Please Say This
GELERNTER, DAVID
Please Say This . . . (Advice on the State of the Union. No charge.) by David Gelernter have spelled out good reasons I for Americans to be impatient A with our war in Iraq, good reasons for us to...
...Arabic translations of Mein Kampf became (and remain) big sellers...
...In Egypt, the "Young Egypt" party, the "Green Shirts" (like the fascist Black Shirts and Nazi Brown Shirts), was founded in 1933...
...Nowadays we often forget the Nazi connections of their predecessors...
...Terrorists understand bullets, not baloney...
...Fanatic Muslim clerics preach murder in their holy places...
...Two nations once ruled by death now have the chance to choose life...
...We are free of that shadow and have made the most of our freedom...
...If that's not sufficiently depraved, behold the ghoulish spectacle of a mother celebrating the death of her own (terrorist) child—a brand new hero by dint of the misery he has inflicted on other mothers and other children...
...If the Iraqi people had failed their two largest tests, that would have been terrible—but the election worked beautifully...
...In March 1933, shortly after Hitler came to power, he sent congratulations via the German consul in Jerusalem...
...But our enemies believe in death and say so plainly...
...Obviously we can't confer life...
...These proud champions of death kill innocent people all over the world, and their own people at home...
...In time he became a classical Nazi-type Jew hater...
...Those are American concerns...
...His penchant for violence and sponsorship of terrorist groups (the "Resistance and Jihad Organization") harmonized perfectly with Nazi methods...
...There is nothing ghoulish or depressing about Westminster Abbey...
...Edward is buried there...
...Let me give you mine for believing that we were right to go into Iraq, righter than we ever knew...
...Our enemies in this war seem varied but share one doctrine...
...the trial of Saddam Hussein was managed well under difficult circumstances...
...First, there is no basic difference between a tyrant like Saddam and a terrorist like bin Laden or Zarqawi...
...probably we would never have traced a worldwide black market in nuclear know-how to Abdul Qadeer Khan in Pakistan...
...He was eager to collaborate with the Nazis...
...The Nazis sent money to the mufti...
...We claim no special credit for being the party of life...
...It is the heart of England, is breathtak-ingly rich in art and history—and is stuffed with tombs...
...they weren't content with 'down with America,' they screamed 'death to America' and meant it...
...We told the world so in 1776...
...Europe's magnificent architectural patrimony is full of death...
...Those words echoed John Winthrop's as he sailed to Boston in 1630...
...But as champions of life, we have awful responsibilities...
...I wish the president would say something like this in his State of the Union address...
...Did we encourage 9/11 by standing down and backing off during much of the 1990s...
...that all we can hope for today is to minimize our losses and get out fast...
...Israel would still be shadowed by Iraqi Scuds...
...and then let me show you the big picture...
...No war we have ever fought is more fundamental than this...
...He wrote about the city on a hill he hoped this land would become...
...Its slogan: "Allah, Fatherland, and People...
...If the tyrant's foul sons had escaped to rally loyalist opposition, that would have been a serious blow...
...The Nazis knew all about death—as a political tool, ideological weapon, terrorist maneuver...
...Death has no comparable presence in central Washington, or in any great American city...
...We have destroyed a totalitarian tyranny, but not only that: We have made it possible for Iraqis to go to the polls, create a humane government, and choose life...
...Secular and Islamic fanatics, terrorist tyrants, and tyrannical terrorists all agree on death...
...Above all, how many 9/11s did we avert by showing that we would hit back and hit hard, and stand and fight for as long as it takes...
...In a 1964 interview with a German neo-Nazi newspaper, Nasser called the Holocaust a myth and regretted Hitler's defeat...
...When he came to power in Egypt, Nasser (according to David Pryce-Jones) became "the first Arab to have created a police state, complete with arrests at dawn, tribunals to pass predetermined sentences, concentration camps and the secret police, and the whole grim and bloody apparatus of control through bureaucratic terror...
...This war against terror and tyrants is a war over nothing less than life and death—a war between the champions of life and the party of death...
...If Saddam had launched poison gas at our troops and killed thousands, that would have been a disaster...
...Arab tyrants and Islamic terrorists are champions of death...
...But in many of the greatest—Winchester, Lincoln, and Wells among others—you will find beautifully maintained "cadaver monuments," where lifelike effigies of distinguished bishops (say) are laid out atop painfully realistic sculptures of their decaying corpses, crawling in some cases with neatly sculpted vermin and worms...
...Many important things have gone wrong...
...by David Gelernter have spelled out good reasons I for Americans to be impatient A with our war in Iraq, good reasons for us to ask more of our Iraqi allies, good reasons to change our own plans...
...Tyrants rule by terror, and maintain their own stable of in-house terrorists called the secret police...
...Now let me show you the big picture in Iraq...
...He endorsed the Nazis' anti-Jewish boycott and promised to work towards the same goal in British Palestine...
...The Lincoln Memorial celebrates the man's life...
...Briefly consider Haj Amin al Hus-seini, mufti of Jerusalem, as forerunner of Islamic terrorists...
...We understand our mission...
...Arlington cemetery is an important and sacred place, but America has nothing remotely like an official burial building for its heroes...
...When the Queen of England was crowned in Westminster Abbey, on the other hand, several of her predecessors were buried just a few steps away behind the high altar, or another few steps beyond that in Henry VII's chapel...
...He was quoting the Bible, and finished by citing another biblical verse: 'Choose life and live, you and your children!' On those words we set to work and built this great American community...
...We invite every person and people in the world to join us...
...A tyrant is a terrorist in office...
...Terror" and "tyrant" go together...
...Of course we have more to do...
...Terrorists are would-be tyrants who hope to rule the world and destroy every trace of freedom...
...Under the circumstances, I owe it to our troops, our allies, our Iraqi friends, and above all to the American people to be a realist and an optimist...
...But I am not...
...Lincoln is not buried there, nor is Washington at his shrine or Jefferson at his or FDR at his...
...Their Nazi connections suggest that they and their successors are in fact the party of death...
...they reveled in death in their concerted attempt to rule Europe and Asia, annihilate the Jews and thereby kill the world's conscience, and kill God...
...Their Arab and Islamic successors would prefer to rule the whole world and not just Europe and Asia, but otherwise their program agrees with Hitler's, more or less...
...And on 9/11, al Qaeda accomplished what even Hitler never did: the mass murder of American civilians...
...He was bitterly anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist...
...they have even discovered new reasons to kill themselves...
...But maybe those are not our concerns...
...You know their reasons...
...In any case, having written my own speech, I will proceed to write my own commentary...
...Jews are "notorious for perfidy and falsification and distortion and cruelty of which the noble Koran provides the strongest testimony against them," he wrote in his memoirs...
...The fact shows up plainly when you compare America and Europe...
...It might easily be the most magnificent building in the world...
...If we hadn't, Saddam would still be writing checks to subsidize Palestinian terror against Israel...
...they are the party of death...
...Let me explain...
...But we do our best...
...In Iraq the fighting is hard but we have achieved something magnificent...
...The less exclusive this party, the better...
...We'll never know for sure...
...Today we might face two Irans, not one—two America-hating tyrant regimes with their weapons programs heated to max-boil...
...And we are the party of life—and they hate us for that and hope to destroy us because of it...
...We must and we will...
...We have spent American lives, the dearest thing we have, to sweep away two murderous tyrannies in Afghanistan and Iraq...
...Those that have gone right are even more important...
...Of course some people argue that the war itself was a mistake...
...Those are American concerns...
...We honor our dead—but don't inaugurate our presidents in Arlington cemetery...
...David Gelernter, a national fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard...
...But realism is a two-way street...
...Shakespeare wrote, "How poor are they that have not patience...
...So now let me tell you why I am optimistic and why I know we will win...
...and Gamal Abdel Nasser, dictator of Egypt, as forerunner of the secular Arab tyrants...
...The secular tyrant Saddam Hussein tortured and slaughtered his enemies and their little children...
...and the medieval world (during certain periods) was obsessed with death...
...We pray God they take it, and we mean to help them...
...Theirs is the party of death indeed...
...If Saddam himself had escaped to haunt the world like an evil spirit—if the eminent murderer Abu Musab al Zarqawi were still alive and free—then I might be pessimistic...
...But a great nation must act on its best judgment, not hang back and dither, when its safety and the world's are at stake...
...Paris, likewise, has the abbey church of Saint Denis on its outskirts, where ancient French kings and heroes are buried, and in the center of the city the Pantheon, with its secular saints like Voltaire, and Les Invalides, with Napoleon's sarcophagus...
...The young Nasser became a member...
...If the fight to topple the tyrant had dragged on for years, I might be pessimistic today...
...can't even protect and preserve it—not always...
...Suicide murderers are in a rush to reach heaven, which they picture as a discount whorehouse...
...Breakthroughs in Lebanon and Libya would never have happened...
...life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are the things we stood for...
...We and the Iraqi people will win in the end...
...America the champion of life might sound like a wildly ambitious claim, but it is a fact and (partly) the result of historical accident...
...They believe in and cultivate death...
...England's medieval cathedrals are probably, as a group, the greatest collection of buildings on earth...
...We must fight this war the best and smartest way we can...
...Death shadows Europe's great cities, and some of her great ceremonies, because Europe's medieval past is ever-present...
...Haj Amin was appointed mufti in 1922...
...America is the champion of life by her own choice—and because she has no ancient past in which to glory...
...If (on the other hand) an outburst of violence had marred or derailed the election, if the trial or execution of Saddam had led to the large-scale violence so many people predicted, I might be pessimistic today...
...resolutions don't impress them...
...His terrorist friends believe in the same doctrine, 'murder thy enemy.' The random killing of men, women, and children inspires their supporters to dance in the streets...
...The champions of life must defeat the champions of death...
...There are shrines in central London too—Edward the Confessor's in Westminster Abbey is the most famous...
...Remind you of anyone...
...His cult of personality rivaled Hitler's and Stalin's...
...Almost 30 years ago, Shiite fanatics gathered in Tehran to scream hatred at this nation...
...Of course we will stay and do it...
...Life comes from God, and we hope to be its champions...
Vol. 12 • January 2007 • No. 18
