Don Feder
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
December 8, 2006
Don Feder delivered the following speech to the Americans for A Safe Israel National Conference (“America And Israel – The Present Danger”) held in New York City on December 3, 2006. – The Editors.
You have a problem. It’s a problem shared by Jews in Hebron, Serbs in Kosovo, Hindus in the Kashmir, Catholics in Lebanon, and Americans walking the streets of New York.
Consider the inter-connectedness of the following incidents, all of which took place in the past few months:
* In Indonesia, three Christian schoolgirls were beheaded.
* In Iraq, a Syrian Orthodox priest was kidnapped, tortured, and murdered.
* In Somalia, a nun was shot to death as she left the hospital where she worked, tending the sick and dying.
* In Lebanon, just days ago, a cabinet minister was assassinated.
* In Britain, authorities uncovered a conspiracy in which native-born Brits plotted to blow up several trans-Atlantic flights, killing as many as 3,000.
* In Afghanistan, suicide bombers are at work again.
* In Iraq, they never stopped. Additionally, the week before last, a group of worshippers were abducted from a mosque, doused with gasoline and burned to death in what’s described as “sectarian violence.”
* In France, a high school philosophy teacher is in hiding after very credible death threats following publication of a September 19th commentary in Le Figaro.
* Some 139 people died in riots in Nigeria, Libya, Pakistan, and Afghanistan – following the publication of Danish cartoons.
* Europe is experiencing the worst wave of anti-Semitic violence since Kristallnacht. The former director of the U.S. Holocaust Museum reports there an average of 12 assaults a day on Jews in Paris.
* In Kosovo, 90 percent of Serbs gave been ethnically cleansed from the province since 1999. The rest live in a state of siege.
* In Mumbai, India, a series of blasts killed almost 200.
* In Gaza, terrorists recently celebrated the latest “ceasefire” by raining more rockets on southern Israel.
* And the leader of more than a billion Catholics received death threats and demands that he convert after giving a speech in which he called for a balance of faith and reason, and quoted a 14th century Byzantine emperor.
What do the foregoing have in common?
To quote columnist Mark Steyn, in his excellent book America Alone: The End of The World As We Know It, it begins with an “I” and ends with a “slam.”
I am not saying that all Muslims are terrorists. I am saying that almost all terrorists are Muslims – the mother of all no-brainers – and that Islam is a faith that is, shall we say, terrorism-friendly. I challenge you to name another faith in which your entry into Heaven is assured by killing those of another faith in a holy war.
I am not saying that Muslims are inherently bad people. Most Muslims are like most people everywhere. I am saying that there are elements in Islam that incline adherents to commit the crimes detailed a moment ago.
I am saying – and let me be clear about this – that a faith embraced by as many as 1.3 billion people worldwide contains within it the seeds of the evil we see all around us – seeds which require only the right conditions to germinate. It all goes back to the Koran.
Ladies and gentlemen, we are in the midst of a world war, one every bit as deadly as the Cold War, and with a potential for devastation to rival World War II. Actually, the Cold War is a bad analogy. For perhaps the 20 years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, almost no one was willing to die for Communism. Today, ten of millions – perhaps hundreds of millions – around the world would gladly die, and kill, for Dar Islam.
But we make a fatal mistake if we think of Islam only in terms of suicide bombings, sniper attacks, death threats, forced conversions, female genital mutilation, honor killings, jihad-this and fatwah-that.
Every bit as important is what’s going on in maternity wards from Brussels to Bombay.
Of the 10 nations with the lowest birthrates, nine are in post-Christian Europe. And the ten countries with the highest fertility rates? That’s right – starts with an “I” and ends in a “slam.”
Fertility rates in the Muslim world look like this: Niger (7.46 children per woman), Mali (7.42), Somalia (6.76), Afghanistan (6.69), and Yemen (6.58). The Palestinian woman in Gaza who – at age 64 – just became the world’s oldest suicide bomber was the mother of nine and (at last count) the grandmother of 41.
Between 1970 and 2000, while the share of the world’s population represented by the industrialized nations declined from just under 30 percent to just over 20 percent, the share accounted for by the wonderful world of jihad rose from 15 percent to 20 percent.
Compared to the rest of the industrialized world, the United States is experiencing a veritable population explosion – with a birth rate of 2.11, just about replacement level. From there, it’s demographic winter as far as the eye can see: Canada (1.5), Germany (1.3), Russia and Italy (1.2) and not-so-sunny Spain (1.1). The latter three nations could cease to exist, as they are currently constituted, within the next 50 years.
According to a November 21st Washington Times story, by 2015, more than half the soldiers in the Russian Army will be Muslims. And you thought the Czar was bad! By 2020, over 20 percent of Russia’s population will be reading the Koran, religiously.
Within the lifetimes of some in this room, the UK, France Belgium, and the Netherlands could go Islamic green. For the present, Muslims comprise 10 percent of the French population. But of “Frenchmen” under 20, fully 30 percent share the faith of Osama bin Laden, Baby Assad, and Iran’s nut-cake leader.
You can talk all you want about population control being the happy result of higher standards of living, careers for women, sex education, contraception and access to abortion. In fact, it’s becoming the assisted suicide of the West. What it really comes boils to is this: Confident societies have babies. People with a sense of mission have children. Nations with a sense of destiny and faith in the future fill maternity wards, and nurseries and cradles.
Those that believe in God as a vague, philosophical concept (if He exists at all), don’t. Instead of the future, they put their trust in 401(k) plans, elaborate state welfare systems, and gated retirement communities.
There are still enough of those of us who care enough to act. But the hour grows proverbially late.
Everyone is so focused on their own thing that they miss the larger picture. Zionists rightly worry about Palestinian terrorism and fate of Israel should Judea, Samaria, and Gaza become Hamas-istan.
Serbs decry the destruction of ancient churches, monasteries, and shrines in Kosovo – not to mention the ethnic cleansing that followed NATO’s victory over Slobodan Milosevic – and worry about the province being permanently detached from Serbia.
Hindus anguish over the ongoing violence in Kashmir, supported by Pakistan, which has claimed more than 50,000 lives in the past 20 years, as well as terrorist acts in the rest of India.
Groups like Voice of the Martyrs meticulously document Christian persecution in the Muslim world. Lebanese Christians lament the demise of the last Christian country in the Middle East and Hezbollah creating a state-within-a-state. Coptic Christians complain about the treatment of their co-religionists in Egypt. And the beat goes on. But these are all part of a seamless chador. What happens in Kosovo affects the Kashmir. As Judea and Samaria go, ultimately, so go Lebanon and London.
In retrospect, it’s easy to see that a number of events in the 1930s were steps leading to the Second World War: Hitler’s rise to power, the remilitarization of the Rhineland, the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, German and Italian intervention in the Spanish Civil War, the Japanese conquest of Manchuria, and so on. It’s always easier to see the interconnectedness of events and the significance of trends in retrospect – well after the fact. But at least after Pearl Harbor, most Americans understood that they were at war. It’s been five years since this generation’s Pearl Harbor, and most of us still don’t have a clue.
When word of Pearl Harbor reached London, Winston Churchill called Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The conversation ended with the British prime minister telling the American president: “Well, we are all in this together now.” As indeed they were; as they probably had been since the early 1930s, though almost no one was aware of it at the time.
Well, my friends, we truly are all in this together – Jews and Catholics, Lebanese Christians and Hindus, Orthodox Serbs, and Indonesian Christians. Until we begin to understand that, we have no hope of countering the global jihad. When Zionists start caring about the fate of Serbs in Kosovo, when Hindus support Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria (designated the West Bank), when Serbs stand up for Indian Kashmir, then we will begin making progress.
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Don Feder is a former Boston Herald writer who is now a political/communications consultant. He also maintains his own website, DonFeder.com.
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