There are touchstones of morality in life. In 1938, resisting Hitler was a big one in Europe; in 1990, support for freedom in the Soviet Empire was another one.

Today we have a new test of character.

Americans have never had much of a problem telling the good guys from the bad guys. It isn't that hard.  If they are head-chopping murderers who go around burning girls' schools in Afghanistan, committing random rapes in Norway,  and truck-bombing civilians in open-air markets in Iraq, chances are that they are bad guys.

See? That wasn't so hard. So why don't the liberals get what's obvious to a child of six? After wrestling with it for years, I think it all comes down to moral cowardice.

Today we are surrounded by moral cowards; people who have chosen to evade choices between good and evil. Every day when they hear the news they shrivel up again like snails drawing into their shells,  because moral cowardice is not a one-time thing. It a lifetime practice of shifty evasions. Courage is a muscle that can be trained, and so is cowardice.

Israel isn't the only question liberals keep dodging. Shifty evasion is how they run their lives.  Ask an honest question and you'll get a shifty answer.  Just watch their eyes.

Israel isn't their only failure of the moral sense. Every time Hollywood pulls another Caligula stunt they know they'll get away with it because of the passive collusion of millions of liberals, who keep paying for their wares, no matter how corrupting. Hollywood's moral monsters keep pushing the limits, and liberals keep paying them.  Liberals around the world are paying for the corruption of your children.

No, Israel isn't their only failure.

Israel is our moral touchstone today because that country is on the front line fighting the risorgiamento of Islamist fascismo.  If you don't think that's true, take another hard look. You can google tons of indisputable facts.  

The Declaration of Independence took a stand on foreign tyranny; the Civil War abolished the intolerable shame of slavery and still preserved the Union; World War I pushed back Prussian imperialism; World War II knocked out Hitler and Imperial Japan; the Cold War brought down the Soviet Empire.

Five historic choices, and all expressed our basic values.

America made the right choices -- and not easy ones --  at five crucial turning points in world history. You may think that's patriotic humbug, but it's true. Lincoln called constitutional government the "last, best hope of mankind," and he was not given to empty rhetoric.  Lincoln had to make the toughest choices in American history, and he always came back to basics. In the end, after all was said and done, we knew it in our bones.

The newest upsurge of barbarism in the world is impossible to ignore  -- unless you're a liberal and blind. (But I repeat myself.) If you see the same international danger that everybody else does, you can either fight 'em or join 'em. The hard Left, like Bill Ayers and Code Pink, has chosen to join the fascists because they hate and despise free people. They are despicable lowlifes. We know where decent people stand, because morality hasn't changed. It is what it is. You know it and I know it.

 Americans didn't go around apologizing for our basic decency until the rise of El Jefe El Magnifico, Barry the Bombastic.  Europe had a Prince William the Silent, but we've got 'em beat hands down, 'cause we have Barry Who Won't Ever Shut Up.  Every time his numbers drop he makes another whiny complaint to over national TV, and his numbers drop even lower.  It's a kind of tic he can't control.

A fresh team of leaders is emerging.  Some of them are Republican presidential contenders. Some are freedom fighters in Europe,  like Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Geert Wilders. Millions of modernist Muslims quietly despise their wife-beating and child-abusing ideologues.

If the West would stand up for its own values the rest of the world would heave a big sigh and get back to sanity. Ordinary decency isn't that different in Cairo and Kansas.  Turn off the hate propaganda and the Muslim world will find a path back to modernity. They don't really want to live in misery and despair.

Which brings me back to Israel.

In the last couple of weeks Israel has seen its own Cottage Cheese rebellion, a democratic eruption about as alarming as the American Tea Party. While next door in Syria the dictatorship has sent 200 battle tanks to kill as many Sunni rebels as possible, the Cottage Cheesers have carried out a model of peaceful protest.  Hundreds of thousands of young people turned out to protest the high price of food and housing. They pitched neat little tents along the center strips of  thoroughfares in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. There they have slept overnight and chanted slogans, waved signs, and got the thumbs up sign from thousands of drivers passing by.

I tell you, it's as scary as Tea.

The Netanyahu government reacted quickly. Not a single man, woman or child was attacked by tanks. Nobody got hurt. The cops were out in force, but I haven't seen pictures of rioters throwing Molotov cocktails the way they did in London, Paris and Athens. Nobody even tossed a cottage cheese pie.  But hundreds of thousands of ordinary people made their case in perfect freedom, and the Cabinet in Jerusalem took urgent action.  Elected officials ran around trying to fix things, the way they're supposed to.

Six months into Obama's "Arab Spring" not a single democracy has emerged in the Arab world, in spite of Obama forcing Hosni Mubarak to resign -- an 82-year old ally who kept the peace for thirty years. The Egypt-Israeli peace treaty  is now in tatters thanks to Obama and the phony-baloney "Arab Spring." 

The only stable country in the Middle East is little Israel, which hasn't even bothered to call an election to fix the Cottage Cheese crisis. It wasn't needed.

Meanwhile,  Obama the Big Bad Wolf has huffed and puffed and blown the house down, except that all the bad old dictatorships are just getting fresh new dictators. So much for the Enlightened One and his Hope and Change for the Muslim world.

 Islamic fascism has received a fresh boost from Obama's community disorganizing. The Moo Bro candidate in Egypt has sworn to renew the war with Israel. Iran's fascists have taken over the formerly free country of Lebanon, and Iran has sent its torture battalions to help Syria  beat up its eighty percent Sunni Muslim population. Tehran is still purging its Green Movement protesters without a peep of protest from Washington. Ahmadinejad is getting ever closer to ICBMs with nuclear warheads. In three years they may have the range to hit us right here at home.

Today no Arab country can trust the United States. We used to support moderate regimes, but we've shafted our biggest Arab ally right in front of God and everybody. Don't think that lesson's been lost in Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan. Or in Beijing and Moscow.

Our Hero has opened Pandora's Box all right, but it was Jimmy Carter who started it by falling for the seductive charms of Ayatollah Khomeini. Thanks to Jimmy Carter the most talented people in the Middle East have been exposed to three decades of abuse, tyranny and war. Jimmy has never bothered to say "sorry." You see, he really meant well.

But it all starts with the moral cowardice of the liberal West. Millions of liberals voted for Bombastic Barack because the media  threatened to call them racists if they didn't.  So the liberals collapsed, the way they always do, and they forgot to think. They got suckered good and proper by the Chicago Machine and the Demagogues, and they will never admit it.

So -- if you want to see the true enablers of the radical Left-Islamofascist alliance, look no further than your gutless friends and neighbors.

It's not good news, I know, but I thought you oughtta know.