By Rabbi Ben Kamin
OCEANSIDE, California — The war against terror is not about semantics
We are all struggling to create some mental headroom for this new wave of terror that has come to us now from the hallowed streets of Paris. The unwelcome knowledge of it, hurling through media and cyber space, affects our basic sense of well-being, our confidence in the future, and our sleep patterns. There is moralizing (“don’t blame all Muslims”) and there is the unfortunate timing of a desultory presidential campaign that seizes upon this frightening situation with blathering opportunism, windy platitudes, and a lot of skewing of the facts and pandering to the fears.
Here are some things to keep in mind, along with our prayers for the innocents and their families:
The war is real, proximate, and immediate. It is not a television series. Pope Francis has appropriately termed this “World War III” because it is, like the Second World War, a total war between civilizations with no acceptable outcome but for the annihilation of the enemy. It doesn’t matter what we call the enemy—they are the enemy and they are absolutely evil, immoral, self-indulgent, and without a trace of human regard. This is not about parsing correct social impulses among ourselves. It is about recognizing that we are dealing with the most sinister global insanity since the Nazis.
You can term them the jihadists, the radical Muslims, the Islamic State, or whatever you want. We can quibble among ourselves about how we use or don’t use the label “Muslim” in assigning to them their grisly existence. While we split hairs over these semantics, they are beheading our journalists and mass-raping their own teenage girls.
Obviously, ISIS and their associated murder-syndicates do not represent all Muslims. But that’s as far as we are concerned. As far as they are concerned, they ARE Islam. So while we stop and debate this stuff, we’re not destroying the enemy. We’re just giving them a larger window through which to terrorize us.
If the Allies had dabbled in such fatuous reflections instead of rigidly mobilizing to demolish the Axis between 1939 and 1945, we’d have an ominously different world today. We thrashed the Japanese and we defeated the Germans. We didn’t have panel discussions about crushing “radical Japanese” and “bad Germans.” That distinction remains a moral imperative within the Islamic culture.
There are many very upright and courageous Muslims who are speaking out against the blood-lust of their crusading co-religionists. These fine folks should keep on parleying against the genocidal goals of their misguided and ruthless religious siblings. We just need to go find the enemy and kill him. This is not about speech with flowers. War does not offer the benefit of a deliberation. This is about preserving our way of life and that is an existential, not a religious configuration.
Because of the singular, lyrical nature of Paris, with its sad beauty and historical vulnerability, its music and pain, we have been powerfully mourning for and with the city. We should—the cruelty inflicted upon it recently, and the wanton mass murders of its people, somewhat recall the “dark night” of the German occupation from 1940 to 1944. When the city was liberated, the free world saw light again.
That day will come again, for Paris and all of decent humankind. Democracy is a sleeping giant; wake up!
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Rabbi Kamin is an author and freelance writer. He may be contacted via ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com