The legendary Thomas Sowell recently compared Benjamin Netanyahu to Winston Churchill.
The only other person to address a joint session of Congress three times was the legendary British prime minister, Winston Churchill.Far be it for me to lecture Sowell on...well, pretty much anything...but the comparison isn't perfect. Mark Steyn warned that Netanyahu may become Churchill in 1945, but last night Netanyahu surged for a win in the Israeli national elections.†
The parallels between the two leaders do not end there. Both warned the world of mortal dangers that others ignored, in hopes that those dangers would go away. In the years leading up to World War II, Churchill tried to warn the British, and the democratic nations in general, of what a monstrous threat Hitler was.
† The win was also another blow to the reputation of polling firms, which showed an extremely close race even in the exit polls, which they then had to backtrack on when the results weren't even remotely similar.
There are, of course, other differences as well. Churchill didn't have to deal with a racial element in his warnings: this was basically one Ehrenarier telling people that another Ehrenarier was wicked and wished to make war. Unfortunately, Netanyahu (who's as far from Aryan -- real or feigned -- as can be possible) is in the position where the wicked men who want to make war against him are all Arabs. In these days of ridiculous race-nonsense pushed on us by the left this leaves the Israelis with a baggage that didn't remotely bother the British ("Hun" talk notwithstanding). Whenever Netanyahu warns his people about dark forces on the horizon, they're literally dark forces on the horizon! This lets the left do their favourite thing on the planet: label somebody a "hater" and then instantly use that fact to discredit their words and actions, even if they end up being totally correct. (A phenomenon that I'm well familiar with, as a quick glance of my Twitter mentions will instantly tell you).
Not to put too fine a point on it, though, but Netanyahu's evildoers still aren't quite in the same class as Churchill's. Great heros need great villains (a topic which is bothering people this week), and Churchill had one of the best. Netanyahu doesn't, not really, and while its certainly not his fault that he doesn't have a bigger military to have to stare down at a greater risk (nor, all but the most vehement anti-Netanyahu folks would acknowledge, something he or Sowell was wishing for), it also means you can't take too much from a Netanyahu-Churchill perspective: certainly not as much as Sowell is trying to here. Also, as has been discussed before, Churchill had no blueprint to work off of: he could hardly point back to Prime Minister Pelham-Holles and say "he stood up to Maximilian III Joseph". This was uncharted territory in the 1930s. Not so today, especially considering the very different situation between 1925 in the UK and 2015 in Israel. A better blueprint for Netanyahu would be the Oslo "Peace" Accords. As you may know, despite claims that Norway was a "Israeli lap dog", Israel came out of the Peace Accords with a completely useless agreement. The PLO violated them before the ink was dry which would have given Israel all the moral authority they needed to wipe the "Palestinian authoruty" off the map forever. (After all, useful idiots like Avi Shlaim were going to be upset no matter what Netanyahu does)
To link back to the Sowell piece, a paper document like what President Monkey has been chasing in Iran generally isn't worth the paper it's printed on.
Just recently, a State Department official in the Obama administration said that Americans have remained safe in a nuclear age, not because of our own nuclear arsenal but because “we created an intricate and essential system of treaties, laws, and agreements.”Arafat was a liar, a terrorist, and a bad person to enter into good-faith negotiations with. Anybody who disagrees with this probably is dumb enough to also believe it isn't also true of terrorists like Ali Khamenei or Hassan Rouhani.
If “treaties, laws, and agreements” produced peace, there would never have been a Second World War. The years leading up to that monumental catastrophe were filled with international treaties and arms control agreements.
Sowell points out that standing armies, and threats of military intervention, are what keeps these wicked men under control. Assholes, as it were, fear getting fucked by dicks. It's reminiscint of the scene in Star Trek: Insurrection where Riker is being attacked by Sona ships using dangerous and illegal subspace weaponry.
PERIM: I thought subspace weapons were banned by the Khitomer Accord.You can file a protest (the Chamberlain method) or you can build a war machine to wipe your enemies off the map (the Hitler method). If there's a middle ground somewhere, history has yet to find it.‡ Of course, history is of no interest to President Monkey, a small-minded and arrogant son-of-a-bitch who thinks that history, as much as he acknowledges it exists at all, exists to cause "ignorant" people reasons to laugh at or denounce his ridiculous policies. To him and his far-left ilk, history is simply an unfortunate world in which right-wing and British/American policies are demonstrated to be true and better time and time again.
RIKER: Remind me to lodge a protest.
‡ If there is another way, the answer may -- surprise surprise -- also come from Star Trek. Read the Chekov stories in this novel for a clue.
Thomas Sowell knows better. Benjamin Netanyahu knows better. President Monkey doesn't. And that's why only two of them are worth ever listening to about foreign policy.
