It’s Veterans Day, and that’s probably why I’ve been so acutely aware of the fact that we are engaged in two foreign wars and one domestic one.

Actually, I believe they are all the same war, which leads me to wonder about something.

I know they say freedom isn’t free, but, since I know as deeply as I can know anything, that freedom is the natural human condition, I can’t help wondering why we keep having to defend it from other humans seeking to destroy it.

I don’t even think it’s a matter of opinion – a matter of allowing others to live the way they want to. The only way everyone in a society can live the way they want to, is for that society to allow it – even for the ones who want to live differently from the majority. And that’s freedom.

What I don’t understand is some people’s driving desire to force everyone to accept their idea of what life should be.

I can understand argument and debate, but force is another thing.

I think mankind’s enemy – and make no mistake, mankind’s enemy has in this generation taken the form of Islamo-Fascism – believes that they can be free to believe as they wish only if all alternatives are destroyed.

It’s proof that something is fundamentally wrong with the ideology, and likely the entire religion, that its adherents believe that for it to survive, no one else’s beliefs can. The principal is similar to the way the Berlin Wall was proof of Communism’s fundamental wrongness.

If you have to build a wall to keep your people in, you’re doing something wrong. And, I’m pretty sure, that if you have to kill or threaten to kill people to get them to join you, the same diagnosis applies.

So, I don’t understand why some monster always seems to crawl out of the muck and convince a certain percentage of people that theirs is the only way and everyone who disagrees should die. You’d think that sort of disease would have been bred out of humanity by now. But, clearly not.

And for some reason, the best indicator of how the two sides – right and wrong, good and evil, light and darkness, whatever you want to call it — are doing, seems to be the number and severity of anti-Semitic incidents and, even more, the overall reaction to it.

For instance, it’s clear the Arab world is mostly enveloped in a thick dark cloud, some of the proof being obvious in it’s widespread, unapologetic anti-Semitism. The Muslim world reached a pinnacle of achievement during the days the Jews were allowed to flourish there mostly unmolested. Clearly those days, and Islam’s glory, are now long gone and tarnished beyond redemption.

If one reads the news about certain European countries in light of that concept, it’s clear they’re up to their eyeballs in the darkness.

The United States is still above water, but the dark forces are also at work here.

In the news just today, are stories of attacks against Jewish institutions on both sides of the country.

Sacramento’s Congregation Beth Shalom, which was covered with anti-Semitic graffiti this week, was among three in the same area torched in June, 1999.

At that time, the press reported “the community of Sacramento mobilized to take a stand against anti-Semitic hate crimes.”

News reports say the police are trying to determine if the latest attack was a hate crime.

Let’s see if we can help them figure it out.

The reports indicate “the vandalism included a swastika, the phrase “Kristallnacht still lives” and the SS lightning bolts symbol,” and that the bushes around the outside of the building were set on fire.

OK, there are lots of innocent explanations for that. Probably. Though I can’t think of any right of the top of my head.
Meanwhile, in Florida, a Jewish community center was vandalized this week, with gold spray-painted swastikas and the phrase “Jews shall die,” and, in a separate incident, “a heavy object” was reportedly thrown through the window of a Florida Jewish high school.

I’m sure it’s strictly coincidence that this happened on the heels of the massacre at Fort Hood of American military personnel on a Texas military base by an American born Muslim soldier.

Now, whether we are able to recognize all this as part of the domestic side of the same wars we’re fighting overseas, and have the guts to say so, remains to be seen.

We aren’t always able to see the forest for the trees, or willing to admit it, it seems.

For instance, in 2004, Vallejo, California’s only Synagogue was set on fire, and swastikas daubed around the inside of the building. The fire was started in the temple’s sanctuary. Police determined it was not a hate crime. I’m sure that’s because synagogues are so notorious for spontaneously combusting. They were doing it all over Nazi-occupied Europe, after all.

I think the miners’ canary is gravely ill. Maybe we need to air out the shaft.

 

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