In a speech to the American Legion, Donald Rumsfeld made a blithe comparison between dealing with "terrorists" today and appeasing Hitler in the 1930s. He ignores the fact that the war he first mentions, World War I, caused the even worse World War II. Had the U.S. simply stayed out of World War I, in which we had absolutely no legitimate interest, the two sides would have had to make peace without humiliation, and then would have recoiled in horror at the pointless futility of it all. Instead, the U.S. charged in, handed victory to one side, then stood by and allowed the victorious Allies to inflict upon the Central Powers the humiliation that alone produced Hitler and a will to get even. That is the real lesson of the World Wars, for our times: that injustice fuels the will to avenge. It is decades-long American violence against Arabs thru callous and insane backing of every one of the crimes of Israel that has targeted us for destruction.
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There is only one cure for rage at injustice: to do justice. There will certainly always be a few violent lunatics who will strike out at people for their own demented reasons, but they can't make a worldwide movement out of their private demons. It is Zionism that fuels the rage of hundreds of millions against us, and only abandoning Zionism will remove us from the target list.
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Had we stayed out of World War I, there would have been no World War II. Had we stayed out of the Arab-Israeli conflict, there would have been no attack on the World Trade Center. And if we now step away from Israel and let it fight its own battles, with its own resources only, without so much as one red cent from us, we will find ourselves no longer in the crosshairs of terrorists.

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:33 PM