Lessons from the other Warsaw Uprising

Jonathan Tobin at JWR has a very good article on the lessons Europe and the world should remember from the Warsaw uprising. No not the Jewish ghetto uprising, the second one. When the Soviet Army was close to Warsaw, the Polish Government in exile in London radioed the resistance and said to take arms and liberate Warsaw like the French liberated Paris before the Americans got to the city. The Soviet Army would then enter a liberated city and defend it against the inevitable Nazi counter attack. At least that is how it worked in France with the US Army.

Stalin didn't want a bunch of non-communist to be around after he "liberated" Poland so the Red Army halted and let the Germans suppress the uprising and kill all the non-communists. It was after that the Soviet Army went forward and "liberated" Warsaw.

What lessons should Europe and the world take from this event? Well Tobin said it best:

Today, the Jews are again under attack, both by a Palestinian war of terrorism and a propaganda war of anti-Semitism, whereby the State of Israel — the place where the survivors of the Shoah found refuge in their ancient homeland — is deligitimized.

At the same time, the rest of the civilized world is also involved in a war, one against fundamentalist Islamic terrorists who seek to destroy Western freedoms.

But like some in the Europe of the 1930s and 1940s, there are many in the West who would like to pretend that the struggle of the Jews for survival is not one related to their own. Though the terrorists have killed thousands in New York and Madrid — and plot who-knows-what sort of mayhem for the future — many, especially in Europe, think the Jews of Israel are expendable.

So rather than join with the Israelis in a common fight against an Islamic movement that has taken up the cudgels that the Nazis laid down in 1945, they stand aside and seek to hamstring the Jews' efforts to defend themselves. They even condemn a defensive fence that seeks to deter suicide bombers, and have the gall to compare it to the ghetto walls that once encircled Jews. They forget that the same killers who today seek the death of the Jews will someday, if they get the chance, come for them, too.

The memory of both the Jewish and the non-Jewish victims of 1943 and 1944 should serve as a reminder that there is no substitute for collective action against a collective threat.

The war on Islamic terror, like the war against Nazism, cannot be divided between a Jewish war and a non-Jewish conflict.

As Europe learned 60 years ago, the monster will not be satisfied with only Jewish blood.