An increasingly dangerous development is the silence or whitewashing by Western commentators of Arab and Muslim deviations from human rights. These commentators refrain from criticism, or sometimes they even justify hatred and injustice — perhaps out of the cowardly fear that they might “lose access” to these autocrats, or perhaps out of the concern that they, too, might be physically attacked; suffer material loss, or even be accused of the charges so frequently propounded in international gatherings of “racism,” “Islamophobia,” or “orientalism.”
We have been through this before — when a quiet, unconcerned policy of appeasement towards the criminal behavior of non-democracies in the 1930s was considered an inadequate response to Hitler and Nazism. It is time to apply lessons from this disastrous policy to the present attacks on Israel and other democracies by non-democratic forces. Genuine believers in political and intellectual freedom must not be hesitant to denounce attempts to stifle such freedoms; and they must not appease those countries and groups who make such attempts.
Originally published by Gatestone Institute http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org