Caroline Glick's Important New Book

Caroline Glick held a remarkable bloggers conference call yesterday, sponsored by One Jerusalem, which has posted the audio and a transcript. 

Glick discussed her new book, “Shackled Warrior:  Israel and the Global Jihad,” a compilation of her columns in the Jerusalem Post that cover why it is so difficult for the world to understand Israel’s role in the global jihad, and what it is about Israeli society that makes it so difficult for Israel to fight:

I separated [the columns] into themes and made ten chapters in the book.  I started with “The War Against Israel,” which is basically a collection of columns that explains what the war against Israel looks like, in terms of the toll of terrorism, in terms of how Israel fights, and what is wrong with what Israel is doing. 

The second chapter is called “The War Against the Free World,” which is about . . . how Jihad manifests itself not only in Israel but throughout the world, from Malaysia to the Philipines to Africa to the United States and Europe, and what it is that the jihadists are doing and how their doctrine works.

The third chapter is called “Israel Alone,” and it’s essentially about how Israel is alone in this – that even though Israel is the proverbial canary in the mineshaft, everybody is ignoring the bird -- and why everybody seems to be hellbent on preventing Israel from achieving victory -- either military or political -- against its enemies.

The forth chapter is “Threat of Destruction” and it is about Iran’s nuclear program and why Iran is making nuclear weapons, why the West is so unwilling to do anything to prevent that from happening, and what Israel’s role in Iran’s nuclear weapons program is -- specifically to be its first victim.

Then Chapter Five is called “Israel’s Suicide Attempt,” and it’s about all the political distortions and corruption inside Israel that makes public debate in Israel generally seem completely incoherent, or a dialogue between two opposing radical leftist camps, where the majority of Israel who are neither leftists nor radical are simply left out -- and that also goes into the withdrawal from Gaza, the problems with Israel’s judiciary and media and also Israel’s political system.

The “Battle of Hearts and Minds,” which is Chapter Six, talks about psychological warfare, particularly how the enemy uses psychological warfare against free societies and makes it difficult for us to understand the war that is being waged against us, and what happens to people who try to explain the nature of the war, particularly in Europe.

Chapter Seven [“Contemporary Thought Police”] is about how people are treated for trying to speak out against jihad in the West . . . about the problems in academia in the United States and Europe, as well as the European attempt to prevent counter-jihadists from having a role in policy-making and policy discussions in Europe.

Chapter Eight is about Europe and is called “The European Betrayal” -- about how post-war Europe has fetishized the Holocaust to the point where they seem to be constantly mourning dead Jews but refuse to have anything but antipathy toward the Jewish state and live Jews trying to defend themselves against another Holocaust.  And it goes also to the wider jihadist threat to Europe with the burgeoning minority threat and the challenges that presents to European culture and European politics.

Chapter Nine is . . . a collection of the articles and columns that I wrote when I was embedded with the U.S. Third Infantry Division on the front lines of the U.S. invasion in Iraq . . . and watched as they took down a terror supporting dictatorship and then were struggling with the initial problems of what it means to actually have invaded an Arab country -- the whole notion of being occupiers and having to deal with an enemy whose war fighting doctrine is suffused with terrorism and psychological warfare.

And then finally the last chapter is “The Light Unto the Nations,” and it takes a step back from the issues of the day and talks about what sort of country Israel actually is -- away from the headlines -- who the Jewish people are, why we’re worth defending, why we must defend ourselves, why Israel is the country that it is, and has achieved what it has, and why there are some things just worth dedicating your life to defending.

Glick believes that, by organizing the articles around themes and collecting them in a single place, her book makes a unique contribution to the dialogue about Israel, politics and war – showing individual events as the tip of the iceberg and relating them to the iceberg itself.  Anyone who has read one of her columns knows what she means. 

Glick went on to make a masterful presentation about what is currently happening in Israel, what the potential cease-fire with Hamas would mean, what she expects from President Bush’s visit this week and what she thinks the U.S. should do, how the election of Ehud Barak in 1999 (with the assistance of Clinton political advisers sent to Israel) changed the relationship between Israel and the State Department (with effects continuing to this day), why the resignation of Ehud Olmert might not occur (or change anything if it does), and finally why – despite everything she covered in her book and on the call – she is optimistic.

All of the One Jerusalem calls have been invaluable, but this may have been the best one yet.  Kol Hakavod to Anne Lieberman for initiating it and for asking her beautiful final question, which elicited an answer that should not be missed.

(Accounts of the call have been posted by Atlas Shrugs, Boker tov, Boulder!, Daled Amos, Gateway Pundit, The Hedgehog Blog and Israpundit).