Ignoring and Revising History

Two articles in yesterday's Frontpagemag.com document the sad decline of Europe with reports from Spain and Germany.

Isaac Martínn-Barbero, the former Executive Advisor to the General Director of the Spanish Police and Director of The Institute for Police Studies, The West's Moral Weakness writes about how fear of Muslims is changing western society. He writes about a Woman who can't get her book on Islamic misogyny published because of fear of retribution by Muslims. He also confirms what I read recently about the Spanish festivals this year deemphasizing the Spanish victories over the Moors.

There is also an increasing demand for a change in history textbooks to downplay our seven-century struggle against Arab occupation. The coat of arms of one of Spain’s regions has been changed to erase a Moor head that has been in it for centuries. There is mounting pressure for similar changes of potentially offensive popular celebrations that commemorate famous battles between Christians and Muslims during the 711-1492 period. Significantly, some groups of converts with substantial financial links to countries in the Arabian Peninsula where religious and political tolerance is nonexistent are being particularly vociferous.

In the United States, political correctness (not a fear of Islam) has caused some communities to deemphasise Andrew Jackson who is now being portrayed as little more than genocidal slave holder. Christopher Columbus has also been under attack as a symbol of the white man's injustice. Eventually, the pendulum will swing back to sanity as one group or another overplays it's hand and provokes a backlash.

Also from Frontpagemag.com, here's a disturbing article about The New German Nazism and it's subtle and not so subtle lingering anti-semitism which along with fundamentalist Islam is in a waxing phase. As in the U.S. there has been some historical revisionism about Germany lately. First, the fiction that the German people were liberated, now this:

…the Free Democrat Party has unofficially adopted anti-Semitism as a campaign tactic to attract Germany's sizeable Muslim minority; and German revisionist historians now are beginning to define German perpetration of World War II and the Holocaust not as crimes against humanity, but as early battles (with regrettable but understandable excesses) in the Cold War against communism.

The situation is so bad that German Jews are advised not to wear anything in public that would identify them as Jewish because their safety cannot be guaranteed. How can this be? Isn't this the "New Germany" that's gone 57 years without a Holocaust or even a pogrom, where truth, justice and the German way prevail amidst economic wealth, a high standard of living that is the envy of their European neighbors, and a constitution guaranteeing freedom for everyone regardless of race, creed or national origin?

What's changed? The answer is: absolutely nothing. My thesis is quite simple. While no longer has the military power to enforce the racist ideology of the Nazis and while all extreme manifestations of Nazism are officially outlawed, the internal conditions -- that is, the attitudes, worldview and cultural assumptions - that led to the rise of Nazism in Germany are still present because they constitute the basic components of German identity. Nazism was not an aberration; it was the distillation of the German psyche into its essential elements. External Nazism may have been utterly defeated in May of 1945; internal Nazism, however, remains, and will always remain, a potential threat as long as there exists a political and/or cultural entity known as Germany.

Of course, if you asked a German, "no one alive" in Germany after WWII had been a Nazi or had collaborated with them. Hmm. The author, William Grim, also points out that the Germans having become Judenfrei brought in Turks to replace them. Its a "better fit."

Over at Townhall.com recently, Caroline B. Glick wrote:

EVEN MORE disturbingly, Rice has officially sanctioned a policy put together by US Army Lt.-Gen. Keith Dayton to expand by up to 70 percent Abbas's presidential guard and personal army, Force 17. The administration wishes to raise some $20 million to fund the training and arming and expansion of Abbas's army from 3,500 to 6,000 soldiers. This move comes after the US transferred 3,000 rifles and 1 million bullets to Force 17 in June. Yet Force 17 is a terrorist army led by terrorists.

Right after he received the weapons shipment, Abbas appointed Mahmoud Damra commander of the force. Damra, who like many of the Force 17 officers and soldiers, doubles as a Fatah terrorist, was wanted by Israel due to his direct involvement in the terrorist murder of at least 15 Israelis. One of his deputies claimed that the rifles were immediately used to attack a bus carrying Israeli school girls in Israel. They arrested Damra at a checkpoint shortly after he received Abbas's appointment. The Americans immediately began pressuring Israel to release him.

In addition to Damra's direct involvement in Fatah terror, he also has close ties with Iran and Hizbullah. In 2002, Arafat reportedly appointed him Force 17's liaison officer to Iran and Hizbullah forces. The fact that Abbas appointed Damra Force 17's overall commander just weeks before Fatah and Hamas began Iran's proxy war against Israel by attacking the IDF position at Kerem Shalom and kidnapping Cpl. Gilad Shalit, should say something about Abbas's intentions. Yet, last week, Rice couldn't praise Abbas enough.

The State Department thinks Fatah is the lesser of two evils but "a snake is a snake." Is there any hope?