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Another factor to consider in our comparison to the 1930’s is a weakness in leadership. Factor #3: Appeasement Presents Weakness in the Face of Tyranny Background: While Hitler and Mussolini were rebuilding their armed forces, the rest of Europe, and the world (for the most part) slumbered. Stalin was busy purging the leadership of what was once the best military on the continent. FDR was foisting his failed policies upon an economically depressed America. Britain, still scarred by the horrendous losses in WWI, looked to their leaders to maintain peace, as another war was unthinkable. France, also appalled by the...

Arms Deal: President Obama signs away U.S. nuclear security and gives the Russians a veto over whether we can defend ourselves. Our nuclear umbrella is in tatters as another piece of paper proclaims peace in our time. Completing a process of disarmament and appeasement that manifested itself in the dismantling and defunding of U.S. military power that began with his inauguration, President Obama signed a new strategic arms limitation treaty with a grinning and very happy Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on Thursday in the Czech capital. How fitting this document was signed in Prague, which isn't far from Munich where...

(IsraelNN.com) Pro-Israel Democrats are criticizing the Obama administration for its heavy hand against the Jewish State. “We urge your Administration to refrain from further public criticism of Israel and to focus on more pressing issues affecting this vital relationship, such as signing and enforcing the Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act when it comes to your desk."

If the first year of President Barack Obama's foreign policy were a law firm in Charles Dickens's London, it would have a name like Bumble, Stumble and Skid. It began with apologies to the Muslim world, a doomed attempt to beat Israel into line, utopian pleas to abolish nuclear weapons, unreciprocated concessions to Russia, and a curt note to the British..It continued with principled offers of serious negotiation to an Iranian regime too busy torturing, raping and killing demonstrators, and building new underground nuclear facilities, to take them up. Subsequently Beijing gave the world the spectacle of the American commander...

To think that Boris and Natasha lived right here in South Dakota, and we didn't even know it! Recently, Walter Kendall Myers and Gwendolyn Steingraber-Trebilcock-Myers - a couple who once lived in Aberdeen - were arrested for spying. The news rocked the nation. Well, actually, the nation immediately forgot the story. Still, South Dakota hasn't forgotten. It's not every day suspected spies are found traipsing through your own neighborhood. The espionage likely started after they left Aberdeen, but you still wonder if that abandoned shopping cart you saw in aisle 8 of Kessler's might have contained a coded message. The...

Strategic Defense: With Iran on the verge of a deliverable nuke, the administration tells our allies in the dead of night that we will scuttle missile defense plans in Eastern Europe to please the Russians.Czechs are used to betrayal by their Western allies. It was at Munich in 1938 that British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain sealed their doom in exchange for a piece of paper promising "peace in our time." The fact that this further gutting of missile defense came on the 70th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland on Sept. 17, 1939, is an eerie coincidence. "Just after...

It is easy now to deride the efforts of Neville Chamberlain. But at the time there seemed to be a realistic chance of peace ) It is 70 years since war broke out in 1939, but historic questions remain. “Appeasement” is still a dirty word, but so is “war-monger”. President Bush repeatedly used the memory of Winston Churchill in 1940 to justify his wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Revisionist historians question whether Neville Chamberlain, the architect of the 1930s appeasement policy, had any choice. One witness was Sir Nevile Henderson, who published his account in Failure of a Mission. Henderson...

The world can be a dangerous place and even more so when we fail to understand the motivations of the various actors on the world stage. Recently, North Korea (DPRK) has provoked the world yet again with the launching of another alleged missile over Japan. For well over a month there was an uproar over the impending launch with warnings and counter warnings. The US threatened to shoot the missile down and the DPRK said shooting their satellite down would be an act of war thus the line was drawn in the sand, each side daring and doubling daring each...

President Barack Obama is at odds with Defense Secretary Robert Gates and others in the military over America’s need for a new generation of nuclear warheads. While serving as President George W. Bush’s defense secretary, Gates repeatedly spoke in favor of the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) program because the country’s weapons, mostly produced in the 1970s and 1980s, are aging and their effectiveness may be in the question, Time magazine reports. “Even though the days of hair-trigger superpower confrontation are over, as long as other nations possess the bomb and the means to deliver it, the United States must maintain...

A Hardball epic . . . Message to Chris Matthews: when ripping a guest for his lack of historical knowledge, try to avoid making a history mistake of your own in the same segment. It happened on this afternoon's Hardball. After lambasting a guest for not knowing his Neville Chamberlain history, Matthews surmised that the attack on the USS Cole in October, 2000 happened under . . . President Bush. View video here.

Over the last two days, the question of patriotism has been debated over the blogosphere. It started with Barack Obama's tortured explanation of why he stopped wearing a lapel pin representing the American flag. He told reporters that he took it off because unnamed others had used it to cover unpatriotic behavior and that the flag had become a "substitute for true patriotism," an explanation that annoyed many more people than did the absence of the lapel pin itself. Today on Heading Right Radio, we debated another dimension of the same question. One of our callers, clearly frustrated with some...

Security: Newly released books and films show a growing pop-culture bias against U.S. counterterror efforts. It's another sign the pendulum is swinging back to a 9/10 state of mind. Six years ago we were united as a nation against a common enemy — 300 million Americans resolved to defeat Islamic extremists. Even Hollywood was on board. But as the nightmare that befell our nation dims, we have turned our anger inward. Now the enemy is portrayed in pop culture as the government, the military and law enforcement — the very forces aligned to protect us from the Islamist enemy. The...

Every effort should be made to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, but failing that, the world could live with a nuclear-armed regime in Tehran, a recently retired commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East said Monday. John Abizaid, the retired Army general who headed Central Command for nearly four years, said he was confident that if Iran gained nuclear arms, the United States could deter it from using them. "Iran is not a suicide nation," he said. "I mean, they may have some people in charge that don't appear to be rational, but I doubt that the Iranians...

OMAHA — Meatpacking plant officials accused of discriminating against dozens of Somali Muslim workers have offered to tweak break times to help accommodate the workers’ prayer demands. If the dozens of Muslim workers and Swift & Co. can agree on details, a solution could defuse the dispute that started earlier this year when 120 workers at the Grand Island plant abruptly quit because they weren’t allowed to pray at sunset. Many say they were fired, quit or were verbally and physically harassed over the issue, and some have complained to the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission about the way they...

A Bridge to 'Moderate' Islam Is In Fact a Road to Hell Amil Imani - 8/8/2007 Islam is a religion of peace and the great majority of Muslims are not party to any plans and actions of the radicals’- so claim academic pundits, leftist journalists, and hired Islamic apologists. The incantation of these “authorities” is the lullaby that puts the people into a sleep of complacency. Complacency and appeasement on the part of the free world and those well-meaning, non-practicing Muslims, can only serve Islam. There is no chance for co-existence with Islam. All one needs to know is to...

That Hamas and the BBC have close relations isn’t exactly a revelation. See here and here, for example. But finally the BBC, the world’s biggest broadcaster, has itself admitted to being in touch with Hamas – the group that unlike other Islamic terror groups, has made a habit of deliberately targeting children (in school buses, bat mitzvah birthday parties, pizzerias filled with kids and so on). A senior BBC executive has confirmed that the BBC held private meetings with Hamas – whose gunmen usually wear ski masks to hide their identity – in the days leading up to the release...

For years the burgeoning Muslim community in Athens lobbied the Greek authorities to build them a house of worship, without success. Now Muslim worshipers have found a temporary solution: a converted factory in the city's southern outskirts. Athens is one of the few European Union capitals to lack a functioning mosque, despite Greece's friendly ties with most Muslim and Arab nations. The few Ottoman-era mosques still standing in Athens have not hosted Islamic sermons since 1833, when occupying Turks were driven out. Initiatives by successive governments to build a new mosque in the capital ran into objections from the Orthodox...

In an open letter to the British Prime Minister responding to last week’s successful anti-terror operations, the leaders of 38 Muslim groups and six Muslim politicians called for immediate changes to British foreign policy, which is “ammunition to extremists who threaten us all.”[1] The letter attacked the “debacle of Iraq” and, in reference to Israeli military action in Lebanon, faulted “the failure to do more to secure an immediate end to the attacks on civilians in the Middle East.” It stated that “current British government policy risks putting civilians at increased risk both in the U.K. and abroad.” This letter...

Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff is blasting the U.S. Senate for failing to pass an immigration bill, and claims the federal government doesn't have the ability to enforce laws when it comes to illegals working in America. "We're going to continue to enforce the law. It's going to be tough," Michael Chertoff said. "We don't really have the ability to enforce the law with respect to illegal work in this country in a way that's truly effective."

Axis Of Evil: Speaker Nancy Pelosi leads another delegation of Democratic supplicants to talk to Syrian Baathist thug Bashar Assad. If she needs reasons why talking to tyrants doesn't work, we can give her 15. In December, when Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., took the recommendations of James Baker's Iraq Study Group seriously and was granted an audience with the Syrian dictator, we predicted he'd be "the first of many appeasers to come."