Whoa, Walter!by
Charley
Reese Walter Williams, in a column deriding those of us who wish to avoid mass murder as being appeasers, says, "Today's Americans are vastly different from those of my generation who fought the life-and-death struggle of World War II." Whoa, Walter, that's jive, and you know it. You were born in 1936. You were 9 years old when World War II ended. Your generation didn't fight any struggle. You've spent your adult life in academia. You served two years in the peacetime Army, just like I did. We were both born in a lucky year. Williams boasts of our capacity to "wipe out" Syria, Iran and any other country with nuclear weapons, but then opines that we just don't have the will. Metaphors and abstractions are dangerous. What he's really saying is that we have the capacity to burn the bodies of millions of babies, children, their parents and grandparents. We have the capacity to commit mass murder of innocent people on a scale that would make Timur or Genghis Khan envious. There is no valid parallel between the rise of Nazi Germany and anything going on in the Middle East. That old canard that World War II was caused by appeasement is dragged out of the closet by the warmongers every time their cockamamie schemes meet opposition. There are no Hitlers in the Middle East. There are no Germanys in the Middle East. Only a great industrial power has the capacity to produce enough nuclear warheads – and the missiles with which to deliver them – in sufficient numbers to threaten the United States. There are no great industrial powers in the Middle East, not one. There are not likely to be any in the foreseeable future. In short, no country in the Middle East is a threat to the United States. No country in the Middle East, including Iran, is a threat to Israel. Israel has the most advanced tanks, the most advanced aircraft, the most advanced missiles and the largest and only arsenal of nuclear warheads in the region. It is relevant to note that Iran has never threatened Israel with physical destruction, American misreporting notwithstanding. It has said repeatedly that it is not a threat to any country in the region, including Israel. It has said repeatedly that it does not desire to build a nuclear weapon. Before you dismiss that statement, be honest enough to recognize that for 12 years Iraq said truthfully that it had no weapons of mass destruction, and the same crowd now clamoring to go to war with Iran claimed that it did. Do you want to let the same crowd con you twice? When it comes to the Middle East, there are two main sources of lies – Washington and Tel Aviv. The war party in power in Washington wants to go to war with Syria and Iran. It wants to go to war because its people are so stupid they can't solve the problems that beset that area. They get frustrated. War is always the simplistic solution: Well, I don't know what else to do, so just bomb the bejeebers out of them. To justify it, the war party lies and seeks to get Americans to think like fascists and racists. Kill the foreigners. Wipe them out. But those people in those countries are human beings just like us. They marry, they have children, then grandchildren. They love, they work, they study, they dream. They don't deserve to be butchered because some dumb politicians have a quarrel with their politicians. Hezbollah, Syria, Iraq and Iran had nothing at all to do with the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
September 4, 2006 Charley Reese [send him mail] has been a journalist for 49 years. © 2006 by King Features Syndicate, Inc. |
Those
who profess to be Christians should ask themselves what Jesus would
think of condoning the mass murder of children. I think he would
look at their mangled and torn little bodies, hear their screams
and then slam the door of heaven in the face of everybody who had
anything to do with it.