Mathias Doepfner pulls no punches in Self-satisfied Europe, thy name is cowardice:
The writer Henryk Broder recently issued a withering indictment: ‘Europe, your family name is appeasement.’ That phrase resonates because it is so terribly true. Appeasement cost millions of Jews and non-Jews their lives as Britain and France, allies at the time, negotiated and hesitated too long before they realized that Hitler needed to be fought and defeated, because he could not be bound by toothless agreements.Later, appeasement legitimized and stabilized communism in the Soviet Union, then East Germany, then throughout the rest of Eastern Europe — where inhuman, repressive and murderous governments were glorified for decades.
Appeasement similarly crippled Europe when genocide ran rampant in Bosnia and Kosovo. Indeed, even though we had absolute proof of ongoing mass murder there, we Europeans debated and debated — and then debated still more. We were still debating when finally the Americans had to come from halfway around the world, into Europe yet again, to do our work for us.
Europe still hasn’t learned its lesson. Rather than protecting democracy in the Middle East, European appeasement, camouflaged behind the fuzzy word ‘equidistance,’ often seems to countenance suicide bombings in Israel by fundamentalist Palestinians. Similarly, it generates a mentality that allows Europe to ignore the nearly 500,000 victims of Saddam Hussein’s torture and murder machinery, and, motivated by the self-righteousness of the peace movement, to accuse U.S. President George W. Bush of being a warmonger.
This hypocrisy continues even as it is discovered that some of the loudest critics of American action in Iraq made illicit billions — indeed, tens of billions — of dollars in the corrupt UN ‘oil-for-food’ program.
Today we are faced with a particularly grotesque form of appeasement. How is Germany reacting to the escalating violence by Islamic fundamentalists in Holland, Britain and elsewhere in Europe? By suggesting — wait for it — that the proper response to such barbarism is to initiate a ‘Muslim holiday’ in Germany.
I wish I were joking, but I am not.