Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”
Longtime Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz, who passed away on December 16 at the age of 95, was the author of World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism, published in 2007. In the light of current events, the title could stand some revision.
In Norman’s vision, World War III is the Cold War, the West versus the Soviet Union. In 2005 Vladimir Putin said the collapse of the USSR was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” Putin’s war on Ukraine is doubtless part of his campaign to put the USSR back together again and has certainly caught the attention of NATO leaders in Europe. In America, WWII is also being revised.
With a nod to WWII veteran Mel Brooks, 99, it’s now springtime for Hitler apologists. Darryl Cooper, in Tucker Carlson’s view “the most important popular historian working in the United States today” regards Winston Churchill, not Adolf Hitler, as “the chief villain of World War II.” That would come as a surprise to Dwight Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe, better known as “Ike.”
In April of 1945, Eisenhower witnessed “conditions of indescribable horror” at the Ohdruf concentration camp, an extension of Buchenwald. The Americans saw the piles of corpses and walking skeletons, all part of the Nazis plan to systematically murder the European Jews. As Ike told Churchill, “everything you read in the paper does not adequately describe what has really happened here.”
The late Claremont professor Harold Rood served as a gunner in Gen. Patton’s Third Army. In 1985, on the 40th anniversary of the war’s end, Rood wrote:
The least reflective of us could wonder at the terrible barbarism that had for six years ravaged Europe. The unforgettable signs were those dreadful concentration camp uniforms hanging like shrouds on the bodies of the dead and near dead. If the war had not made much sense before, it did now.
That was also true of Canada’s Eighth Reconnaissance Regiment, which liberated the Westerbork transit camp in Holland, from which the Nazis sent thousands of Jews to Auschwitz. During WWII the Nazis occupied Britain’s Channel Islands and set up four concentration camps, including, the SS-run Lager Sylt and Larger Norderney with inmates from 27 countries. Those camps were set up on Alderney, 90 miles from the English coast. That gives some sense of what a National Socialist victory would have entailed, but there’s another side to it.
Hitler deployed Muslims in the 13th Waffen SS Division and Crimean Muslims served in Einsatzgruppen D, a Nazi death squad targeting civilians, primarily Jews. These WWII realities endure in the struggle against what Podhoretz called Islamofascism.
Hamas is essentially an Islamic Einsatzgruppe targeting Jewish civilians in Israel. The 10/7 attack was the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust and to paraphrase Ike, media accounts do not adequately describe what really happened. For all but the willfully blind, the Hamas forces are uniformed troops, fully equipped and funded by friendly states, branches of the UN, and US taxpayers. In similar style, the major funders of Somali terrorist group al-Shabaab could be the taxpayers of Minnesota through fraud in the “Feeding our Future” project. These terrorist groups find a partner in the Islamic State, and there’s a back story here people should recall.
A year after World War IV hit the book stores, Barack Obama became president of the United States, promising to fundamentally transform the nation. The composite character, formerly known as Barry Soetoro, refused to link Islam with terrorism. In 2009, when “soldier of Allah” Nidal Hasan committed mass murder at Fort Hood he called it “workplace violence,” not terrorism, a crime, or even gun violence. His CIA director, Gus Hall voter John Brennan, believed that jihad is a “holy struggle in pursuit of a moral goal” and has nothing to do with violence. Contrast the approach of President Donald Trump.
In October 2019 President Trump took out Islamic State terrorist al-Baghdadi. In early 2020, Trump took out Iranian terrorist Qasem Suleimani. In 2021, Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan handed billions in modern weaponry to the Taliban, emboldening terrorists worldwide.
On December 14, during a Hanukkah celebration in Australia, a father-son Islamic State Einsatzgruppe gunned down 15 people including the 10-year-old Matilda Britvan. Two days later, Norman Podhoretz passed away. On Christmas day, President Trump launched a massive attack on Islamic terrorists at their bases in Nigeria, where they have been murdering Christians as the world looked the other way.
The struggle against Islamofascism continues, under a different commander in chief. Norman Podhoretz, rest in peace.
