Jan Willem van der Hoeven, a native of The Netherlands, has been living in the Middle East for over 30 years. He is the founder of The International Christian Embassy Jerusalem and is today the director of The International Christian Zionist Center. He can be reached at iczc@iczc.org.il
More from Jan Willem van der Hoeven
	How should Israel solve the “Arafat problem”?
	Do the United States and Israel have a common enemy?
	Fear for fate of Israelis in New York
	Israeli reactions: solidarity with the American people, high alert at home
	Palestinian officials condemn attacks, strive to contain popular joy

No wonder, then, that NATO and many other countries felt the attack was, in a way, an attack on them as well, with NATO even coming out with the statement that an attack on one of thei r nations is interpreted as an attack on them all.

There are remarkable parallels between Pearl Harbor 1 and this, so to speak, Pearl Harbor 2:

Pearl Harbor 1 forced the United States to enter the war against Japan and the Nazis ­ a scourge against the free democratic world of that day. Pearl Harbor 2 may force the United States to really enter the war against the scourge of the fanaticism of Islam in our day.

The main characteristic of both Nazism and fanatical Islam has been that they above all targeted the Jewish people as their main enemy.

What we saw happening in Durban just a few days before the terrifying Muslim-originated attack which struck New York and Washington DC, was a concerted effort by nearly all the Muslims of the world to denounce and de legitimize the Jewish state of Israel; an awful verbal forerunner ­ much as the one the Nazis sent before launching the Holocaust ­ of the expunging of Israel as sovereign Jewish state from their Arab Muslim midst. That only the U.S. and Israel walked out of that Nazi-like atmosphere revealed how sick and decadent most the world has already become ­ jelly fish in a sea of modern, neo-Nazi like sharks.

Hard as it is to say, perhaps a disaster of the magnitude which has now befallen the United States of America will prove to have been necessary to shake, and open the eyes of, the Western World as to the real danger of this Islamic assault on the freedom and democracy of peace-loving nations. There have been many such instances and reminders over the years that could have succeeded in awakening this gigantic western democratic jellyfish. But as most of these attacks were directed mainly against the Jews and Israel, they failed to get the nations to sit up and really search for a serious response to these bastard acts of murder and terrorism.

It is usually only when we ourselves get hit that we begin to take notice and react. So it has been this time. The desperate hope is that this time the thousands of victims whose lives were cruelly snuffed out did not enter eternity in vain ­ that now the nations, including Israel, will really act as required.

Make no mistake, Islamic terror did not begin with Osama bin Laden and it will not end with Osama bin Laden, even if U.S.­led forces are able to track him down and eliminate him and his fighters.

No. To win this war, the U.S.-led coalition needs to be completely honest as to the characteristics of the worldwide threat of Islamic fanaticism, and in identifying its supporters. Only then will there be any hope of freeing us from its scourge and threat.

But will the West muster the strength to be as honest and courageous as it needs to be? Will political expediency and economic interests not once again play havoc with the very resolve now cou rageously spoken by all western leaders?

Views expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect those of israelinsider.

© 2001 Koret Communications Ltd. All rights reserved. Terms of Use.