Another Perfect Storm

Much has been said (and unsaid) about the Jerusalem Post opinion piece, Essay: This Holocaust Will Be Different, by Benny Morris.

The second holocaust will not be like the first. The Nazis, of course, industrialized mass murder. But still, the perpetrators had one-on-one contact with the victims. They may have dehumanized them over months and years of appalling debasement and in their minds, before the actual killing. But, still, they were in eye and ear contact, sometimes in tactile contact, with their victims.

The Germans, along with their non-German helpers, had to round up the men, women and children from their houses and drag and beat them through the streets and mow them down in nearby woods or push and pack them into cattle cars and transport them to the camps, where “Work makes free,” separate the able-bodied from the completely useless and lure them into “shower” halls and pour in the gas and then take out, or oversee the extraction of, the bodies and prepare the “showers” for the next batch.

The second holocaust will be quite different. One bright morning, in five or 10 years, perhaps during a regional crisis, perhaps out of the blue, a day or a year or five years after Iran’s acquisition of the Bomb, the mullahs in Qom will convene in secret session, under a portrait of the steely-eyed Ayatollah Khomeini, and give President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, by then in his second or third term, the go-ahead.

The orders will go out and the Shihab III and IV missiles will take off for Tel Aviv, Beersheba, Haifa and Jerusalem, and probably some military sites, including Israel’s half dozen air and (reported) nuclear missile bases. Some of the Shihabs will be nuclear-tipped, perhaps even with multiple warheads. Others will be dupes, packed merely with biological or chemical agents, or old newspapers, to draw off or confuse Israel’s anti-missile batteries and Home Front Command units.

Does anyone really believe that scenario to be so implausible? This very scenario and variations thereof, have been a part of Arab world reality for decades. The slaughter and destruction of Jews is preached from religious pulpits, broadcast in the media and is an integral part of Arab world educational curricula.

To paraphrase the now silent Saudi blogger, the Religious Policeman, imagine a school that gave each student a glass of alcohol every day. Each day, beginning at tender nursery school age, the child was encouraged to drink the beverage that would come to poison his mind. Suppose that beverage was from the well aged bottle of anti Semitism.

Suppose also that once that child downed that alcoholic beverage, the teacher refilled that glass with more alcohol. This time, the flavor is religious bigotry directed at non Jews.

Suppose once that glass of alcohol was consumed by young dutiful children, the glass was immediately refilled with the beverage from the bottle of anti western and anti democratic values.

After decades, these children, now adults, go home every day, turn on the television and read the newspapers- and they are fed more alcohol. They get more when their kids come home from school, and share the same familiar poisoned ‘fire water.’ They poison they are fed gets the God’s seal of approval when fed to them from the pulpit- or so they desperately need to believe.

Of course, to keep a drunk or a junkie hooked, it takes an ever increasing amount of poison to induce the same stupor that blinds the drunk or the junkie to his own surroundings and dysfunction. The supply of poison never ends.

After years of such ‘education,’ it would be reasonable to expect that there would be a lot of alcoholics in the Arab world, poisoned by the hate and ideologies of dysfunctional and corrupt leaders. Like alcoholics and substance abusers, they will tell you they ‘have it under control‘ and that they ‘can quit anytime they want.‘

‘Rid us of Israel,‘ they say and there will be no more need to drink.

‘It is the Jews- rid us of them and we will show you we are just like you,‘ they assure us.

‘Democracy conflicts with out values and culture,‘ they lecture us, as we try to empower them.

‘We are a proud people, too proud to take your help. We would rather wallow in the filth.’

‘If you accord our faith special status, we will have no reason to hate you or hurt you.’

These are the illogical and alcoholic induced arguments that emanate from much of the Arab world, every day. Like addicts everywhere, much of that Arab world are unaware of their own stumbling and off balance dysfunction. Like addicts everywhere, the whole world is to blame for their failures, never themselves. It is families suffering and imploding under the weight of the dysfunction and that ‘do not understand‘ them. It is their employer that is being unfair in demanding sobriety at work. ‘I have it under control,‘ is the mantra. Generations have been lost and families and even communities lie in ruin because of ‘I have it under control.‘

The denial of reality is important to every substance abuser. In the Arab world, the unconscious trigger that unleashes reflexive hate, is the word, ‘Jew.‘ That is the educational and cultural legacy of the poison they have been fed for decades by the pathological society created by self serving tyrants.

In the case of much of the Arab world, denying the Holocaust is central to their identity, because they believe that if they can deny the reality of a broken people rising from the ashes of Europe who went on to build a country that was to become a ‘Lamp unto the nations,‘ somehow, their own dysfunction would be minimized. The Jews did in 50 years what the Arab world could not do in 2,000 years. They built a modern, functioning and democratic society. Despite obscene wealth, the Arab world remains a spectacular monument to failure.

The Arab world must deny their own reality so that they can in turn, deny the the Jews their reality. That is critical to Arab Holocaust deniers because if there was no Holocaust, there was no humiliating military failure in 1948. There were no ragtag Jews, they say,and there were no remnants of a broken people that defeated the mighty ummah. The Holocaust was a conspiracy directed against the Arabs, so as to deprive of their dignity and honor. Like alcoholics and substance abusers everywhere, the need for the drug of hate escalates and is mirrored by the escalation of self pity. In the end, to the abuser, the ‘cruel world’ is at fault for his suffering.

The perfect storm is emerging. Survivors and witnesses to the Holocaust are dying off. Soon they will all be gone and then the Holocaust deniers will be free and unencumbered. Those who deny the Holocaust will be free to implement another plan to eradicate Jews from the face of the earth. In their drunken dysfunction they say. ‘It is the Jews we want. We really didn’t mean what we said about western democracies and other religions. It really is just the Jews that we want.’

‘Let us exterminate them and we’ll leave you alone.’ Is it any wonder Mein Kampf is a perennial bestseller in the Arab world?

Notwithstanding all the terror directed at us and at other free nations in the past few years and despite their own words uttered in drunken dysfunction, that is what they demand we believe.

Recorded history has taught us that societies and cultures that are predicated on the glorification of death, violence, hate and war will always emerge as failed societies. Societies that are predicated on values, life and liberty are societies that endure and prosper.

The Jews too, will endure and prosper, in every sense of the word. Indeed, they are the only people who have survived from the time of antiquity. To be referred to as a Jew is not derogatory in the least. Why should it be? The Jews, as a group and despite their minuscule numbers and millennia of persecution, have contributed more to the benefit of mankind than any other group. That many have hated them only highlights the real nature and character of those who hate them.

In what is now the Arab world, Jews lived in communities that predated Islam. That history is gone, a memory eradicated from the consciousness of the Arab world. The Jewish support for Arab nationalist ambitions was repaid with murder and slaughter. Still, with the erasure of 2,000 years of Jewish history and presence in their nations, the Arab world is no better off. Maybe the Jews weren’t the problem, after all.

It is to our credit as a nation that we can stand up and be counted among those who will defend Jews when others, drunk with blind hate, would persecute and butcher them and erase them off the earth. It is to our credit as a nation that we can stand up and be counted among those who will defend Jews even as other nations pretend not hear or ignore the hate.

There were those in prewar Europe that concerned themselves with the western response to Hitler as opposed to worrying about the threats and promises made by the Nazi evil. They believed the threat was against the Jews, and no more.We waited too long and as a result, 44 million non Jewish souls perished.

History does repeat itself. Today, there are those worried about our response to Iran’s threats, as opposed to the Iranian threats and evil. ‘It’s about Jews,‘ or ‘It’s about Israel,‘ are the unspoken and underlying reasons for lack of resolve against Iran.

We cannot reason or accommodate with those who hate any more than we can reason or make accommodations with substance abusers. We cannot put ourselves at risk by allowing drunks to share the road with us. We cannot endanger our families and our community by enabling those who say, ‘We have it under control,‘ even as we watch their descent into self destructive madness.