ISIS too Evil for Civilized Minds to Process

I didn’t watch that video of Islamic State butchers beheading twenty-one Egyptian Coptic Christians on Libya’s Mediterranean coast. The still photos of the terrorists leading the Christians to their doom told me all I wanted to know.

I just finished a book on the Nazi’s death camp Auschwitz authored by Miklos Nyiszli, a Hungarian Jew who served as Dr. Josef Mengele’s pathologist for nine months in 1944. The book presents a jarring narrative of Mengele’s cruelty, Nazi psychopathy and the appalling industrialization of murder from the viewpoint of a man who spent most of a year staring into the Auschwitz maw.

Nyiszli served with Auschwitz’s 12^th Sonderkommando. The Sonderkommando was a group of about 800 inmates who helped shepherd the Jews into the gas chambers and then stacked the dead bodies into the crematoriums. In exchange for this grizzly work, the Sonderkommando were well fed, well clothed and provided with comfortable quarters. Each Sonderkommando served four months and was then executed. Their successors’ first task was to load the previous Sonderkommando’s remains into the crematoriums for disposal.

Every Sonderkommando knew its fate and could predict the approximate date of its annihilation. And yet all but one marched meekly to their deaths.

A remarkable part of Nyiszli’s book is the scathing forward, written by Bruno Bettelheim. Bettelheim savaged the book’s author and the Jewish submission to the Nazis. Stories of Jews marching obediently to their deaths remain one of the enduring mysteries of the holocaust.

But as those Coptic Christians demonstrated, such submission is not unique to Jews. And I’m beginning to think that those Coptics’ acceptance of their fate serves as a metaphor for the entire civilized world’s submission to ISIS savagery. We’re not putting up serious opposition and it’s our government’s official position that we’re not actually at war with these barbarians.

This last Tuesday, Attorney General Eric Holder denied that we were at a war. One of Obama’s first priorities as president was to treat terrorism as a law enforcement problem. And the nation’s top law enforcement officer says, “What war?”

On that same day, at a conference on “violent extremism,” Vice President Joe Biden, who was selected to give Obama “gravitas” in foreign policy, declared himself an expert on Somalia because he had taken so many rides from Somali taxi cab drivers.

And to top it all off, the previous evening, during an interview with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf insisted that, to fight terrorism, we need to create jobs in Islamic countries. No doubt raising the minimum wage would help too.

What all these people need to do is read an exhaustively researched essay by Graeme Wood in the March issue of Atlantic Monthly titled: “What ISIS Really Wants.”

Wood interviewed Islamic State recruiters and spokesmen in western countries, as well as the world’s leading Islamic scholars. Because he prefers his head on his shoulders, he declined to visit the Islamic State. What he found was that, for the true believer, the Islamic State is the purest manifestation of Islam since the 7^th century. The allure of the Islamic State for fundamentalist Muslims is attributable to its strict adherence to the Koran. Muslims who have been taught all their lives to pray for the restoration of a caliphate have their first legitimate caliph in a millennium.

ISIS slave markets, ISIS crucifixion of children, ISIS rape of women, and ISIS burning and beheading of non-Muslims and Muslims who exhibit insufficient purity are not just permitted by the Koran, but required by Mohammed’s teaching.

They don’t want jobs. They want Paradise. Theirs is an apocalyptic doctrine that has as its ultimate goal, hastening the end of the world.

And it is the official policy of the Obama administration that if we could create jobs for them, busting tires, flipping burgers, or manning phones in call centers, Muslims and Christians could live together in perfect harmony.

So here we are, marching ourselves into oblivion like the Jews of Auschwitz with our own government operating the crematoriums. There was nothing unique about the European Jews submission to Hitler’s domination. Their civilized minds simply could not intellectually process the Nazis’ depravity. Similarly, too much of western civilization refuses to admit the reality of the Islamic State.

And there are even those who seem to think we have it coming. Our own president ignorantly repeats the Muslim propaganda that the Crusades justify terrorism.

The ovens are waiting.