By Bruce Kesler

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel says that Israelis shouldn't speak out about the 7/7 London bombings' lessons of the common dangers faced by Israel and the West, because he doesn't want Israel to be seen taking public-relations advantage of the tragedy.

Perhaps he's correct about the PR in today's political world environment. However, the facts are that the London bombings and the sufferings in Israel over the past decade are part and parcel of the same cause and war.

Sadly, many in the West look the other way. For a myriad of reasons, actually rationalizations for the ease or profits of appeasement even more than any anti-Semitism, Israel has been left by Europe and much of American State Department Foggy Bottom-type Arabist logic to stand almost alone in its defense.

Sure, there are circumstances in Israel and between it and its neighbors that are unique to itself, as there are in Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Sudan, Pakistan, Malaysia, Indonesia or any other center of Muslim conflict and terrorism. They need to be considered and dealt with in an informed and locally-sensitive manner.

Still, if only the trees are the focus, then the forest of the broader problems are unduly ignored, and the necessity of considering and dealing with wider, encompassing issues.

There are repressed ethnic and religious divisions throughout the Muslim world, which emerge when the reigns are lightened. Persecutions of minorities, Jews and Christians are millennia old. These are not new problems created by the West or by Israel.

The consciousness of such a group as Palestinians, since Israel's successful self-defense in 1967 removed many from the Jordanian conquest of the Arab portion of the 1948 U.N. partition and placed them under Israeli rule, is relatively recently created, but a fact now nonetheless. Their actual economic conditions, and opportunities for education and advancement, improved.

During the 1960s and '70s, when many left-leaning governments in Europe sought accommodation with the oil powers of the Middle East, and intellectuals and activists in the West celebrated anything anti-Western, their leadership was usurped by outside PLOers with agendas of their own, and Swiss bank accounts of their own to fatten. Now, an even more violent Hamas challenges the PLO's evident corruption and incompetence by at least providing some social welfare benefits for the Palestinians.

Expropriation of Jewish property and escape of millennia old Jewish communities throughout the Arab countries added hundreds of thousands to be assimilated into resource-poor Israel. By contrast, hundreds of thousands of Arabs who left the disputed territories in the concerted 1948 Arab attack upon Israel's creation have been left to languish and fester in camps throughout the oil-rich Arab countries. Their brooding suffering was not caused by Israel or the West, but by Arabic indifference and exploitation, to distract their own oppressed peoples upon outside "thems" instead of their own despots.

These are, obviously, local problems to be dealt with. But, Israel and the West did not cause them. They are primarily the responsibility of the area satrapies. They can well afford to meet their responsibilities, and should be pressured to.

Israel and the West did not cause the disaffection of an Osama bin Laden from the kleptocracy that rules Saudi Arabia, and his refuge among the Islamic puritanical Taliban that took power from the local warlords in Afghanistan. His targeting of America on 9/11, as of other attacks on Americans abroad, preceded the American, British and other allies taking out of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

Iraq is not the cause of these attacks upon the West. The London attack on 7/7 is merely a continuation of a war whose earlier battles were not sufficiently focused upon in the West during the 1980s and '90s. The conditions for hatred and violence within the Middle East were treated in the West in traditional terms as isolable and of secondary concern. Commercial interests, oil supplies, were of higher interest.

In this context, Western support of Israel declined. The link between the West's values and Israel's was seconded to appeasement.

So, where are we now in our understanding?

Simply, anyone who doesn't realize that the U.S. and the West are in the midst of a worldwide attack upon their fundamental values, carried by zealots directly into our homelands, is either a purposeful fool or an anti-Western apologist.

Failed states in Iran, Syria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Malaysia, Indonesia, shift domestic attention from their unfree conditions on to external devils. Out of our freer traditions a misplaced tolerance in the West allows intolerant versions of Islam into our own cities, instead of insisting on assimilation into Western mores, or even honoring peaceful Islamic ones, and doesn't pressure the Saudi billionaires from funding such breeders of hate throughout the Muslim world.

The common goal of the jihadists is their own power over the Mideast's oil riches, and their consequent power over the West. Their domestic program is repression of any modernizing domestic influences. It is a substitution of more lethal despots for the current ones, just as Hamas is superceding the PLO in Gaza.

Britain, like France and Germany, has been far more accepting than the U.S. of Palestinian violence and corruption, and far more critical of Israeli self-defense. It is clear, however, there is no distinction among the terrorists between Jews and the Christian West, between the U.S. and more appeasing European states.

There is an inherent dilemma faced by the West in confronting terrorism: self-defense may lead to terrorists finding more recruits, while lack of defense encourages contempt for weakness and bolder attacks.

The West must either acquiesce in its own destruction, liberty by liberty as we become garrison states, benefit by benefit as more and more resources are drained into insulating our massive vulnerable infrastructure, or the West must resist any diminution of our freedom and comforts.

The only way to do that is by insisting on firm resolve by all public figures, by all media, in focusing on the real challenge and its cause. It is not Israel. It is not the U.S. in Iraq. It is undemocratic Muslim states and the repressed aspirations of their peoples that allow the most sociopathic elements to rise and strike.

The only moral as well as practical course is self-defense, not appeasement. Israel, as Jews have usually been the canaries in the mine for hate and intolerance, has suffered at the hands of Western governors and much of its media to have been castigated for fighting virtually alone. No longer. We must realize that we are all Israelis, with common cultures, aspirations and enemies.

Bruce Kesler, based in San Diego, California,  is a regular contributor to The Augusta Free Press. This article is reprinted with his permission.