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Jewish World Review June 17, 2002/ 7 Tamuz, 5762

Don Feder

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Fascism is the only evil liberals can easily recognize

http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com | Ever wonder why the villain in action flicks is so often a neo-Nazi? It's because fascism is the only evil liberals can easily recognize as such?

The last expatriate from the Third Reich resides in an Argentinean nursing home. Skinheads could convene in a toilet stall. As a viable force, Nazism disappeared almost 60 years ago.

Yet neo-Nazis have become a Hollywood staple. The new movie "The Sum of All Fears" involves a billionaire Austrian industrialist who sets off a nuclear device in Baltimore to start a war between America and Russia, so European fascists can take over the world. (Your chances of being killed in a terrorist incident orchestrated by Nazis are comparable to dying at the hands of renegade Shriners.)

In real life, there is no shortage of madmen with the means to slaughter Americans en masse.

The Sept. 11 terrorists weren't advocates of Aryan supremacy. Neither were those who killed 241 Marines in Beirut in 1983, bombed Pan Am 103 in 1988 or blew up two U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998.

All were Moslems. But the only believers Hollywood is ready to take on are Christians.

Then there's the Asian arm of the axis of evil. According to the June 7 New York Times, North Korean prison guards systematically murder newborns by using their boots to crush the infants' skulls or forcing their mothers to smother them.

Dear Leader Kim Jong Il has allowed 4 million of his subjects to starve to death, while the party and army are well-fed and Kim stockpiles food against the day he goes to war.

North Korea will soon be able to build missiles with a 6,000-mile range. Kim has threatened to launch "a suicide attack to plunge the damned U.S. territory into a sea of flames."

The approved liberal response to this clear and present danger is negotiations and bribes. As the commencement speaker at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy last month, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright complained that the Bush administration "warns about the dangers posed by ballistic missiles, but needlessly delayed negotiations with North Korea on how to reduce that very threat."

And what exactly will be accomplished by talks with a regime that commits genocide against its own people, is the chief proliferator of weapons of mass destruction and threatens to incinerate the United States?

But negotiate we did. Under the 1994 Agreed Framework, a masterpiece of Clintonian diplomacy, Washington has delivered millions of tons of fuel oil and food to North Korea and is helping Pyongyang build two light-water reactors in return for its promise to halt its nuclear weapons program.

But the North refuses to allow inspections of its nuclear facilities, and the light-water reactors can also produce fissionable material.

Still, why worry? From Albright's perspective, Kim and company are misguided economic planners who can be reasoned with.

Equally delusional, Jimmy Carter recently went to Cuba to push engagement with the only totalitarian regime in the hemisphere as a way of moving the island toward democracy. The peace camp continues to carp about Bush's "hard-line" on Iraq. (Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld charges Saddam is developing nuclear and biological weapons for first-strike use.)

Whether it's Islamic fundamentalism or genocidal Stalinism, liberals are loath to confront evil that hasn't been moldering in the grave for half a century.

They just don't get it. You can't trust people who hate everything you stand for and are sworn to your destruction. How can you reach a meeting of the minds with those whose henchmen crush the skulls of babies? How do you negotiate with hatred, repression and holocausts?

Once, liberals understood this. At some point in the Cold War, they lost their moral bearings. Avoiding war at all costs, non-judgmentalism and tolerating the intolerable became their exclusive focus.

While the FBI arrests a convert to Islam with Al Qaeda ties who planned to explode a dirty bomb, Hollywood tells us the most likely candidate to commit mass murder on our soil is some goose-stepping tycoon. Perhaps Bush should establish a Cabinet department to protect us from Nazis in Armani suits.

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JWR contributing columnist Don Feder's latest books are Who is afraid of the Religious Right? ($15.95) and A Jewish conservative looks at pagan America ($9.95). To receive an autographed copy, send a check or money order to: Don Feder, The Boston Herald, 1 Herald Sq., Boston, Mass. 02106. Doing so will help fund JWR, if so noted. He is also available as a guest speaker. To comment on this column please click here.


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© 2002, Creators Syndicate