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Thursday, July 14, 2005

Ed Koch And My Fourth-Grade Teacher

It is amazing to me how many people who have theoretically, at least, received a good and well-rounded education understand nothing at all about the rise of Nazi ideology or what Nazi ideology actually was. The same types of people who did not see the truth then are making the same mistake now in their attitudes toward Islamic terrorism.

My fourth-grade teacher stopped in class one day (we were going over a lesson about European history of the 1930's) and told us that a lot of good people had made a terrible mistake because they had failed to read Mein Kampf or failed to believe that Hitler believed what he wrote in Mein Kampf. This failure to believe Hitler's own words allowed the leaders of the day to adopt a policy of appeasement toward Hitler as he seized nations, exercised terror against his political opponents, and committed mass murder against portions of his own civilian population. The arrests and murders began within the first month in which he held effective power in Germany.

Nonetheless, many in the United States refused to believe that his aim was in fact what he had written it was. Many of the educated in the great humanistic universities tended to support Hitler and his movement in the 1930s, not that the battle wasn't fought on the streets as well. Eugenics and the basic ideas of Social Darwinism dominated the day in the educated strata of American society, and those ideas predisposed America's elites to sympathize with Hitler. There were plenty of Americans who argued that Hitler had a legitimate grievance and only wanted just treatment for Germany's people.

Later events demonstrated that Hitler believed what he wrote in Mein Kampf when he was in prison, and that what he wanted was racial domination of the world which necessarily required, according to his ideas, killing all the Jews. He also wanted to kill those who were sick, ill or disagreed with him, and he promptly pursued those goals (with the active complicity of the medical profession in Germany, and the tacit approval of the eugenicists in the United States). Western society remained largely silent and uncaring as he did, with the exception of those who actively applauded Germany's renaissance.

Did you know that Mein Kampf is a best-seller in the ME today? Did you know that Hitler commented on the virtues of terror in it? Some today do see clearly, but many in our society do not.

Ed Koch:
For the Islamic terrorists, each and every one of their demands must be met by the Christian governments or they will suffer acts of terrorism. Every head of state has expressed outrage....

What world leaders should have said is, “An attack upon any one of us is an attack upon all of us and each of us now pledges to send 10,000 troops to Iraq. We will not be intimidated by terrorism.” Instead, they engaged in platitudes.
Shrinkwrapped:
I would suggest that the anti-war, PC-thought, point of view, is a defensive structure which serves to protect a person form the reality of the threat we are facing.

The defensive nature of the structure is revealed by its lack of involvement with the mass of facts that counter their point of view, and their inability to articulate any alternative approach that can be supported by any reading of the situation.
That's exactly what Dr. Sanity has been writing. One thing I really, really liked about Ed Koch's article is that he points out the horror that these terrorists have unleashed in Iraq, how many innocent Muslims they have killed, and rightly says that we can't abandon the civilians of Iraq to the terrorists. It was reading the stories of the attacks in Iraq (which have only increased with each step in the process of independence and political self-determination), that convinced me that this brand of Islamic imperialists have no core values that I would concede as valid. None.

They have evolved into something as frightening as this world view laid out in Chapter 3 of Hitler's Mein Kampf:
The anti-Semitism of the new movement was based on religious ideas instead of racial knowledge....

It is obvious that combating Jewry on such a basis could provide the Jews with small cause for concern. If the worst came to the worst, a splash of baptismal water could always save the business and the Jew at the same time. With such a superficial motivation, a serious scientific treatment of the whole problem was never achieved, and as a result far too many people, to whom this type of anti-Semitism was bound to be incomprehensible, were repelled. The recruiting power of the idea was limited almost exclusively to intellectually limited circles, unless true knowledge were substituted for purely emotional feeling. The intelligentsia remained aloof as a matter of principle. Thus the whole movement came to look more and more like an attempt at a new conversion of the Jews, or perhaps even an expression of a certain competitive envy. And hence the struggle lost the character of an inner and higher consecration; to many, and not necessarily the worst people, it came to seem immoral and reprehensible. Lacking was the conviction that this was a vital question for all humanity, with the fate of all non-Jewish peoples depending on its solution.
Logically, of course, such a doctine leads to the idea of Hitler's "Final Solution". From Chapter 2 of Mein Kampf:
When over long periods of human history I scrutinized the activity of the Jewish people, suddenly there rose up in me the fearful question whether inscrutable Destiny, perhaps Or reasons unknown to us poor mortals, did not with eternal and immutable resolve, desire the final victory of this little nation.
Was it possible that the earth had been promised as a reward to this people which lives only for this earth?
Have we an objective right to struggle for our self-preservation, or is this justified only subjectively within ourselves?
As I delved more deeply into the teachings of Marxism and thus in tranquil clarity submitted the deeds of the Jewish people to contemplation, Fate itself gave me its answer.
The Jewish doctrine of Marxism rejects the aristocratic principle of Nature and replaces the eternal privilege of power and strength by the mass of numbers and their dead weight. Thus it denies the value of personality in man, contests the significance of nationality and race, and thereby withdraws from humanity the premise of its existence and its culture. As a foundation of the universe, this doctrine would bring about the end of any order intellectually conceivable to man. And as, in this greatest of ail recognizable organisms, the result of an application of such a law could only be chaos, on earth it could only be destruction for the inhabitants of this planet.
If, with the help of his Marxist creed, the Jew is victorious over the other peoples of the world, his crown will be the funeral wreath of humanity and this planet will, as it did thousands l of years ago, move through the ether devoid of men.
Just as when Hitler took power in Germany (he was never actually elected as head of state by a majority of the populace, instead he was appointed Chancellor), he immediately moved against his political opponents, so the Islamic terrorists are actively attacking all moderates in their own societies.

You can see this most clearly in Iraq. Dr. Sanity has pictures of an Iraqi march against terror from Blackfive. Read MEMRI. Read Mein Kampf. Deal with reality - it's the 1930's all over again. Today's lesson comes from MEMRI's special dispatch 932, which covers a July 8th, 2005 Al-Jazeera interview with the Director of London's Al-Maqreze Centre for Historical Studies, Hani Sibai:
Host: "Excuse me, Is Sheik Osama bin Laden a religious scholar, who issues fatwas, or is he the head of Al-Qa'ida?"

Al-Siba'i: "First of all, he is one of this [Islamic] nation. Allah... We have no clergy, or a pope, or anything like this. Anyone can carry out his religious duty, even if he is by himself."

Host: "Mr. Hani, issuing fatwas is done by religious scholars."

Al-Siba'i: "He has a Shura council, he has religious scholars... He wanted to debate with other scholars, but they refused. He asked to discuss matters with them, but they refused."

Host: "The question, in short, is whether the religious scholars... Sir, the religious law assembly in Mecca at the end of last month issued a fatwa forbidding the killing of civilians. Should we follow it or Osama bin Laden?"

Al-Siba'i: "These assemblies resemble the assemblies of the Church. These assemblies forbid young people from going to Iraq to fight the Jihad. These assemblies... The Higher Religious Authority [in Saudi Arabia] are the ones who allowed the presence of Crusader forces in the Land of the Two Holy Places (Saudi Arabia). These assemblies..."

Host: "Mr. Hani, make no mistake. The same assembly ruled that Jihad in Iraq is allowed against soldiers. Even Sheik Osama [sic.] Al-Makdisi, Abu Mus'ab Al-Zarqawi's mentor... Okay. Abu Hani, okay... He asked Al-Zarqawi not to kill civilians and to attack only the Americans... I mean, only soldiers..."

Al-Siba'i: "The term 'civilians' does not exist in Islamic religious law. Dr. Karmi is sitting here, and I am sitting here, and I'm familiar with religious law. There is no such term as 'civilians' in the modern Western sense. People are either of Dar Al-Harb or not.
and:
Host: "Excuse me, who do you want to promote? Those who want the banner of 'There is no god but Allah' over the Queen of England and Buckingham Palace? Those who want to establish a caliphate and turn the Queen of England into a captive? Those who say [England] is Dar Al-Harb and property there can be plundered? Are those the kind of people you want?"

Al-Siba'i: "These associations do not represent the Muslim public. They collaborate with the British police for certain interests. They want an 'English Islam,' and not the Islam that was sent to the Prophet Muhammad. If Al-Qa'ida indeed carried out this act, it is a great victory for it. It rubbed the noses of the world's eight most powerful countries in the mud. This victory is a blow to the economy..."
The English economy is doing just fine, of course, but the truth is that this Islamic sect is trying to dominate the religion of Islam, and its worse rage is focused on Muslims who don't agree with it. This started as an internal war in the 1990's (Osama Bin Laden wanted the American soldiers out of Iraq) and has now gone global, to such places as Beslan. From a February, 2005 interview:
Host: "Does the problem lie with Al-Zarqawi or with the religious scholars?"

Al-Siba'i: "The problem lies with the religious scholars. When they are asked to confront these [ Mujahideen ], to talk with them and respond to the evidence they present. [The Mujahideen ] tell the Prophet drove nails into and gouged out the eyes of people from the 'Urayna Tribe. They were merely a group of thieves who stole from sheep herders, and the Prophet drove nails into them and threw them into the Al-Hrara area, and left them there to die. He blinded them and cut off their opposite legs and arms. This is what the Prophet did on a trifling matter – let alone in war. What else could they do when a 1000 lb. bomb lands on a house or a shack belonging to poor people, and the world doesn't shed a tear, but cries only about the slaughtering? All they have is a knife… "
But the reality is that the huge slaughter of the innocents going on Iraq is Muslims slaughtering Muslims. The reality is that Islamic moderates are much more in danger of being slaughtered by these fanatics than Ed Koch. The reality is that the jihadi philosophy of today is a type of violent nihilism that is focused upon destruction rather than building anything.

For some Muslims, the attraction of jihad is its freedom from all constraints. The call to jihad is a call which permits throwing off all bonds of society without reproach. The Arabic-Islamic world is typically a rather hierarchical one, in which a ruler dominates tribes, and tribal loyalty dominates families, and loyalty to the head of the family dominates the members of the family, and the husband dominates the wife, the brother dominates the sister, etc. But in the service of jihad a woman is freed from all of these bonds, and a man is freed from all of these bonds. For the very young, the call to jihad can be seen as the claiming of an individual identity and a blow against the constraints of the entire world and the frustrations of individual existence.

This fire is running wild and must be fought as a fire. You douse the flare-ups and build firebreaks, you wait for conditions to change and then you move when the time is right, and you attempt to defend the concentrations of population. No government and no particular entity controls this fire; it was lit as a controlled burn, escaped its boundaries and now must burn its fuel before it will die down.


Comments:
Wow. First rate post.
 
But a grim reality.
 
Gindy - reading Mein Kampf does make you want to pound nails through your feet to relieve the excruciating boredom - I'll grant that. But as you say, he wasn't shy about what he intended.
 
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