Jamie

Weinstein

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March 31, 2008

Anne Frank Would Have Believed Ahmadinejad, and Looked to America

Walking through the annex in Amsterdam where Anne Frank hid from the Nazis, one is taken back to another place in time. It is not a pleasant feeling.  It is one of fear and intimidation, death and deliberate destruction on an almost unimaginable scale.

The Franks were a Jewish family living in Germany when Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933. Sensing that Jews may have a tough time of it living under the Fuhrer, Otto Frank wisely moved his family to the Netherlands. But the Nazis' ambitions were not confined to Germany alone.

Soon after the Nazis took over the Netherlands in 1940, Otto arranged for his family and several friends to go into hiding in the annex above his business. It is a bigger space than I imagined it to be, but certainly not large enough to comfortably house eight people. You can imagine how cramped the inhabitants of the annex must have felt, living with the ever-present sense of fear and hope – fear that the Nazis would find them, hope that the Allied Forces would find them first.

Frank's annex, however, is not a telescope into a different world. Evil still exists. Hitler is gone, but others possess his qualities if not his means.

Critics cry foul when Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is compared to Hitler when he expresses his seemingly genocidal wish to "wipe Israel off the map." These critics point to the many differences between Hitler and Ahmadinejad: Germany was strong while Iran is weak. Hitler possessed complete control of the German state, while Ahmadinejad is not even the most powerful leader in his own country.

This is all true. Yet what this critique fails to account for is that, today, nuclear weapons can approximate the type of damage formerly reserved for strong, conventional armies. And while Ahmadinejad is not Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, from public statements it seems his views are very much the same when it comes to eliminating Israel.

Yes, we shouldn't make comparisons to the Holocaust too lightly. I agree. It was a unique evil.  But we also shouldn't reject such comparisons out of hand so flippantly.

The truth is that Hitler's rise to power and the story of the Shoah left us with lessons we should not forget. Writing from Berlin, just blocks away from the location of Hitler's bunker, they are hard to forget. Among these important lessons is that we should believe tyrants when they speak about their evil intents, and we shouldn't give them the benefit of the doubt when using language that could mean two different things.

We see this today with our friend Ahmadinejad in Iran. His famous oration about wiping Israel off the map, critics say, can really be translated to mean something marginally less belligerent. This, of course, despite the fact that the original translators of the speech were not "Zionist warmongers," but Iranian government-controlled media.

Now, I suppose one could trust that Ahmadinejad was professing something less genocidal than the original translation seems to indicate, just like one could read some of Hitler’s speeches as having a slightly more benevolent intent toward the Jews than he turned out to have. The fact of the matter is that Hitler and his top administrators deliberately made their intent vague in order to deceive and hide their radical intentions when necessary. In her acclaimed history of the Holocaust, The War Against the Jews, Lucy Dawidowicz spoke of one such instance where Hitler used a phrase ambiguously to mask his intentions.

"It was not that Hitler was unable to express himself clearly and unequivocally," she wrote. "Rather he deliberately used a word that could be interpreted two ways – one, vague and conventional; the other, specific and radical." We can see this today with our man in Tehran.

But let us not get caught up with Iran. In the Muslim world today, Nazi-like, anti-Semitic propaganda appears too often. Go to MEMRI.org and watch it for yourself. It will boggle your mind. Among the recurring themes is that Jews are subhuman and death in the name of Allah is the greatest reward to be found on Earth. You can also find TV shows for children glorifying martyrdom and Jew-killing. Recently, Mein Kampf, written by Hitler, was among the best selling books in Turkey. To make a gross understatement, this indoctrination and radicalization is unhealthy.

And it is not just the Jews. Evil men abound and enslave their citizens under cruel regimes around the world. Look at North Korea. Look at Sudan. Look at Burma. Yes, evil still exists in the world. Let us not be fooled that it died with the Holocaust.

This brings us back to little Anne Frank. Anne would just have been another statistic if not for the diary she wrote. On D-Day in June 1944, you can sense the excitement as Anne writes about the Allied invasion of continental Europe. "The invasion has begun!," she exclaims. "Is this really the beginning of the long-awaited liberation?"

Sadly, the Allied advance was not swift enough for Anne. Betrayed in August 1944, the residents of the secret annex were arrested and deported to concentrations camps throughout Europe. Anne died in March 1945, less than two months before the war in Europe ended. Her father would be the only resident of the annex to survive the death camps. 

Anne's story should not be seen just as a history lesson. Today, like then, the wretched of the Earth who live under the boot of totalitarian regimes still have one hope – the United States of America. As I travel through Europe, I am not sure Europeans fully understand that their freedom and prosperity, then as is now, is dependent on the continued power and might of America. If America were to weaken and sink from the world stage, we would all suffer.

© 2008 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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