We May Have Found Our Winnie

Via the 910 Group Blog, I found the following:

I understand this is an unpopular war. When I stepped forward to define the enemy as ... fascists, I was ridiculed by the media and others, saying that my words were too harsh, saying that at worst my defining the enemy was incorrect, at best it was inflammatory. But I did so because I believe words matter. If you are going to confront an enemy you have to understand who that enemy is and you have to communicate that to the people...

Ellipses mine.

Now, who does that sound like?

I've been reading The Gathering Storm, by Winston Churchill. Immediately, I saw the resemblance to the old man, ignored by all, ridiculed by many, leaving public life a failure. A failure whose time had passed, they said. Good riddance - he clearly didn't understand the modern world. He was a dinosaur, who yearned for the bad old days of Empire. Too bad.

...what have we seen over the past 6 months? We saw a situation in the central synagogue in Prague where the Islamic fascists intended to carry out, on Rosh Hashanah, a mass kidnapping when large numbers of Jews would be celebrating the new year. When the world’s attention now was focused on Prague, they designed to make impossible demands and then blow up the synagogue and everyone within it. Those people were not marked for death because they supported the war in Iraq. They were not marked for death because they oppressed these Islamic fascists. They were targeted because they were Jews. This is evil.

Islamic terrorists organized an assault on civilian aircraft leaving London, planning to blow up 10 or more planes this summer as they flew over the North Atlantic. You may not know that two of those participants were a husband and a wife, a husband and a wife who were going to board that plane and explode that plane over the North Atlantic while holding in their arms their 6-month-old child.

This is evil.

Islamic terrorists slaughter innocent Iraqis every single day on both sides of the divide within Islam. As we know, in recent days they beheaded an orthodox priest and crucified a 14-year-old boy guilty of nothing but being Christian.

This is evil.

Almost everyone has now heard of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the fact that he denies the existence of the Holocaust and called for Israel to be wiped off the face of the Earth. But he has been remarkably clear about his mission, remarkably clear about his messianic vision of a Shiite religion, his vision to destroy the Western world and impose a caliphate on the world in which the world would submit to Islam or die in the process.

He said:

Is it possible for us to witness a world without America and Zionism?

Then he answered himself:

But you had best know this slogan and this goal is attainable and surely can be achieved.

So do we have any questions about the nature of our enemy? Do we have any questions about the capability of this oil-rich country? Yet just this past week President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sent an open letter, a conciliatory letter, to the American people, addressed to the “noble” American people. He called on America to withdraw from Iraq and end support for Israel, and, of course, to convert to Islam. This man may be a fanatic, but let me assure you he is not a stupid fanatic. This man understands and studies America. The Islamic fascists respect us enough to get to know us. They respect us enough so they know what buttons to push and how hard to push them. They respect us enough to figure out what it will take to defeat us.

He gets it.

I was beginning to despair. To think that we would NEVER get one person in public life who saw the problem, and cared little enough for his career to name it squarely.

Bernard Lewis tells a familiar opinion that he has. He tells a lot of them. He said that the oddity in particular of the Arab and Middle Eastern Islamic world is that the more we have strong relations with the government in an Arab Muslim country the more the people of that country hate us; and the more that we stand up and confront leadership of those countries the more the people like us. Is it no wonder he recounts on the day of 9/11 when there was but one Middle Eastern Muslim capital there was a candlelight vigil in support of those who died on 9/11, and that was in Tehran, Iran.

It is not hard to understand when you have regimes throughout the Middle East who oppress their people that when you stand up and confront those regimes and call them the evil they are the people understand and respect your honesty, agree with you, and support you.

There's a lot more - it's worth your time to read it.

Me, I'm making a copy of that speech. When my great-grandchildren ask about how we finally saw the light at the end of the tunnel, I'll pull out that copy, and tell them of the day I finally started to take hope.

Because someone finally got it.