Goose-Stepping Americans?
The world the former Israeli prime minister referred to is the realm of the Western democracies. The Jewish State of Israel is an extension of the West, with all of its unfettered freedom, boundless resourcefulness, and optimism about what the future could hold if peace were achieved. For these reasons and more, fanatical Islamists, now on a crusade to destroy Israel and globalize their repressive interpretation of Allah’s will, are determined to have it all—at any cost.
Without fear of serious contradiction, one can delineate the general strategy for reaching this goal. First are Israel and the Middle East. Phase I is to destroy every vestige of Western presence and influence there.
Phase II is the conquest of Europe where, until recently, Islamists have chalked up an impressive score. Then, of course, comes the United States—the Goliath-like “Great Satan”—enabler of every evil deed perpetrated on the planet.
In the mix, although hardly noticed by liberal, North American and European movers and shakers, is the long-standing, often-voiced Islamic commitment to crush the “Saturday people” first and then deal with the “Sunday people.” If many didn’t believe it then, they had better believe it now.
Israel Under the Gun
An in-your-face example of just how determined the Muslim and Palestinian worlds are to set the stage for a Jewish exodus out of the Middle East is the recent charade at the International Court of Justice in The Hague over Israel’s security fence.
The Israeli government refused to be hauled before the tribunal, convinced that the court had no jurisdiction to initiate hearings on the fence. To their credit, the United States, all of Europe, Russia, Japan, and China refused to participate.
Nevertheless, the Palestine Liberation Organization, along with Israel-hating, Arab-Muslim nations, was allowed to vent in an exhibition that was nothing less than a show of racist venom, as is so often the case in the environs of the United Nations and its institutions.
Missing, of course, was the fundamental issue of WHY the 450-mile security fence is being built—an issue Islamists and their cadres of suicide bombers avoid at all cost. The day before the hearing began in the Netherlands, a bus was bombed in Jerusalem. Eight innocent people died, while more than sixty were wounded.
Barely three weeks earlier, another suicide attack took eleven lives and injured more than seventy. And those tragedies do not begin to tell the story of how many such attacks Israeli authorities thwart on a daily basis.
Europe on the Brink
An awakening of sorts has come to the statehouses of Europe. The cost of allowing an influx of millions of Muslim immigrants is beginning to be tallied. For starters, radical Islamists are fomenting a disturbing anti-Semitic atmosphere that many say has brought Europe back to the terrible days of the 1930s.
According to a 2002 report by the World Jewish Congress, the Muslim population in the European Union ranges from twelve million to twenty million—which means there are more Muslims in Europe than there are Norwegians, Swedes, Danes, Greeks, Czechs, and Hungarians. In Great Britain Muslims now outnumber Roman Catholics and constitute the second largest religious community in the nation. In France the Muslim population numbers some six to eight million.
France reportedly has twelve hundred mosques, funded almost without exception by foreign money and led by imams imported from other countries. All too often they teach and preach the virulent, anti-Jewish, rabidly radical, Wahhabi brand of Islamist fundamentalism.
The Netherlands, with a population of sixteen million, is currently home to one million Muslim immigrants. Dutch legislators now want the government to investigate activities in the mosques, which often incite anti-western sentiment and violence:
There is a strong current in Muslim society in Europe that balks at the idea of any genuine integration into the surrounding society. Quite the contrary, in the European Muslim community a definite and very worrying rise in religious fundamentalism can be observed—one that precludes Muslims from becoming full-fledged members of the societies in which they live. This is not a question of resistance toward adopting a different life-style or adherence to age-old ritual, but rather a conscience and often militant antipathy to the dominant host culture.1
For some European leaders the event in The Hague over Israel’s security fence was a catalyst:
Some of them . . . understood that what they were witnessing was not a trial, but an invasion, an invasion of barbarians from juridical moonscapes such as Cuba, Algeria, and Saudi Arabia who landed in the heart of Europe in order to collapse Western ideals and institutions—in this case the independent judiciary. And those Europeans who get all this are the same ones who are finally beginning to understand that theirs is a choice between regressing to the past’s anti-Semitism or confronting the future’s Islamism.2
America’s ‘Fuhrer’
To depict evil and spread the notion that an individual represents the demonic dregs, the worst the world has to offer, a comparison to Adolf Hitler often serves the purpose. With increasing fervor and frequency, Islamic leaders make this horrific association.
A chilling example is seen in an article published February 16 in the Arabic paper Al-Hayat Al-Jadida:
The world stands today at the edge of a dangerous slope which threatens the destiny of all humanity. . . . President Bush will be juicy material for tens of psychology books, for he has many characteristics of historical figures that left a negative impact on [the] course of global history lead by the Fuhrer of Germany, Adolf Hitler, and his Nazi and racist proclamations. The Cuban President, Fidel Castro who has deep knowledge of President Bush’s history already called him “Fuhrer of the globalization era or the new world order.” . . . And while the German Fuhrer’s adventure ended with tens of millions of dead and wounded, and partial destruction of several countries, this adventure of the new Fuhrer [Bush] will return the world to the Stone Age.3
It is of no little interest that there are frequent references to the Cuban Communist dictator Fidel Castro and America-haters in the Muslim world. America’s tenacious desire to free oppressed people and spread democracy is a galling contradiction to every principle these masters of fear and deprivation understand. The same can be said of the tyrannical leaders of North Korea—a Communist ghetto-state that has made it a national obsession to take from the poor and give to the military to enhance its ability to make war and enrich its stockpile of horrific instruments of destruction. As in Palestinian Authority classrooms, North Korean children are psychologically brutalized by xenophobic lessons in how to hate.
A CBS 60 Minutes segment in February documented the journey of a Dutch reporter who received permission to visit classrooms and interview North Korean children. Her purpose was to assess their response to The Diary of Anne Frank, Holland’s most famous book. It was written by Anne Frank, a Jewish teenager and Holocaust victim who, with her family, spent two years in hiding in Amsterdam, Holland, before being betrayed and taken to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp where she died.
Her diary has been printed in more than sixty-five languages and has brought hope and inspiration to countless millions. Her message reveals the triumph of personal courage and love in the face of overwhelming odds.
The message being transmitted from her work to the children of North Korea, however, is vastly different. President George Bush is the vile imperialist warmonger, a reincarnation of Adolf Hitler; and Americans are his goose-stepping minions on a mission to brutalize and slaughter the innocent masses. To witness the mutilation of all that Anne Frank’s memory represents and to see the hatred etched in the faces of these young people was extremely disturbing.
But beyond that was the question, “Will these millions of boys and girls in the world of remnant Communist societies and crusading Islamic countries ever be reclaimed from the debilitating brainwashing they receive in their irretrievable, formative years?”
Is America the ‘New Germany?’
The answer to this question is demonstrated every day in the conduct of the majority of American citizens, leaders, soldiers, and in the immeasurable amount of humanitarian efforts and resources being spent to bring aid and comfort to a world awash in privation and suffering. The same can be said of many of America’s Western allies and, most certainly, of Israel, which gives terrorists the same medical care in the same hospital wards as their victims.
These very principles are why our enemies refer to us as refurbished Nazis, Big Satan, Little Satan, malignant aggressors. They accept our benevolence and watch our people go halfway around the world to dig their families from the rubble of devastating earthquakes and similar catastrophes. Yet these good deeds make us the enemy and fuel a conflict that will go on for years to come.
In all of this, we must remember two things: (1) For all of America’s faults, we have nothing to apologize for. Not to these people who, in the words of Benjamin Netanyahu, “do not hate the world because of Israel, but because they hate the world.” (2) Despite a strident chorus of denial rising from within the ranks, we have been forged in the furnace of our Judeo-Christian heritage; and as long as the Bible is the driving force behind a significant segment of our population, we will always stand true to the mission of love and mercy that we have been taught. And whether or not our enemies, or even some of our friends, like to admit it, they need us. During that ignominious hearing in The Hague on Israel’s security fence, a group of Jewish people from many countries gathered to stand beside the bombed wreckage of the bus where a suicide bomber had committed a senseless act of mass murder. And standing with them were at least two thousand Dutch Christians. The bus, flown in from Israel, was on display outside the court. Despite the neo-anti-Semitism plaguing that little nation today, the presence of these Christians represented the best of what the Dutch have personified over the years. They assembled beside the Jewish people in the strength and spirit of the Corrie ten Booms and the sturdy band of Dutch heroes who defied the Nazis and now have their names graced in plaques along the Street of Righteous Gentiles at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.
Not long ago, I listened enthralled by the clarity and eloquence of an elderly black minister whom I greatly respect. He told his congregants, “When you come to the place where your life is wracked by tribulation, turmoil, trouble, and confusion, it’s time to look for the God factor.” Let that be a word for us all, as well as our call to our leaders and the nations of the world—it’s time to look for the God factor.
Blessed is the nation whose God is the LORD (Ps. 33:12).
ENDNOTES
- World Jewish Congress Policy Dispatch No. 83, “Radical Islam in Europe: A united continent faces a burgeoning threat to its stability,” September 2002, [http://wjc.org.il/publications/policy_dispatches/pub_dis83.html].
- Amotz Asa-El, “Middle Israel: My trauma is bigger than yours,” Jerusalem Post Internet Edition, February 26, 2004, [www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1077768891249&p=1006953079897].
- Quoted in “Relentless PA Hate Incitement Against the US and the West,” February 27, 2004, [www.pmw.org.il/new/Latest%20bulletin.html].
