Ripe for Panic

In a piece promoting her upcoming book (The Israeli Solution: A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East), Caroline Glick takes on the "demographic argument" in favor of the "two-state solution" to the problem caused by Palestinian terrorism.

In 1997, the head of the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics Hassan Abu Libdeh told The New York Times that he was carrying out a census which would serve as a "civil intifada," that is, as a statistical terror assault.

And he was right. The goal of terrorism is to force a target population to take actions it otherwise would not have taken. The goal of statistical warfare is to manipulate numbers to coerce a target society into taking actions that it would otherwise not take.

The Palestinian census claimed that by 2015, Arabs would be the majority west of the Jordan River. And once Jews were the minority, the Arabs could destroy Israel just by demanding the vote. [format edits]

Glick indicates that not only was the original count inflated, but the fertility rates used to project an Arab majority in Israel are also wrong. She could have gone further: Not only has there been an entire book written debunking the premise of doomsday projections, but the implicit assumption, that how we vote is biologically determined, is also wrong. It is also noteworthy that Libdeh felt safe assuming that Israel would simply grant citizenship and voting rights to a large, hostile population within its borders. In short, Libdeh sensed confusion among Israelis and cashed in on it by coming up with a convenient set of numbers.

Terrorists are wrong and weak. Just as over half a century of foreign policy appeasement was required to set up the atrocities of September 11, 2001, so have centuries of philosophical decline since the Enlightenment made the body politic easy to whip up into a panic about a trend, that, even if it weren't fabricated, needn't have meant doom.

-- CAV