Daily Alert Archives

Never Again?

(Washington Post) Charles Krauthammer - Israel's Jewish population has just passed 5.6 million. America's Jewish population was about 5.5 million in 1990, dropped to about 5.2 million ten years later, and is in a precipitous decline that, because of low fertility rates and high levels of assimilation, will cut that number in half by mid-century. But there is a price and a danger to this transformation. It radically alters the prospects for Jewish survival. For 2,000 years, Jews found protection in dispersion - protection not for individual communities, which were routinely persecuted and massacred, but protection for the Jewish people as a whole. Decimated here, they could survive there. Hitler demonstrated that modern anti-Semitism married to modern technology could take a scattered people and "concentrate" them for annihilation. Hitler's successors now reside in Tehran, where President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has promised that Israel would be "eliminated by one storm." Former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the presumed moderate of this gang, has explained that "the use of a nuclear bomb in Israel will leave nothing on the ground." Iran makes clear that if there is any trouble, the Jews will be the first to suffer. "We have announced that wherever [in Iran] America does make any mischief, the first place we target will be Israel," said Gen. Mohammad Ebrahim Dehghani, a top Revolutionary Guards commander. Hitler had announced seven months before invading Poland that, if there was another war, "the result will be...the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe." In 1938, in the face of the gathering storm - a fanatical, aggressive, openly declared enemy of the West, and most determinedly of the Jews - the world did nothing.
2006-05-05 00:00:00
Full Article