The GREAT lie

It didn’t take very long for this great lie to rear its ugly head again – and even though this is the weekend between the High Holy Days (of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, when there are so many other things I would have liked to expound upon, for the benefit of Jewish-Christian relations) I feel that it is imperative to get early attention to this most serious of issues.

The great lie is the same as the one perpetrated in Europe during WWII, that the Jews are at the “root cause” of all the evil that is in the world. In the Islamic world, many commentators are now suggesting that Israeli intelligence forces carried out the attacks on the WTC and Pentagon. Who else, they ask, had the most to gain from those attacks … in terms of influencing America to side with Israel and against the Palestinians? Yet, the truth is that when the Israeli Defense Forces choose to retaliate against those same Palestinians (because of “suicide bombings” as a type of the guerilla-war tactics that the PA has been using against Israel), the IDF announce the retaliation in advance, so people can leave the building and lives are saved.

Sacredness of human life is a key tenet of Judaism. Not so for radical Islamic guerilla soldiers within the Global Jihad Movement.

In Great Britain the reaction is mixed! On September 14th, Britain denounced Israel for its military operations in Jenin (site of refuge for many guerilla soldiers involved in the Jihad against Israel). Britain became the first western country to do so after the WTC and Pentagon attacks. When Israelis responded, that Jenin has been a hotbed of “terror” for the past year and that the operation was meant to prevent further attacks, the British official refused to listen and reiterated (by cable) that Israel must leave immediately.

This was confusing since there was a contradictory message from Britain’s Prime Minister Tony Blair. Mr. Blair’s cable described Tuesday’s attacks in the U.S. as an attack on “all of us,” warned that similar attacks could take place “in London or any city in the Middle East” and said that this necessitated a rethinking of how the West should respond to terror.

Meanwhile, in response to an editorial in a local newspaper, a Dallas attorney friend of mine, Reid Heller, wrote that their “editorial shamelessly intones the great lie of our time: that the Jewish-Palestinian struggle is the primary threat to world peace.

“Here in America, the most decent and moderate political regime on earth, the big lie has never taken hold. Americans know that the greatest threat to peace is a collection of Middle Eastern tyrannies that relentlessly brutalize their own minorities and anonymously export terror to silence their critics abroad. Those tyrannies have undermined every Israeli attempt to create a viable Palestinian State and have sought Israel’s destruction through a combination of diplomacy and terror as resolutely as they have sought its destruction through war. America is now the primary target of their hatred.

“Like Israel, America has refused to be cowed. In 1939, when another big lie was on the lips of the European elite, one found similar editorials in the newspapers of Europe. Fashionable writers argued that Nazi Jew hatred can and should be appeased including through the mass suicide of the Jews of Germany or the mass resignation of French Jewish bankers and politicians whose mere existence proved to be a provocation … those writers paid no heed to voices like those of Thomas Mann who warned that the big lie was a stalking horse for the destruction of Christian civilization or that to compromise with such hatred amounted to complicity with it. The road from Munich to Durban, from Nazism to a moral viciousness posing as liberalism, has proved to be a short one.”

Let’s not allow the guerilla soldiers and supporters of military jihad to hijack the “truth,” about the attacks on America, for their propaganda war against the Jews. In the Arab-Moslem world today, we find that a viciously anti-Semitic document is still published and distributed. Its name is the “Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion,” which claims to be the minutes of a meeting of Zionist Jews who are discussing their plan for “world domination.” It was many years ago proven to be a forgery. But this document is still representative of the ultimate great lie that feeds and fans the flames of hatred and lust for bloodshed against a peace-loving people whose holy writings teach about righteousness and justice.

Also, the Christian world needs to learn a lot more about Jews and Judaism, and about Muslims and Islam, in order to decide how to effectively deal with this issue of Global Jihad. Education is an enlightening influence rather than a debilitating one, and the good people of this world must learn to treat one another with respect and in a decent manner, thereby contributing to the solution instead of to the problem.