Ostriches in Paradise

When I was a college student in Munich, Germany, back in the late 60s, I had an older German acquaintance whose family had been aristocracy prior to World War Two. They had owned a number of large industrial plants and a couple of estates.

As a student of political history and international politics, I asked him how many German people were true Nazis. The answer he gave has not only stuck with me, but has guided my attitude toward fanaticism ever since.

"Very few people were truly Nazis," he said, "but many enjoyed the return of German pride, and many more were too busy in the new economy to care. I was one of those who just thought the Nazis were a bunch of fools. So, the majority just sat back and let it all happen.

"Then, before we knew it, they owned us, and we had lost control, and the end of the world had come. My family lost everything; I ended up in a camp, and the Allies destroyed my factories."

We are told again and again by so-called experts and "talking heads" that Islam is a religion of peace and that the vast majority of Muslims just want to live in peace.

Although this unqualified assertion may be true, it is entirely irrelevant. It is meaningless fluff, meant to make us feel better, and meant to somehow diminish the specter of fanatics rampaging across the globe in the name of Islam. The undeniable fact is that the fanatics rule Islam at this moment in history.

It is the fanatics who march. It is the fanatics who are even now waging any one of 50 shooting wars worldwide. It is the fanatics who are right now systematically slaughtering not only Christian enclaves throughout Africa, but tribal groups as well, and are gradually taking over that entire continent in an Islamic wave.

It is the fanatics who bomb, behead, murder. It is the fanatics who take over mosque after mosque. It is the fanatics who zealously spread the stoning of rape victims and hanging of homosexuals.

The hard quantifiable fact is that this "peaceful Islamic majority" is their "silent majority;" it has been cowed, and, therefore, it is irrelevant.

Communist-era Russia comprised Russians who just wanted to live in peace and farm, yet the Soviet Stalinist collectivists were responsible for the murder of some 20 million people during and after the era of Kulak collectivization. The peaceful majority was, again, irrelevant.

China's huge population is peaceful as well, but the Chinese Communists have managed to kill a staggering 70 million of its own people since 1948 in an innumerable variety of purges..

The average Japanese individual prior to World War Two was not a war-mongering sadist. Yet, Japan butchered and slaughtered its way across South East Asia from the mid- 30s to the end of WWII in an orgy of killing that included, among other atrocities, the systematic murder of 12 million Chinese civilians, most of whom were killed by sword or bayonet.

And, who can forget Rwanda, which collapsed a few short years ago into its own orgy of Hutu-Tutsi sectarian butchery? Could it not have been said that the majority of Rwandans too were "peace loving"?

The late Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, former US Ambassador to the UN, once said, "History is a better guide than good intentions." History lessons are often incredibly simple and blunt, yet for all our powers of reason, we often miss the most basic and uncomplicated of points:

Peace-loving Muslims have been made irrelevant by the roar of their silence.

Peace-loving Muslims will become our enemy if they don't speak up because, like my friend from Munich, they will awake one day and find that the fanatics own them, and the end of their world will have begun.

Peace-loving Nigerians, Japanese, Palestinians, Rwandans, Kosovars, Bosnians, Iraqis, Germans, Chinese, Darfuri Sudanese, Algerians, Russians, Serbs, Somalis, Afghans, and many others have died because the peaceful majority did not speak up until it was too late.

As for us who watch it all unfolding on the global tableau, we must pay attention to the only group that counts: the fanatics who threaten our way of life.