"The fact is that the fanatics rule Islam at this moment in history." - Paul E. Marek

Equating Islamists or Islamic terrorists with Nazis and Nazism is an imperfect juxtaposition simply because "at this moment in history" the religious ideology goading the Islamist, namely Islam, to acts of terrorism is regarded and harboured by Western academia and media as sacrosanct whereas Nazism, which drives the Nazi toward precisely the same degree of Jew hatred and genocidal ends as does Islam the Islamist, is generally regarded by Western academia and media as absolute evil. To make such a comparison is to obfuscate the malefic reality pointed out by Wafa Sultan, which is that the religion of Islam created the terrorist and not the other way around.

To propagate the view that a sort of bromidic and innocuous Islam is being ruled by "fanatics" is to obfuscate the dangerous ubiquitousness of veridical Islam, the Islam that exists "at this moment in history;" the same Islam that incites its adherents, in many cases entire nations, to anti-Jewish hatred and exterminationist objectives, as is happening in Iran. Sam Harris writes, "To see that our problem is with Islam itself, and not merely with "terrorism," we need only ask ourselves why Muslim terrorists do what they do. Why would someone as conspicously devoid of personal grievances or psychological dysfunction as Osama bin Laden--who is neither poor, uneducated, delusional, nor prior victim of Western aggression--devote himself to cave-dwelling machinations with the intention of killing innumerable men, women, and children he has never met?"

Present taboos about Islam, if we choose to be constricted by them, will eventually prove to be flagrantly imprudent because of the danger the relgion of Islam poses not only to the Jewish people and Israel, but also to the rest of Western civilization. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen has written of pre-Nazi Germany: "To the large extent that the subject of the Jews was part of the public conversation of society, German writers and speakers discussed them overwhelmingly in a sinister, if not demonic, light, in the racist, dehumanizing idiom of the day." Without a doubt the same anti-Jewish hatred can be attributed "at this moment in history" to those Muslim "writers and speakers" of such countries and regions wherein Islam is the preponderant religion.

In his epilogue to 'Hitler's Willing Executioners,' Goldhagen concludes: "...the eliminationist antisemitic German political culture, the genesis of which must be and is explicable historically, was the prime mover of both the Nazi leadership and ordinary Germans in the persecution and extermination of the Jews, and therefoere was the Holocaust's principal cause, may at once be hard to believe for many and commonsensical to others. The evidence that so many ordinary people did maintain at the centre of their worldview palpably absurd beliefs about Jews like those that Hitler articulated in Mein Kampf is overwhelming. And the evidence has been available for years, indeed available to any observer in Germany during the 1930s. But because the beliefs have seemed to us to be so ridiculous, indeed worthy of the ravings of madmen, the truth that they were the common property of the German people has been and will likely continue to be hard to accept by many who are beholden to our common-sense view of the world, or who find the implications of this truth too disquieting."

"...try to answer the most urgent question, the question which torments all those who have happened to read our accounts: How much of the concentration camp world is dead and will not return, like slavery and the dueling code? How much is back or is coming back? What can each of us do so that in this world pregnant with threats at least this threat will be nullified?" wrote Primo Levi. In my view, Islam and the Muslim world view poses today the same threat as did Hitler's Nazis yesterday. Therefore I cannot allow Islam to be exculpated from the guilt it undoubtedly deserves for making this present world "pregnant with threats." I cannot allow myself to leave unobserved such an open flank through which the Jewish people are even today being attacked.

Michael Devolin,
B'nai Elim Canada