Evil forces usually triumph initially over the forces of good. The Nazi, fascist, and Communist dictators did. Why so?

Evil forces enjoy certain advantages. They plot in secret against unsuspecting enemies. They usually have a clear, common goal. Fanatics care more about their goal. They are uninhibited about the means they use.

By contrast, the forces of good (not always so good) usually are not clear about their goals. Not being fanatical, they refrain from certain means and may defer confrontation in the hope that delay will yield a solution, or that someone else may do the confronting. Nowadays, their notion of all cultures being equally valid dilutes suspicion of their enemies. They don't learn from the past, and repeat mistakes. Some are corrupted by the enemy. Their disunity causes political rivalry by different parts of our government to interfere.

In past struggles, democracies had time to learn that they must struggle against imperialist dictatorships and to learn how to do it. The mobility, accuracy, and power of modern weapons has reduced that shelter of time. Consider the current world war of jihad.

Some of the presidential candidates do not understand or won't admit that jihad has formed an axis challenging our survival as severely as did earlier challenges. These candidates campaign against the little that our President has waged against jihad as "stupid," but it is they who do not understand the struggle of the day. Some of them or their constituents contend that the US should not fight against certain terrorists, because they are not in the Al Qaeda that attacked us on 9/11.

The jihadists, however, constitute an informal allianc e, of which Al Qaeda is just part. S. Arabia and Iran cultivate Muslims and turn the never-ending supply into more enemies. Each part of the axis attacks, develops, or assists attackers somewhere. We must defeat them all, we and everyone else not associated with them. Thus our first problem is failure to recognize the extent of the enemy. Our President failed for a long time to identify the enemy, though he was more advanced in doing so than those who call him stupid.

On the other hand, for various reasons, largely that the State Dept. traditionally is anti-Zionist, US policy has been to assist the Palestinian Arab and other jihadists against Israel. Also inconsistently, the US tolerated terrorist forces in the Kurdish area of Iraq.

There is some question how much of Pres. Bush's heart is in this struggle. He has business interests or social ties with the Saudis. He calls Islam a religion of peace, makes speeches about the war intermittently, and has not tried to rally the country to a world war. The Saudis have corrupted the State Dept. and some of our universities. They infiltrate with curriculums and professors that promote their biased view and undermine a vigorous defense of our society's values.

The State Dept. played politics against the Defense Dept.. The result is that the US did not try to get a change of regime in Iran, and did get changes of regime in Iraq that brought Islamists to power.

Some Christian sects still are immersed emotionally in ancient disputes, and fail to see that those disputes, as against the Jews, have lost their urgency, and the new one, with Islam, threatens to swamp Christianity. Putin has reverted to traditional Russian imperialism.

Popular myopia and myths about conflict resolution keep the West from demanding action against Iran. Iran is building not only large conventional forces capable of attacking neighboring sources of our oil supply, as did Saddam, but nuclear and missile forces.

One of the myths that hamper our defense is that negotiations can resolve jihad. Not true. Fanatics can't be persuaded their mission of religious supremacy is wrong. Negotiations are for civilized people, not for barbarians, such as jihadists.

Islam is threatening to return us to a Dark Age that would be worse than the original one, because contemporary governments can more easily prevent their overthrow. A man who does recognize the danger nevertheless thinks that it would take the US a long time to be taken over by the Muslims. The Muslims would have to build up to a majority, he thinks. Not so.

Islam constitutes both an internal threat and an external one. The external one includes Iran, already mentioned. If Islam takes over Europe, they get nuclear weapons with long-range missiles. They also could start to cut off our imported supplies.

The notion of needing a majority is based on the concept of playing by democratic rules, not what totalitarians do. Mussolini and Lenin staged coups in Italy and Russia. A determined minority can swing power. They also use the West's own rules for civil liberties to paralyze opposition to it. Thus a certain Saudi billionaire sues publishers and speakers in London for libel and slander. British law favors the plaintiff. Many defendants cannot afford lengthy trials. They give in. They are forced to apologize and withdraw publication. We lose freedom of speech and the press. We can't even alert our people to the menace.

On many campuses, we have lost freedom of speech. Muslims and their leftist supporters intimidate opposition speakers. Muslim and leftist professors use the universities to propagandize, in effect, to carry out their war against youths' minds. The The West carries political correctness and multi-culturalism, the latter really being a one-way process favoring Islam, to an insane extent. Muslims can and do criticize their Western hosts and Jews bitterly and falsely, but it is considered not politically correct or tolerant to object and to study Islam objectively, which means to find it inconsistent with Western values. Problem is, in Europe and among the US leftists, Western values are rejected, although Islamic values are the epitome of brutality and intolerance. What ideals has the Left?

One of the values that I find among many liberals is a kind of pacifism. They think war is wrong and killing is evil. They mean well but are misguided. To leave evil people free to organize mass-murder of innocent people is wrong and not killing them is evil. As they say in the Westerns, when someone feels guilty over having slain his attacker, "Some people "need killing."

One friend lamented the deaths in Iraq. How she counted them and to whom she attributed them, she did not say. For all the terrorists killed, I say, well done, troops! The problem with our policy is letting centers of Islamist cultivation continue to develop terrorists.

Another value is dread of hate. I dislike prejudices, but can see the utility of marshalling conscience and emotion against Nazism or Islamism. Some people "need hating." Western countries, however, are banning expressions of hate. An early example was European banning of Holocaust revisionism. How did that interference with free speech get started? It is one thing to ban totalitarian movements such as Islamism, and to ban incitement of Muslims to violence by defamation, because they readily respond to incitement that for other ideologies would not present a clear and present danger. It is another and improper thing to legislate against expressing disapproval of groups. Some groups and ideologies, such as Islamists and Islam need disapproval. Nevertheless, under the ban, truth is not a defense! In Italy, merely asserting the need to save Italy from Islam can get a person convicted of denouncing a group. Inconsistently, nobody pursues the Muslim clergy who preach every week vile and false charges against major groups and urge followers to murder them. Folly!

Richard Shulman is a veteran defender of Israel on several web-based forums. His comments and analyses appear often on Think-Israel. He provides cool information and right-on-target overviews. He distributes his essays by email. To subscribe, write him at richardshulman5@aol.com

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