Israel Matzav

The day America stopped being a superpower

You can mark on your calendar the day that America stopped being a superpower: June 4, 2009. The day Barack Hussein Obama addressed the world from al-Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt:

The address, however, was more than a puerile and pathetic exercise in political correctness. It will be remembered as the pivotal moment in history when the United States ceased to be a superpower. Sapped of its self-confidence and sense of grandiose destiny, America chose the policy of appeasement over confrontation, lies over truth, illusion over reality. At the heart of Mr. Obama's speech as well as his foreign policy is the notion that we are not "at war" with Islam. But the real issue is the very opposite: Political Islam is at war with us - or to be more precise, radical fundamentalists are bent on destroying America, Israel and the West.

The liberals' mantra is that the majority of Muslims are nonviolent moderates. This is undeniably true. But it misses the point.

During the 1930s, appeasement was based upon the notion that a majority of Germans were decent people who simply wanted peace and national self-determination. Thus, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain made the fateful decision to give away the Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia's ethnic German region, to Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime.

By betraying the Czechs at the Munich conference, Chamberlain believed he had secured "peace for our time." Instead, he had emboldened Hitler to wage a war of conquest. The end result was a Europe in tatters, 50 million dead and the Holocaust. The fact that there were countless moderate, anti-Nazi Germans meant nothing. Their refusal to speak out against Hitler's Aryan racialism guaranteed its march to power - and destruction. History reveals that it is militant minorities - not reasonable majorities - that often drive events.

I would just tell you all to read the whole thing, but since I know some of you won't, I want to point out one other thing that appears later in this column by Jeffrey T. Kuhner, the president of the Edmund Burke Institute.

Senior Israeli intelligence officials admit the Obama administration has privately told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Washington can live with an Iranian nuclear bomb. Mr. Obama believes it is only a matter of time. Moreover, should Israel attack Iran's nuclear sites to prevent the mullahs from achieving the bomb, Jerusalem - not Tehran - will be blamed for any military conflict.

The Obama administration argues that Israel's nuclear arsenal can serve as a strategic deterrent to the Iranian bomb, similar to how mutually assured destruction (MAD) between the United States and the Soviet Union kept the peace during the Cold War. But the Soviet Union was a rational, atheistic power. Iran's mullocracy is a messianic, apocalyptic Shi'ite regime, willing to sacrifice millions of Iranians to achieve the Final Solution.

Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani, a so-called "moderate" and a predecessor of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has vowed that Tehran will not be deterred by the fear of Israeli nuclear retaliation. "If the day comes when the world of Islam is duly equipped with the arms Israel has in its possession," he said, ". . . application of an atomic bomb would not leave anything in Israel, but the same thing would just produce damages in the Muslim world." In other words, the mullahs believe Iran can survive a nuclear exchange, while Israel can't.

These are the words - and ideas - of madmen. Mr. Obama lacks the courage and will to confront America's deadliest enemies.

Now, read the whole thing.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 4:38 AM