The guy who wrote "Black Hawk Down" thinks Ahmadinejad and his pals are just playing to the home crowd with their pronouncements about nuclear research. While his historical narrative concerning Iran in 1979, and how the radicals used the seizing of the U.S. embassy and resultant hostage crisis as a means to solidify power, is illuminating, it misses the main point. Are the Iranian leaders to be believed when they say they will "wipe Israel off the map"? If so, should the U.S. and her allies, not just Israel, do something about it?

These questions are troubling Charles Krauthammer, who writes this morning about the Jewish diaspora, created by the Roman effort to wipe them out, and their coming back together again in Israel, created by the efforts of Hitler to wipe them out. He wonders if the coming of Ahmadinejad and his ilk, and the fact that more Jews now live in little Israel than anywhere else in the word, puts all the Jewish eggs in one basket. Six million Jews were gathered up by Hitler's henchmen and slaughtered. Six million Jews now live in Israel, within range of Iranian missiles, perhaps soon to be tipped with nuclear warheads. Krauthammer asks, never again?

Last week Bernard Lewis, America's dean of Islamic studies, who just turned 90 and remembers the 20th century well, confessed that for the first time he feels it is 1938 again. He did not need to add that in 1938, in the face of the gathering storm -- a fanatical, aggressive, openly declared enemy of the West, and most determinedly of the Jews -- the world did nothing.

Read the whole thing.