History has a tendency to repeat itself. In the days of expansionist communist Russia, the country was comprised of Russians who just wanted to live in peace, yet Russian communist leadership was responsible for the murder of at least 20 million of their own people. The peaceful majority was irrelevant.
Prior to that, 80 million Germans were not all confirmed Nazis, but they were irrelevant when Hitler and his murderous minions caused the death of one-third of the Jewish population in the world and brought about WWII.
The so-called German majority was too uninvolved to care. And we are learning today how the ordinary citizens of Germany, Poland and the Ukraine stood silently by while trains and trucks transported Jews to be murdered.
China's huge population was peaceful, but Chinese communists under Mao Tse-tung managed to kill 30 million people in China.
History's lessons, when analyzed, are simple and blunt. Peace loving Muslims have been made irrelevant by their silence, just as the majority of Germans, Russians and Chinese. It is the extremists like Ahmadinejad, the Wahabists in Saudi-Arabia, who dictate policies, set the agenda, and cause the majority to remain silent and to progressively even lose their naturally endowed rights to human freedom and dignity.
Like Nazism, like cruel communism, Islamo-fascism – the extremists – must be defeated not only for the sake of the silent majority in the Islamic world, but also for the sake of our own survival in World War IV, which we are waging today.
President Obama has inherited massive policy challenges, but one of the most challenging will be the existential struggle between societies of freedom and societies of fear – our way of life against those who advocate the Sharia and limit human development.
Sharia
Under Sharia law, if you are accused of stealing, a hand and foot from opposite sides are amputated. If you are caught having an affair, the woman is stoned to death and the man is given 80 lashes. If you change religions, you can be charged under apostasy laws and given the death sentence by a legal Sharia court.
Through Sharia, Islamists govern the private lives of individuals as well as regulate the social, political and economic aspects of society. Islamism crosses national borders, with the final goal of asserting the Muslim ummah (the Muslim community) globally, with all non-Muslims as second-class citizens. It is a totalitarian ideology, and Islamists do want to make Europe and the U.S. Islamist states.
It is time for policy makers to realize that Sharia is a system of hate and it must not gain any influence in American society. It denigrates women, non-Muslims and the U.S. Constitution. Policy makers must define the limits of religious accommodation in light of the Islamist agenda. Otherwise, democracy and true tolerance will be mere words with no meaning, as Islamism spreads in the West.
The new president will be a leader in a conflict which will either be characterized by appeasement – a cold war – or a massive conflagration, that can only be avoided with powerful leadership articulating our values, which must be forcefully defended against usurpers and challengers to this our way of life.
The menace of Iran
Today, the main leader of the forces facing us is the president of Iran, Ahmadinejad, who wishes to establish his influence across the entire region of the Middle East. Facing him are America, pacifist-oriented Europe, America's alleged Sunni Arab allies, with Israel – Ahmadinejad's target for elimination – as the only democratic state allied to the values of the West, surrounded by a sea of cultural, intellectual and socioeconomic decay which describes the current Muslim Middle East.
Iran, in its challenge to the West, is supported by Syria, Hamas, Hezbollah, endowed with the fervor of religious energy. It is supported in its vision by Al Qaeda, the Sunni branch of Islam, in challenging our values, with the latter being responsible for such horrendous deeds as 9 11.
The wide-circulation Iranian Daily Kayhan has clearly defined the participants in this struggle: "In the power struggle in the Middle East, there are only two sides, Iran and the U.S."
Team America so far has been losing on many fronts. How come? Thomas Friedman, in the New York Times, gave a short answer to this: "Iran is smart and ruthless, America is dumb and weak. And the Sunni Arab world is feckless, unreliable, and divided."
Recent history teaches us that the Iranian/Syrian/Hezbollah alliance rules Lebanon, even though western powers have hypnotized themselves into believing that Lebanon's Prime Minister Fuad Siniora is their friend. Recent polls indicate that the most powerful politician in the Arab world other than Ahmadinejad is Sheik Nasrallah, the Shiite chieftain of the Army of G d Hezbollah. His thugs rule Beirut, control the Lebanese airwaves, and as a result of this hegemony of power, have basically sold out Lebanon to Syria, which means Iran.
Ehud Yaari, Israel's outstanding political commentator, calls the present Middle East Pax Iranica. Historians will tell you that in the past, there was Pax Romana when Rome ruled, there was Pax Britannica, because the British Empire ruled the waves and therefore the world. There was Pax Germanica in 1940, because Germany had hegemony over Europe. Then there was Pax Americana after the end of World War II and at the end of the Cold War. We let it slip from our grasp and Iran seems to call the shots today in the Middle East, with an Islamic Jihad motivated by religious inspired fervor to recreate a Persian empire and Muslim Caliphate.
Iran, in the short period of time since Jimmy Carter capitulated to the Ayatollahs, has progressively influenced events in the Middle East. Today, it strongly influences Iraq's Shiite Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki. It manipulates virtually all the Shiite militias in Iraq, has built Hezbollah into a military force equipped with 50,000 rockets that controls Lebanon and threatens Israel, while strengthening in Gaza the creation of a Hamas-administered proxy, even though of a different Islamic persuasion, the latter being Sunnis.
Yaari concludes by saying that anyone who will want to take out Iran's atomic facilities will create a massive conflagration in the Middle East involving the Lebanese, the Palestinians, the Iraqis and the Emirates. The realization of this possibility creates a strategy of deterrence from action, meaning that neither the western powers nor the United Nations will want to face such an event.
The weakness of the west
Deplorably, the Bush administration – in eight years, with two different secretaries of state – has managed to put America in a position where it is not liked, not feared and not respected. The American writer Aaron David Miller, a negotiator with both republican and democrat administrations, says: "We stumbled for eight years under Bill Clinton over how to make peace in the Middle East, and then we stumbled under George Bush over how to make war, with the result that America is trapped in a region which it cannot fix and cannot abandon."
Without using forceful power leverage, Western diplomacy will fail, because states have no friends, only interests. When you possess this type of leverage, you can create situations by formulating economic, diplomatic or military pressures that the other side finds either too tempting or too frightening to ignore.
The weakest party in the struggles of the Middle East is the Sunni Arab world, according to the New York Times: "The Sunni Arab world is either so drunk on oil it thinks it can buy its way out of any Iranian challenge, or is so divided that it cannot make a fist to protect its own interests, or both."
The Shiite Crescent, as we have seen, has achieved significant political success. On the other hand, the Sunni powers, basically funded by Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, use their soft power to propagate Islam throughout Europe – which Bernard Lewis refers to in his writings as Eurabia – with large parts of Europe having large militant Islamic populations, from England to Scandinavia to Germany, a situation probably to be witnessed also in the U.S. in the not too distant future.
This phenomenon has also had an impact on the perception in Europe of Israel as a Jewish state. Muslim propaganda has succeeded in presenting the establishment of the State of Israel as a sin committed by the Europeans against the world of Islam. Israel became an easy way for Europeans to atone for their cooperation with Nazi Germany in making the Holocaust happen, at the expense of the Arabs who continue to feel entitled to a land known as Israel.
But it is Shiite Iran's global ambition of fighting the infidel and bringing true faith to the world which politically threatens the stability of our system, by its aspirations for nuclear technology, in contravention to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaties and multiple U.N. resolutions. We the western world have been led to negotiate with Iran in a manner not dissimilar to the way Hitler played with Western powers in the 1930s. Ad nauseam negotiations led to the concept of appeasement before it was reversed. It had caused 50 million victims.
The lessons of history
Iran's global ambition also manifests itself with an increased influence in Latin America, particularly Venezuela and Bolivia, and in Africa, be it the Sudan or Somalia, where Islamist bridgeheads for future domination have been established. There is also Afghanistan and Pakistan, where Shiite and Sunni interests tend to converge, like the mutual interests of Maoist and Stalinist communism, in order to eliminate western capitalism, notwithstanding their internal differences.
It was probably Churchill who alerted us in his writings at the end of the 19th century, when he wrote the following in his book The River War, pp. 248-250. This is an extensive quote which is given here in its entirety:
"How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism (Islam) lays on its votaries!
Beside the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy.
The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of life and property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live.
A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.
Individual Muslims may show splendid qualities, but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it.
No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome."
Churchill's admonition to the world when Chamberlain returned from the Munich Conference in 1938 practicing his policy of appeasement, has deep relevance today: "We are existentially threatened by the malice of the wicked, enhanced by the weakness and hesitation of the allegedly virtuous."
History has a tendency to repeat itself.