Never Again ?

Searching through my personal archives I came across a frightening article by Charles Krauthammer that has stayed with me. I think one of the great misconceptions of the left and right views in this country is to selectively discount the word of others. Should a Bin Laden state he wants to kill all "infidels," do not discount such statement because it seems improbable by Western values. If the leader of the Iranian regime says he wants to destroy Israel in a great ball of fire at the same time they are fast breaking towards a nuclear weapon, pay attention. Let's not treat these people as pets that we can pacify with carrots and daises. Of course, it is imperative we educated ourselves, make every rational attempt at dialogue and work hard towards peaceful solutions. However, to simply ignore dialogue from a culture so different than our own culture is a huge miscalculation.

Never Again?

By Charles Krauthammer Friday, May 5, 2006

When something happens for the first time in 1,871 years, it is worth noting. In A.D. 70, and again in 135, the Roman Empire brutally put down Jewish revolts in Judea, destroying Jerusalem, killing hundreds of thousands of Jews and sending hundreds of thousands more into slavery and exile. For nearly two millennia, the Jews wandered the world. And now, in 2006, for the first time since then, there are once again more Jews living in Israel -- the successor state to Judea -- than in any other place on Earth.
Israel's Jewish population has just passed 5.6 million. America's Jewish population was about 5.5 million in 1990, dropped to about 5.2 million 10 years later and is in a precipitous decline that, because of low fertility rates and high levels of assimilation, will cut that number in half by mid-century.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/04/AR2006050401458.html