Many readers may wish to ignore or refute the following essay by Raymond S. Craft, but there's no doubt that it will provoke much thought and hopefully a lot of discussion. Here is the essay that email correspondent Mr2Ears2 sent recently:
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Some of you are not
old enough to remember that nearly every family in america was grossly affected
by WWII. Most of you don't remember the rationing of meat, shoes,
gasoline, and sugar. No tires for our automobiles, and a speed limit of 35
miles an hour on the road, not to mention, no new automobiles. Read this
and think about how we would react to being taken over by foreigners in 2008.
This is an EXCELLENT
essay. Well thought out and presented.
Please read it all and
think seriously about our future here on earth. It is critical.
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Historical Significance
By Raymond S. Craft
Sixty-three years ago,
Nazi Germany
had overrun almost all of Europe and hammered England to the verge of bankruptcy
and defeat. The Nazis had sunk more than 400 British ships in their convoys
between England and America taking food and war materials.
At that time the US
was in an isolationist, pacifist mood, and most Americans wanted nothing to do
with the European or the Asian war.
Then along came Pearl
Harbor on December 7, 1941, and in outrage Congress unanimously declared war on
Japan, and the following day on Germany, who had not yet attacked us. It was a
dicey thing. We had few allies.
France was not an
ally, as the Vichy government of France quickly aligned itself with its German
occupiers. Germany was certainly not an ally, as Hitler was intent on setting
up a Thousand Year Reich in Europe. Japan was not an ally, as it was well on
its way to owning and controlling all of Asia .
Together, Japan and
Germany had
long-range plans of invading Canada and Mexico, as launching pads to get into
the United States over our northern and southern borders, after they finished
gaining control of Asia and Europe .
America's only allies
then were England, Ireland, Scotland, Canada, Australia, and Russia. That was
about it. All of Europe, from Norway to Italy (except Russia in the East) was
already under the Nazi heel.
The US was certainly
not prepared for war. The US had drastically downgraded most of its military
forces after WW I because of the depression, so that at the outbreak of WW II,
Army units were training with broomsticks, because they didn't have guns, and
cars with 'tank' painted on the doors, because they didn't have real tanks. A
huge chunk of our Navy had just been sunk or damaged at Pearl Harbor .
Britain had already
gone bankrupt, saved only by the donation of $600 million in gold bullion in
the Bank of England (that was actually the property of Belgium ) given by
Belgium to England to carry on the war, when Belgium was overrun by Hitler (a
little known fact).
Actually, Belgium
surrendered after one day, because it was unable to oppose the German invasion,
and the Germans bombed Brussels
into rubble the next day just to prove they could .
Britain had already
been holding out for two years in the face of staggering losses and the near
decimation of its Royal Air Force in the Battle of Britain, and was saved from
being overrun by Germany, only because Hitler made the mistake of thinking the
Brit's were a relatively minor threat that could be dealt with later. Hitler,
first turned his attention to Russia, in the late summer of 1940, at a time
when England was on the verge of collapse.
Ironically, Russia
saved America's butt by putting up a desperate fight for two years, until the
US got geared up to begin hammering away at Germany.
Russia lost something
like 24,000,000 people in the sieges of Stalingrad and Moscow alone . . . 90%
of them from cold and starvation, mostly civilians, but also more than a
1,000,000 soldiers.
Had Russia
surrendered, Hitler would have been able to focus his entire war effort against
the Brit's, then America. If that had happened, the Nazis could possibly have
won the war.
All of this has been
brought out to illustrate that turning points in history are often dicey
things. Now, we find ourselves at another one of those key moments in history.
There is a very
dangerous minority in Islam that either has, or wants, and may soon have, the
ability to deliver small nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons, almost
anywhere in the world.
The Jihadist, the
militant Muslims, are basically Nazis in Kaffiyahs -- they believe that Islam,
a radically conservative form of Wahhabi Islam, should own and control the
Middle East first, then Europe, then the world. To them, all who do not bow to
their will of thinking should be killed, enslaved, or subjugated. They want to
finish the Holocaust, destroy Israel, and purge the world of Jews. This is
their mantra. (goal)
There is also a civil
war raging in the Middle East -- for the most part not a hot war, but a war of
ideas. Islam is having its Inquisition and its Reformation, but it is not yet
known which side will win -- the Inquisitors, or the Reformationists.
If the Inquisition
wins, then the Wahhabis, the Jihadist, will control the Middle East, the OPEC
oil, and the US, European, and Asian economies.
The techno-industrial
economies will be at the mercy of OPEC -- not an OPEC dominated by the
educated, rational Saudis of today, but an OPEC dominated by the
Jihadist. Do you want gas in your car? Do you want heating oil next
winter? Do you want the dollar to be worth anything? You had better hope the
Jihad, the Muslim Inquisition, loses, and the Islamic Reformation wins.
If the Reformation
movement wins, that is, the moderate Muslims, who believe that Islam can
respect and tolerate other religions, live in peace with the rest of the world,
and move out of the 10th century into the 21st, then the troubles in the Middle
East will eventually fade away. A moderate and prosperous Middle East will
emerge.
We have to help the
Reformation win, and to do that we have to fight the Inquisition, i.e., the
Wahhabi movement, the Jihad, Al Qaeda and the Islamic terrorist movements. We
have to do it somewhere. We can't do it everywhere at once. We have created a
focal point for the battle at a time and place of our choosing .. in Iraq. Not
in New York, not in London, or Paris or Berlin, but in Iraq, where we are doing
two important things.
(1) We deposed Saddam
Hussein. Whether Saddam Hussein was directly involved in the 9/11 terrorist
attack or not, it is undisputed that Saddam has been actively supporting the
terrorist movement for decades. Saddam was a terrorist! Saddam was a weapon of
mass destruction, responsible for the deaths of probably more than a 1,000,000
Iraqis and 2,000,000 Iranians.
(2) We created a
battle, a confrontation, a flash point, with Islamic terrorism in Iraq. We have
focused the battle. We are killing bad people, and the ones we get there, we
won't have to get here. We also have a good shot at creating a democratic,
peaceful Iraq, which will be a catalyst for democratic change in the rest of
the Middle East, and an outpost for a stabilizing American military presence in
the Middle East for as long as it is needed.
WW II, the war with
the Japanese and German Nazis, really began with a 'whimper' in 1928. It did
not begin with Pearl Harbor. It began with the Japanese invasion of China. It was
a war for fourteen years before the US joined it. It officially ended in 1945
-- a 17-year war -- and was followed by another decade of US occupation in
Germany and Japan to get those countries reconstructed and running on their own
again -- a
27-year war.
WW II cost the United
States an amount equal to approximately a full year's GDP -- adjusted for
inflation, equal to about $12 trillion dollars. WW II cost America more than
400,000 soldiers killed in action, and nearly 100,000 still missing in action.
The Iraq war has, so
far, cost the United States about $160,000,000,000, which is roughly what the
9/11 terrorist attack cost New York. It has also cost about 4,000 American
lives, which is roughly equivalent to lives that the Jihad killed (within the United
States ) in the 9/11 terrorist attack.
The cost of not
fighting and winning WW II would have been unimaginably greater -- a world
dominated by Japanese Imperialism and German Nazism.
This is not a
60-Minutes TV show, or a 2-hour movie in which everything comes out okay. The
real world is not like that. It is messy, uncertain, and sometimes bloody and
ugly. It always has been, and probably always will be.
The bottom line is
that we will have to deal with Islamic terrorism until we defeat it, whenever
that is. It will not go away if we ignore it.
If the US can create a
reasonably democratic and stable Iraq, then we have an ally, like England, in
the Middle East, a platform, from which we can work to help modernize and
moderate the Middle East. The history of the world is the clash between the
forces of relative civility and civilization, and the barbarians clamoring at
the gates to conquer the world.
The Iraq War is merely
another battle in this ancient and never ending war. Now, for the first time ever,the
barbarians are about to get nuclear weapons. Unless somebody prevents them from
getting them!
We have four options:
1 . We can defeat the
Jihad now, before it gets nuclear weapons.
2 . We can fight the
Jihad later, after it gets nuclear weapons (which may be as early as next year,
if Iran's progress on nuclear weapons is what Iran claims it is).
3 . We can surrender
to the Jihad and accept its dominance in the Middle East now; in Europe in the next few years or
decades, and ultimately in America, France
and Germany and possibly most of the rest of Europe. It will, of course, be
more dangerous, more expensive, and much bloodier.
If you oppose this
war, I hope you like the idea that your children, or grandchildren, may live in
an Islamic America under the Mullahs and the Sharia, an America that resembles
Iran today.
The history of the
world is the history of civilization clashes, cultural clashes. All wars are
about ideas, ideas about what society and civilization should be like, and the
most determined always win.
Those who are willing
to be the most ruthless always win. The pacifists always lose, because the
anti-pacifists kill them.
Remember, perspective
is everything, and America's schools teach too little history for perspective
to be clear, especially in the young American mind.
The Cold War lasted
from about 1947, at least until the Berlin Wall came down in 1989; forty-two
years!
Europe spent the first
half of the 19th century fighting Napoleon, and from 1870 to 1945 fighting
Germany!
World War II began in
1928, lasted 17 years, plus a ten year occupation, and the US still has troops
in Germany and Japan .. World War II resulted in the death of more than
50,000,000 people, maybe more than 100,000,000 people, depending on which
estimates you accept.
The US has taken more than 3,000 killed in action in Iraq. The
US took more than 4,000 killed in action on the morning of June 6, 1944, the
first day of the Normandy Invasion to rid Europe of Nazi Imperialism.
In WW II, the US averaged 2,000 KIA a week --
for four years. Most of the individual battles of WW II lost more Americans
than the entire Iraq war has done so far.
The stakes are at
least as high. A world dominated by representative governments with civil
rights, human rights, and personal freedoms -- or a world dominated by a radical Islamic Wahhabi
movement, by the Jihad, under the Mullahs and the Sharia (Islamic law).
It's difficult to
understand why the average American does not grasp this. They favor human
rights, civil rights, liberty and freedom, but evidently not for Iraqis.
'Peace Activists'
always seem to demonstrate here in America, where it's safe.
Why don't we see Peace
Activist demonstrating in Iran, Syria, Iraq, Sudan, North Korea, in the places
that really need peace activism the most? I'll tell you why! They would
be killed!
The liberal mentality
is supposed to favor human rights, civil rights, democracy, multiculturalism,
diversity, etc., but if the Jihad wins, wherever the Jihad wins, it is the end
of civil rights, human rights, democracy, multiculturalism, diversity, etc.
Americans who oppose
the liberation of Iraq are coming down on the side of their own worst enemy!
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Raymond S. Kraft is a
writer and an attorney living in Northern California that has studied the
Middle Eastern culture and religion
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