World War III has begun: A war on truth, freedom, and justice - opinion

Let me begin by saying, unequivocally, that I am not an alarmist by nature.

In fact, I am a confirmed optimist, especially when it comes to Israel and the Jewish people.

We have a mandate from the Almighty that we are an eternal nation that can never be expunged; we have gone head to head against the great empires of history and watched them fade into oblivion while we survive, against all odds. And, as far as our presence in Israel goes, despite having twice been exiled from our land, we believe that this time we are here to stay and will not be expelled again.

Having said that, I fear that the road ahead is a treacherous one, and the fight for survival will test us to the limit. In fact, I believe that we have already entered a Third World War.

But, like old age and credit card debt, it creeps up on you in increments, barely noticeable, until suddenly you are overwhelmed and shocked by it. You may deny it, pooh-pooh it, or close your mind to it, but face the facts: This is war. A global war that extends far beyond the Middle East, though that is its epicenter.

Like most wars – World War II is a perfect example – it is fought on two fronts. The first arena of combat is the physical one, whereby nations seek to overwhelm their neighbors and swallow their land. Hitler whetted his appetite with the Sudetenland, and then went on to conquer most of Europe, even as his Japanese allies feasted on the nations of the Pacific.

At the same time, an ideological battle is also being waged. The Nazis sought to impose their vision of a supremacist, all-powerful Third Reich upon the entire world, fashioning a brutal system that would create a hierarchy of rulers and subjects, comprising super-human, human, and sub-human divisions, with Germany at the top of the pyramid and Jews at the bottom. The fuhrer would displace God in order to determine what was right, what was moral, and what was justified.

This helps to explain Hitler’s obsession with wiping out the Jews, for the Jews, as God’s chosen people, represent the primacy of God on Earth and thereby threatened the Nazi’s plan to create a new world order. As long as the Jews existed, that plan would be frustrated.

In our current war as well there is the issue of land. In the limited scope and the short term, the Islamic radicals of Hamas, Iran, Hezbollah, and “Palestine” seek to devour Israel, the wondrous country that we have developed.

Backed by almost an entire world that is one part evil and one part ignorant, they fabricate history by denying our ancient, ongoing connection to the Holy Land, seeking to displace us with yet another fundamentalist, racist, totalitarian state that enriches the leaders while oppressing the majority of its members.

On a larger scale, however, this is just one small skirmish in a global battle that would see Islamic dominion spread across the entire planet, with some allowance – perhaps temporarily – for other, similar totalitarian regimes like Russia and China, which have their own ravenous appetites for swallowing up their neighbors and spreading their own ideologies.

A war of ideologies

WHILE THIS world war revolves around the acquisition of land and partisan belief systems, it is also a War on Freedom, a War on Justice, and a War on Truth.

In this conflict, universal human rights are flippantly cast aside, as they are deemed, at best, a distraction, and at worst, an impediment to world progress. While much lip service is spent glorifying the role of women, for example, they can also be raped at random by the real powers when the situation calls for it. Diversity is a holy virtue, they crow, but only as far as it extends to those deemed worthy. Whites, Jews, and intellectuals need not apply.

In this war, as in most wars, truth is the first casualty. For the forces of darkness to succeed, they must prevent the light of truth from shining on their agenda and exposing its demonic nature. And so, they invoke the woke rule that there is no abstract truth, no baseline of what is right and wrong. After all, “You have your truth, and I have mine.”

And so, the savage behavior of Hamas terrorists can simply be denied – despite the evidence and testimony that even the terrorists themselves have provided – and the so-called courts of justice can pompously focus only on the side that they predetermine is guilty.

They will be eagerly assisted by all manner of accomplices, from the useful idiots of world campuses, who mindlessly mouth their mantras of “Free Palestine,” to the editors of The New York Times, who despicably focus almost all their attention on the suffering of the victimizers and precious little on that of the victims.

Sadly, but not completely unexpectedly, even fellow Jews are caught up in the war frenzy, either due to misplaced mercy or, more likely, because of their desire to jump on a beckoning bandwagon that thinks it has discovered the coolest cause of the century.

But these misguided ignoramuses – including those vile neo-Nazis who masquerade in Jewish costumes and travel to Iran to praise the fallen Ebrahim Raisi and participate in Holocaust-denial conventions – will be among the first victims if their mentors succeed in their devilish plans.

We have seen their type before – the Datans of Egypt who supported Pharaoh; the Hellenists who fought the Maccabees; the Trotskyists (Leon Trotsky was born Lev Bronstein) who helped lead the Communist revolution, et al. They were all eventually doomed to be disgraced and discarded in the dustbin of history.

As the worldwide insanity proliferates, Jews – and our courageous supporters – are going to be under increasingly greater pressure. The success of anti-Israel zealots in inflaming the public will energize them to passionately push the envelope even more.

More and more countries will abdicate their previous commitments and support a “Palestinian state,” despite – or perhaps because of – the growing Islamization that is rapidly decimating their own particular culture and ultimately threatening to control them.

After the US elections in November – which will provide whoever prevails with a four-year cushion of unhampered mobility – there is no telling what policies may be enacted. And on the street, anti-Jewish actions – or “Aktions” – will proliferate.

As we have seen so vividly, there are no distinctions between “Zionists” and “Jews,” and so no Jewish institution can be assumed to be safe. Jewish day schools, synagogues, kosher restaurants, Chabad houses, etc., will all come under increasingly violent attack. It will not surprise me if Jewish ritual observance – brit milah, shechita (ritual slaughter of kosher animals), eruvin enabling Shabbat observance, and more will come under fire – literally. After all, war is war.

WHAT, THEN, can be done? What does the future hold? Who will win this Third World War?

One scenario sees the world descending further into continual chaos, with Europe and America capitulating to the growing masses of false liberation, led by Iran, Russia, China, and the Islamists.

Another scenario is that sanity will ultimately prevail, and – as happened in World War II – the free nations of the world will recognize the threat to their way of life and rise against the enemy both without and within. That will entail no small amount of blood-letting – even, perhaps, civil wars – but in the end, society will be saved.

A third scenario is put forward by the Yalkut Shimoni, a 13th-century commentary on the Talmud by Rabbi Shimon Ashkenazi Hadarshan of Frankfurt. He paints a prophetic picture of what will happen in the “end of days,” a chillingly relevant picture. He writes:

“There will come a time when the nations of the world – led by the king of Persia and the nations of Edom [Europe] – and including the former friends of Israel – will combine to fight us. Many will flee from Israel in panic. The initial battles will go against us, causing many more to run away from Israel.

“But the brave of heart will remain, and just when things appear the darkest, God will cause the other nations to turn on one another and God will send us the message: ‘Do not fear; everything that I have done is for your benefit, to destroy the evil kingdoms and eradicate evil from this world so that the final redemption can come.’”

No one alive today is a prophet. No one has divine inspiration. There are no heavenly voices to guide us, and so we cannot know the future. But what we do know is that life in Israel, every day, is a nes, a miracle.

Yet, at the same time, it is a nisayon, a test. We are all being tested, and we must be up to that test.

We will have hard times with much suffering. We will have our doubts. But we will persevere in this latest war, so long as we hold on to the truth that, in the words of the prophet Samuel, “Netzach Yisrael lo yishaker” – the eternity of Israel can never be false. 

The writer is the director of the Jewish Outreach Center of Ra’anana. 

rabbistewart@gmail.com