How many of us are part of the silent majority? This is by far the best explanation of the Muslim terrorist situation I have read. His references to past history are accurate and clear. Not long, easy to understand, and well worth the read. The author of this email is Dr. Emanuel Tanay, a well-known and well-respected psychiatrist. A man, whose family was German aristocracy prior to World War II, owned a number of large industries and estates. When asked how many German people were true Nazis, the answer he gave can guide our attitude toward fanaticism. ‘Very few people were true Nazis,’ he said, ‘but many enjoyed the return of German pride, and many more were too busy to care. I was one of those who just thought the Nazis were a bunch of fools. So, the majority just sat back and let it all happen. Then, before we knew it, they owned us, and we had lost control, and the end of the world had come. My family lost everything. I ended up in a concentration camp and the Allies destroyed my factories.’ We are told again and again by ‘experts’ and ‘talking heads’ that Islam is the religion of peace and that the vast majority of Muslims just want to live in peace. Although this unqualified assertion may be true, it is entirely irrelevant. It is meaningless fluff, meant to make us feel better, and meant to somehow diminish the spectra of fanatics rampaging across the globe in the name of Islam. The fact is that the fanatics rule Islam at this moment in history. It is the fanatics who march. It is the fanatics who wage any one of 50 shooting wars worldwide. It is the fanatics who systematically slaughter Christian or tribal groups throughout Africa and are gradually taking over the entire continent in an Islamic wave. It is the fanatics who bomb, behead, murder, or honor-kill It is the fanatics who take over mosque after mosque. It is the fanatics who zealously spread the stoning and hanging of rape victims and s. It is the fanatics who teach their young to kill and to become suicide bombers. The hard, quantifiable fact is that the peaceful majority, the ’silent majority,’ is cowed and extraneous. Communist Russia was comprised of Russians who just wanted to live in peace, yet the Russian Communists were responsible for the murder of about 20 million people. The peaceful majority were irrelevant. China’s huge population was peaceful as well, but Chinese Communists managed to kill a staggering 70 million people. The average Japanese individual prior to World War II was not a warmongering sadist. Yet, Japan murdered and slaughtered its way across South East Asia in an orgy of killing that included the systematic murder of 12 million Chinese civilians; most killed by sword, shovel, and bayonet. And who can forget Rwanda, which collapsed into butchery. Could it not be said that the majority of Rwandans were ‘peace loving’? History lessons are often incredibly simple and blunt, yet for all our powers of reason, we often miss the most basic and uncomplicated of points: Peace-loving Muslims have been made irrelevant by their silence. Peace-loving Muslims will become our enemy if they don’t speak up, because like my friend from Germany, they will awaken one day and find that the fanatics own them, and the end of their world will have begun. Peace-loving Germans, Japanese, Chinese, Russians, Rwandans, Serbs, Afghans, Iraqis, Palestinians, Somalis, Nigerians, Algerians, and many others have died because the peaceful majority did not speak up until it was too late. As for us who watch it all unfold, we must pay attention to the only group that counts–the fanatics who threaten our way of life. Lastly, anyone who doubts that the issue is serious and just deletes this email without sending it on, is contributing to the passiveness that allows the problems to expand. So, extend yourself a bit and send this on and on and on! Let us hope that thousands, world wide, read this and think about it, and send it on – before it’s too late.
Emanuel Tanay, M.D.
Verse number three, comes from a Jewish poem, Haddanut, written in Aramaic in 1050 by Meir Ben Isaac Nehorai, a cantor in Worms, Germany. The music was arranged by his daughter Claudia Faustina Lehman Mays. She was born July 15, 1892 in Griswold, Iowa. One of nine children, she harmonized many of the songs written by her father. She died February 19, 1973 in Medford, Oregon.
work, more followed. At work, during short intervals of inattention (break time), more words came which he jotted down until he had completed the first two verses. When he got home, he went to the old upright piano and composed the melody for the two verses and chorus. However, a hymn has to have three verses to be complete. As he tried to write the third, he found the words were not falling into place as had the first two. As he tried to figure out what to do, he remembered about the poem he had heard at a camp meeting. The profound depths of the lines moved him to preserve them for future use and it was not until coming to California that this urge was fulfilled. He knew that he had saved the card with the poem but where was it now? His search was soon rewarded because he had used it for a bookmark. As Lehman again read the words, his heart was thrilled just as had happened when he heard them originally. This time he noticed some smaller print that told this story, "These lines were found in translated form on the walls of a patient's room in an insane asylum after the patient's death." As he set the words to the third verse to the tune, he found they matched exactly. God knew when he had the poem, written in 1050, that it would be translated into English and brought to America at the exact time Lehman was going to need it to finish this hymn. That is 867 years from the time the words were written and they traveled half-way around the world to be joined with this song. Since then, this hymn has been translated into at least 18 languages. This hymn was first published in Songs That Are Different, Volume 2, 1919.
