The Gathering World Storm

The gathering storm of the 21st century is quite visible in many places in the world, but apparently not sufficiently for many Americans to see it coming. When individuals, including the president of the United States, try to warn the citizenry that this storm has yet to hit the country in full force, they are dismissed by many Americans, most of them bitter partisans of the party out of power, as well as pacifists and radical populists, as prevaricators, warmongers and incompetents.

the attack on the pope was only the latest signal from the supranational terrorists that their target was not merely the State of Israel, the American government and Jews everywhere. Evangelical Protestants, already identifying with Israel and the fate of Judaism as tied with their own, had very early recognized the gathering storm. So did individual Catholics. But with the brutal reaction to Pope Benedict XVI, the terrorists made plainer than ever before their true target and goal, the destruction of western civilization itself by violence. Liberal religious persons, and secular Christians and Jews, in many cases, remain skeptical of the storm ahead, and often lead the rhetorical campaigns in the media and in political campaigns to denounce those who warn of its imminence and try to prepare for it. When the next wave of attacks do come, these naysayers, of course, will try to make the world forget their shortsightedness, just as the isolationists did after Pearl Harbor, just as those Frenchmen who caved into Hitlerism tried to do after the Vichy regime fell, just as Europe tried to do after the Holocaust was revealed in its full horror, just as the Common Market did after ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia, just as Africans are doing while Darfur sinks into further depravity.

When American apologists for terrorists, and others who feed on their own political correctness or other grievances, recently criticized the use of the phrase "Islamo-fascism," they attempted, consciously or unconsciously, to avert the world's attention from actual and historical origins of the hatreds in the Middle East, and the womb of the ideology of much of the terrorism from which has grown a supranational threat and a gathering world storm.

Recent gloating by these apologists that they had successfully suppressed the term "Islamo-fascism" by associating it with their negative perceptions of President Bush, Prime Minister Blair, and the efforts to prepare for and combat the gathering storm, was premature. The term is exactly and historically accurate. It will not go away. Nor will the storm.
Barry Casselman

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