This week marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day. By May 1944, the fate of Hungary's Jews was already known. A detailed report by two survivors who escaped from hell, Alfred Wetzler and Rudolf Vrba, meticulously documented the machinery of extermination at Auschwitz and was placed on the desks of Western governments.
Despite the detailed information, the Allies decided not to bomb the railway lines or the camps. They chose diplomatic caution and military calculations over rescuing an innocent people subjected to planned and organized murder.
History repeats itself in different and terrifying ways. There is a clear and necessary distinction, by a thousand degrees of separation, between the Holocaust, a unique and unimaginable crime against the Jewish people, and events in Iran. Yet there is one point where past and present intersect: the civilized world standing by in the face of documented mass killing.
Confronted with what is unfolding in Iran today, reality cries out for a simple moral definition. Reports from Iran speak of tens of thousands killed in a single day of brutal repression. This is not crowd control. It is the mass killing of civilians seeking freedom.
Unlike in 1944, the information is not buried in encrypted intelligence reports. It is streamed live to every phone in the world. The gap between the severity of the acts and the global response is inconceivable, and the primary responsibility lies with Europe's governments.
The Holocaust took place on European soil, and its capitals hosted the machinery of extermination. Europe, more than any other place, should have internalized that "never again" is not a slogan for ceremonies but a plan of action. Instead, Europe once again convenes empty summits while the executioner in Tehran operates without restraint.
Donald Trump's firm stance toward the ayatollahs' regime does not stem from altruism alone. It is clear to all that the US is driven by cold interests: containing the radical axis and ensuring regional stability and strategic advantage vis-à-vis China. But in global politics, meaningful moves are often a fusion of interest and moral imperative.
Trump has held up a mirror and exposed the international community's naked hypocrisy. Organizations that railed against Israel, which fought a moral war of survival against a murderous terrorist organization that carried out genocide on October 7, are now silent in the face of the mass killing of civilians. But holding up a mirror is only half the job.
The Iranian regime's repression
For this mirror not to become yet another testament to impotence, it must lead to action. History teaches that evil on this scale is not stopped by speeches. To prevent Iran from becoming a final valley of death, the American administration must complete the move and shift from verbal deterrence to a broad strike that dismantles the regime's apparatus of repression.
The message to Europe's leaders is clear: the era of hypocrisy is over. When a continent on whose soil millions were slaughtered chooses diplomatic caution in the face of mass killing, it betrays the historical lesson of its own past. Just as the Nazi regime was defeated only by force of arms, so too must the reign of terror in Tehran be eradicated.
The question is not what the price of an attack would be, but how the world will be able to look itself in the mirror if it fails to act now. History will not forgive leaders who ignore what is happening in Iran, foremost among them the governments of Europe, on whose soil the Holocaust occurred.
