Ronald Reagan was the consummate collector of great quotations. The one about the crocodile was borrowed and adapted from Winston Churchill. “Winston Churchill took a dim view of neutrals. For him there were only two options in the face of Hitler: fight or surrender. Each neutral, Churchill said on 20 January 1940, ‘hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last. All of them hope that the storm will pass before their turn comes to be devoured. But I fear -- I fear greatly -- the storm will not pass.’”

What was true of Hitler and Nazism is equally true of radical Islam. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu brought the crocodile story up to date when he spoke before the 66th session of the General Assembly at the United Nations on September 23, 2011, following Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ speech:

"And these critics continue to press Israel to make far-reaching concessions without first assuring Israel’s security. They praise those who unwittingly feed the insatiable crocodile of militant Islam as bold statesmen. They cast as enemies of peace those of us who insist that we must first erect a sturdy barrier to keep the crocodile out, or at the very least jam an iron bar between its gaping jaws."

Appeasers to the Islamic worldview keep telling us that only a small percentage of Muslims are radicals. Some say it’s about ten percent. I’m not great at math, but I do know that ten percent of one billion is 100 million. That’s a lot of radical Muslims who want to see every aspect of Western culture destroyed.

What has President Obama’s apology for burning already Muslim-desecrated Qurans done for America? “Nothing but burning the White House can relieve the wound of us -- the Muslims -- caused by the Burning of Quran in the US,” the commander of Iran’s Basij force Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Naqd said.

He then added: “Their apology can be accepted only by hanging their commanders; hanging their commanders means an apology.”

The Islam world always saw President Obama as a dupe, a useful idiot, who would believe that appeasement toward a sworn enemy of the United States would bring about peace. In reality, the plan of the Islamic world has always been the destruction of all things non-Islamic.

President Obama’s June 4, 2009 speech in Cairo, Egypt, was the start of the appeasement process. The Muslims smelled fear and inevitable capitulation.

All of this reminds me of the long out-of-print book by John Ames Mitchell (1848–1918) -- The Last American (1889) -- that I have in my library. There is a sobering message on the dedication page and the book’s closing words:

“To those thoughtful Persians who can read a warning in the sudden rise and swift extinction of a foolish people [the Americans] this volume is dedicated....Again upon the sea. This time for Persia, bearing our wounded and the ashes of the dead [the last American]; those of the natives are reposing beneath the Great Temple [U.S. Capitol]. The skull of the last Mehrikan [American] I shall present to the museum at Teheran.”

There are several ink etchings in The Last American. One shows “The Ruins of the Great Temple,” a devastated United States Capitol. Pray and act that it will not be so.

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