Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day. I was born a mere 6 years after the world became aware of the horrors of the Holocaust, that time in which the full weight of an industrialized state was devoted to genocide of the Jewish people.
Every Passover, Jews around the world repeat the words:
For, not only one stood against us, and tried to destroy us, rather in every generation they try to destroy us.
This year there is an additional poignancy to these words.
For the first part of my life, anti-Semitism was a nuisance rather than a tragedy. Overt Jew hatred was rare, notwithstanding my third grade classmate's insistence that I killed Christ. When Israel, facing an existential threat, destroyed the Arab armies during the 1967 War and then showed them once and for all (we foolishly thought) in 1973 that Israel would not be defeated, anti-Semitism seemed to be an ancient hate that would become an historical hate. Surely the modern world would never again remain silent in acquiescence of genocide.
Too many examples have occurred since then, in Sudan, Rwanda, Bosnia, to continue to believe that we have matured beyond the need to tolerate genocide. Yet, there was a brief moment of hope that the world was changing, that civilized people would no longer engage in such primitive hate fueled carnage. Surely the Jews could begin to relax their eternal vigilance.
Sadly, after discovering that they would not be able to "kill the Jews" and "push them into the sea" the Arabs chose to continue their historical animus in new guises, and more recently discovered that the Europeans had never really fully weaned themselves from Jew hatred.
The American government's current animus toward Israel adds tot he feeling of threat. If America cannot be counted on as an ally when Israel is in duress, the Jews must consider themselves truly alone.
Our President, blinded by his naivety or something more malevolent, acts as if he believes that Israel has provoked the hatred directed at it, that somehow Israel's desire to build apartments in its capital explains Palestinian Jew hatred. Further, he apparently believes that the Iranian mullahs can be understood and reasoned with as rational actors who would never do any of the terrible things they constantly threaten.
Israel is being forced to make a Hobson's choice:
If You Shoot at a King You Must Kill Him
Last week I spoke with Reza Kahlili, a man who during the 1980s and 1990s worked for the CIA under the code name "Wally" inside the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. He wrote a terrific book about his experience as an American agent called A Time to Betray, and today he's issuing a serious warning about his former Iranian masters: they mean what they say, and the West had better start taking them seriously.
He thinks President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Supreme Guide Ali Khamenei fully intend to use nuclear weapons if they acquire them, either by exploding them in enemy cities or holding the Middle East and the world's energy resources hostage. It's hard, to be sure, for even a well-placed expert to know this for certain. Perhaps not even the leadership knows exactly what it will do with the bomb once it gets the chance. (Either way, a nuclear-armed Iran won't suddenly play well with others.) What happens in the region over the next couple of years may depend in large part on whether the Israelis are willing to chance it.
Yet, surely some optimism must remain. Yad Vashem celebrates the righteous Gentile because we know that if the world is going to be saved, it will require righteous men and women, and they still exist.
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