Coincidences About Life and Death

By Alan Caruba

If you’re a writer, you begin to notice how various pieces of information come at you in what appears to be a random fashion, but which have a curious way of connecting. That’s because everything human connects in some fashion. Nothing human happens in a vacuum.

On Sunday evening, the famed “60 Minutes” had a segment on the Israeli Air Force, interviews with its commander and with some of its pilots, including one girl who was small enough to be asked if they made uniforms in her size. She flew a U.S. made Apache helicopter, the kind the Israelis use to kill the leaders of Hamas if they can find them driving around Gaza. They use them to suppress the daily rocketing. She was only one of forty in her class who earned the right to kill Israel’s enemies in this fashion.

Others flew large fighter planes, acknowledging that Israel rules the skies. That’s a good thing because the field from which they fly is only fifteen minutes from Beirut or Damascus. Everyone, young men and women, in Israel must serve in its defense force, but the Air Force has the right to choose the best among them to fly. It is not a choice for those called to this duty and, even then, only the best among them will have the responsibility.

Israel cannot lose a single war. So far, as it makes ready to celebrate its sixtieth year, it has not. Against impossible odds, the Jews fought, triumphed, and survived. It is not a coincidence. They have no intention of being killed like sheep as occurred to six million European Jews during World War II. Some of the survivors made it to Israel to reclaim their lives and to resurrect their nation.

Later Sunday evening, I turned to the National Geographic Channel and it had a program that showed extremely rare photos of the commandant and staff of Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp where, astoundingly, a million Jews were systematically killed between 1944 and the end of the war in the following year. The work for the staff was very demanding, trainloads of Jews would arrive and as many as 8,000 at a time had to be sent to the gas chambers, their bodies burned in the crematoriums.

The photos of the staff showed them relaxing from their task. In one, maybe twenty women are shown being given blueberries, all young, smiling. In others, the men seemed in good spirits, including a smiling Dr. Mengele who, by age 32, had both a medical degree and one in philosophy. They were happy in their work and their work was not war, but murder, genocide.

The photos of a trainload of Hungarian Jews showed men, women, and children of all ages, including a mother holding her baby. With the exception of those separated to become workers, all were killed within hours of arrival. The mind cannot comprehend murder on such a scale.

The Israeli Air Force general put it this way, when Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, repeatedly says he wants to wipe Israel off the map, you have to take him at his word.

The world did not believe what the Nazis were saying until it was too late to realize they were telling the truth when the said that Europe must be “judenfrei”; that all the Jews must be killed. Not surprisingly, Ahmadinejad also denies that the Holocaust ever happened.

About seven months ago, the Israeli Air Force blew up a nuclear facility in Syria that we are now told was being built under the supervision of North Koreans whose chief export is death. It is only a matter of time before the Israelis will have to destroy the Iranian nuclear facilities being built, we’re told, for “peaceful” purposes. One hopes that American bombers will be flying with them.

As the war clouds gathered, the British tried to negotiate peace with the Nazis. The Russians signed a peace pact. In 1939 the Nazis attacked Poland and, as they say, the rest is history. History teaches that you cannot negotiate with murderers, with people who have a history of taking hostages, with men obsessed with the belief that their god commands them to do monstrous evil. You must kill them before they kill you.

The Israelis know this.

One hopes the rest of the world and, especially, America, does as well.