Appeasement and Radical Islam

The Belmont Club's marvelous Wretchard may be a bit over the top in comparing the Phoney War (*) of 1939-40 to the post-9/11 world, as he himself acknowledges, but as usual he provides ample food for thought in a post on the Danish Cartoon Controversy. An excerpt:

[T]he cartoon crisis has been cruelest to radical Islam because it has upset the timetable for the slow demographic conquest of Europe. It forced the crisis before the time was ripe to win an outright trial of strength. And it has deranged the carefully crafted plan to hold Europe politically neutral while the Islamists concentrated their force on their most dangerous enemy, the United States. Unless the Islamists can reverse or at least pause the process of confrontation it will find itself engaged on two fronts, against Europe and the United States simultaneously.

Like all historical comparisons this one is inexact. The world of the late 1930s can never be compared to the opening decade of the 21st century. Nazism is not Islam nor is Hitler Osama Bin Laden. But I think some valid correspondences still remain between the Phoney War and the period between September 11 to the present. Both are marked by an attempt to maintain a disintegrating status quo long after it became imperative to exchange it for a new model of relationships. Both are marked by miscalculation as political leaders find themselves struggling to overtake the tide of events. Both mark the end of the last boundaries between the familiar and the dark, unknown future. What did Churchill feel, one wonders, in those desperate days when he did not know the end yet went on?

(*) The so-called Phoney War was the period between September 3, 1939, when Britain declared war on Nazi Germany and May 10, 1940, when Hitler invaded the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg. Despite the war declaration, there was no fighting in Western Europe during the period.