When it comes to security threats to western civilization in general and the United States in particular, Israel, along with nations that make up the European Union are the canaries in the coal mine. When they are under threat, so are we; that’s why the words of their leaders matter. The Canary with the biggest pair of lungs in the EU should be Great Britain. That’s why it is cause for great concern when that nation’s leader gets wobbly.

British Prime Minister David Cameron gave a speech in Ankara, Turkey recently in which he labeled as “prejudiced” fellow European nations that oppose allowing Turkey’s entry into the EU. While doing so, he shockingly chided Israel for its “attack” on the Gaza flotilla, a flotilla backed by not only Hamas and Hezbollah but also the Turkish government. Turkey has become increasingly Islamist and is aligning with Iran more each day.

Sir Winston Churchill once famously said,

An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.

It’s an added touch of stark irony that Cameron – the latest in a line of Churchill successors – not only refuses to allow those words to resonate with him but doubles down on the appeasement to which Churchill was referring. By painting his allies as Islamophobic, he performed the equivalent of soaking his fellow canaries in meat sauce, hoping not to be eaten at all because he’s serving up his allies on such a pretty silver platter.

Churchill would be repulsed by Cameron’s words, if not from an appeasement standpoint, then likely based on the former’s own words about what he called, “Mohammedanism”. Wrote Churchill in 1899:

The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men. Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities – but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it.

Based on Cameron’s own words, Churchill must have been a “prejudiced” Islamophobe as well.

Ironically, when Churchill wrote those words, Islam’s Ottoman Empire was the most powerful Islamic force in the world. It was dismantled in 1924 after being on the losing side in WWI. In 1928, the Muslim Brotherhood was formed in Egypt by Hasan al-Banna; its objective is – as it was then – to destroy western civilization and re-establish the Ottoman Empire, centered in what is today, Turkey.

Cameron’s words in Ankara can only be the result of two realities – ignorance or fear. If ignorance, it would mean he doesn’t know that Turkey is rapidly and more openly aligning with the enemies of western civilization and has been ever since Recep Tayyip Erdogan was swept into power in 2002. It would mean he doesn’t know his history, is grossly unqualified and never studied Churchill.

That leaves fear, which is at the essence of Churchill’s metaphor and the more likely reality.