By Charles Krauthammer
Thursday, January 29, 2015
Amid the ritual expressions of regret and the pledges of
“never again” on Tuesday’s 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, a
bitter irony was noted: Anti-Semitism has returned to Europe. With a vengeance.
It has become routine. If the kosher-grocery massacre in
Paris hadn’t happened in conjunction with Charlie Hebdo, how much worldwide
notice would it have received? As little as did the murder of a rabbi and three
children at a Jewish school in Toulouse. As little as did the terror attack
that killed four at the Jewish Museum in Brussels.
The rise of European anti-Semitism is in reality just a
return to the norm. For a millennium, virulent Jew-hatred — persecution,
expulsions, massacres — was the norm in Europe until the shame of the Holocaust
created a temporary anomaly wherein anti-Semitism became socially unacceptable.
The hiatus is over. Jew-hatred is back, recapitulating
the past with impressive zeal. Italians protesting Gaza handed out leaflets
calling for a boycott of Jewish merchants. As in the 1930s. A widely popular
French comedian has introduced a variant of the Nazi salute. In Berlin, Gaza
brought out a mob chanting, “Jew, Jew, cowardly pig, come out and fight alone!”
Berlin, mind you.
European anti-Semitism is not a Jewish problem, however.
It’s a European problem, a stain, a disease of which Europe is congenitally
unable to rid itself.
From the Jewish point of view, European anti-Semitism is
a sideshow. The story of European Jewry is over. It died at Auschwitz. Europe’s
place as the center and fulcrum of the Jewish world has been inherited by
Israel, now the largest Jewish community on earth.
The threat to the Jewish future lies not in Europe but in
the Muslim Middle East, today the heart of global anti-Semitism, a veritable
factory of anti-Jewish literature, films, blood libels, and calls for violence
— indeed for another genocide.
The founding charter of Hamas calls not just for the
eradication of Israel but for the killing of Jews everywhere. Hezbollah chief
Hassan Nasrallah welcomes Jewish emigration to Israel — because it makes the
killing easier: “If Jews all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of
going after them worldwide.” And, of course, Iran openly declares as its sacred
mission the annihilation of Israel.
For America, Europe, and the moderate Arabs there are
powerful reasons having nothing to do with Israel for trying to prevent an
apocalyptic, fanatically anti-Western clerical regime in Tehran from getting
the bomb: Iranian hegemony, nuclear proliferation (including to terror groups),
and elemental national security.
For Israel, however, the threat is of a different order.
Direct, immediate, and mortal.
The sophisticates cozily assure us not to worry.
Deterrence will work. Didn’t it work against the Soviets? Well, just 17 years
into the atomic age, we came harrowingly close to deterrence failure and
all-out nuclear war. Moreover, godless Communists anticipate no reward in
heaven. Atheists calculate differently from jihadists with their cult of death.
Name one Soviet suicide bomber.
Former Iranian president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani
once characterized tiny Israel as a one-bomb country. He acknowledged Israel’s
deterrent capacity but noted the asymmetry: “Application of an atomic bomb
would not leave anything in Israel but the same thing would just produce
damages in the Muslim world.” Result? Israel eradicated, Islam vindicated. So
much for deterrence.
And even if deterrence worked with Tehran, that’s not
where the story ends. Iran’s very acquisition of nukes would set off a nuclear
arms race with half a dozen Muslim countries from Turkey to Egypt to the Gulf
states — in the most unstable part of the world. A place where, say, a moderate
pro-American Yemen can fall to pro-Iranian rebels overnight.
The idea that some kind of six-sided deterrence would
work in this roiling cauldron of instability the way it did in the frozen
bipolarity of the Cold War is simply ridiculous.
The Iranian bomb is a national-security issue, an
alliance issue, and a regional Middle East issue. But it is also a uniquely
Jewish issue because of Israel’s situation as the only state on earth overtly
threatened with extinction, facing a potential nuclear power overtly
threatening that extinction.
On the 70th anniversary of Auschwitz, mourning dead Jews
is easy. And, forgive me, cheap. Want to truly honor the dead? Show solidarity
with the living — Israel and its 6 million Jews. Make “never again” more than
an empty phrase. It took Nazi Germany seven years to kill 6 million Jews. It
would take a nuclear Iran one day.
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