The post-World War II order was meant to be post war simpliciter — to complete the job not done in the Great War of having made a war to end wars. In place of an effectual the League of Nations, the United Nations (the name the Allies gave themselves as they fought Hitler) were to preside in a united way over the peace.
It shouldn’t have happened. And it need not again if Israel succeeds and we ally ourselves with its aim.
How Stalin, whose alliance with Hitler made World War II possible, could ever be a partner in peace was a question never answered.
Underlying the dream of a world united under an international peacekeeping organization was the idea that Nazism had been fully laid to rest. The politics of the world had been purged of Nazi hatred. The organization could be given power to keep the peace because that was all anyone wanted.
Aside from the fact that Stalinism was as murderous as Hitlerism, despite the fact that Stalin only arrived at exterminationist antisemitism in his last days, Hitlerism itself had not been fully rooted out. As Douglas Murray noted in his latest book, on the shelves of nearly every home he saw in Gaza was a copy of Mein Kampf. Nazi propaganda had targeted the Middle East. Nazi strategy envisioned a gigantic pincer extending down from the Caucasus in the north and swooping up, under Rommel, from the Nile Valley in the south, by which the British and the Jews would together be extinguished from the Middle East.
The most effective organizer of Arab violence against Jews in the Holy Land (and everywhere else in the Middle East) was the Mufti Amin al Husseini. After having masterminded orgies of murder, rape, and pillage, including the Hebron massacre of 1929 and the Farhad in Baghdad in 1941, he partnered with Hitler in, among other things, recruiting Balkan Muslims to be concentration camp guards and in other ways get rid of the Jews in southeastern Europe.
The victorious Allies decided not to bother with al Husseini after the war. Nor did they anticipate that the Muslim world and the Nazi doctrine would ever merge. Like President Bush landing on the aircraft carrier, the Western allies wanted to congratulate themselves on a job completed. And as the Stalinist threat became clearer and clearer, the enemy was now Communism.
And so the seeds Hitler had planted in the Middle East had time to sink deep roots. Their growths were ignored and different reasons were given and excuses made for the enduring murderous hatred against Jews that refused to die in the Middle East. It was Arab nationalism, we said when it was Nasser who mobilized his armies to throw the Jews into the sea. It was Saddam Hussein’s fault. It was this, it was that.
But all the time it was the Nazi idea of the Jew as the chief and core enemy, satanic and cunning that was the one true and continuing underlying theme. And that hatred has proved so robust that it is importable, and cavorting in our American universities, in the streets of London, in the no-go zones surrounding Paris, in the streets of LA. The Uni-cause opposed to Western civilization and its freedoms has made the terrorist-chic kaffiyeh its emblem as it burns police cars, pillages Adidas and Apple stores, and tosses concrete from bridges onto whatever cars are coming by.
And ever since the well-meaning Jimmy Carter opened up Iran for conquest by the Ayatollahs, Teheran’s theocrats have melded Nazism with their take on Islam in one of the world’s longest-lasting tyrannies. And though America’s intervention made this possible, America has taken only a belated interest in rooting it out, especially as the mullahs have always said they would first destroy the Little Satan before they came at the Great Satan. America would have some time to prepare, as long as Israel hadn’t yet been conquered.
Only Israel did not consent to be conquered. When Iran’s proxies yearned for action and started the final assault prematurely, Iran’s slowly matured plans began to come undone. Despite the horrific harm inflicted by the Hamas assault, so powerfully chronicled by Douglas Murray among others, Israel recovered from a shameful unpreparedness and has methodically been bringing Iran’s great scheme of extermination down to the ground. Hamas is decimated, its home, by its own design, as ruined as Berlin in May 1945. The once dauting Hezbollah has proved powerless.
And now, the Iranian atomic weapons program is being taken apart.
Yes, it should have been done by the organized free world long ago. But the West has long lost confidence in itself and its mission and has proved unable to grasp the nettle and to address the core issue — the new Nazism — for what it is and always has been.
So America has left room for Israel to defend itself against the threat everyone has known has threatened its very existence for decades. May they succeed with a minimum of losses, both in Israel and among the Iranians so long oppressed by mullahs.
May the West be stirred out of its suicidal slumber. Its own loss of purpose and mission is what allowed the peaceful world order to crumble. It is not too late to regain the moral discernment and the courage necessary to root out the hatred one more time.
It shouldn’t have happened. And it need not again if Israel succeeds and we ally ourselves with its aim of a Middle East freed of the politics of hatred armed with atomic bombs.
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