President Joe Biden’s visit to Israel Wednesday is an incredible illustration of America’s strong alliance with Israel and commitment to the security of the Jewish state as it battles to destroy the ruthless and murderous Hamas terrorist organization in the Gaza Strip. For coming to Israel during a war and everything else he has done since the Hamas massacre on October 7, we thank the president on behalf of the entire Jewish people.
What Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran are now doing is a repeat performance of the great tragedy that our world experienced during the Hitler era. On March 7, 1936, Adolf Hitler sent over 20,000 troops into the Rhineland, an area that was restricted and demilitarized according to the Treaty of Versailles.
Hitler was gambling because Germany was not yet strong enough to face the French army. When he saw that his hunch was right, that the French as well as the British did nothing, he left his troops there.
In a January 1939 speech, Hitler told the German people: “it is a shameful spectacle to see how the whole democratic world is oozing sympathy for the poor tormented Jewish people but remain hard-hearted when it comes to helping them.”
By the time the democratic governments acted, it was too late, bringing the world to a war in which more than 50 million people, Jews and non-Jews, paid with their lives.
Iran is the greatest threat to world peace
And here we are, some 84 years later, and our world is again repeating the same mistake. Rather than being a friend of the West, Iran is the greatest danger to world peace, pursuing nuclear weapons while nurturing an insatiable thirst of Jews, and desperately seeking ways to destroy Israel and the Western world.
And look at what Hamas is now doing in Gaza. Using a mosque as their secret headquarters from which they plot the slaughtering of innocent civilians – woman, children, and the elderly, laughing and taking pictures, documenting their inhuman acts.
Undeniably, Iran is the world’s greatest sponsor of terrorism and has gone as far as to plan and finance its Hamas client’s descent into mass killings and butchery without any compassion and trace of humanity. October 7th, 2023 was the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust and it could have been prevented had the world put its foot down.
President Biden’s visit to Israel is an important milestone and is an opportunity to lead the world now to confront the terrorists of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran.
The time has come for the world to unlock its silence. Simon Wiesenthal, who lost 89 members of his family in the Holocaust, who gave up his career as an architect to fight back – who brought 1,100 Nazi war criminals to justice, warned the world, “Freedom is not a gift from heaven, it is something we have to fight for each and every day.”
So thank you President Biden, leader of the free world, for standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the State of Israel.
Am Yisrael Chai!
The writer, a rabbi, is the co-chair of the Museum of Tolerance Jerusalem and the founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles.