Circumloquacii Europanis

On the other hand, if one asks the opponents of American policy how terrorism is to be effectively combated and how the misery of Middle Eastern societies is to be overcome, the answer one usually gets is: “through dialogue”. Dialogue is the magic word invariably deployed whenever concrete political measures are demanded.

Such “dialogue” with Islamists of all stripes, representatives of Arab dictatorships and all sorts of self-appointed spokespersons for the Arab and Islamic world has been underway for over ten years now. Astonishingly, it is seldom asked what results it has in fact produced. Two years of “dialogue” with Iran over its nuclear program has, for example, brought no results whatsoever. Unperturbed, the Iranian Mullah Regime is sticking to its plans to build a bomb, just as if all the many positive rounds of discussion had never taken place.

>”Dialog” even when you’re being suckered. Why then?

What, then, is driving the “old” Europeans? Is it cowardice, as Matthias Doepfner recently suggested, a preemptive capitulation to Islamism, as Bernard Lewis suspects, appeasement as Henryk M. Broder (“Europe – appeasement is your middle name”) has insisted, or a mix of stupidity and arrogance coupled with a large dose of anti-American and anti-Semitic resentments? Can it really be the case, as Nikolaus Blome recently put it in the pages of Die Welt, that a German Chancellor seriously defends the view that although Iran does indeed want the bomb, “this does not [threaten] world peace as much as that American President manically fixated on going to war”? Even the most experienced observers of the so-called dialogue with Islam and the Arab world are left looking for answers.

The fuse is lit!