During the 1930s, Winston Churchill, a seemingly failed politican, repeatedly warned his British countrymen against the growing menace of Nazi Germany.

The leaders of Britain and France–the two great victors of World War 1–hoped that if they simply ignored the increasingly aggressive behavior of German Fuehrer Adolf Hitler, they could somehow escape catastrophe.

Winston Churchill

This behavior included:

• In the early 1930s, Hitler began re-building a powerful German army in open defiance of the Versallies Treaty that had ended World War 1.
• Hitler ordered his army to occupy his native Austria in 1938.
• In 1938, Hitler demanded that Czechoslavakia cede the Sudetenland, its northern, southwest and western regions, which were inhabited mostly by ethnic Germans.
• British Prime Minister Nveille Chamberlain surrendered to Hitler’s demands at the infamous “Munich conference.” Believing they had avoided war, his fellow Britons were ecstatic.
• In March, 1939, the German army occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia.
• Hitler next turned his attention to Poland–which he invaded on September 1.
• In doing so, he unintentionally triggered World War II.

Adolf Hitler

In time, historians and statesmen would agree: Trying to appease dictators is futile–and a guarantee for their further aggression.

It is a lesson that current world leaders have forgotten as Islamic fundamentalists increasingly flex their military and economic muscles–and demand that Western nations bow to their demands.

• In Iran, scientists continue to fashion a nuclear weapons program–while insisting they intend to use the atom only for “peaceful purposes.”
• In Pakistan–which has 90-110 nuclear warheads–Osama bin Laden lived less than a mile from the Pakistan Military Academy, the country’s West Point.  So much for America’s “ally” in the “war on terror.”
• On January 7, 2015, the worst terrorist act in France since World War II occurred when three Islamics slaughtered 12 people at a satirical magazine that had published cartoons about the Prophet Muhammed.
• The rising tide of Muslim population growth spells deadly challenges for non-Islamic nations.

Winston Churchill’s warnings were ignored by other world leaders–most notably Franklin Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin–until their countries became victims of unprovoked aggression.

So were the warnings of Harvard political science professor Samuel P. Huntington.

In 1993, he published an essay in Foreign Affairs called “The Clash of Civilizations.”  Its thesis: In the post-Cold War world, nationalism would decline and differing cultures and religions would emerge as the primary sources of conflict.

Huntington’s critique of Islamic civilizations ignited a firestorm of controversey–especially his statement: “Islam has bloody borders.”

In 1996, Huntington expanded his thesis into a book–called The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.

Among his assertions:

• People are divided along religious and cultural lines.
• Islamic civilization do not share the general ideals of the Western world–such as individualism and democracy.
• Their primary attachment is to their religion, not to their nation-state.
• When the Muslim world conflicts with other civilizations, tensions and wars result.
• Arab dictatorships were fragile and could be overturned by the masses of unemployed young men. But even if they fell, the new regimes would not modernize along Western lines.
• A fundamental clash of civilizations between Islam and the West is inevitable.
• Relations between Muslims and non-Muslims–such as Catholics, Protestants, Hindus, Buddhists and Jews–have been marked by Islamic antagonism and violence.
• Western nations should distance themselves from Islamic ones.  The more both civilizations interact, the greater tensions between them will be.

Huntington cited several reasons for an inevitable war between the West and Islam:

• Western secular vs. Islamic religious values.
• Past historical rivalry between Christianity and Islam.
• Jealousy of Western power by Islamic nations.
• Islamic resentments of Western domination during the post-colonial restructuring of the Middle East.
• Islamic bitterness and humiliation at the achiveements of Western civilization over the last 200 years.

A point of Islamic irony:

Islamic terror groups such as Al Qaeda and ISIS damn Western nations as havens of corrupt infidels.  But it’s to Europe and the United States that tens of thousands of Syrians and Iraqis are now fleeing.

And they are fleeing to escape the barbaric slaughters of their fellow Islamics.

Following the 1979 Iranian Revolution, a quasi-war developed between some Islamic nations and some Western ones.

On the Islamic side:

• Iran
• Sudan
• Iraq
• Libya
• Syria.

On the Western side:

• The United States
• Great Britain.

“In this quasi war,” wrote Huntington, “each side has capitalized on its own strengths and the other side’s weaknesses.”  For example:

• Muslim terrorists exploited the openness of Western societies to plant car bombs at selected targets.
• Western powers used their superior air power to bomb selected targets in Islamic countries.
• Islamics plotted the assassination of Western leaders.
• The United States plotted the overthrow of hostile Islamic regimes.

Writing at a time before the United States directed its full military power at conquering Afghanistan and Iraq, Huntington ominously noted:

“During the 15 years between 1980 and 1995…the United States engaged in 17 military operations in the Middle East, all of them directed against Muslims.   No comparable pattern of U.S. military operations occurred against the people of any other civilization.”

The war that Huntington warned was coming and was, in fact, already in progress, has since erupted into full-scale conflict, with no end in sight.