Guess what– the Iran deal is like the west capitulating to Hitler at Munich in 1938.
Bill Kristol said so. So did Bret Stephens and Charles Krauthammer [link]. So has Cal Thomas at Fox:
A better analogy would be the 1938 Munich Pact, which gave Hitler part of Czechoslovakia in the vain hope that war could be avoided. It is worth noting that several of the nations that were signatories in Munich, namely Germany, France and Britain, are also part of the current deal with Iran.
From Oliver Willis and Samantha Wyatt at Media Matters:
Breitbart’s Ben Shapiro denounced the Iran nuclear deal in a post titled “Worse Than Munich,” as “the most ignominious moment in western foreign policy in decades,” and compared it to British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s 1938 appeasement of Hitler in Munich…
In a post on National Review Online, Daniel Pipes wrote that the Iran deal “will be remembered along with Munich,” calling it a policy “disaster” for the Obama administration:
Two other voices:
Dear Everyone, Everywhere Equating Iran/The Iran Deal With Nazi Germany/The Holocaust: Please read a book.
— Emily L. Hauser (@emilylhauser) November 26, 2013
Back in 1993, @netanyahu compared a deal granting the PLO semi-autonomy over West Bank cities to Munich: http://t.co/lgI2Q54LhV
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) November 25, 2013
By making this comparison they just demonstrate how ignorant and stupid they really are. Perhaps sane, intelligent people will now ignore them just like sane intelligent people should ignore Pamela Geller**** now that they know how batshit racist she is. The ironic thing is that the real appeasement at the moment is Americans (just where were they in 1938?????) and certain others giving into that rabid dog Netanyahu every time he wants to further colonize the West Bank.
**** – BTW, did you hear that the leader of her political party du jour (well some time ago), the EDL (English Defence League) quit because he discovered that the membership was batshit racist. What the f*&^ did he expect?
The next 6 months will define the Obama legacy in many ways.
Domestically, you have Obamacare. If the exchanges don’t work by 6 months, i.e. enough people with no insurance sign up, then the cost structure becomes haywire and it will essentially doom his presidency.
On foreign policy, the enforcement of the Syria deal as well as the completion of an Iranian rapprochement will be decided in this timespan.
But I’m less concerned with Obamacare or Syria. I think those have a good degree of working out. The Iranian issue is different. I think we’ll see a lot of crazed comparisons to Nazi Germany going ahead. You can count on Menendez and/or Mark Kirk to echo these statements as well as loyal tools like McCain/Graham.
AIPAC is already calling for more sanctions, per Zaid Jilani:
http://t.co/iV4vXZk6DV
The goal, as he notes, is to kill this. So we’re already seeing a battle with the Israel Lobby. Maybe the press will talk aloofly about “hardliners in Washington and Gulf states” instead of the Israel Lobby in order to obscure the issue(and the opposition coming from within Washington)?
Either way, Congress does seem to have more power on these issues than I thought. I always heard a president is more or less independent of Congress on foreign policy. While that is still true to a large extent – i.e. a president can choose to not enforce laws on the books and de-facto nullify them – Congress apparently has ways of overriding some of those executive desicions. Which is why Kerry went to Capitol Hill to lobby lawmakers.
When the history books of the Obama presidency will be written, my question is, have there been any presidency as colored by battles with the Israel Lobby as this administration?
I can’t remember any. Unlike so many of them who battles with the lobby and lost, Obama survived in 2012, in large part because of demographics as well as the radicalization of the GOP.
Finally, a word about Palestine. It will be important to see what the movement is on the issue in the primararies. Clinton will sell out the Palestinians, as usual, but if there’s a de Blasio-esque candidate, will he or she take a progressive stance? My guess is, like the real de Blasio, no. But in some ways, what happens with the grassroots is even more interesting.
In the 2012 democratic convention, they had to vote three times to get Jerusalem into the plank. They were too divided. Will they outright lose the vote this time?
Keep these quotes together. Collect all the Munich analogies.
And then collect all the Hitler/Nazi analogies.
And then ask why it is said to be impermissible to use such analogies w.r.t. Israel.
Double loyalties are one thing, but double standards are quite another. Or do I have it backwards?
BTW, refresh my memory: wasn’t Germany (and not France, England, etc.) in those days the preeminent military power in Europe? And, today, aren’t (ahem) USA, Russia, EU the preeminent military powers (and not Iran)? Just asking. Might be germane to the Munich analogy.
Let’s see:
At Munich the major European powers agreed to placate an aggressive and rising military country by allowing it to annex a part of it’s neighbor. They were reluctant to confront its violation of treaties — and anyway they expected it to fight a proxy war against their common enemy to the East, rather than against themselves. Of course, the winner of Munich soon grabbed the whole of its neighbor anyway, and there was no stopping its military aggression in the end.
So today, if it’s Munich, just who is who?
I can’t say I’m surprised. Shapiro, Krauthammer, Thomas, Krisol, Pipes… these are not exactly deep thinkers. It’s always the 1930s to them, and there is always a “Next Hitler,” and the people they disagree with are always Chamberlain in Munich, because their whole approach to these things is based on a fantasy in their heads. They don’t actually understand the history they’re discussing, but are pretending that they’re some kind of policy superhero. It’s pathetic, but predictable.