Tonight, I heard Andy Rooney discuss the antiwar movement at the beginning of World War II, when he was a young man. Rooney said he at the time was ambivalent about US involvement in the war, and had even considered becoming a conscientious objector. However, by the end of the war, any personal doubts about the justness of the Allied cause were convincingly removed, as he says, "when I saw Buchenwald."
A Hitler makes it easier to reduce to complex considerations regarding the justice of a war to a simple black/white formulation. Is today's debate as black and white? Certainly Saddam is a threat, but to whom? We can gauge the level of threat of aggressor megalomaniacs by the stated intentions of their ideology. The most striking and undeniable similarity between the ideologies of Hitler and that of Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden (and like-minded leaders such as Sheik Hassan Nasrallah and Sheik Ahmed Yassin and Dr. Ramadan Shallah) is frenetic, malignant hatred of Jews.
The world did not really take Adolf Hitler's words seriously in the years preceding 1939, even though he made it quite plain what he intended to do to the Jews. Today, similar vicious anti-Semitic rhetoric is heard unremittingly from the imams and mullahs and sheiks of radical Islam, even in the supposed "Western-friendly" countries. Perhaps "today" is not specific enough; it has been heard for decades. Just as the Nazi propaganda ministers for years had infected the people of their society with Jew-hatred, so too has the Arab/Muslim populace been long infected. But we have paid little attention. It is only recently, when those words became bodies of "Jew-lovers" falling from the sky here, that we have taken notice.
Still, some like young Rooney of years ago, are questioning about the morality of this war. And well they should, as I have also. Yet for me, Rooney's comment about Buchenwald, made in retrospect, helps provide some moral clarity.
For extremely few in 1939 had foreseen that there would even be a Buchenwald. Even while the war was raging, few understood the extent of the Holocaust. Should they have seen it? Yes, the evidence was available, but most chose to avert their eyes from the slaughter of Jews, until it was too late.
Now, President Bush tells us a war against Iraq is imperative. Some agree, some do not. But what would happen if there is no war? In a short time, Saddam Hussein will have nuclear weapons, and the means to deliver them. Whom does this most immediately threaten? Those Jews who happen to live in his neighborhood, those whom he has vowed to eradicate: Israel.
We must not make the mistake of those who only saw Buchenwald in retrospect. In the Middle East today exists a series of regimes whose intentions regarding Israel are no less toxic than Hitlers. We know it from the words they say, just as we knew it from what Hitler said. These Arab/Muslim nations, such as Syria, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the terrorist organizations hosted, funded and supplied by them, wish to destroy Israel, and wish to acquire sufficient armaments to do it.
I have not heard President Bush use this argument to justify the war, nor do I suppose he would. But for me, seeing the real future danger that radical Muslim extremists present to the nation of refuge for those Holocaust survivors is the closest I can come to moral clarity about this war. Iraq is the most immediate threat to the existence of Israel because it is the nation that will not be effectively restrained by other influences. If not tomorrow, then next month, or next year, Saddam will succeed in his goal to attain the capability to destroy Israel, and will share that capability with others.
He must be stopped. The specter of mushroom clouds in Tel-Aviv and Haifa to finish off the job Hitler started is too great a risk for the civilized world to allow.
Bob Westbrook
The author is regional representative for the Jerusalem-based International Christian Zionist Center and author of www.TrumpetSounds.com.
