Kampf and Jihad

[ginny]

I'm not an expert, but I think I agree with that. Does that mean we (Americans) could actually have stopped Hitler? I've never heard that thought posed before.

[James Heaps-Nelson]

I'm not an expert, but I think I agree with that. Does that mean we (Americans) could actually have stopped Hitler? I've never heard that thought posed before.

Americans generally thought about Hitler as Europe's problem. If the French and Chamberlain in Britain didn't think he was a problem why would the Americans think so. After all, it was their behinds on the line. But of course you can always count on the French to wave the white flag :-). If we did do anything it would have been a clandestine operation to take him out, but at the time that probably seemed like a lot of risk for very little reward.

My grandmother was an opera singer in Berlin in the early '30's. She left in 1933 when things started seeming to get sinister. I still remember going over to Grandma's house and having to sit for hours through productions of Tosca or Madame Butterfly on public TV in 5th and 6th grade. I think now that I'm older, I should give opera another chance :-).

Jim

Edited January 14, 2009 by James Heaps-Nelson

[ginny]

Makes sense to me. I guess Americans didn't think it was worth getting involved, but I have to believe they didn't understand the fully extent to Hitler's doings. As for the french and Chamberlain - we can't compare Americans to cowardly appeasers, can we?

Opera - yeah, that's real big in Europe. My landlord allowed me to sit and watch TV with him when a good Opera was on. I can't say I really go for the singing, but man, those customs, sets and high drama! Yeah! They sure know how to die in a swell way in an opera.

[James Heaps-Nelson]

Makes sense to me. I guess Americans didn't think it was worth getting involved, but I have to believe they didn't understand the fully extent to Hitler's doings. As for the french and Chamberlain - we can't compare Americans to cowardly appeasers, can we?

Opera - yeah, that's real big in Europe. My landlord allowed me to sit and watch TV with him when a good Opera was on. I can't say I really go for the singing, but man, those customs, sets and high drama! Yeah! They sure know how to die in a swell way in an opera.

No, but after WWI a lot of Americans had to be saying: why should we save Europe's sorry cowards, what good would it do when there'd just be another large scale conflict in 20-25 years. A lot of Americans became cannon fodder and died from poison gas in WWI in something that wasn't our fight. The trick is to know ahead of time if it is or it isn't and that's not always easy to do.

Jim

[James Heaps-Nelson]

I don't know, but it's worth checking into what percentage of the American WW2 fighting force were volunteers. If you want to look for heroes, look in the graveyards at Normandy and their parents on a farm in Iowa or Nebraska somewhere waiting for that awful letter or knock on the door.

Jim

[ginny]

Agreed. I'm an army brat, so I know about those heros. I actually DO celebrate Veterans Day, even if only with a few minutes of reflection of what I owe to so many people.

[James Heaps-Nelson]

Agreed. I'm an army brat, so I know about those heros. I actually DO celebrate Veterans Day, even if only with a few minutes of reflection of what I owe to so many people.

One of the reasons I think a great education is so important even at a young age is so that kids can understand why they're enlisting to go off and fight and perhaps die. The average age of the US WW2 fighting force was about 23. They knew why they were fighting. Many of the army kids are a lot younger now and just as brave, but I hope they know how important their contributions are and that our politicians would learn to treat them as sacred.

Jim

[tjohnson]

I'm not an expert, but I think I agree with that. Does that mean we (Americans) could actually have stopped Hitler? I've never heard that thought posed before.

I am just trying to point out the danger of self-righteousness in general, which is the kind of thinking that lead to the treatment Germany received after WWI. It is not unlike the way we treat criminals - in our attempts to punish them we usually make them even more criminal and more of a danger to society. It may feel good and morally justified but it's not very smart.

[Selene]

Makes sense to me. I guess Americans didn't think it was worth getting involved, but I have to believe they didn't understand the fully extent to Hitler's doings. As for the french and Chamberlain - we can't compare Americans to cowardly appeasers, can we?

Opera - yeah, that's real big in Europe. My landlord allowed me to sit and watch TV with him when a good Opera was on. I can't say I really go for the singing, but man, those customs, sets and high drama! Yeah! They sure know how to die in a swell way in an opera.

Ginny, et al:

My father was a member and very active in the America First movement. Many leftist revisionist historians tried to claim it was pro Nazi. There was nothing pro-Nazi about my father and his friends. They were extremely isolationist though. Fortress America was a theme.

This was a very large, well funded and growing movement centered around the 1939 Neutrality Act passed by Congress. The Doughboy who returned from WWI passed on the oral history about French women and the horrors of trench warfare and European stupidity. Walter Brennon, the actor with the raspy voice, got that voice from a mustard gas attack in the trenches in France.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America_First_Committee

The Committees disbanded after the Japanese sneak attacked Pearl on December 7th 1941.

Adam

[James Heaps-Nelson]

Makes sense to me. I guess Americans didn't think it was worth getting involved, but I have to believe they didn't understand the fully extent to Hitler's doings. As for the french and Chamberlain - we can't compare Americans to cowardly appeasers, can we?

Opera - yeah, that's real big in Europe. My landlord allowed me to sit and watch TV with him when a good Opera was on. I can't say I really go for the singing, but man, those customs, sets and high drama! Yeah! They sure know how to die in a swell way in an opera.

Ginny, et al:

My father was a member and very active in the America First movement. Many leftist revisionist historians tried to claim it was pro Nazi. There was nothing pro-Nazi about my father and his friends. They were extremely isolationist though. Fortress America was a theme.

This was a very large, well funded and growing movement centered around the 1939 Neutrality Act passed by Congress. The Doughboy who returned from WWI passed on the oral history about French women and the horrors of trench warfare and European stupidity. Walter Brennon, the actor with the raspy voice, got that voice from a mustard gas attack in the trenches in France.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America_First_Committee

The Committees disbanded after the Japanese sneak attacked Pearl on December 7th 1941.

Adam

Adam,

Thanks for that post. It does capture the American mood at the time. Both John F. Kennedy and Gerald Ford supported the America First movement.

Jim

[James Heaps-Nelson]

Getting back to MSK's point about Nazism and Islamism. If you go to the link upthread to the Tell the Children the Truth site MSK pointed me to, it indicates that Nasser's Egypt was littered with ex-Nazis in important posts in the Egyptian government. For the Israeli Jews and the Nazi-linked Islamists, World War 2 never ended. The Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah and Hamas are constantly fed impressionable new recruits from fundamentalist Wahhabi and Fundamentalists Shia madrassas and comingle with leftover Nazi ideology which has an almost permanent residue in these extremist groups in Egypt, Syria, West Bank and Gaza.

Jim

[BaalChatzaf]

Getting back to MSK's point about Nazism and Islamism. If you go to the link upthread to the Tell the Children the Truth site MSK pointed me to, it indicates that Nasser's Egypt was littered with ex-Nazis in important posts in the Egyptian government. For the Israeli Jews and the Nazi-linked Islamists, World War 2 never ended. The Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah and Hamas are constantly fed impressionable new recruits from fundamentalist Wahhabi and Fundamentalists Shia madrassas and comingle with leftover Nazi ideology which has an almost permanent residue in these extremist groups in Egypt, Syria, West Bank and Gaza.

Jim

One of the Best Sellers among the Jihadi folk is the Arabic translation of -The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion-. Bad memes seem to be immortal.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Selene]

And I belief the Turkish translation of Mein Kampf was their number one or two best seller last year after the Muslim electoral victory.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

One of the frustrations I have had in discussing Islamist terrorism ever since I discovered the Nazi connection is that many people point to a Nazi-Islamist atrocity, then claim that the Qur'an is to blame for the evil. For example, a while back it used to be fashionable on anti-Islamic sites to unroll lists of violent passages from the Qur'an, wed this to some Nazi-Islamist atrocity or other and claim that the entire religion is to blame.

If you pointed to the gazillions of Muslims who did not participate or condone the atrocities, you were told that they were actually hiding the terrorists or consciously complicit with terrorism by their silence, and all this because they were corrupted by the passages cited.

And the Islam-bashers hardly ever mentioned the Nazism. They still don't.

Not that the Qur'an doesn't come with its own can of worms. It does. I believe it is a backward religion and one of the main elements to blame for the lack of technological progress in the Islamic world and some other things like that. I do admit that the penal code favoring dismemberment and other torture is a lamentable atrocity.

But the vicious anti-Semitism, the organized terrorism, the manipulation of brain-washed poor people into convincing them of the glories of suicide bombing, the constant ham-handed duplicity in international relations, etc, all stinks of Nazism much more than Islam. Let's say that Nazism is the cake and fundamentalist Islam is the icing for these evils.

If you constantly misidentify a problem while claiming you want to fix it, you perpetuate the problem.

I am grateful this is finally being discussed.

Michael

[Barbara Branden]

Barbara,

From what I have read, all Muslims accept the legitimacy of jihad, which means struggle. Not all accept the legitimacy of violent jihad against non-Muslims, or the holy war version. Nor do all accept it as an official pillar of Islam. I have read that the Sufis, and even many other Muslims, consider jihad to be mainly an inner struggle with faith.

Michael

Michael, I don't deny that many Muslims do not believe their religion requires violence and terrorism; I've talked with some who don't, and read the writings of others. But doesn't that make it even worse that those who reject violence are silent in the face of it? While Muslims in other countries were celebrating the carnage of 9/11, why did not American Muslims take to our streets to protest?

Barbara

[Selene]

Barbara, Michael, et. al.

I think that no one wants to accept the dirty little secret which is that the Muslim religion is a religion of spreading the word with the sword.

I have.

Adam

[BaalChatzaf]

Barbara, Michael, et. al.

I think that no one wants to accept the dirty little secret which is that the Muslim religion is a religion of spreading the word with the sword.

I have.

Adam

Another little secret. Islam is NOT the religion of peace. It is the religion of submission.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

If you constantly misidentify a problem while claiming you want to fix it, you perpetuate the problem.

All I can say is look at history in terms of terrorism, then look at recent history.

Who have been terrorists throughout their entire history, Nazis or Muslims?

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Michael, I don't deny that many Muslims do not believe their religion requires violence and terrorism; I've talked with some who don't, and read the writings of others. But doesn't that make it even worse that those who reject violence are silent in the face of it? While Muslims in other countries were celebrating the carnage of 9/11, why did not American Muslims take to our streets to protest?

Barbara,

Worse by what standard? One alien to their thinking?

A Muslim believes he can fix another Muslim a lot easier than he can fix a non-believer. And he believes non-believers hate him.

Until that thinking changes, it is difficult for me to condemn the silence. I condemn the violence, I condemn the celebration of that violence, but not sins of omission in the face of intense hostility on all sides, including his own side (from the fanatics).

I want to help change the thinking of these people, not simply say they are evil, stop there, and hope for the best. There's a billion or more of them and they won't go away.

Michael

[ginny]

Michael, no one is saying no-violent Muslims are evil. But those that live peacefully have the OBLIGATIOJN to speak out about the violence perpetrated by other Muslims. Sorry, I don't think you can have it both ways, namely to say 1) nI'm a Muslim and deserve respect and 2) I have a duty to respect Muslim who kill. Time to take a stand. Pick a side. And yes, try and be brave and be vocal and speak up.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Ginny,

What happens if they don't fulfill the obligation you charge them with (and commit a sin of omission by staying silent)?

Any suggestions?

Michael

[ginny]

I don't know what happens, but I think those that remain silent bear a brunt of the guilt.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Ginny,

Guilt for what? The terrorism of the fanatics?

And if they don't feel that guilt? What do you do with a billion people?

Doesn't it make sense to try to convince them to adopt a different standard than the one they are using (i.e., adopt individual rights for government instead of the word of Allah as interpreted by Holy Men), then let them do their own thinking?

If that happens, I honestly believe the rest will follow, including condemnation and ostracism of the violent Islamist fanatics, just as sure as the law of causality exists.

I also believe many Muslims would be outraged (as many already are) if they understood just how deeply Nazism has infiltrated the morality of the fanatics who use the name of their religion.

Michael

[ginny]

Teach them a different standard? Okay, I'll buy that. The battle between West and Muslims has been going on for over a millenmium. The antagonism (at least on their end) is deeply rooted. If they want to learn more about western way, that's great. But I still say before that happens, those moderates that claim they are not part of the killing machine need to make it abundantly clear where they stand. I have a feeling the reason so many moderate don't is that there is some kind of ambivalence about the west.

As for guilt - sorry, I stand by what I said - seeing evil and not speaking out is the same as tentatively accepting the evil. You accept the evil, you accept the guilt.

Anyway, stay warm. Chicago's being a real bitch today.

[Selene]

Ginny:

I think the reason they are so silent is FEAR of reprisals in business, in the tight social circles and in too many cases - real FEAR of physical reprisals against you or your family.

Adam