by Dr. Jack Wheeler
December 6, 2017

When my father pledged the Phi Delta Theta house at Stanford in 1931, catching a snipe was a requirement to join.  He was taken out to a forest, told to stand along a small trail, crouch down holding a bag, and wait for a snipe – a bird that runs on the ground like a roadrunner only bigger – to catch.

“They run really fast so you’ve got to stay alert – we’ll chase them to you,” they said.  Left alone in the dark, crouching down intensely waiting for the elusive snipe’s fast approach, it took my father a while to realize he’d been had “holding the bag” for something that would never come.

A “snipe hunt” is a time-honored practical joke pulled on generations of kids at summer camps, Boy Scout outings, and college fraternity hazings.  It’s a harmless prank that everyone laughs about afterwards, like my Dad did when he got back to the Phi Delt house.

Yet the Snipe Hunt for Peace that American and Western diplomats have been engaging in for nigh-on two-thirds of a century has been far from harmless.  All of them have been left stupidly “holding the bag” while Palestinian Arabs laugh and sneer at them – because the “peace” being sought after is as imaginary as a snipe.

Nothing could more exemplify Trump’s strategic genius than to put an end to this game.

He set the stage by obliterating ISIS in Iraq and Syria; by going to the capital of Saudi Arabia, Riyadh, and telling a conference of Moslem world leaders right to their faces they will now ally with America in putting an end to Islamic terrorism; by supporting Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) in an anti-Wahhabi revolution; and forging an alliance between Sisi’s Egypt, MBS’ Saudi Arabia, and Israel.

And now today (12/06), he puts an end to the Moslem Myth of Jerusalem.

He announced the “United States government recognizes that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel.  The change is a recognition of reality — both the historic reality that Jerusalem has been the capital of the Jewish people and the Jewish faith since ancient times; and the modern reality that the city is the seat of government for Israel, housing its legislature, supreme court, prime minister, and executive agencies.”

Actually, this opens the floodgates of reality – for it implicitly states that Jerusalem has never been the capital of any Arab people ever.  Further, it explodes the Moslem mantra that “Jerusalem is the third holiest city in all Islam, next to Mecca and Medina.”

You’ve heard this innumerable times — but how come?  The word al-Quds, Arabic for Jerusalem, does not appear in the Koran.  The claim that the city sacred to Jews and Christians is also sacred to Moslems is based on a single line in the Koran.

Sura (Chapter) 17 of the Koran is called al-Isra, the Night Journey, due to the first verse which reads:

“Praise be to him (Allah) who took his servant (Mohammad) by night (Isra’) from the Al-Haram Masjid (sacred place of prostration or mosque) to the Al-Aqsa Masjid (most distant mosque), whose environs we (Allah) did bless, so that we might show him some of our signs, for he (Allah) is the All-Hearing and All-Seeing One.”

Here is the point to be clear on: The entire claim that Jerusalem is holy to the Moslems is based on the assertion that the “most distant mosque” of the Koran’s Sura 17 was in Jerusalem.

But since there were no Moslems in Jerusalem during Mohammed’s life – all Moslems confined to his followers in Mecca and Medina – there could not possibly be a mosque there when he had his vision.  As Egyptian Islamic scholars now show, the most-distant mosque has to be in Medina.

The Night Journey actually refers to the Hejira — Mohammad’s flight from Mecca to Medina in 622 AD, Islam’s founding event which provides Year One in the Moslem calendar.

The entire rationale for the Moslem claim that Mount Moriah, Jerusalem’s Temple Mount and the Jewish people’s most sacred site for 3,000 years, really belongs to them has been demolished — by Moslem scholars.  The claim that Jerusalem is a Holy Islamic City is a total fabrication.  There is no legitimate Moslem claim to Jerusalem whatever.

Trump is now free to point out that the Palestinian Arab claim of Islamic holiness to Jerusalem –  and therefore the capital of a Palestinian state must be Jerusalem –  is bogus.

To fully end the Snipe Hunt for Peace requires one more move by the President.  That is to use the right Arab word for “peace.”

For it turns out there are three different words in Arabic for “peace.”  Only one of them is for real.  And it’s not the one used at any negotiation, such as at Camp David II, Oslo, or Camp David I.  All fail a linguistic test, a test which any real Arab-Israeli agreement must pass, the Test of Suhl.

The three Arabic words translated as “peace” in English are salaam, hudna, and suhl.

Salaam is the peace of submission.  It’s the drawn out pronunciation of “slm” in “Islam,” (written Arabic has no vowels) the Arabic word for submission and obedience, and in “Moslem” or “Muslim,” the Arabic word for “one who submits.”

There is peace, salaam, among Moslems when they submit to Allah and the teachings of the Koran.  There is peace, salaam, between Moslems and kafirs, infidels, only when the latter submit to the rule of the former.

In other words, salaam,  Moslem peace, is not the absence of violence as it is for us, but the absence of disobedience.  Just like it was for the Communists.  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.”(1)

Or, as the Soviet Military Encyclopedia stated it:

“Peace is impossible without Soviet socialism. A truly lasting peace is impossible and cannot be achieved without a proletarian revolution.”(2)

Compare Lenin’s words to the words of Allah, as 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 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)

Just as there could not be peace with the Soviets until we sang a funeral dirge over the Soviet Union, there cannot be peace with Moslems who believe that salaam requires Islam to be a religion of the sword.

Hudna, the second Arabic word translated in English as “peace,” means cease-fire, a temporarytruce.

When the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, for example, proposes a hudna with Israel, it’s hailed in the Western media as a peace proposal.  It is instead a tactical, temporary break in hostilities, giving Moslems time to re-organize, re-arm, then renew the Jihad against the kafirs when they can be most caught off-guard.

Suhl, the third Arabic term for “peace,” is the most interesting, the one we must insist on Arabs using, the one they always avoid and refuse to use.  Suhl means 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.” (3)

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

Nonetheless, insistence on using the word sulh in any Arab-Israeli agreement, 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, making it a legally binding aqd, even though one of the signatories is not Moslem.

That these words matter is shown by Arab resistance to signing an agreement that makes it a binding contract using sulh.

Anwar Sadat, for example, 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.

If there is one thing Arabs respect, it is “the strong horse” – the man who won’t be fooled or intimidated, the man you don’t want to mess with.  Trump is the Strong Horse, for they know one when they see one.

Every American and Western politician and diplomat for almost 70 years has been on a Snipe Hunt in the Middle East.  Not Trump.  No Snipe Hunts for him.  That’s why he really is the guy who could “bring peace to the Middle East.”

Providence, indeed, does have a sense of humor.

——————

  1. V.I. Lenin, “Speech to Moscow Party Nuclei Secretaries,” November 26, 1920. Selected Works(New York: International Publishers, 1943), vol. 8, p. 297.
  2. Moscow: USSR Ministry of Defense, 1976-1980, vol. 5, 1978, p.316.
  3. Volume IX, (Leiden, Holland: Brill, 1997) p. 845-846.

— Trump Ends the Snipe Hunt for Middle East Peace originally appeared at To The Point News. Dr. Jack Wheeler is widely credited as the architect of the Reagan Doctrine.