Comments
THE VIEW FROM HERE - FDR and Churchill were not blithering idiots like those fools who propose that the Hamas participate the new Gazan government. Step one for peace requires the total, complete and unconditional surrender of Hamas. The Allied Forces did not allow the Nazi Party to survive in any form. The acceptable end to the war is Hamas’ total, complete, and unconditional surrender and Hamas’ organizational obliteration. Yet, we are beset with fools who are working for Hamas to return to total power in Gaza.
Because Trump is an illiterate and unaware of history, he fails to comprehend that the world has previously seen this scenario of eternal appeasement. The world knows about Chamberlain’s peace in our time which led to WW II, but few know that we came close to committing the same absurdity as WW II ended. After the May 7th surrender, Nazis would have quickly reconstituted itself had Russia not demanded a total, complete and unconditional surrender. America and UK were willing to let the post Hitler Nazi’s leaders, e.g., Amb. Karl Dönitz and Gen. Alfred Jodl, to control the government and to militarily surrender only on the Western front and not in the East where the Nazis were still fighting the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union required a second surrender of both the Nazi military and the Nazi government on May 8th. Despite his verbal bluster, Trump is backing down on Hamas’ disarming and on Hamas‘ exclusion from the new Palestinian government.
The Nazis’ surrender at Reims, France on May 7th was limited to the military surrender of Germany’s armed forces but did not constitute a surrender by the Nazi government. After Hitler’s death on April 20, 1945, his successors, e.g. Amb. Karl Dönitz and Gen. Alfred Jodl were making plans to re-establish Nazi control of Germany’s Weimar Republic. Because the Russians were still fighting the Nazis in the East, the Soviets found the idea of allowing the Nazis to immediately resume control to be intolerable. Thus, the following day, May 8th, at Stalin demanded that the Germans had to sign a total complete and unconditional surrender of both the military on all fronts and of the government. Stalin, like the Nazis and Hamas, was a genocidal mass murderer so that Stalin understood the extreme folly of allowing the Nazi mentality to avoid an unconditional surrender. Also, the Soviet Union had suffered far worse than America Western Europe WW II’s Two Peace Treaties
Why the West Was Willing to Allow the Nazis to Continue
Horrible as WW II had been, it had not been fought in America. Although Germany had lost the Battle of Britain, Germany never landed on British soil. France had been quickly overrun, and it was not calling the shots at the war’s end. The Soviets, however, had been invaded by the Nazis and the Russians had lost 27 Million people (8.7 million military and 19 civilian). The UK lost 510,595 (450,000 military and 60,595 civilian), America lost no one on American soil but lost 405,400 military personnel (250,000 in Europe). From the Russian perspective, the West was settling the war in the Western Europe, while allowing the Nazis to reconstitute the government under Nazi control and to continue fighting the Russians in the East. The West’s near eternal love affair with appeasement, as exemplified by the May 7th surrender, is still crucial to Putin’s and Hamas’ psychology. Both the Soviet Union in 1945 and Israel and Ukraine in 2025 are the only countries with skin in the game, while everyone else promotes some form of appeasement.
In the Gaza-Israel War, Trump is allowing Hamas to continue both militarily and civilly. Even with video evidence of Hamas’ executing Gazans so that Hamas will eventually become the sole governing Palestinian body, Trump claims that his peace deal holds! Just as the West tried to double cross the Russians in 1945, the West is double-crossing Israel to allow Hamas to continue to rape, pillage, murder its way to becoming the governing body for all Palestinians.
This time Hamas is not waiting for any other Palestinians to be elected to public office; it’s murdering them now. In response, Trump has only pusillanimous verbiage, while pressuring Israel to ignore all Hamas’ on-going atrocities. Most recently, Trump’s alleged peacekeepers want Israel to guarantee safe passage of 200 Hamas militants trapped in Rafah tunnels rather than have them surrender.
Similarly, Trump has left Iran with nuclear capabilities and Trump forced the Israelis to stop the war with Iran on the 12th day because Trump wanted to declare a premature victory. Despite the air strike successes on Iran’s Fordow Uranium Enrichment Plant, Iran’s Natanz Nuclear Facility, and the Isfahan Nuclear Technology Center, Trump opted for the illusion of total victory over reality. As a result, it falls to Europe to demands that Iran allow inspection of its stockpile of highly enriched uranium and of its nuclear facilities. Iran refuses. Despite the consensus that Iran still has indeterminate nuclear capacities, Trump told Nora O’Donnell on 60 Minutes that after the US Israeli strike, “they [Iran] have no nuclear capability.”
Just as Trump prefers to believe that he won the 2020 Presidential election and that January 6th was “a day of love,” Trump chooses to believe that the Gaza Peace Deal is holding. When necessary to protect his ego, Trump resorts to delusions. The rest of us are left with the hope that Kushner can somehow have Trump stop interfering with Netanyahu’s taking the necessary action to protect Israel from the Hamas’ barbarism. Hamas wages a religious war, making it is imperative that Hamas admit that it has totally lost the war. This admission will be a huge deterrent to more young Muslims taking up Islamic’s cause . There will be no Middle East peace without Hamas’ total, complete, and unconditional surrender both militarily and civilly as prelude to Hamas’ total demise. We did it after WW II with Germany’s Nazis, and we can do it again with Hamas.
(Richard Lee Abrams is a former Los Angeles-based attorney, an author, and political commentator. A long-time contributor to CityWatchLA, he is known for his incisive critiques of City Hall and judicial corruption, as well as his analysis of political and constitutional issues. Abrams blends legal insight with historical and philosophical depth to challenge conventional narratives. A passionate defender of civic integrity and transparency, he aims to expose misuse of power and advocate for systemic reform in local government. You may email him at [email protected])
