Author and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel challenged President Obama over the ongoing existence of the Iranian and Syrian dictatorships, as he warned that Israel must have the ability to defend itself from a second Holocaust.
Wiesel, while introducing Obama at the Holocause Memorial Museum, suggested that world leaders have not “learned anything” from the failure to prevent the Holocaust in the late 1930s and early 1940s.
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“How is it that Assad is still in power?” the Nobel Laureate asked. “How is is that the Holocaust’s number one denier, Ahmadinejad, is still a president? He who threatens to use nuclear weapons — to use nuclear weapons — to destroy the Jewish state. Have we not learned? We must. We must know that when evil has power, it is almost too late.”
He concluded with a direct address to Obama. “Mr. President, we are here in this place of memory,” Wiesel observed to his fellow Nobel Peace Prize winner. “Israel cannot not remember. And because it remembers, it must be strong, just to defend it’s own survival and it’s own destiny,” he said, appparently referring to Israel’s right to attack Iran if necessary.
