Dennis Prager:
We say that evil is dark. But this metaphor is imprecise. Evil is actually intensely bright. So painfully bright that people look away from it. Many even deny its existence.
Why? Because once people acknowledge evil’s existence, they know that they have to confront it. And most people prefer not to confront evil.
That is what led to World War II. Many in the West denied the darkness of Nazism. They looked the other way when that evil could have been stopped, and then appeased it as it became stronger.
We are reliving 1938. The British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, went to Munich to negotiate with Adolf Hitler. He left believing Hitler’s promises of peace in exchange for Germany being allowed to annex large parts of Czechoslovakia. Upon returning to England, Chamberlain announced “peace for our time.”
The American and European negotiations with Iran have so precisely mirrored 1938 that you have to wonder how anyone could not see it.
The Nazi regime’s great hatred was Jews. Iran’s great hatred is the Jewish state. The Nazis’ greatest aim was to exterminate the Jews of Europe. Iran’s greatest aim is to exterminate the Jewish state. Nazi Germany hated the West and its freedoms. The Islamic Republic of Iran hates the West and its freedoms. Germany sought to dominate Europe. Iran seeks to dominate the Middle East and the Muslim world.
And exactly as Britain and France appeased Nazi Germany, the same two countries along with the United States have chosen to appease Iran.
Today, people mock Neville Chamberlain. But just change the names and you realize that we are living through a repetition of Munich. Substitute the Islamic Republic of Iran for Nazi Germany, the Ayatollah Ali Khameni for Adolf Hitler, Barack Obama and John Kerry for Neville Chamberlain, Israel for Czechoslovakia and for Europe’s Jews, And the increasingly unsafe world of 2015 with the increasingly unsafe world of 1938.
In fact, there is considerably less defense for the Iran agreement — which awards Iran 150 billion dollars in currently frozen assets and the right to keep its nuclear program — than there was for the Munich agreement. Prior to 1938, Hitler had not publicly proclaimed his aim to annihilate Europe’s Jews. Yet, Iran has been proclaiming its intention to annihilate the Jewish state for decades. There were no massive “Death to America” demonstrations in Germany as there regularly are in Iran. In 1938, Germany had not been responsible for terror around the world as Iran is now. Nor was Germany responsible for the death of more than a thousand Americans as Iran has been.
Iran is responsible for more American deaths in the last quarter century than any other group or country. Colonel Richard Kemp, the former commander of British troops in Afghanistan, and Major Chris Driver-Williams of British special forces, summarized it this way: “Iranian military action, often working through proxies using terrorist tactics, has led to the deaths of well over a thousand American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan over the last decade and a half.”
The Neville Chamberlains of 2015 defend the agreement with Iran on two grounds — that the only alternative is war and that this agreement has the capacity to bring Iran into “the community of nations.”
The first is a falsehood. For three reasons.
First, the alternative to this agreement was continuing and tightening the sanctions that were weakening the Iranian regime and greatly diminishing its ability to fund terror groups around the world. Second, because the agreement so strengthens Iran, it makes war far more likely. When evil, expansionist regimes get richer, they don’t spend their wealth on building new hospitals. Third, because we have been at war with Iran for decades. But only one side has been fighting.
