Border Fences and Appeasement

Hedgehog Blog was a star over the weekend, with two powerful posts.

The first, on Saturday, was on the border fence. He included a link to this article in the Las Vegas Review-Journal on private citizens--organized by the Minutemen--making plans to build fences on their Mexico-bordering property.

Mexico President Vicente Fox called the plans "shameful." He's a fine one to talk.

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The second, on Sunday, was on Europe's predilection for appeasement. He reprinted a March article in Die Welt that was translated from German.

A few days ago Henry Broder wrote in Welt am Sonntag, " Europe--your family name is appeasement." It's a phrase you can't get out of your head because it's so terribly true.

Appeasement cost millions of Jews and non-Jews their lives, as England and France, allies at the time, negotiated and hesitated too long before they noticed that Hitler had to be fought, not bound to toothless agreements.

Appeasement legitimised and stabilized Communism in the Soviet Union , then East Germany , then all the rest of Eastern Europe , where for decades, inhuman suppressive, murderous governments were glorified as the ideologically correct alternative to all other possibilities.

Appeasement crippled Europe when genocide ran rampant in Kosovo , and even though we had absolute proof of ongoing mass-murder, we Europeans debated and debated and debated, and were still debating when finally the Americans had to come from halfway around the world, into Europe yet again, and do our work for us .

Rather than protecting democracy in the Middle East, European Appeasement, camouflaged behind the fuzzy word "equidistance," now countenances suicide bombings in Israel by fundamentalist Palestinians.

Appeasement generates a mentality that allows Europe to ignore nearly 500,000 victims of Saddam's torture and murder machinery and, motivated by the self-righteousness of the peace movement, has the gall to issue bad grades to George Bush... Even as it is uncovered that the loudest critics of the American action in Iraq made illicit billions, no, TENS of billions, in the corrupt U.N. Oil-for-Food program.

The author, Axel Springer, CEO of Mathias Dapfner, goes on to defend American presidents Reagan and GW Bush. His tone is that of frustration that his countrymen and continentmen just don't get it.

The freedom of the world depends on Springer getting his message through the thick heads and lazy, greedy, uncaring hearts of Europe's leadership--and on America staying the course.