It looks like a Churchill moment in the world.  With the Charlie Hebdo massacres in Paris the French have had enough.  Finally -- finally! -- after years of terrorist murders followed by appeasement or worse, ordinary people are ready to take to the streets.  Politicians feel threatened by rising parties like UKIP in Britain, Marine le Pen’s Front Nationale in France, and PEGIDA in Germany. 

As usual, Europe’s politicians try to smear their opponents as neo-Nazis, but that is a lie in most cases.  No warmongers need apply in Europe today.  But vigorous self-defense against Muslim aggression is now widely understood to be in the cards.  Europe’s many collaborators and appeasers are losing ground, as they did in the 1930s when the public finally saw that appeasing Hitler was doomed to fail.  The big parties are trying to coopt the new protest movement, but now they’re on the spot: If they fail to stop future terror attacks their careers are dead. 

That is why the French Prime Minister finally used the word “war,” and France sent its sole aircraft carrier to join the fight against ISIS.  With the exception of the United States, the Anglosphere came out strongly against Islamist warmongers.  Tony Blair made a very clear statement against Islamist aggression. 

Only Obama was missing in action. 

Forty international leaders came to Paris to join the big protest march, including odd birds like Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian corruptocrat who has been running terror attacks on Israel.  Turkey’s Islamofascist Prime Minister naturally accused Israel of aggression “just like ISIS.”

Countries like India, which has faced its own Muslim threat since 1948, sounded generally sympathetic.  Obama may still think there’s a big struggle between the West and the developing world, but India, China and Africa are far beyond that stage.  They want what we’ve got, and they are quickly trying to join the modern world. 

A vitally important split is emerging in the Middle East, with Egypt’s Sisi calling for a “religious revolution” in Islam.  Nobody knows whether he will gain political traction, and he is likely to back off if he doesn’t.  But the Saudis and Egypt are in a very close alliance for survival, with Egypt being Saudi Arabia’s military defender while the Saudis support Sisi’s regime with billions of dollars.  So it’s likely that the Saudis secretly supported Sisi’s message as a test balloon. 

The MEMRI.org website, which translates news from the Muslim world, shows a split between the usual hatemongers and modernists.  It’s impossible to tell how that split will develop, because (in Nathan Sharansky’s words), there are Free Societies and Fear Societies:  In Fear Societies nobody says what they believe.

Now that Sisi has said out loud what millions of people have been thinking, Egyptians are making their bets: Quietly follow reformers like Sisi, or play it safe? The Muslim world is balanced on a tightrope, ready to tumble either way. 

Saudi Arabia is in the middle of a succession struggle, a time of great instability, with 92-year-old King Abdullah said to be close to death. 

Yet they are now stuck between the devil and the deep blue sea, between two mortal enemies of ISIS and Iran, both laying claim to Mecca and Medina.  The two holy cities give the Saudis their standing in the Muslim world.  Saudis are afraid of a future without OPEC oil power, with their oil money fleeing to safer havens, and threatened by the opposing war cults of Iran and ISIS.  They have built a 600-mile military barrier to keep out ISIS infiltrators, and some have been caught.  The Iranians are constantly making trouble for the Saudis as well. 

In public the Saudis follow Wahhabi doctrine, a real desert war mania.  But they also want to survive, and the thought of hanging concentrates the mind most wonderfully. 

In the Middle East ordinary people in urban areas have about the same access to cellphones and the web as you and I do.  Your teenage Saudi billionaire kid is constantly getting mind-boggled by Kim Kardashian soft porn on the web versus five-times-a-day prayers and holy roller indoctrination by Wahhabi fanatics.  That’s how Osama bin Laden started, torn between two worlds.  Every single ISIS recruit is running away from modernity, trying to escape into a bloody and absolutist desert creed, trying to resolve that mental split. 

This is hardly a new phenomenon: Millions of Nazi and Communist recruits came from the same kinds of alienated adolescents. 

Meanwhile, Obama has been out on the golf course, and we can only guess at his passive reaction at this critical time of choosing.  Nobody can doubt Obama’s soft side for the militant Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood and Tehran, or his inability to choose between Muslim war theology and the more peaceful side.  Obama is a lame duck who can still make trouble, but he cannot control the future.  But -- if another Left-Islamophile is elected president, like Liz Warren or Hillary, we are in for a sea of trouble. 

If Ted Cruz, Bobby Jindal, or another realist is elected in two years, the Western world will unite to defend against the aggressive war cults.  Many Muslim nations will then fall in line as well. 

Right now, a heated debate is breaking out on the Left, with big foreign policy voices like Leslie Gelb calling for a rejection of Obama’s appeasement policies. 

Obama will always be Obama, because he is the most rigid ideologue ever to occupy the White House.  Inevitably his fan base on the Left will follow him or another radical.  But Democrats who want to survive politically are beginning to speak out against the deep irrationality of the Obama years, and soon, they will have to take a public stand. 

This is a Republican moment if the right candidates emerge, both in Congress and in the next presidential election.  Mitt Romney is not temperamentally suited for these times, being a compromiser at heart.  John McCain’s candidacy is a bad joke.  The right candidate is one who will show a deep understanding of this time of choice for the American people, showing strength, mental clarity, reassurance and the will to win. 

We are not a war-loving people, but when the danger is beyond dispute, Americans have always made the right choice.  It was never easy, and there were always appeasers, liars, demagogues and collaborators with our enemies. 

Obama has failed to show a convincing way in the Jihad War.  He has tried and tried appeasement and retreat, to the point that the Iranian war cult has now essentially gone nuclear, while the Saudis are running scared, away from us. 

Obama has made the world much more dangerous.  Syria is building a nuclear industry embedded in its mountains and therefore very difficult to stop, following the example of Iran and North Korea.  Russia is helping to build more nuclear plants for Iran, because there is no American penalty for doing so. 

Obama started off saying that America should retreat as a world power, and we have done that.  China is now advancing militarily, Russia is pathetically failing to take over the Eastern Ukraine (but not for want of trying) and Islamist aggression is breaking out all over. 

In Nigeria, Muslim slave raiders are killing thousands of villagers, taking children and women as slaves, and selling them on the Muslim slave market.  In the Sudan, the West has done nothing while an Islamofascist regime has made two decades of genocidal war on African tribal and Christian peoples. 

It is utterly shameful for the first black president of the United States to do nothing at the spectacle of Muslim slave-raiders killing and stealing thousands of African children in Kenya, Nigeria and the Sudan. 

Obama has done nothing for black unemployment in the United States, nor has he even spoken out against the weekly killings of black American kids in Chicago and Detroit.  Rather, he has allied himself with Al Sharpton, a shameful demagogue and extortionist, who always makes race relations worse. 

Instead of much-needed leadership, Obama has pursued a rigid Left-Islamophile direction that consistently make things worse.  Obama does not solve problems, not even for his own voters. 

Now Europe is showing us the way.  Our people are also beginning to face reality, in spite of all the corruption and appeasement by the political-media class.  In Europe ordinary people are beginning to speak out, because they are tired of years of failure to stem the tide of brutal violence.  Politicians are jumping on the bandwagon.  But ordinary people have shown the real leadership. 

Americans see the same facts that other people see around the world. 

This is a time of choosing, and the biggest question is “What side are  you on?”

Every political candidate will soon have to take a stand.