Thursday, April 2, 2015

The Western capitulation to Adolf Hitler in the 1938 Munich Agreement is cited as classic appeasement that destroyed Czechoslovakia, backfired on France and Britain, and led to World War II.

All of that is true.

But there was much more that caused the Munich debacle than simple Western naiveté. The full tragedy of that ill-fated agreement should warn us on the eve of the Obama's administration's gullible agreement with Iran on nuclear proliferation.

Fable one is the idea that most people saw right through the Munich folly. True, Europeans knew that Hitler had never once told the truth and was already murdering German citizens who were Jews, communists or homosexuals. But Europeans did not care all that much.

Instead, the Western world was ecstatic over the agreement. After the carnage of World War I, Europeans would do anything to avoid even a small confrontation -- even if such appeasement all but ensured a far greater bloodbath than the one that began in 1914.

Another myth was that Hitler's Wehrmacht was strong and the democracies were weak. In fact, the combined French and British militaries were far larger than Hitler's. French Char tanks and British Spitfire fighters were as good as, or superior to, their German counterparts.

Czechoslovakia had formidable defenses and an impressive arms industry. Poland and perhaps even the Soviet Union were ready to join a coalition to stop Hitler from dissolving the Czech state.

It is also untrue that the Third Reich was united. Many of Hitler's top generals did not want war. Yet each time Hitler successfully called the Allies' bluff -- in the Rhineland or with the annexation of Austria -- the credibility of his doubters sank while his own reckless risk-taking became even more popular.

Munich was hardly a compassionate agreement. In callous fashion it immediately doomed millions of Czechs and put Poland on the target list of the Third Reich.

Munich was directly tied to the vanity of Neville Chamberlain. In the first few weeks after Munich, Chamberlain basked in adulation, posing as the humane savior of Western civilization. In contrast, loud skeptic Winston Churchill was dismissed by the media and public as an old warmonger.

Hitler failed to appreciate the magnanimity and concessions of the French and British. He later called his Munich diplomatic partners "worms." Hitler said of the obsequious Chamberlain, "I'll kick him downstairs and jump on his stomach in front of the photographers."

The current negotiations with the Iranians in Lausanne, Switzerland, have all the hallmarks of the Munich negotiations.
The Indiana Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 2015 is constitutionally infirm and legally troublesome.

The circuitous constitutional route that brought about this statute began in 1990 when the Supreme Court ruled that the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment may not be used as a defense to violating the general laws of the land. In Employment Division v. Smith, a small group of Native Americans who had been fired from their jobs because drug tests revealed their use of peyote made applications for unemployment compensation, which the State of Oregon denied.

They appealed and claimed that their use of peyote, a hallucinogenic drug, could not be the basis for firing them from their jobs because it was a sacrament in their religion. The court ruled that the adherents to this religion had the same obligation to obey the laws that prohibit the use of peyote as all persons do.

In response to that decision, and wanting to show an interest in an issue of constitutional liberty for a change, Congress enacted the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (RFRA), a clumsy effort to overturn the Employment Division v. Smith ruling.

That statute basically required the federal government and the states to permit the "my religion made me do it" defense wherever there was an arguable claim that a general law of the land conflicted with a genuine religious practice or belief. The statute also mandated an exacting due process standard, called strict scrutiny, that the courts are to apply to the states' enforcement of their laws when addressing an alleged clash between a general law applicable to everyone and a free exercise of religion claim.

Four years later, when the Roman Catholic Archbishop of San Antonio, Texas, claimed the protection of RFRA to justify an exemption to a local zoning law so that an old church could be expanded, and lost, he appealed, and the case made its way to the Supreme Court. In Boerne v. Flores (1997), the court found RFRA to be unconstitutional. It ruled that Congress had effectively redefined the meaning of the Free Exercise Clause and mandated the judicial standards to be used when assessing claims made under it, and that that definition and mandate are not properly Congress' to make. Because Congress' powers under the Fourteenth Amendment are limited to remedying state failures to protect fundamental liberties and do not extend to defining the meaning or parameters of constitutional provisions, the court invalidated RFRA.

Iranian Foreign Minister “all smiles” over nuke concessions from US
 

By Robert Spencer / Jihad Watch

 

Iranian Foreign Minister “all smiles” over nuke concessions from US
Why wouldn’t he be “all smiles”? He’s achieved total victory. “

Iranian Foreign Minister ‘All Smiles,’” by Adam Kredo, Washington Free Beacon, April 1, 2015 (thanks to Pamela Geller): 

LAUSANNE, Switzerland—Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister, said late Wednesday that he is “all smiles” as talks with Western powers over the country’s nuclear weapons program run past […]

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Report: As Nuclear Deal Closes, Iranian Troops Headed to Israel’s Border

Pamela Geller / Atlas Shrugs

President Obama, the architect of genocide.
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Future generatios under siege by Islamic nuclear powers will curse the day that urbane savage was born wherever the hell it was.

Nothing happens for decades, then decades happen in a day-  get ready, thanks to the enemy in the White House.
“Report: As Nuclear Deal Closes, Iranian Troops Headed to Israel’s Border,” Times.UK, March 30, 2015
Golan Heights rebels Golan Heights violence Iran nuclear ambitions Iran Nuclear Negotiations Israel Golan Heights Israel Syria Golan Heights Israeli border syria civil war golan heights
An IDF patrol. Iranian forces are approaching Israel’s northern border. Photo: Twitter.
The Times – Iran is close to putting its forces on Israel’s...