NEVER AGAIN?

Never Again? - 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.

The establishment of Israel was a Jewish declaration to a world that had allowed the Holocaust to happen — after Hitler had made his intentions perfectly clear — that the Jews would henceforth resort to self-protection and self-reliance. And so they have, building a Jewish army, the first in 2,000 years, that prevailed in three great wars of survival (1948-49, 1967 and 1973).

But in a cruel historical irony, doing so required concentration — putting all the eggs back in one basket, a tiny territory hard by the Mediterranean, eight miles wide at its waist. A tempting target for those who would finish Hitler’s work.

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.(Washington Post)