THE BERLIN WALL AND KRISTALLNACHT:
Two Examples of Human Forgetfulness
by
Brock Thoene
Some media attention has been paid to the fact that today is the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Twenty years ago today the evident moral and spiritual bankruptcy of the Communist system strangling Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union was clear for all the world to see.
The people of divided Berlin came to symbolize the eternal desire of people everywhere to be free. The wall came down when they asserted their will as to the form of government under which they would live. They rose up to do away with an ultra-restrictive system that relied on coercion and torture and secret police and informants to continually prop up a failed economic system.
President Ronald Reagan stood up to the Soviets and forced them to compete with the power-for-good vested in free market capitalism. Pope John Paul II, with personal courage and sacrifice, showed the world the authority of a God-centered belief in the fundamental rights of man.
You know---life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Seems like we heard that phrase somewhere before!
Together Reagan and John Paul brought about more than just the collapse of the Berlin Wall…they brought down the Iron Curtain, and exposed atheistic communism for what it is: a sham and a fiasco.
How quickly we forget!
Today America is far down the road to embracing socialism. This is not some ‘new and improved’ version either; it’s the same old failure that will take an entire generation to tear down and another generation to recover from if it is not stopped short of its goal of government intrusion into every aspect of American lives.
What’s the point of celebrating the anniversary of tearing down the communist wall if apathy and ignorance are rebuilding it in America?
And the remembrance of the fall of the wall obscures another anniversary that should also be in the forefront of our minds as freedom-loving people everywhere wrestle with the problem of Islamic terrorism.
November 9th is also the anniversary of Kristallnacht; the Night of Broken Glass, when Nazi-organized vandalism and thuggery against Jews broke out across Germany and Austria. That was in 1938----but it foreshadowed the Holocaust.
Nor did it only occur within Nazi-controlled territory. Haj Amin el Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, was friends with, and formed a mutual-admiration society with, Adolf Hitler.
(You will remember the Mufti from our Zion Chronicles series.)
The Muslim terrorists of today are the spiritual (and in some cases physical) descendents of those Muslims recruited and trained by the Nazi SS. This is true of Muslim radicals in general, and of Iran’s terrorist-sponsoring regime in particular.
You probably didn’t hear any reference to that anniversary in the main-stream media, did you?
Take a look at an article (lengthy, but worth reading in its entirety) from yesterday’s Jerusalem Post:
Posted by Petra Marquardt-Bigman
Sunday Nov 08, 2009
THE WARPED MIRROR
JERUSALEM POST
When President Obama welcomed the newly re-elected German chancellor, Angela Merkel, in Washington last week, he commented on the imminent 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989. But as Merkel emphasized in an address to both houses of the US Congress, November 9 is also the anniversary of the so-called Kristallnacht in 1938, the "night of the broken glass," when Nazis brutalized Jews and attacked their homes and property in an orgy of unrestrained violence that "later turned into the break with civilization that was the Shoah."
In the same speech, Merkel also declared that a "nuclear bomb in the hands of an Iranian president who denies the Holocaust, threatens Israel and denies Israel the right to exist is not acceptable." A few weeks earlier, Israel's Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu had focused on this specific issue in his address to the UN General Assembly, where he sought to highlight the danger posed by a fanatic Iranian regime that is pursuing its nuclear ambitions at all costs while denying the Holocaust and Israel's right to exist.
But the argument that the danger posed by Iran's nuclear ambitions must also be assessed in view of the Holocaust denial of Iran's president and the threats against Israel that are a staple of the Iranian regime is often rejected, not least because the implied comparison between Iran and Nazi Germany is regarded as very controversial.
In an article on "Iran, the Jews and Germany" written in March, New York Times columnist Roger Cohen haughtily dismissed criticism "from several American Jews unable to resist some analogy between Iran and Nazi Germany" and asserted firmly that "Iran's Islamic Republic is no Third Reich redux."
Of course, much has changed in the meantime, and some experts have argued that Iran is evolving into a military dictatorship. Moreover, as far as history is concerned, it is worth remembering that during the Third Reich, relations between Nazi Germany and Iran were excellent. It was admiration for Nazi Germany that prompted the shah in 1935 to change the country's official designation from Persia to Iran, because this term refers to the Aryans so admired by Nazi racial ideology.
It may be debatable if this past is relevant for today's developments, but what is certain is that a curious double standard exists: Europeans firmly believe that it is important to confront the past, and particularly the Germans were and still are expected to own up to the evils of Nazism. But no such demand is made of the admirers and collaborators of the Nazis in the Middle East.
Quite the contrary - Middle Eastern enthusiasm for Nazism is something of a taboo in Europe. In a recent Wall Street Journal article, Daniel Schwammenthal reported on the difficulties encountered by the German organizer of an exhibition that was devoted to the subject "The Third World in the Second World War" and included one section on the role of the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al Husseini, who was a Waffen SS recruiter and Nazi propagandist in Berlin.
The exhibition was scheduled to be shown in a multicultural center located in a Berlin neighborhood with many Turkish and Arab residents, but the center's director objected to the segment that focused on the mufti's enthusiastic collaboration with the Nazis.
It is worthwhile to note in this context that even before the mufti came to Berlin, he had played a role in what has been described as "Kristallnacht in Baghdad," the pogrom in June 1941 that is commonly known as "Farhood" (also spelled Farhud or Farhoud), which was no less brutal that the German Kristallnacht.
As Schwammenthal rightly emphasizes, there is no justification for the "politically correct" tendency to downplay the role of the mufti:
The mufti 'invented a new form of Jew-hatred by recasting it in an Islamic mold,' according to German scholar Matthias Küntzel. The mufti's fusion of European anti-Semitism - particularly the genocidal variety - with Koranic views of Jewish wickedness has become the hallmark of Islamists world-wide, from al Qaeda to Hamas and Hezbollah. During his time in Berlin, the mufti ran the Nazis' Arab-language propaganda radio program, which incited Muslims in the Mideast to 'kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history and religion.'
Among the many listeners was also the man later known as Ayatollah Khomeini, who used to tune in to Radio Berlin every evening, according to Amir Taheri's biography of the Iranian leader. Khomeini's disciple Mahmoud Ahmadinejad still spews the same venom pioneered by the mufti as do Islamic hate preachers around the world."
In recent years, there have been a number of scholarly studies examining the lasting influence of Nazi propaganda in the Middle East. A new book on Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World, by Jeffrey Herf, has just been released. In a class of its own will be the forthcoming work A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad by Robert S. Wistrich, the Director of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
It is certainly sobering to read Wistrich's thoughts on the anniversary of Kristallnacht in a recent article, where he writes:
The scale and extremism of the literature and commentary available in Arab or Muslim newspapers, journals, magazines, caricatures, on Islamist websites, on the Middle Eastern radio and TV news, in documentaries, films and educational materials, is comparable only to that of Nazi Germany at its worst. Yet the Western world largely turns a blind eye to the likely genocidal consequences of such a culture of hatred, much as it did seventy years ago."
END QUOTE
Now, while that’s a lot to read and absorb, don’t stop just yet. Read today’s readings aloud to get God’s perspective---
This book is among the manuscripts discovered in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Hear the warning to tyrants and to false shepherds operating under the claims of ‘Hope and Change.’
Reading 1
Wisdom 6:1-11
Hear, O kings, and understand;
learn, you magistrates of the earth’s expanse!
Hearken, you who are in power over the multitude
and lord it over throngs of peoples!
Because authority was given you by the Lord
and sovereignty by the Most High,
who shall probe your works and scrutinize your counsels.
Because, though you were ministers of his kingdom, you judged not rightly,
and did not keep the law,
nor walk according to the will of God,
Terribly and swiftly shall he come against you,
because judgment is stern for the exalted–
For the lowly may be pardoned out of mercy
but the mighty shall be mightily put to the test.
For the Lord of all shows no partiality,
nor does he fear greatness,
Because he himself made the great as well as the small,
and he provides for all alike;
but for those in power a rigorous scrutiny impends.
To you, therefore, O princes, are my words addressed
that you may learn wisdom and that you may not sin.
For those who keep the holy precepts hallowed shall be found holy,
and those learned in them will have ready a response.
Desire therefore my words;
long for them and you shall be instructed.
Amen! The Word of the Lord!
To Sum Up:
Today is a good day for those of us who remember the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism to speak up to the younger generations about what it cost and the dangers of going down that road in the name of ‘progressivism’ and ‘secular humanism.’
It’s also a good day to recognize that evil directed against Jews (and Christians!) has a supernatural, malevolent spiritual source---and those demons don’t die, they just reappear in other bodies. But they are aided in their destructive tasks by….guess what?....apathy and ignorance.
Blessings in Jesus’ Name,
Brock
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