Game Changer

There is a great scene from Groundhog Day where Phil the weather man says to a mocking news anchorwoman:

“For your information, Hairdo, there’s a major network interested in me.”

I had a Phil moment watching the above clip.

CNN anchor Erin Burnett (with no mean hairdo) is interviewing Pamela Gellar about her ad with the slogan “Support Israel, Defeat Jihad” and she condescendingly feels the need to define “jihad” for Pamela as follows:

“The word "jihad" actually means struggle, and technically in the Koran, to improve yourself, to make yourself a better person.”

Pamela Gellar counters with:

“Actually, in the Koran nothing speaks to a spiritual struggle. It’s all holy war.”

Two things are absolutely clear. Firstly that Erin is absolutely convinced that she is right about jihad being concerned with self improvement. And secondly, she can’t possibly have read the Muslim "holy” book.

The above interview starkly brings into focus the yawning gap between reality, on the one hand, and the progressive understanding of it. On planet Liberal, Islam is a sort of misunderstood Buddism for excitable types, but back on planet earth it is a misogynist, Dark Age ideology responsible for more than 19,000 terror attacks on "infidels" around the world since 9/11.

Erin's widely held fantasies wouldn’t matter over much if we were facing the failed and demoralized remnants of a once mighty world empire as our grandfathers were. Instead what our generation is witnessing is that, in the shadow of western decline Islam has rediscovered its Mojo.

Muslim populations are surging across the world. Its young people no longer look on the west’s staggering achievements with awe and as a beacon of progress. Muslims who have emigrated to the rich west in search of opportunity actively oppose the freedom which is the basis of that wealth. Islamic clerics and leaders think nothing of placing bounties on the heads of western citizens for insulting their religion whilst indulging in orgies of spite about the rest of us. Muslim holy men and opinion formers deny the holocaust. Iranian leaders repeatedly call for the annihilation of Israel. And…

Iran is in the final stages of building a nuclear bomb.

Now if Erin and the vast majority of talking heads are right and jihad is about spiritual struggle and Muslims generally are no more inclined to violence than anybody else, we have nothing to fear. A nuclear armed Iran will be deterred by a nuclear armed Israel just as the US and the Soviet Union were by each other in the Cold War.

But …

What if, unlike the Soviets, the Iranian leaders really believe in the next world?

What if they really believe that, according to the holy Koran, the Jews are "descended from apes and pigs"?

What if they really believe that it is their religious duty to annihilate Jews?

What if they are prepared to pay the price of the Israeli counterstrike?

What if the number of victims of Iranian terrorism over the last 33 years has only been limited by their killing capability?

Well, in the next couple of months we will learn Israel’s take on those questions. If they are inclined to take the Iranians at their word, they must strike first.

And things may come to a head pretty soon. Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has a five-week window of opportunity, because Obama will have to support any Israeli attack before the US presidential election or lose critical support from a pro-Israel US citizenry.

But if he decides to give the Islamic Republic the benefit of the doubt, we will all learn over the next few years whether he made the right call.

I wonder if, even in the wake of a nuclear firestorm over the holy land, Erin wouldn’t still think the Islamist perpetrators had been terribly mistaken in their understanding of jihad and Islam?