Lieberman Gets It

Lieberman's said something to stir up the blogosphere (though for the Left, his mere continued existance exacerbates them):

“I’m worried that too many people, both in politics and out, don’t appreciate the seriousness of the threat to American security and the evil of the enemy that faces us,” Mr. Lieberman said at the Waterbury event. He called that threat “more evil, or as evil, as Nazism and probably more dangerous than the Soviet Communists we fought during the long cold war.”

The left is already screaming that he's done a disservice to Holocaust victims by comparing what they perceive as a limited threat to the fascism of the National Socialist party. Here's Kos on the topic (God I hate this man more every day):

More evil than the guys who gassed 6 million Jews?

More dangerous than the guys who had thousands of nuclear warheads pointed at us and could've snuffed out all life on the planet at the press of a button?

Lieberman has lost it. Completely and utterly. He is insane.

Uhh Markos? You're the one whose lost it buddy. Ever heard of this little thing called MAD? Mutual Assured Destruction - yeah, maybe if your history classes didn't use Howard Zinn as the gold standard, you would have read about it. MAD ensured that although the USSR was dangerous, yes, they were never a truly existential threat to the United States. Why? Because we were an existential threat to them as well, in that we would wipe them off the face of the earth and that was that. Marx didn't prescribe a heaven for Communist martyrs who died spreading proletarian bliss. Mohammed, on the other hand, prescribed exactly that for those who give their lives for the expansion of Islam. Don't believe me? Try this on for size: "O ye who believe, what is the matter with you, that when ye are asked to go forth in the cause of God, ye cling so heavily to earth! Do ye prefer the life of this world to the hereafter?" (Koran 9:38) A call to martyrdom, a promise of a better world beyond this one: such assurances (and remember, the Koran is infallible: to pious Muslims this is a promise) mean that MAD is useless to those seeking martyrdom. This sort of fanatical willingness to cast one's life away with reckless abandon was unknown to the Soviet Union's Politburo, and makes Islamo-fascism a much graver and more unpredictable danger that Communism.


What of fascism? I will not in any way attempt to be an apologist for Hitler - he was truly evil, and sought the destruction of worldy Jewry. But how much different, to Muslim literalists, are the commands of Mohammed? There exist among the Muslim scriptures a collection of what are known as haditha (sing. hadith), sayings attributed to Mohammed and treated as law. One of these also captures the eschatological worldview inherent in Islam, and sets as a precondition for Judgement day the destruction of Jewry:

The Hour [Resurrection] will not take place until the Muslims fight the Jews, and kill them. And the Jews will hide behind the rock and tree, and the rock and tree will say: oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, this is a Jew behind me, come and kill him!"

Can we honestly say that this is any less serious a threat than Hitler? Critics may reply that of course Hitler killed six million Jews and turned mass murder into a science. The world view of Islamo-fascists demands nothing less - there is a reason that among those seeking to prevent the establishment of a Jewish state, Hitler was viewed with reverence. This, I think, puts Islamo-fascists on the same plane of evil as Hitler, because although the means differ, their end is the same. To push Islamo-fascism beyond the evil of Hitler requires a bit of thought, but is really a matter of personal opinion; I won't offer my own, merely the following observation. Hitler's goals were not clearly and demonstrably internationalist - he might not have sought to dominate the whole world.

The foe we face today is explicitly internationalist, calling for jihad until all non-believers submit, often in the face of a choice between submission and death (or conversion and death: in the Balkans, so frequent were such Ottoman threats that when locals were asked whether or not they accepted Islam, they refused by nodding their head up and down as if submitting - some say that tradition continues today so that a shake of the head signals agreement). For Islamo-fascists, their struggles end only when the entire world has either converted or submitted to Islamic rule; there is no American exceptionalism here, which, some may argue, renders it a more existential threat to our way of life than Nazism.

Was Lieberman right to say these things, and highlight the global underestimation of the threat before us? Given the harsh response of the Left, I think so - they cleary don't understand. We face a foe as equally bent on the destruction of Judaism as Hitler was, imbued with the same internationalism of Marxist ideology, but lacking the rational desire for self-preservation that permitted us to bring down Communism without the world suffering a nuclear exchange. In short, our present foe combines some of the worst traits of the two of our greatest 20th century enemies.

Lieberman was, and is, right - and for his clear perception he deserves reelection.