Browsing through French-language and other Europe-generated news articles online, I have noticed how often the term "nazi-islamist" or some derivitive thereof is used. It is really not uncommon. However, I have yet to hear something like it in U.S. media. I find it extremely telling that in countries where there are still living memories of Nazi terror, one's mind easily recognizes the similarities between the agenda of the Third Reich and the agenda of modern Islamic fundamentalists. It is disturbing that the typical American mind has yet to connect the dots.

In the past decade, historians have written extensively on the ties between Islamic fundamentalists and Nazi Germany at the height of WWII, particularly the ties of the then-Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el-Husseini, with Hitler's SS. The Mufti appears during the war on both the payrolls of both the SS and Mussolini. It is likely that he was involved in instigating uprisings in Baghdad. When the war ended he was wanted as a war criminal in Yugoslavia, where in Bosnia Nazis had eliminated nearly the entire Jewish population. Although he received bags of gold and other payment for his efforts, the only official request of the Mufti was that once Germany won the war, it would liquidate all the Jews in Palestine, along with the state of Israel.

Amongst the varied divisions of the SS was one Hanjar (aka Hanzar) Division of the Waffen SS, under the command of SS Brigadier General Karl-Gustav Sauberzweig, a volunteer division intentionally recruited from amongst Muslims from the Balkans, Bosnia and Herzegovina. The fez-sporting Hanjar Division ("hanjar" meaning "sabre") was the pet project of Himmler, who during the war established an official school for their training - the Mullah Military School in Dresden. The Hanjar Division is estimated to have slaughtered 90% of the Bosnian Jews.

It is significant to note that when Hitler first rose to power in 1933 Germany, offers of congratulations came immediately from Muslims in Jerusalem and elsewhere in the Arab world. After all, the groups shared a common goal: elimination of Israel and of the Jewish race, and domination of world governments by their own Anti-Semitic ideology.

But what does this mean today? To begin with, both Arafat and Saddam Hussein seem to have had familial and other ties to the Arab supporters of the Nazi regime, and both have admittedly looked for inspiration to the Nazi Party's birth and to Hilter's life and writings. Because the ideologies of Hitler's Germany and Islamic Fundamentalism share so many similarities and this common history, it would seem naive to assume that there is no leftover Nazi inspiration for the modern Islamic terrorist movements.

But what is more unsettling is that we are failing to address anew the serious phenomenon of the Nazi rise to power within a civilized Christian country. We need to restudy the ways in which persecution of the Jews and other "undesirables" became acceptable to the average German psyche quite gradually and quietly. By the time it became the terrorism it was by the late 1930s, Germans were ready to look the other way and calmly allow the Nazi takeover of their country and those of their European neighbors. Toward the final months of the war, as the ashes from nearby crematoriums rained down upon their cities like snow, what were they thinking? What were they thinking as they continued to deny that any mass extermination was taking place amidst them? Where did they suppose their Jewish neighbors had disappeared to?

As we see Muslim populations increase quickly in the cities around the western world, and hear government-sanctioned pro-Jihad rants in the streets of these cities, as we hear the open threats of these jihadists against western populations and governments, as we hear leaders of Arab nations proclaim their conviction that Israel has no right to exist, are we pulling the wool over our own eyes as the German people did a mere half a century ago? Can we afford to let this happen - again?

When America and its allies prevailed against the Nazi threat in 1945, we were still a predominantly Judeo-Christian, God-fearing nation. At some late point in the war, we recognized evil for what it was, and insisted that the German people and Germany's friends do the same. Of course, this came after a related menace came to our shores at Pearl Harbor. So somehow in the end, we won the war and the plans of the Nazi regime and its Islamic allies came to a halt.

Perhaps the Judeo-Christian God was with us, perhaps it was just Luck on our side, perhaps it was our superior military technology, perhaps a populace that understood future consequences far more fully than do the young of the modern Western world. The next time around - as the monster creeps closer and we remain sleeping - will we be so lucky?