The phone rings. I pick up. How are you?
I dont know what to answer. Automatically I say, Fine, thanks . . . I stop in the middle. Im fine, but Im not fine.
How can I be fine when criminals stab innocent Israelis to death and radical Islamists murder innocent Frenchmen?
How can I be fine when the world is anything but fine?
When evil flourishes?
When growing numbers of people have no respect for human life, including their own?
Who is fine anymore?
The world forgot the lesson of 9/11.
We thought that a few victories would mean that Islamic terrorism went away, or that it was confined to faraway places.
We thought we defined the war. It would be fought on our terms. We would impose timelines and deadlines, and be done with it.
This war would be relatively painless. Some shock and awe from the air, then a short mop up operation on the ground.
I was shocked when President Obama said last week that one reason he wont launch an American military showdown with ISIS is because he visits Walter Reed Hospital twice a year and meets soldiers without limbs soldiers, he said pointedly, that he sent into battle.
If he wasnt prepared to do that, should it become necessary, he shouldnt have run for the office of commander in chief. Can you imagine Dwight D. Eisenhower or John F. Kennedy making a statement like that? War is hell, another presidents general said.
What is new in the 21st century is the ease with which we have forgotten the lesson of 9/11, namely, that we face a different kind of enemy. An enemy with the fanaticism that only religious faith (distorted or not) can muster.
We should have known this simply by virtue of the emergence of the suicide bomber, the shahid, and the promiscuous stabber.
But they emerged in faraway places. The bell tolled, but not for us.
Then, when it did toll for us, on 9/11, we couldnt muster the resolve to fight the enemy to the end. We became complacent, because the suicide bombings happened to others in Israel, Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan and other faraway places.
We acted as if this would never touch us.
We acted, for example, as if only we did not arm the rebels in Syria when the civil war there began a very small conflict back in 2011, and a very uncomplicated one then, lacking as it did radical Islamic forces we would be safer.
We now learn that our oscillation between inaction and impatience to be done with the nasty business only spawned a far more widespread embrace of radical Islam than was evident even on 9/11.
How are you?
Not fine. However, I would be, if not actually fine, then at least better if I knew that our American leaders stopped making excuses for evil, stopped finding ways to explain it as a consequence of our actions or inaction as if fanatical religious faith were not autonomous.
Its tough for people who do not take religion seriously to understand that fanatical religion is beyond the reach of secular explanations such as poverty and unemployment.
In my youth there was a bestseller, The Ugly American. Its main point was that American foreign policy overseas failed because Americans were unable to see foreigners on their own terms, instead clumsily and ineffectively imposing American mores in places governed by other mores.
We still havent learned.
We still think that things that matter to us life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and of material wealth are what drive everyone else. Mentally, we still impose our mores on segments of humanity that do not share them. Were making the same mistakes we did back in the 1950s. Except that this time, they come to kill us.
Terrorism will not go away just because we knock off a couple of leaders who became symbols, such as Osama bin Laden or Jihadi John. To be sure, let the world be rid of them; but to think that this makes a significant difference, to think that this is a major victory in the war against terrorism, is delusional.
Its a big enemy out there.
Its not going away due to the loss of a couple of symbols.
This enemy will take advantage of every weakness we manifest such as ignoring it or figuring it can be defeated strictly by air power or by others.
It can be defeated.
If we will it.
If we acknowledge that we face religious fanaticism, that its reformation is a sina qua non to success.
We must acknowledge that this will not be a war like earlier ones, that it will take full faith in our values and a blatant battle against theirs by every means necessary: ideological, educational and military Yes, ideological. Our enemy is an idea as well as a gun.
Today we face the again in Never Again. The barbarian is at the door. 9/11. Mass murder in Paris. Literally hundreds of evil acts of terror between these two markers.
How many wake-up calls do we need?
Hillel Goldberg can be reached at hillel@ijn.com
Copyright © 2015 by the Intermountain Jewish News
