OPINION:
When he awarded Jan Karski the U.S. Medal of Freedom in April 2012, President Obama said, “We must tell our children about how this evil was allowed to happen — because so many people succumbed to their darkest instincts, because so many others stood silent.”
Who was Jan Karski and why did President Obama posthumously award him with the nation’s highest civilian award? Jan Karski, a Roman Catholic Pole, was one of the few eye-witnesses to the Holocaust who warned both British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden and U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt about the annihilation of the Jewish people that he saw in the Warsaw ghetto and at the Izbica transit camp. Unfortunately, Mr. Karski’s message was met with disbelief. Roosevelt inquired about the horses in Poland but not about the welfare of Poland’s Jews. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter said that he was unable to believe Mr. Karski’s reports.
While the calculated extermination of the Jewish people was unimaginable 70 years ago, the Holocaust is now known to every member of the U.S. Congress. Every member of the House of Representatives and Senate knows that Iran has unequivocally and repeatedly vowed to eradicate Israel, the Jewish nation, from the map with the nuclear weapons that it will soon make operational. What reception do the rulers in Iran receive from the Democratic leadership in the White House and Congress? Undeterred by Iran’s role in killing Americans for more than 30 years — from the Marine barracks in Beirut to the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, from the mountains in Afghanistan to the streets of Iraq — the Democrats never tire of fawning over Iran, as the charade of nuclear negotiations in Geneva and Vienna carry on.
Even U.S. News and World Report recently summed up the duplicity of Iran with its headline, “Bad faith on display: Iran’s supreme leader confirmed his country is just stalling, not negotiating.”
What reception does Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu receive from the Democratic leadership when he wishes to update Congress on the progress that Iran is making in carrying out its vow to annihilate the Jewish state? House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, with her smirks and chuckles and use of paralipsis, publicly urged Democratic representatives to boycott Mr. Netanyahu’s address to Congress. Do Democratic leaders in Congress heed Mr. Obama’s warning about how standing silent allows evil to happen? No. These self-defined paragons of “open-mindedness” refuse to listen to the leader of the nation that sits in the crosshairs of a nuclear attack.
Jan Karski said of the indifference to the Holocaust in his 1980 speech to concentration camp liberators: “The second original sin had been committed by humanity. Through commission, or omission, or self-imposed ignorance, or insensitivity, or self-interest, or hypocrisy, or heartless rationalization. This sin will haunt humanity until the end of time.”
The Democrats’ derision of the leader of the nation faced with a credible and increasingly imminent threat of extermination is infinitely worse than indifference. There are truly evil people in this world. And not just in the Iranian government.
DAVID WANETICK
Institute for Strategic Negotiations
Princeton, N.J.
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