By Rabbi Ben Kamin
TACOMA, Washington–So nice of Iranian president Hassan Rouhani to have actually acknowledged the Nazi Holocaust of six million Jews and six million other innocents, including Gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Catholic priests, and assorted other subversives. This is noted on the Sept. 29 anniversary of the 1938 Munich Agreement, when European leaders appeased Adolf Hitler and conceded the German annexation of Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland. The world was at war within a year and 59 million people died.
Now, a phone call and a smile, and we are ready to get warm with the Islamic Republic, suddenly, inexplicably, and in spite of the fact that Iran has never taken responsibility for the 1979 storming of the US Embassy in Teheran and the agonizing, 444-day hostage-holding of American citizens.
This is also in spite of the fact that Iran is the model state-sponsor of international terrorism, the closest ally of the chemical Syrian child-killers, the malevolent client of Russia, and a nuclear power still openly committed to the evaporation of our singular ally and friend in the Middle East, Israel.
In all fairness, decades after the War, Germany and Japan are two of our closest partners. It is reasonable to say that the former has officially denounced and outlawed fascism (though remained painfully silent while we at least condemned the chemical infanticide in Syria) and the latter is more-or-less a bastion of pacifism.
But radical Islam—jihadism, not mainstream Islam—is at this moment, more than ever, bloodying and horrifying this world, from the malls of Africa, to the subway tracks of Europe, to the vulnerable skylines of America. 9/11 is still an open wound, have we already forgotten? Are we as naïve and given to dreams as Neville Chamberlain of Britain was when he thought Hitler was a normal human being?
Iran underwrites Syria, arms killer gangs in Somalia, supports suicide bombers in Iraq, and sends armaments to Hezbollah and missiles to Hamas. The Iranian theocratic leaders, who have forsaken the proud chronicles of this-once great civilization in the neighborhood of Eden, have had endless opportunities to check in and make nice. Even some Arab sheikdoms sense that this is more about making Munich.
Is Israel the only member of the family of nations that knows this is about the sanctions, and not the spirit?
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Rabbi Kamin is a freelance writer based in Encinitas, California. He may be contacted at ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com