Back to The Dark Ages - live from the Middle East! [Excerpts]

*(Hanson, Jewish World Review,  Oct. 26, 2006 ).

The most frightening aspect of the present war is how easily our pre-modern
enemies from the Middle East have brought a stunned postmodern world back
into the Dark Ages.

Students of history are sickened when they read of the long-ago, gruesome
practice of beheading. How brutal were those societies that chopped off the
heads of Cicero, Sir Thomas More and Marie Antoinette. And how lucky we
thought we were to have evolved from such elemental barbarity.

Twenty-four hundred years ago, Socrates was executed for unpopular speech.
The 18th-century European Enlightenment gave people freedom to express views
formerly censored by clerics and the state. Just imagine what life was like
once upon a time when no one could write music, compose fiction or paint
without court or church approval?

It is almost surreal now to read about the elemental hatred of Jews in the
Spanish Inquisition, 19th-century Russian pogroms or the Holocaust. Yet here
we are revisiting the old horrors of the savage past.

Beheading? As we saw with Nick Berg and Daniel Pearl, our Neanderthal
enemies in the Middle East have resurrected that ancient barbarity -- and
married it with 21st-century technology to beam the resulting gore
instantaneously onto our computer screens. Xerxes and Attila, who stuck
their victims' heads on poles for public display, would've been thrilled by
such a gruesome show.

Who would have thought centuries after the Enlightenment that sophisticated
Europeans -- in fear of radical Islamists -- would be afraid to write a
novel, put on an opera, draw a cartoon, film a documentary or have their
pope discuss comparative theology?

The astonishing fact is not just that millions of women worldwide in 2006
are still veiled from head-to-toe, trapped in arranged marriages, subject to
polygamy, honor killings and forced circumcision, or are without the right
to vote or appear alone in public. What is more baffling is that in the
West, liberal Europeans are often wary of protecting female citizens from
the excesses of Sharia law - sometimes even fearful of asking women to
unveil their faces for purposes of simple identification and official
conversation.

Who these days is shocked that Israel is hated by Arab nations and
threatened with annihilation by radical Iran? Instead, the surprise is that
even in places like Paris or Seattle, Jews are singled out and killed for
the apparent crime of being Jewish.

The Goths and Vandals did not sack Rome solely through the power of their
hordes; they also relied on the paralysis of Roman elites who no longer knew
what it was to be Roman -- much less whether it was any better than the
alternative.

[Civilization] is forfeited with a whimper, not a bang. Insidiously, we have
allowed radical Islamists to redefine the primordial into the not-so-bad.
Perhaps women in head-to-toe burkas in Europe prefer them? Maybe that crass
German opera was just too over the top after all? Aren't both parties
equally to blame in the Palestinian, Iraqi and Afghan wars?

To grasp the flavor of our own Civil War, impersonators now don period dress
and reconstruct the battles of Shiloh or Gettysburg. But we need no so such
historical reenactment of the Dark Ages. You see, they are back with us -
live almost daily from the Middle East.

(Hanson, Jewish World Review,  Oct. 26, 2006 ).