believers and are utterly subdued. (Sura 9:29)

Mohammed is Allah’s apostle. Those who follow him are merciless towards the unbelievers but kind to each other. (Sura 48:29)

O Unbelievers! We renounce you. Enmity and hatred will reign between us until you believe in Allah alone. (Sura 60:4)

For Moslems, these are the sacred commands of God Himself. These commands make it impossible for Islam to be a religion of peace, and necessitate that it be a religion of the sword.

Of course, there are many, many Moslems for whom their humanity takes precedence over their religion, who want peace as live-and-let-live, peace as the freedom for them, as well as everyone else, to be left alone to practice their beliefs. The best way to promote this is the Bush Doctrine of democratizing Moslem countries.

The world’s largest Moslem country, Indonesia, is well on its way to becoming a genuine democracy. A Democratic Iraq is rapidly becoming a reality. With some luck, a democratic revolution will soon rid Iran of its mullah masters. The winds of democratic change are blowing through the entire Arab and Moslem world.

Yet in any adversarial or suspect relationship between Moslems and Non-Moslems, the only way to verify if Moslems are serious about what we call “peace” is a linguistic test, the Test of Sulh.

It turns out there are three different words in Arabic for “peace.”

First is hudna. When the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, for example, proposes a hudna with Israel, this is often translated in English as “peace,” when it actually means “cease-fire,” a breather in hostilities to give Hamas time to re-organize and re-arm.

Second is salaam, the peace of submission.

Third is the most interesting: sulh, the peace of reconciliation. The Encyclopedia of Islam describes sulh as a concept of Islamic sharia law:

The purpose of sulh is to end conflict and hostility among believers so that they may conduct their relationships in peace and amity….In Islamic law, sulh is a form of contract (aqd), legally binding on both the individual and community levels.

Note that it applies only between believers. Once again, it’s deuces wild with unbelievers.

Nonetheless, insistence on using the word sulh in any agreement between, say, Palestinians and Israelis, putting it in writing in the Arabic version of the documents that this agreement is not a hudna and not a salaam, but a sulh that is a legally binding aqd even though one of the signatories is not Moslem, is the best chance of transforming a Palestinian Sith peace into a real peace for Israel.****

The War on Islamofacist Terror is, according to my friend Dr. Ariel Cohen of the Heritage Foundation, at root a War of Ideas. This means a war of words and concepts, in which the enemy’s concepts must be used against him, rather than against us.

From now on, no more cavalier use of the word “peace.” From now on, there must be an explicit rejection of peace as salaam, peace as submission. We mean peace as freedom, and until they accept this, there can be no talk of peace at all.

Notes:
*An Internet acronym for “rolling on the floor laughing my a** off.”
** V.I. Lenin, “Speech to Moscow Party Nuclei Secretaries,” November 26, 1920. Selected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1943), vol. 8, p. 297.
***(Moscow: USSR Ministry of Defense, 1976-1980), vol. 5, 1978, p.316.
****All previous or proposed peace agreements between Arabs and Israel use the term “salaam,” and avoid the use of “sulh” which again connotes permanent reconciliation and forgiveness. Thus Anwar Sadat in signing the Camp David Accord insisted on “salaam” and refused to have the word “sulh” in the Arabic version of the document. The absence of reconciliation meant that Egypt could abandon the peace agreement if and when circumstances changed