The Real Enemy

The Real Enemy

By

Leonard Zwelling

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2308267?query=featured_home

The Israel-Hamas War might lead you to believe that Hamas is the primary enemy of the Jewish people and the state of Israel. It is not. While it is absolutely true that the goal of Hamas is to eliminate the Jews of the world and especially those in Israel as well as the Israeli state itself, they would be no more than a splinter under the Israeli skin were it not for their sponsors in Iran and their bankers in Qatar.

In this world today, there are countries that are the sworn enemies of freedom– China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran. Iran has been the most focused on Israel and the use of proxies to accomplish the Irani goal, the elimination of Israel and the Jewish people. Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis, and others do the bidding of the Iranian mullahs keeping Israel in a constant state of war for years.

In the attached editorial from The New England Journal of Medicine on November 23 the nature of that enemy is well-described by Dr. Susan S. Kashaf, a native Iranian, now at Yale. Through many stories of the Irani government’s war against freedom and especially against women, she puts into focus the nature of the regime that we are up against. Just like the heads of the regimes in Russia, China, and North Korea, the leadership of Iran is dictatorial and ruthless and in the Iranian case theocratic. It is critical that we in the United States know our enemy. Iran is as much the enemy of America as it is the enemy of Israel.

So, much as was the case in 1939, the forces of autocracy and evil are aligned to bring down western democracy and freedom. As in 1939, the United States is reticent to fully engage in combat against the evil forces of darkness. I understand, but can it be any more true now than it was then that we will be able to avoid conflict? I think not.

Just as anti-Semitism is the canary in the coal mine of a society’s drift toward autocracy, the war against the Jews in Israel is symptomatic of a greater threat to civilization just as it was in Nazi Germany in 1939. The time has long since passed for America to stand up and say—no more deals with Iran. Give them a week. Either all the hostages come home and the Iranian surrogates leave Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, the West Bank, and Gaza or they will be forcibly removed by a coalition of American and European and, if possible, Sunni Arab forces as was the case in Kuwait under President George H. W. Bush. It is important that the Iranian civilian population be spared for it is that population that must rise up and depose the mullahs and be the next generation of leaders of Iran, a country full of gifted people. It was even more filled with them before so many fled in 1979. That should be possible given the Iranian leadership uses others to do its fighting far from Tehran.

What I fear is that Biden is too timid to do anything and Trump too much of an isolationist to muster a collation with the forces of freedom around the world.

America must lead this and it should do so now.

The forces of evil are on the move. Russia is clearly not afraid of us in Ukraine. China is itching to take back Taiwan. North Korea is so bellicose it is scary and it has the backing of both Russia and China.

We need to get over ourselves. Democracy is in a fight for its life all around the world. If the forces of light will not rise to the occasion, the forces of darkness will triumph. Western civilization is not guaranteed a win. We have to earn it. We may as well get started.

Lindsey Graham has it right. Iran’s source of money is its oil fields. Level them or else repeat the lessons of the Cuban Missile Crisis and blockade Iran. Cut off all their money in western banks. Help the people of Iran rise up against their leadership and allow Iran to grow and prosper. A democratic Iran would not have surrogates fighting on the Israeli borders. It is what needs to happen. Let’s not wait for another Pearl Harbor to do what we know we must.