OUR CENTURY'S RENDEZVOUS WITH DESTINY - with apologies to Patrick Henry and Ronald Wilson Reagan

The appeasers cry, Peace, Peace – but there is no peace. And no "religion of peace", either. Perhaps they say "religion of peace" because they believe saying it will help us avoid a global religious war. But that war has actually already begun. Gales have already swept across the seas to our shores bringing to our ears the clash of resounding arms, our eyes the horror of riots, beheadings and bombs.

And our brothers and sisters in the armed forces and special forces have long been in the field!

We have been lately told by the current ruling elites that we have to choose between a left or right - between their "smart diplomacy" and our clumsy "war-mongering".

But in this global war, there is no such thing as a left or right. There's only "UP" or DOWN". "UP" is humanity's age-old dream: maximal individual freedom consistent with law and order, or "DOWN" the ash heap of totalitarianism.

The same folks who want us to trade our "risky" freedom for the safe soup kitchen of the welfare state have told us they have a solution for peace without victory. They call their policy "smart diplomacy", but that's just another way to say accommodation and appeasement.

And they say if we'll only avoid any direct "islamophobic" confrontation with the enemy here and abroad, that the enemy will forget their evil ways and learn to love us.

All of us who oppose this policy are indicted as racists, islamophobes and warmongers. They say we offer simple answers to complex, nuanced problems. But perhaps there is a simple answer—not an easy answer—but a simple one: If you and I have the courage to continue to tell our elected officials that we want our national policy based on what we know in our hearts is both morally right and at the very heart and soul of who we are as a nation.

That's what we tea partiers are all about, and why the appeasers have been attacking us with everything they got - including the IRS.

We mustn't buy a false security and phony freedom from the threat of the terrorists' bombs by committing an immorality so great as saying to our allies and to billions of human beings now terrorized on every continent - by over 20,000 attacks since 9/11, "Give up your dreams of freedom and self-determination because to save our own skins, we're going to accommodate your slave masters."

That would be a rejection of our founding principles and a disgrace - and as Alexander Hamilton said, "A nation which can prefer disgrace to danger is prepared for a master, and deserves one."

We must reject the false dichotomy of the appeasers: There's no argument over the choice between peace and war - we'd all prefer peace. The choice is between liberty and tyranny.

What is more, there's only one guaranteed way we can have peace—and we can have it in the next second—and that is by surrendering. If we surrender to our enemies and convert from our way of life to theirs, then we will have peace.

There is a risk in any course we follow other than surrendering.

Appeasement is merely surrendering a little bit at a time. Our well-meaning, appeasing, liberal friends refuse to face this fact.

They refuse to accept that their policy of so-called "smart diplomacy", accommodation and appeasement doesn't really give us peace and avoid war; it really only means we will be surrendering our liberty slowly instead of fighting for it.

We have a rendezvous with destiny.  A choice:

We'll either preserve for our children and our children's children Western civilization by fighting with every means necessary, or we'll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.

Can a thousand years of darkness really be what the appeasers wish for? Would the liberals really have this for themselves and their children and their children's children? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of 1000 years of islamist-phobia, and dhimmi chains?

I know the course appeasers will take - they took it with Sudetenland, which only emboldened the enemy, made them stronger and the inevitable war worse. The appeasers have sought to do it again by appeasing the Muslim Brotherhood and the Taliban and Iran and Turkey and Fatah and so on.

But as for us, Americans true to our founding principles, we refuse to take that course. We say: Give us liberty or give us death!