Cannon Fodder

It is a fact that most every Muslim stands with the oppressed Palestinian brothers in the Holy Land. Outside of Palestine, well, Palestinians are just another despised minority.

Palestinians living in Iraq have been warned that they will be killed by Shia militias unless they leave the country immediately.

Doesn't sound like that renowned Middle Eastern hospitality, does it?

More than 600 Palestinians are believed to have died at the hands of Shia militias since the war began in 2003, including at least 300 from the Baladiat area of Baghdad. Many were tortured with electric drills before they died.

That's one way to drive your point home. Just imagine the outcry if this was done by the Zionists or the Great Satan.

Sheik Mahmoud El Hassani, a spokesman for the Mehdi Army, said the Palestinians had brought their suffering on themselves. He said Shias believed they were in league with Sunni extremists and al-Qaeda.

"We are sure that all the Palestinians in Iraq are involved in killing the Shia people and they have to pay the price now," he said. "They lived off our blood under Saddam. We were hungry with no food and they were comfortable with full bellies. They should leave now, or they will have to pay."

If the rumor sounds remotely plausible, then it must be true. If it must be true, then let the slaughter ensue (don't bother to check if those accusations are actually true or not).

And sure enough, more Palestinians were abducted today in Baghdad.

Seventeen Palestinian men were seized on Tuesday by armed men wearing police uniforms from a Baghdad house rented by the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR), the agency said.

Odds are that the tortured remains of these poor men will be found soon.

So if the Shia aren't sending large sums of money to kill Palestinians in the Holy Land fighting Israel, they are happily killing Palestinians on their own turf. Either way Palestinains are dying by the droves. As they say, against Israel the Muslim world will fight to the very last Palestinian.

Reasonably one might come to the conclusion that the battle lines are drawn along the Sunni-Shia divide. Condoleeza Rice seems to think so.

“There’s still a tendency to see these things in Sunni-Shia terms,” Ms. Rice said. “But the Middle East is going to have to overcome that.”

That, and a long list of other things, to say the least.

Such thinking has lead some optimistic souls view the Iranian nuclear threat as a possible opportunity for the threatened parties to join ranks against the common enemy. Not hardly says former CIA director James Woolsey.

"I do not believe the current Sunni concern over the Shi'ite nuclear weapons program in Iran will lead to some sort of covert Saudi, Egyptian, American, Israeli modus vivendi to protect ourselves together against the Shi'a," former CIA director James Woolsey told the Herzliya Conference on Monday...

"The Wahhabis, al-Qaida, the Vilayat Faqih in Teheran, although often lethally competitive with one another in the way the Nazis and communists were in the 1930s, are capable of unification," Woolsey asserted. "Those who say that these movements will never work together because of their ideology are precisely as correct as those who in the 1930s said that the communists and Nazis will never work together. They didn't, until they did."

In other words, just as Nazism, Communism, and western Democracy were ideologically unequivocally incompatible with each other, during the 1930's and 1940's strategic alliances were formed despite the mutual hostility. Sunni and Shia may never, as Ms Rice puts it, "overcome" their insurmountable differences and hostility, but they will always unite on common denominator: their bitter hatred of Israel. And just as the Allies and the Nazis never formed an alliance, so too Muslims will not, and cannot, ally themselves with the Zionists. Ever.

The main point here is this: Those who say that Iran would never use a nuclear weapon to hit Israel because they would also kill Palestinians and other Israeli Arabs are either hopelessly naive or sadly underestimate the depraved depths to which Islamic fanatics continually plumb.