If we take any lesson from the deadly struggles of the 20th century, it is to take our enemy’s ideologies seriously.
Hitler’s opponents read their own motivations into him. But Hitler had been perfectly clear years before he seized power. In Mein Kampf, he laid out his core belief that he has a divine mission:
I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.
This key idea stayed true throughout his life. Biographer John Toland wrote:
He carried within him [the] teaching that the Jew was the killer of god. The extermination, therefore, could be done without a twinge of conscience since he was merely acting as the avenging hand of god.
And the idea remained pre-eminent to the very end. In his 1945 last will and testament, Hitler wrote:
Above all I charge the leaders of the nation and those under them to scrupulous observance of the laws of race and to merciless opposition to the universal poisoner of all peoples, international Jewry.
Associating his hatred with God showed that this was ultimate. He invoked the centuries of European culture that placed God as superordinate to whom all else is subsidiary. Warring against Jews, he was saying, came before all else. That is why, even when his armies were starved of transport and weapons, he gave top priority to the use of the railroads and transport to annihilate the Jews still left under his control rather than to aid his hard-pressed military.
Despite the influence of fabulist supporters of today’s Nazi heirs, reality has reasserted itself.
In dealing with the mullahcracy of Iran, the role of ideology is the same and we ignore it at our peril. That ideology is deeply akin to the Nazis’: they make the Jews their first enemy; “Death to Israel” always precedes “Death to America” in regime demonstrations throughout its 47-year rule. Because they identify America as spiritually akin to Israel, its death is called upon as well. Teheran, like Hitler, sees the Jews as weak but cleverly capable of subverting larger and stronger nations to help them.
The mullahs were not in power in Iran in Hitler’s heyday. The first to hitch Islam to the Nazi cause were Sunnis far to the West in the Holy Land. The man the British appointed the Muslim leader of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, swiftly turned his mosques into organizing hubs for violence against the Jews. A crescendo of violence led to the great wave of terror in 1929. Here is Yardena Schwartz, author of a recent book about the apex of that terror, the violent pogrom that destroyed the centuries-old Jewish community of Hebron:
Families were slaughtered. Women and teenage girls were raped by their neighbors in front of their family members. Infants were murdered in their mother’s arms. Children watched as their parents were butchered by their neighbors, rabbis, yeshiva students were castrated and Arabic-speaking Jews, you know, Sephardi, Mizrahi Jews, who composed about half of the Jewish population in Hebron at the time, and were very friendly with their Arab neighbors. You know, they went to each other’s weddings and holidays, went to each other’s shops, and these people were also slaughtered.
This was twenty years before a Jewish state existed. The Jews of Hebron were there because they had homes there, legally bought under the old Turkish rule mostly. There was no “nakba,” no wars, not yet even a Jewish self-defense militia. In the city where Abraham lived, where King David first ruled, where the Patriarchs and Matriarchs of Israel are buried, organized terror was being unleashed to rid the Holy Land of Jews entirely.
This was project entirely aligned with Hitler, who believed the Jews were a curse to all nations. Though his main concern at first was Germany, as he gained power and saw the usefulness of another Jew-hating political movement, he slowly made an alliance, despite his reservations about Arab racial inferiority.
But ultimately, the superordinate position of Jew-hatred made a full alliance inevitable. After al -Husseini at last lost the good will of his British sponsors, he fled and eventually wound up in Iraq after World War II had broken out. There, he helped organize a coup that briefly set up an anti-British regime until Churchill was able to organize a shoe-string operation that somehow worked— whereupon al-Husseini recruited Balkan Muslims to hep round up Jews for Hitler’s camps.
When the mullahs took over Iran 47 years ago, they immediately sought leadership of what they wished would be a jihad that would forever end Jewish independence and restore the Muslim empire in the Middle East — and, in their Twelver beliefs, over the entire world. They picked up the strain of Nazism that had been so congenial to the effort to end Jewish independence by force. Teheran has hosted a series of conferences denying the Holocaust that attracted the predecessor to the Carlson-Owens krazy kaukus, David Duke, to make an arms-across-the-ocean alliance of international hatred.
But the main accomplishment of Iran was to set up a series of cut-outs and clients to do the spade work, to do the black ops, so Iran could make a great show of moral and religious authority in the eyes of a West that thought that all nice and powerful people had stopped believing in religion years ago and were not yet ready to embrace Jew-hatred as a progressive cause.
Hatred crosses boundaries. Despite Hamas being Sunnis, the Shi’a of Iran were quick to fund them, to the detriment of just about everyone. What was so attractive were the declarations of Hamas’ founding covenant, ripped from Nazi propaganda and made authentically their own:
With their money, they took control of the world media, news agencies, the press, publishing houses, broadcasting stations, and others… They were behind the French Revolution, the Communist revolution and most of the revolutions we heard and hear about, here and there. With their money they formed secret societies, such as Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, the Lions, and others in different parts of the world for the purpose of sabotaging societies and achieving Zionist interests…
They were behind World War I, when they were able to destroy the Islamic Caliphate, making financial gains and controlling resources. They obtained the Balfour Declaration, formed the League of Nations through which they could rule the world. They were behind World War II, through which they made huge financial gains by trading in armaments, and paved the way for the establishment of their state. It was they who instigated the replacement of the League of Nations with the United Nations and the Security Council to enable them to rule the world through them. There is no war going on anywhere, without having their finger in it.
Like Hitler, Iran and its proxies and fellow travelers embrace death. Tens of thousands of their own citizens have been shot since this January alone. Hamas’s spree of death, torture, and sexual sadism is just Hebron again with better weapons and a whole claque of pious true believers trying to sell this death cult as the ultimate exemplar of righteousness.
But in the world of reality, so foreign to the detached moral dreaming of the West’s new Jew-haters, we see the cold facts where Israel’s enemies have had the upper hand:
-The slaughter and expulsion from Hebron in 1929, those not killed expelled, and no Jew allowed even to visit the grave of the Patriarchs.
-The slaughter and complete eviction of all Jews from Jerusalem’s Old City after Israel lost the battle to retain it in the War of independence—followed by razing of its synagogues and desecration of the graves on the Mount of Olives.
-The slaughter and eviction of millennia-old Jewish communities across the Middle East, reducing once-large populations to just about zero everywhere but Morocco and Tunisia.
-The expulsion of all Jews in every territory yielded by Israel in negotiations, whether to Egypt, Jordan, the Palestinian Authority, or Gaza, which Israel unilaterally and entirely gave over to its Arab residents.
Despite the influence of fabulist supporters of today’s Nazi heirs, reality has reasserted itself. With Iran, too, the president prefers reality to beliefs absent results.
Reality has already showed what works with real Nazis — the ones whose Jew-hatred shapes every thought and action.
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