An Israeli Churchill

An Israeli Churchill


By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Thursday, January 29, 2009 4:20 PM PT

War On Terror: The comparisons between Israeli electoral front-runner Benjamin Netanyahu and Winston Churchill are all too obvious. Too bad statesmen who have learned history's lessons are so rare.

As British historian Graham Stewart notes in his 1999 book "Burying Caesar," chronicling the 1930s political rivalry between Churchill and Neville Chamberlain, Churchill, "in contrast to many of his colleagues, anticipated the problem of a resurgent Germany even before Hitler's ambitions had become more fully evident." Stewart points out that Churchill made his first House of Commons speech on the subject no later than November 1932.

It was not the first example of the Last Lion's remarkable prescience. As another acclaimed British historian, Paul Johnson, observed in his sweeping history of the 20th century, "Modern Times," regarding the rise of Lenin in Russia, all but one Western politician failed "to grasp the enormous significance of the establishment of this new type of totalitarian dictatorship, or the long-term effect of its implantation."

Johnson said the exception was Churchill, whose strong sense of history caused him to realize "a fatal watershed was being reached." In 1918, he said Lenin and Trotsky should be hanged and the next spring he argued that of all history's tyrannies, "the Bolshevik tyranny is the worst, the most destructive, the most degrading."

As former Israeli prime minister and current Likud Party head Bibi Netanyahu enjoys a comfortable lead in the polls a week and a half before election day, his words of warning regarding Iran should remind the free world of how Churchill's advice went unheeded for so long — at the cost of millions of innocent lives.

Speaking to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Tuesday, Netanyahu cautioned that economic woes are distracting the West from a far greater danger. The former finance minister said that while global economic woes are reversible, "the acquisition of nuclear weapons by a fanatic radical regime" is not.

"We have never had, since the dawn of the nuclear age, nuclear weapons in the hands of such a fanatical regime," Netanyahu added. Stopping Tehran "remains the greatest challenge facing the leaders of the 21st century at the beginning of the 21st century."

For years most of the world has dithered in regard to Iran. Deluded governments still believe that an Islamofascist regime awaiting the coming of the 12th imam and an apocalyptic holy war can respond to diplomatic carrots and sticks with rationality.

Fortunately Israel, the nation that has the most to lose from a nuclear Iran, may soon be led by perhaps the sole 21st century statesman who possesses a strong, Churchillian sense of history.



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