Greetings from the French Hill: As It Is With us, So Shall It Be With The Rest Of The World

-Eric Hoffer was a journalist and author, amongst other things. He was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He died in 1983. He wrote the following article in the LA Time in 1968. He could have written it yesterday. It is still that relevant. READ IT CAREFULLY!!

ISRAEL'S PECULIAR POSITION
By Eric Hoffer (LA Times 5/26/68)

The Jews are a peculiar people: Things permitted to other nations are forbidden to the Jews.

Other nations drive out thousands, even millions of people, and there is no refugee problem. Russia did it. Poland and Czechoslovakia did it. Turkey threw out a million Greeks, and Algeria a million Frenchmen. Indonesia threw out heaven knows how many Chinese--and no one says a word about refugees.

But in the case of Israel, the displaced Arabs have become eternal refugees. Everyone insists that Israel must take back every single Arab. Arnold Toynbee calls the displacement of the Arabs an atrocity greater than any committed by the Nazis.
Other nations when victorious on the battlefield dictate peace terms. But when Israel is victorious it must sue for peace. Everyone expects the Jews to be the only real Christians in this world.

Other nations when they are defeated survive and recover, but should Israel be defeated it would be destroyed. Had Nasser triumphed last June, he would have wiped Israel off the map, and no one would have lifted a finger to save the Jews.

No commitment to the Jews by any government, including our own, is worth the paper it is written on. There is a cry of outrage all over the world when people die in Vietnam or when two Negroes are executed in Rhodesia. But when Hitler slaughtered Jews no one remonstrated with him.

The Swedes, who are ready to break off diplomatic relations with America because of what we do in Vietnam, did not let out a peep when Hitler was slaughtering Jews. They sent Hitler choice iron ore and ball bearings, and serviced his troop trains to Norway.

The Jews are alone in the world. If Israel survives, it will be solely because of Jewish efforts and Jewish resources.

Yet at this moment Israel is our only reliable and unconditional ally. We can rely more on Israel than Israel can rely on us. And one has only to imagine what would have happened last summer had the Arabs and their Russian backers won the war to realize how vital the survival of Israel is to America and the West in general. I have a premonition that will not leave me; as it goes with Israel, so will it go with all of us. Should Israel perish, the holocaust will be upon us.

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-Suzanne Fields explains how Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld's comments that those who do not wish to confront terrorism are the same as the appeasers to the Nazis were absolutely correct.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who likes historical analogies, compares the appeasers of Germany in the run-up to World War II to his critics who stubbornly refuse to see in full the terrorists who want to destroy the civilized way of life, and us along with it.

The 1930s were "a time when a certain cynicism and moral confusion set in among the Western democracies." Men and women who should have known better refused to see what was writ large and plain before their eyes, and what Winston Churchill meant when he said that accommodating Hitler was "a bit like feeding a crocodile, hoping it would eat you last." The analogy to modern appeasement is not exact, but the faint-hearted who demand a quick withdrawal from Iraq are trying to appease a hungry crocodile. The French, as the Germans of the Weimar Republic had before them, wore blinkers looking at the crocodile. Those most blinded to the evil threat of Hitler were exactly those with the most to lose.

Many intellectuals and Democratic politicians of our own time resemble the Germans so soothed by rhetoric and intoxicated by the creativity of the 1920s and early 1930s that they could not see how all they held dear could be destroyed by Hitler. The Germans were afflicted with a terminal naivete, confronting the emerging fascists in their country, just as many Americans are confronting the "new fascism."
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