I won­der if it’s time to invoke Godwin’s Law on the national con­ver­sa­tion, espe­cially after this press release from the DoD:

WASHINGTON, Aug. 11, 2004 — The Defense Department’s No. 2 offi­cial com­pared rad­i­cal Islamic ter­ror­ists to Adolph Hitler’s dis­pensers of death — the dreaded “Schutzstaffel,” or SS — dur­ing Aug. 10 tes­ti­mony on Capi­tol Hill.
Appear­ing before House Armed Ser­vices Com­mit­tee to dis­cuss the military’s role in car­ry­ing out the 9/11 Commission’s rec­om­men­da­tions to deny ter­ror­ists places of sanc­tu­ary, Deputy Defense Sec­re­tary Paul D. Wol­fowitz observed that the United States and its allies “are fight­ing a cult of death, not life.“
Accom­pa­nied by Marine Gen. Peter Pace, vice chair­man of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Army Gen. Bryan Brown, head of U.S. Spe­cial Oper­a­tions Com­mand, Wol­fowitz observed that pre­vent­ing ter­ror­ism “means more than killing or cap­tur­ing ter­ror­ists.“
Ulti­mate vic­tory over global ter­ror­ism, he noted, “requires sow­ing the seeds of hope, par­tic­u­larly in the broader Mid­dle East.“
The 9/11 Com­mis­sion report, Wol­fowitz told com­mit­tee mem­bers, noted that rad­i­cal Islamic fun­da­men­tal­ists pos­sess an intol­er­ant, non-negotiable ide­ol­ogy and world view that has no regard for human rights or the rule of law.
Global ter­ror­ism is another man­made evil “that needs to be erad­i­cated and dis­carded,” Wol­fowitz said, “just as piracy and the slave trade were de– legit­imized and dri­ven to the mar­gins of civ­i­lized life in the past.“
Ter­ror­ists’ extrem­ist ide­ol­ogy, he said, must be “replaced by a hope­ful vision of free­dom.“
Wol­fowitz char­ac­ter­ized ter­ror­ists who rou­tinely employ suicide-attack tac­tics as “peo­ple who wor­ship death more than they seem to wor­ship any­thing else.“
Today’s rad­i­cal Islamic ter­ror­ists, Wol­fowitz pointed out, “remind you of the noto­ri­ous Nazi groups like the SS that proudly wore the death’s head as their sym­bol.” Under Hein­rich Himm­ler, the SS, which was estab­lished as Hitler’s elite mil­i­tary force, stamped out dis­sent and prop­a­gated the Nazi vision of estab­lish­ing a pure, “Aryan” race in Ger­many and in con­quered ter­ri­to­ries.
Mil­lions who didn’t fit into the Nazis’ world view, includ­ing polit­i­cal pris­on­ers, gyp­sies, Jews, and men­tally or phys­i­cally chal­lenged per­sons, were sum­mar­ily killed or per­ished in labor and con­cen­tra­tion camps.
Like the long-gone Nazis, Wol­fowitz noted today’s Islamic rad­i­cals also rely on ter­ror and “their abil­ity to kill inno­cent peo­ple” to attain and retain power.
The cures for rad­i­cal Islamic ter­ror­ism “must come from within Mus­lim soci­eties them­selves,” he said, and the United States “must sup­port such devel­op­ments.“
Such a goal is “ambi­tious,” Wol­fowitz acknowl­edged. But, he pointed out, “the threat we face is ambi­tious” as well as “enor­mous and unprecedented.”