As we reported this weekend, Israel and its supporters are flipping out over the apparent thaw between the United States and Iran, precipitated by Obama’s climbdown on Syria. Here is an angry piece by Bill Kristol at the Weekly Standard, calling Obama an appeaser, Rouhani Hitler, Assad Mussolini, and saying that only Israel can lead. It seems the piece is written in desperation: Kristol marshaling what forces he still has at his disposal to head off any understanding between the US and Iran.

There is so much hysteria here that I need to quote a lot of Kristol’s argument to give full measure to his world view. How many Americans share this understanding? Notice Kristol’s extended and repeated Hitler analogies, the characterization of Obama as an appeaser who will leave the U.S. to be eaten by locusts, the overblown tone employing Shakespeare and Churchill references, and the heroic description of Israel as “for now the leader of the West” because it will act against Iran.

Act Two opens at the United Nations. There, we’ll see a charm offensive worthy of Richard III by the new Iranian president and veteran deceiver of the West, Hassan Rouhani. In response, the Obama administration will move on from punting in Syria to appeasing Iran…. Smaller retreats lead to larger ones. The West’s failure to resist Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935—and his troops’ use of poison gas—was merely a foretaste of the failure to resist Hitler when he took the Rhineland in March 1936. In his essay in the volume Present Dangers, the historian Donald Kagan tells the story. Hitler had expected Britain to slap down Mussolini…. Hitler drew the lesson. The occupation of the Rhineland followed shortly.