Seventy years ago today, some of the German government’s top bureaucrats gathered in a Berlin suburb. The event, known to history as the Wansee Conference, after the name of the neighborhood in which these Nazi technocrats came together, was remarkable for the commonplace way in which the participants approached their problem as if it were a normal matter in which inter-governmental agency cooperation was necessary. But there was nothing normal about their task: the extermination of the Jews of Europe.
Lawrence Kadish notes the event today in an important article in the New York Post. But the point of the piece isn’t merely commemoration of a milestone event in the Holocaust. Rather, Kadish wisely compares the bureaucratic thoroughness with which much of the considerable power of the German state was put at the disposal of the Nazi death machine with the way Iran is currently marshalling its resources for a similar purpose: the construction of a bomb that might be used to eradicate the state of Israel.
Kadish’s comparison is apt and not just because both Nazi Germany and Islamist Iran are tyrannical states governed by vicious anti-Semites who scheme against the Jews. He rightly points out that just like Adolf Hitler, a man who made no secret of his plans for genocide, the Iranian regime has also not been shy about telling the world its intentions for dealing with Israel. But in both cases, much of enlightened opinion dismissed their warnings as being mere rhetoric intended for domestic consumption. Few took the Nazis at their word in the 1930s. The same is true about the West’s refusal to take the apocalyptic warnings of Israel’s destruction, ironically by leaders like Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who deny the original Holocaust while boasting of wishing to start another.
There may be those who will object to conflating the discussion of the Holocaust with concern about Iran, but any such complaints are without substance.
Holocaust remembrance is important, but any words spent lamenting the Six Million murdered by the Nazis without some reference to the need to defend the lives of the descendants of the Jews who survived is pointless. Kadish’s piece is a reminder that the best memorial to the Holocaust is not a speech, a statue or even a museum (however praiseworthy such things might be), but the state of Israel and the continuance of Jewish life there and elsewhere.
Tears shed for Hitler’s victims without a thought as to the potential for an equally great toll of victims of an Iranian nuke are of no use. And just as that tragedy might never have occurred had the Allies summoned the resolve to oppose Hitler before he struck, so too might the next great tragedy be averted if the West acts to stop Iran.
As Kadish writes:
This Third Reich milestone should serve as a cautionary tale for every 21st-century democracy. Middle East expert Bernard Lewis has observed that Islamist leaders like Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are little concerned with the mutual-destruction strategies that kept the Cold War from becoming hot. Instead, they welcome the martyrdom of their subjects.
History consistently reminds us that indifference in the face of an implacable enemy invariably leads to disaster. Further, more often than not, our enemies tell us exactly what they mean to do before they do it. Acting on their warning requires our collective insight, personal courage and national will.
This month, the world is still in doubt as to whether the United States will act to impose an oil embargo on Iran, the only measure short of war that has a chance to convince the ayatollahs to abandon their nuclear ambitions. Yet even as President Obama dithers, Washington is sending signals it may be more concerned about an Israeli attempt to forestall the Iranian nuclear program and a possible rise in the price of oil, then it is in the cost of waiting until Tehran achieves its goal.
The Wansee Conference anniversary should alert us to the fact that such complacency can only lead to catastrophe.
"There may be those who will object to conflating the discussion of the Holocaust with concern about Iran, but any such complaints are without substance." n nReally. So tell me, where can I do some reading about European Jewry being a nuclear power with the ability to wipe out Germany several times over? And after I've done that reading, I'd like to learn some more about the Nuremberg Laws that Nazi Iran has imposed on Israeli Jews. n nI'll be waiting…. n nKathy, whose grandmother died in Sobibor and who would laugh at the absurdity of your analogy if it weren't also so disgusting.
They impose Nuremberg Laws on their Bahai community which is routinely terrorized. And no, Israeli strategic planners don't know if Iran plans to use the nuclear force to strike Israel directly or leverage conventional forces against Israel. But their state rhetoric is undeniably Hitlerian. Ultimately, as the West itself is undivided as how vigorously to pursue sanctions and, as anti-Semtic taunts to these posts suggest, Western public opinion would, in part, be prepared to sacrifice the Jewish state if, to use the analogy you object to, Hitler's would stop at destroying Czechslovakia, the final response may, yes, have to come from Israel with its nuclear power capable of turning Tehran's streets into glass. Containment? Preemptive conventional attack? More sabotage? But yes, a replay of Hitler against Israel is not strictly analogical.
I have just finished reading an interesting and disturbingly timely book. Why We Watched: Europe, America, and the Holocaust, by Theodore S. Hamerow, a history professor at the University of Wisconsin, chronicles and analyzes a story too rarely told: why the USA and Western European democracies exerted so little effort to prevent Hitler’s genocide of the Jews of Europe. n nHamerow gives full credit to the supreme efforts made by the allies in the war to defeat Hitlerism – once the allies belatedly recognized that their appeasement and isolationism would not avert the danger of further territorial aggression. n nBut he focuses on the numerous instances when the US and Britain failed to take available steps to assist Hitler’s victims. The public silence about the death camps. The repeated failure to offer wholesale welcome to refugees. And, above all, the refusal to divert even limited military resources to disrupting the railroad networks supplying the death camps. n n n n
[Part 2] n nWhich brings us to the present day. Again, we see a nation seeking to control its region and dominate its neighbors. We see this nation in the hands of militant fanatical ideologues and apocalyptic tyrants. We hear in their own words their hatred of the Jews and their commitment to destroy them. n nAnd now we see them devoting all their efforts to achieving a level of nuclear armament that will put their neighbors under their control, and put extinction of the hated Jews within easy military reach. n nOnce again, the factors which enabled Hitler’s Germany are at work to enable Ahmadinejad’s Iran. n nThe counsels of isolationism tell us to stay out of the fight, to maintain even-handed detachment, to avoid antagonizing enemies or reassuring allies. Indeed, we seek to have neither enemies to oppose nor friends to support (see below, “Obama’s Isolationism Unveiled“). n
[Part 3] n nAnd, above all, we have the pernicious influence of foreign-policy realists who reassure us that Iran couldn’t possibly mean what it says about eradicating Israel. That’s just rhetoric, big talk. They must know that they couldn’t possibly use nuclear weapons even if they get them. After all, they wouldn’t want to risk the casualties from an Israeli or US second-strike. They’re not crazy, you know! n nThe ultimate failure of imagination, as we saw on 9/11, is to refuse to believe people when they say they want to murder us. n nWill we, once again, sit and watch? Despite the present excitement about “talks” and toothless sanctions, it appears that the world is dithering while Iran arms itself with first-strike weapons of annihilation. n
World War II wasn't fought, Trudy, to save the Jews specifically. Hitler declared war on the United States for a variety of (defective) reasons after Japan attacked. The Nazis declared war on the US, not the other way around, as you know. But if the West perceives that the threat of Iranian nukes is, in fact, exclusively directed against the Jews of Israel, not much would be forthcoming to force transparency into the Iranian nuclear weapons program. Where the anti-Semites (as usual) go off the rails is their Manichean obsessing on an imaginary cosmos where the Jew Zionist bankers face off against everyone else. The West probably is willing to see Israel vanish but the Sunni emirates are themselves terrified of Iranian hegemony and begging anyone who will listen to contain Iranian expansion,
We ourselves ("ourselves" meaning the United States) aided and facilitated Iranian expansionism when we invaded Iraq and overthrew Saddam Hussein. Obviously, that was an unintended consequence, but it was NOT (or should not have been) an *unforeseen* consequence. Everyone knew that Saddam Hussein's regime was keeping Iran's regional ambitions in check, but Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, et al., arrogantly believed that Iran would react to the U.S. invasion with "Oh my god, we better be good or they'll do this to us, too," which is almost NEVER the way nation-states react in situations like that.
S.P.H. Yerucham /The "Hippies Smell" t-shirt advertised in the side column might just be the thing to turn away any person of a bohemian persuasion who might possibly be converted to an understanding of the Islamic persecution of Jews and the seriousness of the construction of nuclear bombs by Iran. The "Palestinian" cause is only the latest blood libel against the Jews: this magazine makes that clear, but advertisements like this in the side column truly show a lack of understanding about how to convince people. It may not make sense, but people will not listen to reason if they are needlessly offended.
USSR was the only country that saved many of it`s Jews by evacuating them to Eastern regions. nAs always comments of Katy,Besht and other Jews show the great burden of Holocaust on the souls the burden that hampers the adequat position.