Monsters Among Us
Civilization, International Chaos, Terror, and the Impotence of Power
There are monsters among us, men with empty souls driven by remorseless hatred. They live only to inflict terror, pain, and death. They can be found anywhere in society. They may be lone psychopaths, or political or religious fanatics filled with hatred. At the present juncture in history, they are most common among the followers of Allah, and the most intense object of their hatred are Jews, followed only by Americans and decadent Europeans.
In the aftermath of World War Two, men of goodwill hoped that the curse of anti-Semitism would be swept away with the horror of the holocaust. That was however but a pious dream. More realistic men believed that the Jewish people needed a state of their own in their ancient homeland. Tens of thousands fled Europe for Israel which was created by the United Nations some seventy-five years ago despite intense hostility from its Arab neighbors. Unfortunately, anti-Semitism has not vanished. It has only found a new home, not on the American right, as many seem to believe, but in the Islamic world, where Jew hatred is as intense as ever. Amazingly, it has also found a home on college campuses in the precincts of the American left where sympathizers of bloodthirsty terrorists chant anti-Semitic slogans.
Most of mankind wish only to live in peace, to love and raise families, and follow their dreams. Unlike the adherents of these Islamic death cults, they live for life. They are the people who cultivate the arts and build civilizations. They are the creators.
Civilization is on one side. Monsters are on the other side. Nations with laws, and policemen, defend the peaceful against the lawless, civilization against chaos. Nations with armies defend themselves and their civilizations against monsters and other enemies.
Last weekend the world was reminded that that evil is relentless. Islamic terrorists associated with the Iranian backed Hamas organization descended upon a crowd of young Israelis celebrating a religious holiday, to rape, murder, and torture the innocent. According to reports, they spared nobody, not defenseless families, not invalids and grandmothers, not even infants. The scale of the assault relatively speaking, was orders of magnitude greater that the 9/11 attack on the United States.
This was not a military operation with a military objective. It was a brutal attack intended to terrify the most vulnerable. They call it “terrorism,” because it is an attempt to make the peaceful cower and submit. Armies exist for many reasons, but one of them is to defend the peaceful against terrorists. The Israeli Defense Forces are going into action in Gaza, the origin of the attack, as we speak. Many innocent Palestinian civilians will certainly suffer and die as a result, and many in the west will condemn Israel saying that it is no better than the terrorists, a false charge of moral equivalence that will resonate with many.
But Israel did not provoke this attack. It merely responds in the only way it can. The Israeli Air Force could level Gaza, inflicting tens of thousands of casualties while suffering very few. But instead, Israeli soldiers will go into Gaza on the ground, taking far greater risks, to seek out and kill Hamas terrorists wherever they are found while inflicting as few civilian casualties as possible.
It is worth contrasting this approach to what amounts to an enemy city with that taken during the Second World War. At that time, air forces had no qualms about bombarding cities full of civilians. Few in the west wept for the tens of thousands burnt and asphyxiated in Dresden or Hamburg under the rain of British and American bombs. Nor did many concern themselves about the eighty some thousand incinerated in the fire-bombing of Tokyo or the hundred thousand or more vaporized at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, until many years later when the war was long over.
We cannot predict the future. Only God knows what the future holds. But we can speculate about how these events will play out.
It is easy to see how events could spin out of control leading to a general Middle Eastern War that could have disastrous consequences.
First, it is likely that Hezbollah, in the north, another proxy of Iran, will open a second front against Israel. Indeed, reports indicate that this is already happening. It is likely that this will drag Lebanon into the conflict.
Second, Israel will respond accordingly, with a vigorous assault on both terrorist organizations. Hard and bitter fighting will ensue on both fronts.
Third, the United States will pledge its support in the form of both money and munitions—drawn from arsenals already depleted by support for the Ukraine war.
Fourth, depending upon the course of the fighting, Iran may intervene directly or with the IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps]. This may in turn trigger the spread of war throughout the region.
Direct Iranian intervention may convince Israeli authorities that it is time to eliminate Iran’s nuclear facilities. Of course, it may already be too late to do that.
By this time, only overwhelming American power, both military and economic, prudently exercised behind the scenes may be capable of preventing regional catastrophe. Unfortunately, American influence in the region has waned significantly since the American debacle in Afghanistan.
To make things infinitely worse, suppose Xi Jinping chooses this moment to conquer Taiwan. This would tax American power to and possibly beyond the limit.
Meanwhile, what reason is there to believe that there are no Islamic terrorist groups forming in the United States today? There are hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens, many from Islamic nations infected by radically anti-Semitic hatred, who have crossed the southern border and slipped into the country without detection during the last few years. Surely some of them are poised to carry out “martyrdom” missions in the United States itself. In its zeal to expand its voter base has the Democratic Party imported intifada into the country along with eight million more illegal immigrants?
In all this the Biden Administration is deeply culpable. In its almost incomprehensible effort to realign American policy in the Middle East with the terror state of Iran, it has led many governments in the region to believe that Israel can no longer depend upon the steadfast support of the United States, thus tempting aggression.
The debacle of American withdrawal from Afghanistan has cast doubt upon the competence of the administration—doubt reinforced by the president’s almost daily episodes of incoherence.
An ancient Roman axiom holds that if you want peace, you must prepare for war. It is as true now as it was then, but the American, indeed the international left, and the Biden administration in particular, has abandoned this idea much as it abandoned Bagram Airbase.
In prioritizing the fight against “climate change” over the preservation of the global balance of power, the administration has sent a message to the world that the United States is no longer a reliable ally. Accordingly, Vladimir Putin was tempted to attack Ukraine, thus unleashing a war that is now unfolding much like the battle of Verdun during the First World War. Not only are the Ukrainian people suffering terrible casualties, but the threat of nuclear escalation remains.
It is likely that Hamas and its Iranian masters have made the same calculation that Putin did. The United States with its “woke” officers more concerned about extirpating “white rage” from the armed forces and promoting drag shows in the Navy, has suggested to miscreants around the world that American military force is no longer to be feared.
Accordingly, the United States, under its current leadership, has lost the ability to deter hostile foreign powers from taking violent action. Once lost, deterrence is difficult to regain.
Without the stabilizing influence of the American armed forces, the world becomes a much more dangerous place. Will the Chinese now be tempted to invade Taiwan? Let us hope Xi can still be deterred.