September 11, 2001 Remembered

 

This column was triggered by an excellent recent movie, Operation Finale, It is the story of the hunt for the Nazi primarily responsible for the creation and implementation of the eradication of European Jews during World War II – Adolf Eichmann. That coupled with a realization that our public schools teach little about the horrors of World War II, the Holocaust, the rape of Nanking and even less about the current brutality of the Islamic terrorists.

On September 11, 2001, nineteen Islamic terrorists boarded four airliners and almost immediately hi-jacked those planes flying two of them into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York, one of them into the Pentagon, and the fourth allegedly was headed for the White House but was crashed into a field in Pennsylvania when other passengers tried to wrest control from the terrorists. Much to the surprise of those nineteen Islamic terrorists, they did NOT wind up in paradise surrounded by seventy two virgins but rather rest in the lowest recesses of hell where they will listen to the screams of their innocent victims forever.

Fourteen of those nineteen Islamic terrorists were Saudis and were educated in the madrassas aligned with the Wahhabi movement and financed by wealthy Saudis including the members of the Saudi royal family. Of the remaining five terrorists, two were from Egypt, two were from the United Arab Emeritus, and one from Lebanon. All were members of al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda continues to exist today and continues its murderous terrorism throughout the Middle East, Southwestern Asia and Africa. It is joined now by the Islamic State (ISIS), Hamas, Hezbollah and other regional terror organizations engaging in savagery including mass executions, beheading, encircling victims with burning tires, kidnapping and rape of school age children, fire bombing and disembowelment.

This truly is an instance where the failure to learn from history will almost guarantee a repeat of it. Today, the Iranian mullahs – the leaders of the second largest faction of Islam – systematically and simultaneously deny the occurrence of the Holocaust and promise to reinvigorate it by annihilating the Jews of Israel. They are joined by the Islamic terrorists who make no distinction between Israel and the “Great Satan” – the United States.

How is it that our children should remain studiously ignorant of the past horrors of these groups and their promises of future horrors? In contrast these mullahs and extremists are indoctrinating their children with anti-Semitism and fear of the West. Generation after generation is being groomed for an eternal fatwa against Judaism and Christianity in the West.

As is often the case, these extremist views arise out of ignorance, superstition and excuses for failure. In the aftermath World War I, Germany suffered stagnation while the rest of Europe began rebuilding their countries and their economies. Men like Adolf Hitler needed a scapegoat – a minority of the population that could be blamed for hard times in Germany. The Jews, who were relatively prosperous in a post-war Germany, were an easy target. After that it was the Romani (gypsy) and then the communists, the mentally and physically handicapped and the deformed. Six million Jews died, 220 thousand Romani were executed; all told there were approximately 5 million killed in addition to the 6 million Jews. Hitler and the Nazis were systematically ridding the state of those they blamed for their failures, for those who were different and for those deemed a “burden” on society.

Those “exterminated” were lined up in rows in trenches that they were forced to dig and then shot and buried whether dead or not. They were hanged and left on street poles, bridges and overpasses. The women were systematically raped and brutalized until the troops tired of them and then murdered them in cruel and inhumane ways. The prison camps were rife with horrifying medical experiments, usually without anesthesia. The children suffered every cruelty that their parents did. Millions of these people were simply worked to death, starved to death or left to the ravages of pestilence and disease. The pictures of the dead and dying at Auschwitz, Belzec and Treblinka were exceeded only by those of the bodies pouring out of the trains and trucks used for gassing the prisoners. It was humankind at its savage worst.

Move forward to today.

The Middle East remains a tribal society mired in feudalism since Biblical days. Despite the riches of their oil fields, there has been precious little economic or social progress – particularly for women. You would be hard pressed to identify any industrial, medical or scientific breakthroughs emanating from the Middle East or any cultural contributions in art or literature since the 5th Century. Most of the wealth is concentrated in a small number of “royal” families while the masses suffer poverty that makes the poor in America seem like the idle rich. It is in fact, like post-War Germany – a perfect breeding ground for those who seek to find others to blame for their lack of progress.

And they have again found their patsies – the Jews of Israel, the decadence of the West, and the wealth of Europe and America.

Despite the inhumanity of the Nazi’s concentration and death camps, the same Nazi atrocities continue today. Mostly initiated by Islamic terrorists but also by others involved in “ethnic cleansings” in Croatia and Myanmar. Bashar al-Assad has been gassing his own people. Boko Haram has massacred thousands in Nigeria and kidnapped young girls to be used as sex slaves. And the list goes on indefinitely.

And so the justification for war, terrorism and subjugation continues. Not only do our schools turn a blind eye towards the past and present atrocities that arise from the Adolf Hitlers, the Josef Stalins, the Hideki Tojos, the Mao Zedongs, the Osama bin Ladens and the Abu Bakr al-Baghdadis, we instead teach the requirements for safe spaces, dog whistles and trigger words in effort to shield children from the real rough and tumble world.

How much better would we be if we remembered. Remembered the instant destruction of September 11, 2001, and those who died as a result of another act of terrorism. Remembered the systematic elimination of Jews in Europe. Remembered the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, Armenia, Myanmar and other places. Remembered the causes of the atrocities and most importantly the heroism of those who stepped forward to rescue humanity from its own worst members.

Start teaching the past so that we may avoid the repeats in the future.