MetroWest Daily News, MA
July 21, 2006

Greenberg: Evil threatens survival of western world
By Dan Greenberg/ Local Columnist
Friday, July 21, 2006 – Updated: 01:03 AM EST

Let’s not mince words.

What is going on in Israel, Lebanon, and Gaza is not a "dispute"
or "conflict." It is a battle for survival, another in a string of
battles of survival, in a prolonged war Israel has been fighting
against enemies that wish to annihilate it.

I am tired of hearing people talk about the "political blustering"
of radical Islamic leaders — referring to their fiery speeches and
deeds as threats made to gain some diplomatic leverage. If the past
100 years have taught us anything at all, it is this: political leaders
who advocate the destruction and slaughter of their opponents mean it,
and do it if they have the opportunity.

We learned this with Turkish leaders in the early 20th century who
slaughtered over a million Armenians.

We learned this with Communist dictators who, in the name of the
so-called "class struggle," murdered their own people by the millions
— some forty million killed by Stalin in the Soviet Union, even more
by Mao in China. (Their use of the euphemism "struggle" for murder
is another example of sanitized language.)

We learned this with Hitler, who killed six million "Jewish vermin"
and over six million "inferior Russian Slavs" before being defeated.

We learned this with the Japanese armies in occupied China during the
"rape of Nanking."

We learned this in Ruanda, in Bosnia, in Burundi, in the Congo, in
Iraq, where such terms as "ethnic cleansing" were used to represent
the killing.

We should have learned this on 9/11, where the "infidel" people of
"the great Satan" were slaughtered in the twin towers and the Pentagon.

Jonathan Goldhagen, in his trail blazing book "Hitler’s Willing
Executioners," introduced the apt phrase "eliminationist politics"
to designate the discourse of destruction. This phrase recognizes
the call to annihilate a people, or a religious group, or a political
entity, for what it is — namely, a direct, unambiguous declaration
of intent to utterly destroy the alleged enemy.

All this has special relevance today.

In 1947, the United Nations voted to partition Palestine into two
entities, one predominantly Jewish, the other predominantly Arab. (The
term — indeed, the concept — "Palestinians" was not in use then;
for the Arab population, since Palestine had been a province of Syria
from time immemorial.)

>From the moment the vote was taken, the Islamic nations of the region
vowed to destroy the Jewish enclave. The local population, joined by
all the neighboring states — Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Transjordan (as
it was then called), Lebanon and Syria — and by the distant state
of Iraq, declared a war of annihilation against the fledgling state
of Israel, and vowed to drive the Jews into the sea.

In the intervening decades, only Egypt and Jordan have decided
to end their war and sign a peace treaty with Israel. Even within
those countries, radical Islamic groups (that threaten to overthrow
their governments and replace them with radical Islamic regimes)
have denounced the peace treaties as invalid.

For the others, the war never ended. It has been renewed periodically,
always with the same goal. The current call by Iran’s leader to
"finish the work Hitler had begun" and kill the Jews remaining alive
in Israel, is just a continuation of a by-now familiar routine of
renewed efforts to attain an old goal.

Israel’s attempts to deflect the hostility have been greeted with
derision. Leaving the part of Lebanon Israel had occupied — in an
attempt to end earlier hostilities across that border — did nothing
to change the goals of those living to the north of Israel.

Leaving Gaza, occupied after another earlier war of survival, did
nothing to change the goals of those living to the southwest or east
of Israel. Surrounded today as it has always been by nations that
support fanatics determined to wipe Israel off the map, the country
lives day by day in the shadow of its own destruction.

There is a reason we here have a hard time understanding all this. We
Americans are a fortunate, indeed unique, people. We have left our
eliminationist past behind, when we all but completed the task of
killing off this continent’s natives and decided to allow the remnant
that survived to live in their reservations. It is an ugly past,
one for which we have still not expiated, but from which we have
distanced ourselves.

With that behind us, we no longer have a direct connection to
eliminationist thinking. In so doing, we have come to believe that
other nations and peoples have distanced themselves as well from
their eliminationist pasts. Over and over again we mistake the
rhetoric of intent and action for boastful talk, for "racism," for
"discrimination," for a lack of tolerance that can be overcome by
patience, by negotiation, by civilized intercourse.

Even when faced with the brutal facts of the past century, and by
the terrible consequences of ignoring the clear harbingers of those
facts, we want oh so terribly badly to believe that this time, at
last, the talk and the action is just bluff, just a political ploy,
and that "negotiation," "cease-fires," and gestures of welcome into
the political mainstream, will deflect the intentions of the radicals.

We are deluding ourselves if we think this way.

The slaughter perpetrated by the murdering leaders of the past century
ended only with their death or utter defeat. The slaughter being
prepared by radical Islam for Israel, and for Western societies,
will only be barred by the same preventive — the death or utter
defeat of those who plot and execute their evil designs.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress