Charles Krauthammer is saying outloud what many of us in the Blogos have been saying for months - It's beginning to feel like 1938 all over again. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is the new personification of Evil or Hilter in the world.

RBT

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Never Again?

By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, May 5, 2006; Page A19

When something happens for the first time in 1,871 years, it is worth noting. In A.D. 70, and again in 135, the Roman Empire brutally put down Jewish revolts in Judea, destroying Jerusalem, killing hundreds of thousands of Jews and sending hundreds of thousands more into slavery and exile. For nearly two millennia, the Jews wandered the world. And now, in 2006, for the first time since then, there are once again more Jews living in Israel -- the successor state to Judea -- than in any other place on Earth.

[...]

For 2,000 years, Jews found protection in dispersion -- protection not for individual communities, which were routinely persecuted and massacred, but protection for the Jewish people as a whole. Decimated here, they could survive there. They could be persecuted in Spain and find refuge in Constantinople. They could be massacred in the Rhineland during the Crusades or in the Ukraine during the Khmelnytsky Insurrection of 1648-49 and yet survive in the rest of Europe.

Hitler put an end to that illusion. He demonstrated that modern anti-Semitism married to modern technology -- railroads, disciplined bureaucracies, gas chambers that kill with industrial efficiency -- could take a scattered people and "concentrate" them for annihilation.

[...]

The establishment of Israel was a Jewish declaration to a world that had allowed the Holocaust to happen -- after Hitler had made his intentions perfectly clear -- that the Jews would henceforth resort to self-protection and self-reliance. And so they have, building a Jewish army, the first in 2,000 years, that prevailed in three great wars of survival (1948-49, 1967 and 1973).

But in a cruel historical irony, doing so required concentration -- putting all the eggs back in one basket, a tiny territory hard by the Mediterranean, eight miles wide at its waist. A tempting target for those who would finish Hitler's work.

His successors now reside in Tehran. The world has paid ample attention to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's declaration that Israel must be destroyed. Less attention has been paid to Iranian leaders' pronouncements on exactly how Israel would be "eliminated by one storm," as Ahmadinejad has promised.

[...]

Last week Bernard Lewis, America's dean of Islamic studies, who just turned 90 and remembers the 20th century well, confessed that for the first time he feels it is 1938 again. He did not need to add that in 1938, in the face of the gathering storm -- a fanatical, aggressive, openly declared enemy of the West, and most determinedly of the Jews -- the world did nothing.

When Iran's mullahs acquire their coveted nukes in the next few years, the number of Jews in Israel will just be reaching 6 million. Never again?

READ IT ALL!

The Daily News, Jacksonvill, NC
May 02,2006
BILL TAMMEUS View stories by reporter

WASHINGTON — Asra Q. Nomani still feels heartbroken — even guilty — about the death of her former Wall Street Journal colleague, reporter Daniel Pearl, whom terrorists murdered in Pakistan in 2002. Pearl and his wife, Mariane, had been staying with her in her apartment in Karachi when he disappeared Jan. 23, 2002, after leaving for an interview with a spiritual leader. Asra and Mariane searched for him for weeks. But he died at the hands of fanatics who cared more for their twisted version of Islam than they did for Danny’s life.

Asra, a Muslim, was furious with Islam because of Pearl’s murder. As she reports in her book, “Standing Alone,” “In my heart, I felt fear and loathing for my religion.”

She left Pakistan, where she was a journalist, too, and returned to her parents’ home in Morgantown, W.Va.

“I went into a fetal position in my parents’ house, saying, ‘I hate Islam,”’ she told me.

Who could blame her for such angst? Islamic extremists, after all, had traumatized her life, murdering a close friend. They had pulled off 9/11. They had tortured Israel with suicide bombings. And they had taken her religion and turned it into a deadly political and ideological weapon.

But she’s discovered that her anger was misplaced.

“I’m not angry at Islam now,” she says. “But I am very angry and disappointed by Muslims.”

She says they aren’t standing up strongly and loudly enough to this polluted version of Islam. Her parents, she says, helped to change her attitude BIabout Islam by showing her “a personification of an expression of Islam that didn’t have to be violent.”

So she wrote her book (just out in paperback) about her struggles inside Islam. In it she argues that Muslims need to challenge Islam. Their complaints, she says, must be raised whenever Muslims still holds to a 7th-century mentality. But she has paid a price for confronting Muslims publicly.

“The ugly e-mails I get from Muslims who think they’re being pious makes me feel sad about the Muslim world,” she says. Putting up with all of this “gets really dark and morose and difficult.”

She spoke one recent evening to a seminar I attended here on religion in America. And I left wondering how Asra Nomani will be perceived in, say, 10 or 50 years. Will she be seen as a female Muslim Martin Luther?

Probably not. For one thing, it’s difficult in any religion today to make the kind of difference Luther did, much less a religion that has more than 1 billion adherents around the world. Beyond that, many Muslims see Nomani as morally compromised because she bore a child out of wedlock, “ignoring,” she acknowledges, “the rulings of sharia (Islamic law).”

And yet Nomani insists that Muslims in America — who number anywhere from 3 million to more than 10 million, depending on who’s counting — are at a crucial stage.

“We’re at this crossroads in America right now,” she says, “because there are these Muslims who challenge what the people who are in power are saying.” Many American Muslims, she says, have quit attending mosques (some estimates put the “un-mosqued” at more than 70 percent) because they are disaffected with what she calls an “Old World” faith that conservative immigrant imams preach.

She has insisted on equality for women in mosques and has said that given the current conservative atmosphere in many Muslim schools, she will not send her son to one: “I’m not alone in this. There are just all these people who’ve become disconnected.”

She notes that in the broad spectrum of Islam there are several different schools of law, or jurisprudence, each with slightly different views of how the religion should be lived based on different interpretations of the Quran and other sacred writing. All those schools have their roots in the 8th or 9th century, she says.

“There has to be a new school of law for the 21st century,” Nomani says. And she says this kind of transformation is almost inevitable: “All you have to do is read about what’s happened in other religions to see where it’s going.”

That’s the sort of talk that makes enemies for Nomani. She knows that. But she says she can’t do anything but what she’s doing. Even if it continues to mark her as a rebel, she says, her direction has been set.

KNIGHT RIDDER

Bill Tammeus is a columnist for The Kansas City Star. Readers may write to him at: The Kansas City Star, 1729 Grand Blvd., Kansas City, Mo. 64108-1413, or e-mail him at tammeus@kcstar.com.

Link to Source

Sorry for the slow blogging. Still shuttling back and forth from So Cal to WA. House in So Cal has not sold yet! Contact me privately if you know of anyone wanting to relocate in the Inland Empire Region of So Cal.

Anyway there is an absolutely bang up, barnstorming discussion going on re all facets of the GWOT over at Winds of Change. Joe Katzman founder of WOC has elevated this discussion to the "Best of" status at WOC.

t's a long read but definitely worth the investment of time. And yes RBT has contributed in some small way. This was my last post in the comment thread.

Ignore my bloviating but do scroll the entire comment thread.

WOC Link

RBT


This is truly a war of Good vs. Evil in a war of information.

#104 Blair

To All

Re: Info on Iran

Don't want to beat a dead horse but this is another piece of information that the LL and the MSM have failed to report to the American people.

For all things Iranian go to the best source in all the Blogosphere, Dr. Zin's site:

Regime Change Iran

The readers will see there are large demonstrations occuring daily by the Iranian people who are chafing at the bit of the ruling Islamofascist male hegmonic theocratic regime.

Some telephone poles by US based Iranian Sat TV svs indicate a majority of callers from inside Iran would favor the bombing of Iran if it would collapse the regime. But unfortunately this news goes under the radar of most Americans.

Hence again my call for the Blogos to spread the word of the displeasure/discontent of the Iranian people especially the Joyless Generation.

The ruling Arabian Islamofascist theocrats are an ever shrinking minority. The majority of Iranians consider themselves Persian, speak Farsi, and look down on the ruling fascist Arabic minority.

The only reason the Mullahs remain in power is they pay and arm Pakastani thugs and those who feel it's their destiny to be members of the religious police. Again think 1938 and the brownshirts of the Third Reich.

The Mullahs are actively blocking/filtering/imprisoning bloggers. They know the free flow of alternative sources of news and information both into and from within Iran will ultimately lead to the collapse of their house of cards.

As mentioned above the fanatical regime is economically running the country into the ground. The question is whether there will be a regime change before these cultlike religious nuts go nuclear.

Hence the metaphorical charge to Instapundit's Army of Davids to tear down those virtual walls. For the first time in history you have the the collective power with your keyboards to bring down this tyrannical regime and free its people from bondage.

There are no excuses for the Big Lie and Final Solutions to hold sway in this age of the interconnected Blogosphere.

You don't have to go in harm's way like our brave men and women in uniform do everyday to protect and perserve our most cherished freedom - THE FREE WILL OF MEN AND WOMEN!.

You can do this from the safety of your armchair. The collective power you wield in your fingertips is perhaps greater than the sum of all our military forces.

You have the power to tear down the Mullahs virtual walls by launching a massive information counter attack. There is no way they can plug all the holes and the truth will leak through.

The truth is what will lead to their fall from power.

There is a recent historical parallel to tearing down the physical walls of another totalitarian regime with a failed ideology:

Ronald Reagan at the Brandenburg Gate of the Berlin Wall:

[...]

The reference was to Ronald Reagan's speech at the Brandenburg Gate in 1987:

Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" Shortly thereafter, down it came, and with it the Soviet Union.

Excerpt from the WSJ

We can debate this forever but now is the time for action. No longer must you remain a passive bystander in the GWOT.

You can be an active warrior to decisively win this war once and for all by crushing this enemy and wiping its ideology of hate and Evil from the face of the earth.

There is no moral equivalency of Islamofascism.

This is truly a war of Good vs. Evil in a war of information.

See Captain's Quarters re what RBT has been saying about employing the power of the Net and the Blogos.

Join The 101st Fighting Keyboardists!

See RBT's previous post re:

An Army of Davids to Force Leverage Scarce Police Resources

RBT

RBT has been offline for a few days but saw this and had to link to this story.

RBT has been on this kick of using the Net and the Blogos to force leverage scarce police resources for a long time.

See this previous comment over at Roger L. Simon's.

See today's AP story re a classic example of the use of the Army of Davids effect (Glenn Reynold's new book by that title - www.instapundit.com)

Think for a moment of harnessing just a small percentage of the online gaming community to tap their collective creativity/genuis for a public good. And it's FREE!

Undercover Civilians