The New Threat

In an essay at the New Republic, Daniel Goldhagen (author of "Hitler's Willing Executioners") warns of the dangers posed by the radical politics of Islamic fundamentalism.

The figure who most formidably exemplifies contemporary political Islam is not Osama bin Laden. It is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, with whom Hamas forms a tag-team of interlocking support. (Iran has just announced that it will help fund the Hamas-controlled Palestinian Authority.) Ahmadinejad's by-now-notorious Holocaust denial was no act of a rash militant. More than being merely anti-Semitic, it was a symbolic political gauntlet, a declaration to the West that he, Iran, and political Islam seek to overturn what is understood to be truth, who is owed moral respect, and who will determine the contours of acceptable politics. It should have been no surprise that Ahmadinejad's Holocaust denial came as warp to the woof of his Hitlerian exhortation that Israel should be "wiped off the map" and his confrontation with the West over restarting nuclear production.
This rhetoric of mass murder, though shocking to Western publics and political Islam's more naïve apologists, is entirely consistent with the genocidal rhetoric and proto-genocidal violence already long practiced by political Islam's vanguard--especially Hamas and Iranian-controlled Hezbollah--euphemistically known as "suicide-bombing."

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