by Jeff Jacoby in The Boston Globe, 3/3/13
Excerpt:
So what can explain the European reluctance to blacklist Hezbollah as a terrorist organization and shut down its fundraising and logistical operations? As in Churchill’s day, cowardice and dishonor might have something to do with it.
“There’s the overall fear if we’re too noisy about this, Hezbollah might strike again,” Sylke Tempel, editor-in-chief of the German foreign affairs magazine Internationale Politik, said last month as the Bulgarian government was preparing its report on the Burgas bus bombing. “And it might not be Israeli tourists this time.”
The moral stench of that rationalization is almost as repellent as its stupidity. Yes, Hezbollah’s foremost targets are Jews and the Jewish state – it has always proclaimed the destruction of Israel as its goal – but have Europeans still not figured out that while Nazis and the Nazi-like start by killing Jews, they rarely end with them? After 30 years of Hezbollah butchery around the world, can Europe still imagine that pretending Hezbollah is mostly “benign” will keep them safe? That if they feed the crocodile enough, it won’t eat them just yet?
“The storm will not pass,” Churchill warned Europe’s appeasers. “It will rage and it will roar, ever more loudly, ever more widely.” Trying to appease the unappeasable is always folly. Europeans were supposed to have learned that lesson from the Nazis. Must they learn it again from Hezbollah?
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