I have often wondered why so many of the Jews of Germany took so long to realize that Hitler and the Nazi regime intended to kill them, along with all the Jews of Europe and what they hoped would be the conquest of Russia. They need only have read "Mein Kampf", Hitler’s book that blamed Jews for all the ills of Germany.
On November 9-10, 1938, there was a series of coordinated attacks against Jews in Germany and Austria that became known as Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass, during which 91 Jews were killed and an estimated 30,000 were arrested and incarcerated in concentration camps. More than 1,000 synagogues were burned. What followed was the Holocaust, the deliberate killing of Jewish men, women and children. Its victims numbered between five and six million.
Kristallnacht had been preceded by years of vicious propaganda against all Jews. Those who intend to kill Jews do not hide their plans, they tell the world.
The Iranian regime has been doing this since it seized control in 1979. On August 17, Agence Press France reported on a speech given by Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in which he called Israel a “cancerous tumor.” He ranted on claiming that “Zionists” had triggered World War I and II and had “taken control over world affairs since the moment they became dominant over the U.S. government.”
The day before, a prominent Saudi Arabian cleric declared that Jews drink the blood of children during religious ceremonies, a notorious “blood libel.” People living in the Middle East have been hearing such things for decades. The nation of Israel has, since its founding in 1948, had to fight a succession of wars for its survival.
Just as the nations in the 1930s tried to ignore the threat of Nazi Germany and sought to appease it, we are living through a similar process as Iran continues its relentless quest for nuclear weapons.
In a recent opinion in The Wall Street Journal, “What Obama Isn’t Saying About Iran”, David Feith, its features editor, wrote “The United States doesn’t want Israel taking military action against Iran’s nuclear program, and top officials have been traveling to Jerusalem this summer to make their case in person.” The claim is that sanctions are working. They are not, nor is there any united front to deter Iran.
Just as the world of the 1930s knew what was coming, the world today knows that Iran intends to destroy Israel with nuclear weapons and Americans should know, if they do not already, America is the other hated nation, slated for destruction by Iran’s leaders.
In 2009, Dore Gold, a former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, 1997-1999, and diplomatic envoy to Middle Eastern nations, currently the president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, authored “The Rise of Nuclear Iran: How Tehran Defies the West.” It laid out all the facts regarding Iran’s nuclear program, warming that “it is not too late to prevent their becoming a nuclear power.”
The previous year, Americans had elected not just the first black President, but one who had made clear in his memoir, “Audacity of Hope” that “I will stand with the Muslims should the political winds shift in an ugly direction.”
DEBKA file, an Israeli news organization with contacts throughout the Netanyahu administration, reported on August 18 that Israel, in return for not attacking Iran soon, has been seeking guarantees that the U.S. will not stand aside as Iran closes in on possessing nuclear weapons that can be put on its missiles. Assurances from the Obama administration should be regarded as both politically motivated so that it can reach Election Day without having to respond to an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities and as essentially worthless.
The Holocaust taught the Israelis that Jews are essentially on their own when threatened anywhere in the world. They have twice destroyed nuclear reactors, first in Iraq in 1981 and second in Syria in 2007. They are not going to stand aside and permit Iran to acquire nuclear weapons. They are not going to wait on U.S. assurances, particularly from Barack Obama.
They will risk everything because they will lose everything if that do not act. Inasmuch as Iran has engaged in numerous acts of war against the U.S. since 1979; most notably the 1983 Iranian truck-bomb attack against our embassy and a marine barracks in Lebanon it is clear that a state of war has existed now for decades.. A thwarted 2011 plot to kill the Saudi ambassador to the U.S. in a Washington, D.C. restaurant is only the latest of such outrages.
The United States is at war with Iran even if a succession of administrations from Reagan to today has refused to admit it. It is not a war of our choosing, but of Iran’s. We can wait for them to destroy Israel and than attack us or we can take the action necessary to stop it before it happens. As in the 1930s, we can wait to suffer the consequences of doing nothing.
In the end, it appears that only Israel is prepared to do what neither the U.S. nor any other nation will do.
© Alan Caruba, 2012
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