What started in the 1950s as a six-country grouping bound by reformed trade rules is now a 27-member bureaucracy

Adrian Michaels begins by assessing the EU’s health and worth as its 27 members combat recession and square up to the might of China and the US .

When it comes to thinking about the European Union, compare what a Briton could have done on a whim one September morning in 1949 with what might seize your fancy 60 years later.

However much you may dislike budget airlines, you can, for the cost of an inexpensive dinner, head out instantly to Tallinn, or Faro, or Krakow or any one of dozens of European cities. You don’t need to wait days or weeks while applying for a visa. If you have some euros left over and travel to the 16-country eurozone, you won’t have to organise currency exchanges. And if Aarhus, or Bucharest, or Dortmund takes your fancy, you can settle down and start working. Or buy a house. Or fall in love. You can move, with relatively little difficulty, from one country at peace to another, from the shores of the Atlantic to the upper reaches of the Baltic and out to the Black Sea. Technological and amorous advances aside, all this has been made possible by the grand European integration project, formed out of the smoking ruins of the most devastating war in our history. It probably exceeds the wildest dreams of its founders.

The EU, which we use today as shorthand for the union and its predecessor incarnations, has its critics. What started in the 1950s as a six-country grouping bound by reformed trade rules is now accused by many of being an interfering 27-member bureaucracy led by an elite that is out of touch with the wishes of millions of Europeans.

Unemployment is climbing steeply and growth has stumbled badly. There is a crisis in the market capitalism that has been championed by the EU for decades. Ageing populations are leading us towards disaster in our tax and social security systems, and there is growing resentment of an accumulation of powers in Brussels, of further enlargement and immigration.

People are asking what being "European" means, and what the EU should stand for in a global system increasingly influenced by the newly powerful, such as China and India.

For much of its history, those have been easy questions to answer. The EU stood for peace and prosperity. Dismantled trade restrictions and freedom of movement have vastly increased economic activity and wellbeing; and the countries of western Europe have not been at war with each other for decades, meaning the EU must be judged to have succeeded in its most important task.

In 1943, Jean Monnet, the French statesman with the greatest claim to be the EU’s founding father, declared, in the midst of war: "There will be no peace in Europe if the states rebuild themselves on the basis of national sovereignty, with its implications of prestige politics and economic protection ... The countries of Europe are not strong enough individually to be able to guarantee prosperity and social development for their peoples…[They] must therefore form a federation or a European entity that would make them into a common economic unit."

And so it has come to pass, up to a point, though it has not meant peace throughout Europe. Conflict has raged in the Balkans and the countries of central and eastern Europe have not been calm until relatively recently. Georgia and Russia went to war, briefly, only last year.

But peace in the West is itself very rare. Timothy Garton Ash, professor of European studies at Oxford University, says it is "unique. Without precedent. So long as there’s been a Europe there’s been fighting."

Some argue that peace has been more a result of the existence of the Nato military alliance, which came into being in 1949. But the point is impossible to prove, as neither Nato nor the EU has existed without the other. Supporters of the EU point out that Brussels has given us – in Mr Garton Ash’s words - "a massive conflict resolution mechanism". In spite of the terrible failure to prevent conflict just outside its borders, in places such as Kosovo, war is virtually unthinkable between EU member states; the principle is established that we sort out our divisions, often at tedious length, around a table.

This is potentially a great selling point for the EU as the world grapples with the big multilateral issues of our day such as climate change and nuclear proliferation. Mario Monti, a former European commissioner, now president of Milan’s Bocconi University, says the EU’s founders might be disappointed at the lack of political union that has so far been forged between members.

"On the other hand," he says, "the recipe put in place by the founding fathers has proven prophetic as the world moves to globalisation. The Monnet method of co-ordinated governance is really the name of the game in the world now."

José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, who hopes to be reappointed shortly by members of the European Parliament, writes in his recent manifesto: "The European Union has had almost 60 years as a laboratory for cross-border supranational co-operation, making it a natural champion of global governance."

He says that we feel every day the EU’s experience and quiet diplomacy. His office has, for example, been writing, unheralded, large parts of the communiqués and agreements associated with G20 summits.

But inventing a system isn’t the same as running it. England gave football and cricket to the rest of the world, but it still gets beaten regularly at both. And there are plenty of countries such as China and Russia who do not in any case subscribe to a continuous global pow-wow.

"In a world of giants, we need the scale that only the EU brings," says Mr Garton Ash. But, he adds: "I see little evidence that the rest of the world is moving towards a series of versions of the European Union. There is limited co-operation…and great big nation states who regard postmodern shared sovereignty as anachronistic."

The Brussels co-operative can look wasteful, argumentative and slow. And when China and the US hold bilateral summits, they underline that the EU seems to be losing importance, an odd position for 27 countries that together bind 500 million people in the world’s largest economy.

Membership of the euro has probably saved some countries such as Ireland from bankruptcy, but Europe’s countries have nonetheless been hammered in the global downturn. Unemployment in Spain is heading for 20 per cent. The Latvian economy has been shrinking at an annualised rate of 19 per cent. Meanwhile, it seems for now that many other countries such as the US will emerge from economic crisis faster, and more robustly, than the EU 27.

Bruegel, the respected Brussels-based think-tank, suggested recently: "There is now a distinct possibility that this crisis will be remembered as the occasion when Europe irretrievably lost ground, both economically and politically.

"Economically, there is a risk that…the crisis will result in a spiral of near-stagnation, rising public debt and declining innovation performance. Politically, the European Union is at risk of being blamed for having fostered a liberalisation agenda in the past rather than being praised for having promoted a co-ordinated response to the crisis when it struck."

Millions of Europeans clearly have little interest or faith in what is happening in Brussels. Turnout for the European parliamentary elections this year was a woeful record low of 43 per cent. That represents a failure as much for Eurosceptics, who have failed to raise a significant dissenting vote, as for Europhiles.

Matters may have been different in the years after the Second World War, but many in Europe have lost the appetite for bold, integrating initiatives. Instead, they are aghast at a Brussels elite they think is spending taxes without accountability and taking the EU in a centralised, federal direction that they have not approved. That is a feeling that in Britain really started to take root with the Maastricht Treaty of 1992, the single currency and the Commission presidency of Jacques Delors, he of the thoroughly rude headlines in The Sun.

Yet the EU’s budget is small, just 1 per cent of the combined gross wealth of the countries in the union. And there have been sensible reforms in recent years of such deserved targets as the Common Agricultural Policy. The EU says its court of auditors gave the 2007 books a "completely clean bill of health" for the first time.

Multilateral institutions such as the International Monetary Fund or World Trade Organisation are in any case not built with the mass approval of millions of people. Charles Grant, director of the Centre for European Reform, a think-tank, says: "I don’t think European integration has ever been driven by the will of the people…. Sceptics are right to say it is driven by elites, but the EU is not built in contradiction to the wishes of the people." And, he adds: "The EU is not as unpopular in other countries as it is in Britain."

While Britons often see Brussels as a hyper-regulated impediment to free markets, others in Europe view it as the opposite – a dismantler of trade barriers and a thorn in the side of protectionist governments.

The economic crisis saw the authority of Brussels seriously weakened as governments took unilateral action to save their countries’ banks, car companies and jobs. Now, with deficits at record levels, the stability pacts that have kept budgetary discipline relatively tight in the eurozone are in disarray. Brussels will also have to move stridently to reimpose its right to set competition policy in a new era of vastly increased state intervention and ownership.

This is the biggest challenge for some. Mr Monti says: "The crisis has delegitimised the market economy [because some elements of capitalism have lost credibility in many countries]. There must be a new deal on how to integrate social policies without violating single market rules."

In spite of these potentially fatal injuries, countries outside the EU are still anxious to join, presumably because they see the prosperity it has conferred on members in better times. Over the next few years we could see an EU that includes Turkey, Iceland, Belarus, Moldova, Georgia and Ukraine, and a eurozone that will steadily increase in size.

The EU long ago realised that its structures and rules on decision-making would have to change to reflect its great size. It is now near to implementing the Lisbon Treaty – the latest of many revamps since the Treaties of Rome in 1957.

Its defenders say that Lisbon could lead to a big improvement in the way the EU is represented on global issues, and its provisions may enhance the legitimacy and accountability of the EU’s institutions. But critics see it as taking the EU further down a centralised road at precisely the moment when a furious and real debate is raging about whether we are better together or apart.

In the UK, the Labour government has been attacked for supporting Lisbon. Its critics – some forever fearful that Brussels is a conspiracy run counter to Albion’s interests by an alliance of French and German federalists – say it is giving the country a written constitution by the backdoor.

Lisbon will probably go through if the Irish reverse an earlier rejection of it in a referendum next month. That, too, gives sceptics cause to tear out their hair. The Irish have already voted no. How can it be that they just keep voting until Brussels has the answer it wants?

For its supporters, Lisbon goes some way towards addressing the complaints of sceptics. It grants more legislative power to the EU’s parliament, which may help its distant members to connect with voters.

Crucially, the treaty puts in place someone who may be considered a European president as well as a powerful European foreign minister, and a diplomatic service. It ends the crazy carousel of the six-month rotating presidency. When the EU sits down to talk with India or China or the US, it will no longer have to start building relationships from scratch every six months because the French have given way to the Czechs, who have given way to the Swedes.

The Conservative Party, which seems likely to win the next general election, houses a considerable group of sceptics who have pledged to fight Lisbon given the chance. This is of immense importance to the EU’s future, but as the party moves towards its conference – only three days after the Irish vote – it is still giving confused signals about whether it, too, will order a referendum on Europe.

Communication is also arguably Brussels’ biggest failing. If the union is to survive and prosper this century, it needs to find an inspiring message in the manner of Winston Churchill’s speech in Zurich in 1946: "The structure of the United States of Europe, if well and truly built, will be such as to make the material strength of a single state less important. Small nations will count as much as large ones and gain their honour by their contribution to the common cause."

Belief in that common cause is wavering in important places. For the Conservative Party, the Irish in their referendum and everyone else, the question is how the interests of Europe’s small nations will be best served in Mr Garton Ash’s "world of giants".

"In terms of European history," he says, "this is the best Europe we’ve ever had. It’s an extraordinary achievement. The challenge is to defend our own interests in a world increasingly dominated by non-western powers."

Discriminate." The article demands, with religious fanaticism, that white children be made to shun all knowledge of racial differences and taught to feel guilty. <SPAN style="COLOR: #ff0000"><STRONG>Newsweek actually printed "It's horrifying to imagine kids being proud to be white."

The Newsweek article actually states that white children should be made to feel guilty to “knock down their glorified view of white

people, while black children should be built up with "ethnic pride." White parents, and only white parents, are called on to go to great lengths to brainwash their own children starting at age 3.

However, amidst the extremist statements by Newsweek, some real bombshells about racial realities are admitted. Here are some highlights:

-Kids as young as 6 months judge based on skin color. Newsweek

-White parents, who welcome multiculturalism and embrace diversity, are terrified to talk to their own children about race for fear of what their own children might say.

-75% of non-white parents talk to their children about race, compared to only 25% of white parents.

-White children 5 to 7 attending racially diverse schools universally had a better opinion of their own race than other races.

-Whites are called on to begin intense multi-cultural indoctrination using videos and parental discussions at age 3, so as not to miss the right "developmental window."

-White children should be made to feel guilty for alleged wrongdoings by their race, to increase positive attitudes towards blacks.

-Black children need to be coached on "ethnic pride" to pump them up and make them more likely to succeed in life.

-553 scientists signed a 2007 Supreme Court school amicus brief supporting school desegregation. However, the brief used many qualifiers and only said that desegregation "may" improve black performance. There was no real confidence in desegregation on the part of the scientists.

As many as 60 million dead, great cities reduced to rubble, families torn apart ... The second world war caused unprecedented hardship, but it also accelerated change. By Margaret MacMillan

At the end of the first world war it had been possible to contemplate going back to business as usual. However, 1945 was different, so different that it has been called Year Zero. The capacity for destruction had been so much greater than in the earlier war that much of Europe and Asia lay in ruins. And this time civilians had been the target as much as the military. The figures are hard to grasp: as many as 60 million dead, 25 million of them Soviet. A new word, genocide, entered the language to deal with the murder of 6 million of Europe's Jews by the Nazis.

During the war, millions more had fled their homes or been forcibly moved to work in Germany or Japan or, in the case of the Soviet Union, because Stalin feared that they might be traitors. Now, in 1945, another new word appeared, the DP, or "displaced person". There were millions of them, some voluntary refugees moving westward in the face of the advancing Red Army, others deported as undesirable minorities. The newly independent Czech state expelled nearly 3 million ethnic Germans in the years after 1945, and Poland a further 1.3 million. Everywhere there were lost or orphaned children, 300,000 alone in Yugoslavia. Thousands of unwanted babies added to the misery. It is impossible to know how many women in Europe were raped by the Red Army soldiers, who saw them as part of the spoils of war, but in Germany alone some 2 million women had abortions every year between 1945 and 1948.

The allies did what they could to feed and house the refugees and to reunite families that had been forcibly torn apart, but the scale of the task and the obstacles were enormous. The majority of ports in Europe and many in Asia had been destroyed or badly damaged; bridges had been blown up; railway locomotives and rolling stock had vanished. Great cities such as Warsaw, Kiev, Tokyo and Berlin were piles of rubble and ash.

In Germany, it has been estimated, 70% of housing had gone and, in the Soviet Union, 1,700 towns and 70,000 villages. Factories and workshops were in ruins, fields, forests and vineyards ripped to pieces. Millions of acres in north China were flooded after the Japanese destroyed the dykes. Many Europeans were surviving on less than 1,000 calories per day; in the Netherlands they were eating tulip bulbs. Apart from the United States and allies such as Canada and Australia, who were largely unscathed by the war's destruction, the European powers such as Britain and France had precious little to spare. Britain had largely bankrupted itself fighting the war and France had been stripped bare by the Germans. They were struggling to look after their own peoples and deal with reincorporating their military into civilian society. The four horsemen of the apocalypse – pestilence, war, famine and death – so familiar during the middle ages, appeared again in the modern world.

Politically, the impact of the war was also great. The once great powers of Japan and Germany looked as though they would never rise again. In retrospect, of course, it is easy to see that their peoples, highly educated and skilled, possessed the capacity to rebuild their shattered societies. (And it may have been easier to build strong economies from scratch than the partially damaged ones of the victors.) Two powers, so great that the new term "superpower" had to be coined for them, dominated the world in 1945. The United States was both a military power and an economic one; the Soviet Union had only brute force and the intangible attraction of Marxist ideology to keep its own people down and manage its newly acquired empire in the heart of Europe.

The great European empires, which had controlled so much of the world, from Africa to Asia, were on their last legs and soon to disappear in the face of their own weakness and rising nationalist movements. We should not view the war as being responsible for all of this, however; the rise of the US and the Soviet Union and the weakening of the European empires had been happening long before 1939. The war acted as an accelerator.

It also accelerated change in other ways: in science and technology, for example. The world got atomic weapons but it also got atomic power. Under the stimulus of war, governments poured resources into developing new medicines and technologies. Without the war, it would have taken us much longer, if ever, to enjoy the benefits of penicillin, microwaves, computers – the list goes on. In many countries, social change also speeded up.

The shared suffering and sacrifice of the war years strengthened the belief in most democracies that governments had an obligation to provide basic care for all citizens. When it was elected in the summer of 1945, for example, the Labour government in Britain moved rapidly to establish the welfare state. The rights of women also took a huge step forward as their contribution to the war effort, and their share in the suffering, were recognised. In France and Italy, women finally got the vote.

If class divisions in Europe and Asia did not disappear, the moral authority and prestige of the ruling classes had been severely undermined by their failure to prevent the war or the crimes that they had condoned before and during it. Established political orders – fascist, conservative, even democratic – came under challenge as peoples looked for new ideas and leaders. In Germany and Japan, democracy slowly took root.

In China, people turned increasingly from the corrupt and incompetent nationalists to the communists. While many Europeans, wearied by years of war and privation, gave up on politics altogether and faced the future with glum pessimism, others hoped that, at last, the time had come to build a new and better society. In western Europe, voters turned to social democratic parties such as the Labour party in Britain. In the east, the new communist regimes that were imposed by the triumphant Soviet Union were at first welcomed by many as the agents of change.

The end of the war inevitably also brought a settling of scores. In many parts people took measures into their own hands. Collaborators were beaten, lynched or shot. Women who had fraternised with German soldiers had their heads shaved or worse. Governments sometimes followed suit, setting up special courts for those who had worked with the enemy and purging such bodies as the civil service and the police. The Soviets also tried to exact reparations from Germany and Japan; whole factories were dismantled down to the window frames and were carted off to the Soviet Union, where they frequently rotted away. Much of the revenge was to gain advantage in the postwar world. In China and eastern Europe the communists used the accusation of collaboration with the Japanese or the Nazis to eliminate their political and class enemies.

The allies instituted an ambitious programme of de-Nazification in Germany, later quietly abandoned as it became clear that German society would be unworkable if all former Nazis were forbidden to work. In Japan, the head of the occupation, General Douglas MacArthur, broke up the zaibatsu, the big conglomerates that were blamed for supporting the Japanese militarists, and introduced a range of reforms, from a new school curriculum to a democratic constitution, that were designed to turn Japan into a peaceable democratic nation. In both Germany and Japan, the victors set up special tribunals to try those responsible for crimes against peace, war crimes, and the catalogue of horrors that came increasingly to be known as "crimes against humanity".

In Tokyo, leading Japanese generals and politicians, and at Nuremberg, senior Nazis (those that had not committed suicide or escaped), stood in the dock before allied judges. Not a few people then and since wondered if the trials were merely victors' justice, their moral authority undercut by the presence, in Nuremberg, of judges and prosecutors from Stalin's murderous regime, and by the fact that in Tokyo, the emperor, in whose name the crimes had been committed, was shielded from blame.

The trials, inconclusive though they were, formed part of a larger attempt to root out the militaristic and chauvinistic attitudes that had helped to produce the war, and to build a new world order that would prevent such a catastrophe from ever happening again. Well before the war had ended, the allies had started planning for the peace. Among the western powers, the United States, by 1945 very much the dominant partner in the alliance, took the lead.

In his Four Freedoms speech of January 1941, President Roosevelt talked of a new and more just world, with freedom of speech and expression and of religion, and freedom from want and fear. In the Atlantic charter later that year, he and Churchill sketched out a world order based on such liberal principles as collective security, national self-determination, and free trade among nations. A host of other allies, some of them represented by governments in exile, signed on.

The Soviet Union gave a qualified assent, although its leader Stalin had no intention of following what were to him alien principles. Roosevelt intended that the American vision should take solid institutional form. The key organisation was the United Nations, designed to be stronger than the League of Nations, which it was replacing, and the economic ones known collectively as the Bretton Woods system, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs. This time, Roosevelt was determined, the United States should join. Stalin again gave grudging support.

While much of what Roosevelt hoped for did not come about, it was surely a step forward for international relations that such institutions were created and largely accepted and, equally important, that they were underpinned by notions of a common humanity possessing the same universal rights. The idea that there were universal standards to be upheld was present, no matter how imperfectly, in the war crimes trials, and was later reinforced by the establishment of the United Nations itself in 1945, the International Court of Justice in 1946 and Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948.

It had already become clear at the top-level conferences of Teheran (1943), Yalta (February 1945) and Potsdam (July-August 1945) that there was a gulf in what constituted universal values and goals between the United States and its fellow democracies and the Soviet Union. Stalin was interested above all in security for his regime and for the Soviet Union, and that to him meant taking territory, from Poland and other neighbours, and establishing a ring of buffer states around Soviet borders. In the longer run, where the western powers saw a democratic and liberal world, he dreamed of a communist one.

The grand alliance held together uneasily for the first months of the peace, but the strains were evident in their shared occupation of Germany, where increasingly the Soviet zone of occupation was moving in a communist direction and the western zones, under Britain, France and the United States, in a more capitalist and democratic one.

Both sides built military alliances and prepared for the new shooting war that many feared was bound to come. In 1949, the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb, giving it parity, at least in that area, with the United States. That the cold war did not in the end turn into a hot one was thanks to that fact. The terrifying new power of atomic weapons was to lead to a standoff suitably known as Mad – Mutually Assured Destruction.

The cold war overshadowed another momentous international change that came as a result of the second world war. Before 1939 much of the non-European world had been divided up among the great empires: the ones based in western Europe but also those of Japan and the Soviet Union. Japan and Italy lost their empires as a result of defeat. Britain, France, and the Netherlands all saw their imperial possessions disappear in the years immediately after the war. (The Soviet Union was not to lose its until the end of the cold war.)

The former imperial powers no longer had the financial and military capacity to hang on to their vast territories. Nor did their peoples want to pay the price of empire, whether in money or blood. Furthermore, where the empires had once dealt with divided or acquiescent peoples, they now increasingly faced assertive and, in some cases, well-armed nationalist movements. The defeat of European forces all over Asia also contributed to destroying the myth of European power.

The British pulled out of India in 1947, leaving behind two new countries of India and Pakistan. Burma, Sri Lanka and Malaysia followed the road of independence not long after. The Dutch fought a losing war but finally conceded independence to Indonesia, the former Dutch East Indies, in 1949. France tried to regain its colonies in Indochina but was forced out in 1954 after a humiliating defeat at the hands of Vietnamese forces. The Europeans' African empires crumbled in the 1950s and early 1960s. The United Nations grew from 51 nations in 1945 to 189 by the end of the century.

Because of the cold war, there was no comprehensive peace settlement after the second world war as there had been in 1919. Instead there were a number of separate agreements or ad hoc decisions. In Europe most of the borders that had been established at the end of the first world war were restored.

The Soviet Union seized back some bits of territory such as Bessarabia, which it had lost to Romania in 1919. The one major exception was Poland, as the joke had it "a country on wheels", which moved some 200 miles to the west, losing some 69,000 sq metres to the Soviet Union and gaining slightly less from Germany in the west. In the east, Japan of course lost the conquests it had made since 1931, but was also obliged to disgorge Korea and Formosa (now Taiwan) and the Pacific islands that it had gained decades earlier. Eventually the United States and Japan concluded a formal peace in 1951. Because of an outstanding dispute over some islands, the Soviet Union and its successor Russia have not yet signed a peace treaty ending the war with Japan.

We have long since absorbed and dealt with the physical consequences of the second world war, but it still remains a very powerful set of memories. How societies remember and commemorate the past often says something about how they see themselves – and can be highly contentious. Particularly in divided societies, it is tempting to cling to comforting myths to help bring unity and to paper over deep and painful divisions. In the years immediately after 1945, many societies chose to forget the war or remember it only in certain ways. Austria portrayed itself as the first victim of Nazism, conveniently ignoring the active support that so many Austrians had given the Nazi regime. In Italy, the fascist past was neglected in favour of the earlier periods of Italian history. For a long time, schools did not teach any history after the first world war. Italians were portrayed in films or books as essentially good-hearted and generally opposed to Mussolini, whose regime was an aberration in an otherwise liberal state.

In France, the Vichy period, after France's defeat by Germany, when there was widespread French collaboration, some of it enthusiastically antisemitic and pro-Nazi, was similarly ignored. From de Gaulle onwards, French leaders played up the resistance in such a way as to claim its moral authority but also to imply that it was more broadly based and widespread than it actually was.

West Germany was not able to escape its past so easily; under pressure from the allies and from within, it dealt much more thoroughly with its Nazi past. In West German schools, children learned about the horrors committed by the regime. East Germany, by contrast, took no responsibility, instead blaming the Nazis on capitalism. Indeed, many East Germans grew up believing that their country had fought with the Soviet Union against Hitler's regime.

In the east, Japan has been accused of ignoring its aggression in the 1930s and its own war crimes in China and elsewhere, but in recent years it has moved to teach more about this dark period in its history.

How should the past be remembered? When should we forget? These are not easy questions. Acknowledging such difficult parts of the past is not always easy and has led to history becoming a political football in a number of countries. In Japan, the conservatives minimise Japanese responsibility for the war and downplay atrocities on nationalist grounds. Japan, they argue, should not apologise for the past when all powers were guilty of aggression.

It has not necessarily been easier among the nations on the winning side. When French and foreign historians first began examining the Vichy period in France critically, they were attacked from both the right and the left for stirring up memories that were best left undisturbed. When the Soviet Union collapsed, there was, for a time, a willingness among Russians to acknowledge that many crimes were committed in Stalin's regime in the course of the war, whether the mass murder of Polish army officers at Katyn or the forcible deportation of innocent Soviet citizens to Siberia.

Today, the conservatives argue that such criticism of the great patriotic war only gives comfort to Russia's foes. Britain and Canada played a major role in the mass bombing campaign of German cities and towns; suggestions that the destruction of Dresden or other targets that may have had little military significance might be war crimes causes impassioned debate in both countries. That the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki might have been morally wrong or unnecessary causes equal controversy in the United States.

Today, particularly in the countries that were on the winning side, there is a reluctance to disturb our generally positive memories of the war by facing such issues. The second world war, especially in the light of what came after, seems to be the last morally unambiguous war. The Nazis and their allies were bad and they did evil things. The allies were good and right to fight them.

That is true, but the picture is not quite as black and white as we might like to think. After all, one ally was the Soviet Union, in its own way as guilty of crimes against humanity as Nazi Germany, fascist Italy or Japan. Britain and France may have been fighting for liberty, but they were not prepared to extend it to their empires. And Dresden, or the firebombing of Hamburg, Tokyo and Berlin, the forcible repatriation of Soviet prisoners of war, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, should remind us that bad things can be done in the name of good causes. Let us remember the war, but let us not remember it simplistically but in all its complexity.

9-12-9

Posted: September 14, 2009
10:32 pm Eastern

© 2009 WorldNetDaily

The organizer is Hassen Abdellah, who leads a Elizabeth, N.J., mosque, and two special guests for the event, according to the website, will be Sheik Muhammad Jebril and Sheik Ahmed Dewidar.

In the interview, Dewidar talked about sermons he'd heard that "Muslims should march on the White House…"

The interviewer asked for an explanation.

"One cleric said in his sermon: 'We are going to the White House, so that Islam will be victorious, Allah willing, and the White House will become into the Muslim house,'" he said, according to the MEMRI report.

Dewidar denied that this was a plan for a physical occupation of the building.

"They say that through the domination of Islam and its ideas, the White House will change," the report quotes Dewidar saying.

Atlas Shrugs also cited Dewidar's comments for a Muslim Brotherhood website that American society is controlled by Jews.

His translated comments include, "Whether or not these events were planned, or pinned on the Muslims, or something else – [it] provided an opportunity for [the American government] to legislate dubious laws that restrict the growth and presence of Islam in the U.S," Atlas Shrugs reported.

Organizers themselves have credited Obama's advocacy for Islam for their inspiration.

While he praised Islam during his inauguration, Obama elaborated during his speech in Egypt months later.

He carried a greeting from "Muslim communities" in America, complained how Muslims had been "denied rights and opportunities," and stated, "I also know civilization's debt to Islam. It was Islam at places like Al-Azhar that carried the light of learning through so many centuries, paving the way for Europe's renaissance and enlightenment."

Besides crediting Islam with significant responsibility for the development of civilization in Europe, Obama also said Muslims have served similarly in America.

According to a Daily India report, Abdellah confirmed the idea of the event "germinated" after Obama's inaugural speech, then was reinforced by the Egypt speech.

"For the first time in my lifetime," Abdellah said. "I heard someone of his stature speaking about Islam and Muslims not in an adversarial sense, but in the sense of being welcome and acknowledging we are integral citizens in the society-that we're gainfully employed, we're educated."

Gellar wrote of another event organizer, Abdul Malik.

"I highly recommend taking a look at Abdul Malik's Facebook page, and watching the video – during which he says many interesting things including: Polygamy is an American tradition," she wrote.

She also cited this comment from Malik: "Democracy is not revelation, and democracy does not equal freedom, for in democracy you have apartheid, you have slavery, you have homosexuality, you have lesbianism, you have gambling, you have all of the voices that are against the spirit of truth; so no we don't want to democratize Islam, we want to Islamize democracy. That's what we want."

"It is a mockery of the Christian faith," Safa told the magazine. "It's a mockery of all of it. In a sense, I'm happy for it because the church needs to wake up before it's too late."

The prayer day website says, "The Athan will be chanted on Capitol Hill, echoing off of the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument and other great edifices that surround Capitol Hill.

"Our Time Has Come."

Obama repeatedly has denied he is a Muslim. His presidential campaign website contained the statement, "Senator Obama has never been a Muslim, was not raised as a Muslim, and is a committed Christian."

In Obama's autobiography, "Dreams From My Father," he acknowledged studying the Quran and describes the public school as "a Muslim school."

In an interview with the New York Times, Obama described the Muslim call to prayer as "one of the prettiest sounds on Earth at sunset."

The first few lines of the call to prayer state:

Some attention also has been paid to Obama's paternal side of the family, including his father and his brother, Roy.