OPINION:
America must stand with Israel as the Jewish state takes defensive action to prevent a second Holocaust (“Israel’s blow against Iran,” Web, June 13).
The Iranian government’s intentions toward Israel are unabashedly genocidal. Since 1979, Iran has repeatedly vowed to “wipe Israel off the map.” Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has called Israel a “cancer that must be cut”and a “virus that must be destroyed.” In 2020, he said Israel “must be eliminated as soon as possible” and called for Israel’s “final solution.”
Iran has assembled a crescent of proxy terrorist militias — Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah and the Houthis — encircling Israel. Hamas’s charter vows that “Islam will obliterate” Israel and envisions a war in which “the stones and trees will say … there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.” The Houthis’ motto is: “Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse be upon the Jews, Victory to Islam.”
For decades, Iran has attacked Jews and Israelis through its proxies. Hezbollah’s 1992 and 1994 bombings targeted Jews and Israelis in Argentina, killing 114 people. During the early 2000s, Hamas bombed Israelis in schools, buses, discos, pizzerias, cafeterias, malls, ice cream parlors and at a Passover seder. Since 2002, Hamas and PIJ have fired 100,000 rockets from Gaza at Israel. And on Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorists raped, kidnapped, beheaded and massacred Israelis. Iran reportedly provided $154 million to Hamas for the Oct. 7 pogrom.
On April 13, 2024, Iran attacked Israel directly with drones and cruise and ballistic missiles. And last week, the International Atomic Energy Agency found Iran in violation of its nuclear nonproliferation obligations, raising the specter of an Iranian nuclear weapon.
The question is not whether Israel is justified in preemptively striking Iran’s nuclear facilities, but whether its strikes will succeed. America must ensure that our ally is safer as a result, so Israelis will no longer live under threat of nuclear annihilation.
STEPHEN A. SILVER
San Francisco, California
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