Burning Under Our Feet

The burning alive of the Jordanian pilot reminds me of the Kristallnacht. Just as the horrific war that followed in its wake killed 60 million people, today we face a pernicious evil that seeks worldwide domination employing a bloodthirsty ideology.

You know, it was easy 70 years ago to ignore what was happening. There was no 24 hour cable TV news, no videos on the internet and no instantaneous news bulletins flashed across the television screen courtesy of satellites and thousands of embedded journalists and people with iPhones.

Back then, all one had were newspaper photos that are far less dramatic than a video and the newsreel in the movie theatres were days late and were often used by the patrons to go to the bathroom or purchase a snack at the candy counter. Besides, who really cared what was happening to some foreign Jews in Germany anyway?

However, this makes what is happening today far more dangerous. No one can say that they haven’t heard or seen the news. The targets now are not only Jews, but Christians and Moslems. That Jordanian pilot was not a rabbi or a priest, but a Moslem,

The “Great Powers” of the 1930s buried their collective heads in the muck when the German Army marched into the Rhineland in 1936 in direct contravention of the Versailles treaty. They looked the other way when the Anschluss, the rape of Austria by Nazi Germany’s troops walked into Vienna and German agents assassinated the Austrian chancellor. In an incredible act of appeasement, Britain and France surrendered the Sudetenland section of Czechoslovakia
to the Nazi thugs and then, remained silent when these same troops occupied the rest of that hapless nation.

Even after the invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, it took THREE days for the French and the British to declare was on Germany and then they sat on their hands on the Western front, during what has come to be known as the “Sitzkrieg” or the “Phony War.”

There is nothing phony about the chain of events we have been witnessing throughout the Middle East and Africa-the slaughter of thousands of innocent people, the rapes, crucifixions, beheadings and now, the burning of a man in a cage, are all over the media. and yet, the United States and the European Union are incredulously in denial.
The Nazis said, quite openly, over and over again, “Today Europe, tomorrow, the world.” Now we see that today, it’s Syria and Iraq, tomorrow, the Caliphate. Just as Germany grabbed lands through conquest and murdered men, women and children, so today, ISIS is accomplishing the same. If the world does not take heed of what is happening before their eyes, I fear that the coming conflagration will make World War Two look like a bridge tournament.

The silence of the “Great Powers” of today is inimically related to the inactivity of their past generations. of leadership  has created a tradition of weakness in the face of barbaric evil. I need to wonder that if the media tools that we have available to us today would have been around during the 1930s-would the Kristallnacht be on the network 24 hour cable stations? Would the massed rallies of Nazi torch marches been covered live by correspondents in Berlin or Nuremburg? Would the invasion of Manchuria by Japan or the slaughter of spear carrying Ethiopians being gunned down by Italian aircraft have made the evenig news? And, if it all had been so, would the world’s reaction been any different than what we see today?

A man being burned alive in a cage, men being beheaded, children butchered in a school and little girls as young as 9 and 10, being raped and sold as sex slaves-no one anywhere can deny that this is happening before our eyes. Where is the universal outrage taking us except to twiddle our thumbs and mutter, “tsk, tsk.”

I applaud the Jordanian monarch for taking a route that should be magnified and copied a thousand times over. I am no proponent of his rule, but I can definitely report that he is doing what must be done. The president of the United States, just the other day, compares the Crusades to the present level of atrocities-what an horrific analogy! The Crusades were launched, among other reasons, to halt the spread of a vicious Islamist ideology of its day, from spreading like a cancer all over  North Africa and eventually Europe(which did, in fact take place later-than G-d for Charles Martel). Furthermore, unlike the Islamist savages, Christendom has advanced beyond such barbarism unlike Islamist Jihadism-a movement dedicated to destroy civilization and return us to a 7th century mentality, albeit they are armed with 21st century weaponry.

In the magnificent film “Judgement at Nuremburg,” about the trial of Nazi judges for their actions during the period of the Third Reich, the late actor, Burt Lancaster, plays a pivotal role as the accused former minister of justice of Nazi Germany. After listening to the obfuscations od excuses of his fellow defendants that they did not know what was happening to the Jews, he mounts the witness chair and declares, “Did we not see our neighbors dragged out of their homes in the middle of the night? Did we not hear their screams for help? When every train station in Germany was filled with railway cars of crying and pleading people, did we not know this? Were we deaf, dumb, blind?”

Perhaps the German people didn’t know because they did not want to know-their excuses ranged from fear for their own safety, to the question, “Well, what can we do about it?” We, today, have no such panacea. The evidence of the atrocious barbarism being in front of our faces every day cannot be denied, but it can be, and is being ignored. Especially by the nations that can do something about it. But how can they defeat this enemy without even having the courage to name it?

ISIS is spreading its poisonous tentacles in front of our eyes, Boko Haram is slaughtering and raping schoolgirls and burning kids to death in their schools, Christians are being crucified by Islamist devils all over the areas under control of the beasts, journalists are routinely beheaded and their nations’ leaders orally condemn this savagery but go play golf only minutes after their umbrage. Yemen’s pro-western government collapses under the threats of the Islamists and now, a major waterway (the Red Sea) for international commerce is endangered. And the maniacal mad mullahs of Iran, supporting this terror and spreading its hegemonic outreach into the entire Middle East is being placated by the same cowardly and impotent heads of state that allowed Hitler to lay the groundwork for the greatest and most devastating bloodletting in human history.  Just as the Nazis developed the first rockets to carry their explosive warheads filled with a ton of TNT to hit the civilians of London, now the Iranians are building, not these firecrackers by today’s standards, but ICBMs (Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles)  to carry far more lethal payloads-and the ghost of Neville Chamberalin is guiding the negotiations, perhaps handing over today’s version of the Sudetenland as a bribe. I leave to you, the reader, to place that in in context of today.

It appears that the world is not heeding the warning signs ahead of us and the chasm ahead of us won’t be the graveyard of all that we hold dear.