On the evening of Dec. 7, 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt ordered FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to pick up German agents in the United States, including those bent on sabotage. Hoover did so, even though the U.S. was not yet at war with Germany, and would not formally declare war even on Japan until the next day. By the time Germany declared war on the U.S. on Dec. 11, quite a few German agents had already been detained.
But let's pretend that they hadn't been picked up. Let's suppose they had all come out of hiding and banded together in, say, the Boston area, where, with Concord as their base, they destroyed historic buildings, terrorized the population and killed everyone who wouldn't become a Nazi.
Presumably, the U.S. would have sent planes to bomb the bases of the Nazi terrorist forces. Americans on the ground along the seaboard would have cheered the sight of bombers flying wing to wing.
Remember, we are pretending. So what if some of those wings would have had swastikas on them? What if German planes, perhaps launched from ships offshore, had joined the effort to destroy the Nazi terrorists? And what if the White House had publicly thanked our German allies in these raids, boasting that it was not the U.S. alone that was destroying the savage foe?
Does that sound very likely? Well, it's pretty close to what's going on right now as our planes fly alongside those of Qatar and Saudi Arabia in the air war against ISIL.
If it's impossible to imagine Germany helping us to destroy Nazi terrorists, it's almost as ludicrous to go into battle alongside Qatar, which funded ISIL, and Saudi Arabia, which not only has funded terrorists for years (most of the 9/11 killers were Saudis), but has ensured for a very long time that the education of its young emphasizes hatred of the West, and which sanctions violence as an appropriate expression of that hatred.
The rulers of these states may not believe in the terrorism that they fund and teach. But they've made a little deal. In exchange for being able to keep their palaces and their truly astonishing wealth, not to mention a lifestyle when abroad that tends to veer from Islamic orthodoxy, all they had to give their mullahs were the minds of their population. And this they have done. Generations have been taught not how to compete effectively in the global economy, but rather to hate and to kill. (Actually, only half a generation: the women aren't taught anything.)
And these are our allies in the war on terror? Exactly so. The Nazi analogy is pretty harsh, but all too apt.
