The Cat's Finally Out Of The Bag

Submitted by Seamus MacNemi (United States), Jun 19, 2007 at 23:25

Surprisingly, I find nothing in this article that surprises me. My colleagues and I saw something of this sort back in 1969 but few would listen to us then.

It was just after the Six Day War that hints of this sort of thing started popping up in various coffee houses and radical hangouts. Though then most thought they were radical anti American types like the Weathermen. Underground America has always harboured some pretty extreme nut cases, but I don't think anyone at that point thought of something like an Isamic Jihad. The word Jihad just hadn't entered into our lexicon at that time.

Sure, there were all sorts of crazy religious ideas floating around but most of it seemed pretty tame compared to this. The revolutionaries were mostly political and had a disdain for religion. Most were Marxist-Leninist ideologues, though there were some closet Nazi types as well, pandering to the anti semitic crowd.

We would often sit around speculating about future events on the political horizon and how those events would effect our lives. For a lot of us, the recent war in Israel had set our future course pretty much in stone. More than a few emigrated to Israel and took up residence there. I was one of those who emigrated. Even though I was not Jewish according to Halacha I saw that as no barrier to my desire to live in Israel and I had a lot of Jewish friends who encouraged me to go with them.

The real bust came after the Yom Kippur War when I came back to America. I really began to feel it then, though at the time I couldn't put a name to it. When I saw grafitti scrawled on the walls of subway stations saying: "Burn Jews Not Oil" I thought it was just more Nazi stuff. It was later that I began to make the connection between Mein Kampf and Mein Jihad and it seemed that most of my friends had made the same connections simultaneously though there was nothing in the media which would support our suspicions. Islam, per se, wasn't even on the horizon as far as the American politcal view was concerned. Most people were still worrying about the communists. The Middle East was just a side note and nobody gave it much credence.

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