Prof. Paul Eidelberg
Although more people have been killed in the name of Karl Marx than in the name of Allah, those who believe in Allah and the Koran now constitute the greatest threat to mankind. Islamic states possess or are in process of acquiring weapons of mass destruction. Such weapons may or will soon be in the hands of al-Qaida, whose agents will be found in fifty countries.
British historian Paul Johnson writes: “It is very difficult to combat an enemy that has so few inhibitions about killing either opponents or its own people.” Unlike the Jews who regard “individual human life as sacred … the Islamic-Arab concept of ‘the war of the martyrs’ places no value on human life except as a sacrifice in the holy war” (Jerusalem Post, June 12, 2002).
Johnson draws parallels between Islam and Nazism. He notes that the Arabic translation of Hitler’s MEIN KAMPH is a best-seller in the Islamic world. Churchill referred to MEIN KAMPF as “the Koran of faith and war.”
It took 9/11 to wake up America to the menace of Islam, obscured as “international terrorism.” But Washington has yet to adopt a morally and strategically consistent policy toward Arab-Islamic regimes that spawn or harbor terrorists. Most of the suicide bombers that destroyed the World Trade Center were from Saudi Arabia and Egypt, two regimes which have nonetheless retained Washington’s friendship.
If democracy is the standard of what is good, then despotic regimes like Saudi Arabia and Egypt are evil. President Bush (the younger) referred to the 9/11 terrorists as “evildoers.” Saudi Arabia has been financing such evildoers. It has financed arch terrorist Yasser Arafat and supports the families of his suicide bombers. Meanwhile, Egypt has been smuggling arms to Arafat’s Palestinian terrorists via tunnels into Gaza.
We are not shocked by the appeasement of such evildoers by Europe. We do not expect European nations to attack something evil as evil because we suspect they are secretly related to it. May the same may be said of the U.S., seeing that Washington continues to mollycoddle Arafat while advocating a Palestinian state that would drastically truncate Israel and facilitate its extinction?
Like the Nazis, Arafat and his Palestinians would gleefully commit genocide in Israel. Paul Johnson writes: ”If Israel lost control of the air [a consequence of its truncation], and her army were overrun, there can be absolutely no doubt that the entire Jewish-Israel nation would be exterminated. It would be Hitler’s Holocaust all over again” (ibid.). There are officials in Europe that would not regret the demise of the Jewish state. What unites Europe and Islam, besides the obvious?
Islam’s use of sacrificial human bombs is a manifestation of ancient paganism. This paganism, which preceded Islam, lurks in the Arab and Muslim soul. Islam is the veneer of that soul, a veneer whose meaning is the subject of controversy among Western Islamic scholars. These scholars do not see beneath the veneer. They do not see that even if Islam is viewed as a benevolent religion, this religion never succeeded in erasing the antecedent paganism on which it was engrafted since Islam’s ascendancy in the seventh century. Therein is the root of Islamic terrorism.
Much the same may be said of Europe, where Christianity was imposed on pagan tribes. This paganism periodically erupts and shatters the veneer of Christianity. Not even humanism has prevented Europe from being drowned in rivers of blood. Rabbi Avraham Kook (d. 1935) provides a profound explanation.
Reflecting on European depravity in World War I, he writes: “Europe rightly gave up on God, whom she never knew. Individual humanists adapted to the sublime good, but not an entire nation. No nation … could understand how to aspire to the Good, the All, let alone how to stamp with this the foundation of its existence. Therefore, when in our day nationalism grew strong and penetrated the system of philosophy, the latter was forced to place a big question mark over the contents of absolute ethics, which truly came to Europe only on loan from Judaism, and as any foreign implant, could not be absorbed by its spirit.”
Rabbi Kook saw in European nationalism the old paganism—its materialism and denial of ethical monotheism. “Paganism sensed in Israel, in Judaism, its greatest foe, the force which in proportion to its revelation, the [pagan] world [instinctively rejected]. Thus there issues a mighty instinctive hatred toward Israel from all the nations.” Therein is the root cause of anti-Semitism now recurring in Europe (despite the waning of nationalism).
I hesitate to ask: Can this be equally said of America, which was founded by Old Testament Puritans and still bears their influence? The evidence of neo-paganism in America is undeniable: hedonism, sexual perversions, pornography, lascivious music, Satanic cults. This neo-paganism is fostered by the nihilism of academia, where anti-Semitism has made its ugly appearance, magnified by Muslims and the media. Nevertheless, mainstream America very much adheres to biblical values, and no country is more supportive of Israel.
Rabbi Kook writes: “There are in the world pious men, philosophers, holy men of God, but in the world there is not a nation—besides Israel—whose soul cannot be whole other than by the purpose of the sublime idea in the world.” Evangelical Christians understand this better than most Jews, which is why so many have become ardent Zionists! They not only see the re-establishment of the State of Israel as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy, but they fear the resurgence of Islam, which threatens both Israel and America.
One last word. Notice that Western nihilists are supportive of Islam’s war against Israel. Obviously, what unites them with Islam is not Islamic absolutism but the nihilism implicit in Islam’s contempt for life. In Judaism, life in its fullness unites heaven and earth. The time is approaching when America and Israel will have to choose between life and nothingness.