Appeasement - the Euro disease

Front Page has an article by Matthias Dopfner who is the Chief Executive of German publisher Axel Springer AG on the Euro disease.

He starts out with:

A few days ago Henryk M. Broder wrote in Welt am Sonntag, "Europe -- your family name is appeasement." It's a phrase you can't get out of your head because it's so terribly true.

He goes on to point out how WW2 started and its cost the the Europeans and especially to the Jews. Then he comes forward to today:

Rather than protecting democracy in the Middle East, European appeasement, camouflaged behind the fuzzy word "equidistance," now countenances suicide bombings in Israel by fundamentalist Palestinians. Appeasement generates a mentality that allows Europe to ignore 300,000 victims of Saddam's torture and murder machinery and, motivated by the self-righteousness of the peace-movement, to issue bad grades to George Bush. A particularly grotesque form of appeasement is reacting to the escalating violence by Islamic fundamentalists in Holland and elsewhere by suggesting that we should really have a Muslim holiday in Germany.

What else has to happen before the European public and its political leadership get it? There is a sort of crusade underway, an especially perfidious crusade consisting of systematic attacks by fanatic Muslims, focused on civilians and directed against our free, open Western societies. It is a conflict that will most likely last longer than the great military conflicts of the last century -- a conflict conducted by an enemy that cannot be tamed by tolerance and accommodation but only spurred on by such gestures, which will be mistaken for signs of weakness.

He has more. Go and read.