| The memories of theHolocaust continue to hover over our planet every single day. The current uneasiness and fear throughout the world over North Korea’s leader emanates from our memories of another cultish leader named Adolph Hitler, who also defied the world… While North Korea’s leader, is no Hitler, the world needs to learn that these are the consequences when you dilly-dally with someone for20 years, allowing him to do his own thing. And it was that behavior in North Korea that gave birth to the stubbornness of the Ayatollahs in Iran who want to copy theirstrategy of defiance in order to achieve the same objective…. When President Obama visited Yad Vashem, Israel’s former chief rabbi, Rabbi Lau, told the President about an American colonel, whoapologized to him a few months ago for not liberating Buchenwald earlier. He then turned to the President speaking about Iran and said, “We know that America is our dearfriend, we only pray that you will not be late again” …we must never accept a moral equivalency between those who commit ultimate evil and those who are forced to respond to it. The world mustreject out of hand the naïve view of such people as the Nobel Laureate, Jose Saramego who labeled the blockade of Ramallah, “In the spirit of Auschwitz” … if that is inthe spirit of Auschwitz, then there would be no difference between Hitler’s blitzkrieg and the attack on Europe and D-Day, the Allied response of landing on the Normandybeaches. No difference between Himmler’s cattle cars deporting its victims to the death camps and the Allied response to save human kind from a thousand year ThirdReich. Excerpts from Rabbi Hier's speech delivered on Yom Hashoah 2013 in the presence of Holocaust survivors, members of the diplomatic corps and community leaders(pictured below) at the Museum of Tolerance. Read full speech here...
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