Can we ever trust the promises of a genocidal dictator? Can governments that openly and explicitly say they wish to kill Jews and Christians and undermine American interests ever be reliable in making deals with Israel and America? These questions are necessary for us to answer, and it seems appropriate to do so on the anniversary of a short-lived and short-sighted deal the British and French made with Adolf Hitler.
While I will not attempt to answer the above questions definitively in this piece, I do want to propose some key facts about why Chamberlain was foolish to believe he had achieved peace with Hitler and what his mistakes might teach us as Donald Trump and other leaders try to make peace with murderous Islamic and Communist tyrannies.
We hear the cry from all sides that we are seeing the realization of peace in our time. This is on one level certainly false, because the Islamic religion explicitly commands the killing of non-Muslims, which is why any peace made with an Islamic nation always lasts for a relatively short amount of time. That has been true since the seventh century, and it will continue to be true as long as the religion of Islam exists. The regimes of Qatar, Iran, Gaza, Syria, etc., are not going to stop believing in death to America and Israel because we gave them more concessions. The only question is whether or not we can convince them to stop killing Jews and Christians for a few days, a few months, or a few years.
Related: Why Israel Should Control Gaza, Judea, and Samaria
British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain tried that concession tactic with Hitler, even though bribing dictators has only ever encouraged more violence, not less. On Sept. 30, 1938, Germany, Britain, France, and Italy completed the Munich Agreement. The Holocaust Encyclopedia explains:
Hitler had threatened to unleash a European war unless the Sudetenland, a border area of Czechoslovakia containing an ethnic German majority, was surrendered to Germany. The leaders of Britain, France, and Italy agreed to the German annexation of the Sudetenland in exchange for a pledge of peace from Hitler. Czechoslovakia, which was not a party to the Munich negotiations, agreed under significant pressure from Britain and France.
Of course, it didn’t work. How infamous now is the photo of Chamberlain waving the piece of paper that was to bring peace in our time! How quickly the hopes of France and England fell apart! Hitler wanted only to see how far he might push his enemies — he intended world war all the same; he would implement his youthful aspirations of Mein Kampf to such a degree of bloodshed that his name is in itself now a curse and a horror. He found his enemies were weak, and he went for the throat.
We now have to deal with many governments and terror organizations as genocidal and untrustworthy as the Nazi Third Reich. It is no mistake or coincidence that the Muslim Arabs who wanted to found a state of Palestine were allied with the Nazis during World War II. Now we have the Palestinian Authority financially incentivizing and rewarding terrorism, Hamas openly avowing genocidal aims, Syria massacring Christians and Druze, Qatar poisoning our universities and sponsoring Hamas leaders in luxury, Iran vowing death both to Israel and America, North Korea deepening ties with China, and China committing genocide while infiltrating other countries.
And yet, many Western governments, the United States included, are treating promises from these nations as valid and believable. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was even pressured into apologizing to Qatar for trying to kill the mass murdering Hamas leaders responsible for the greatest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, seemingly because America wants Qatari investment.
Obviously, no two historical situations are exactly alike, and it is sometimes necessary to make temporary deals with dangerous governments to postpone open fighting, but it seems as if the West has become too complacent, too willing to believe that dictatorships will not start wars and commit atrocities — even to the point of overlooking the wars and atrocities dictatorships are committing at the current time.
Chamberlain made the mistake of trusting Hitler too far. Let that not be said someday of us and the new Hitlers of our time. When your enemy tells you who he is, believe him.
