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What's in a name....





I've noticed that OpinionJournal has taken to referring to our current military actions as World War IV. Turns out their using the notion of Eliot Cohen, who wrote World War IV, which has this straight-to-the-point quote:



The enemy in this war is not "terrorism"--a distilled essence of evil, conducted by the real-world equivalents of J. K. Rowling's Lord Voldemort, Tolkien's Sauron or C. S. Lewis's White Witch--but militant Islam. The enemy has an ideology, and an hour spent surfing the Web will give the average citizen at least the kind of insights that he might have found during World Wars II and III by reading "Mein Kampf" or the writings of Lenin, Stalin or Mao. Those insights, of course, eluded those in the West who preferred--understandably, but dangerously--to define the problem as something more manageable, such as German resentment about the Versailles Treaty, an exaggerated form of Russian national interest, or peasant resentment of landlords taken a bit too far. In the reported words of one survivor of the Holocaust, when asked what lesson he had taken from his experience of the 1940s, "If someone tells you that he intends to kill you, believe him."
And he's right. Stroll around the assorted Arab, Islamic, Muslim--whatever--sites and you get a distinct and vitriolic view of the world. All of their problems are the fault of the United States and Israel. If only we'd go away...but leave the money!



All this talk of a Palestinian state, of the oppression of the Arab world, etc., is smoke and mirrors. There is a large movement (growing? spreading?) that longs for a great clash of civilizations, the one vast battle that will eradicate all non-Islamic faiths from the world. Osama bin Laden and his ilk want to set the world on fire.

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