I speak today with a heavy heart as war engulfs Iran and the wider region. We believe in the intrinsic value of each life and abhor violence. But our mission is rooted in remembrance of the Shoah (Holocaust) and in a solemn commitment that the world must have in response to evil.
For years, and even more brutally recently, we have watched tens of thousands of young Iranians beaten, shot, and murdered in the streets and hospitals simply for yearning to be free. We have witnessed women and girls assaulted, arrested, and killed for the “crime” of showing their hair and insisting on basic human rights. Today, the Iranian regime routinely and systematically tortures, imprisons, and rapes their own people.
The Ayatollah has directed and armed proxies such as Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and Hamas in Gaza, among others, enabling campaigns of terror and bloodshed across the Middle East and beyond. These networks have perpetrated atrocities that history should never have had to witness again.
Now, even within this conflict, Iran has launched missiles and drones across the Persian Gulf, killing citizens of many nations that did not attack it. There is no limit to how far this regime has gone in endangering the world.
As students of the Holocaust, we cannot ignore the echoes of the past. During the Second World War, desperate pleas reached President Roosevelt and the Allied leadership to bomb the train tracks leading to Nazi concentration and extermination camps; those pleas went unanswered, and countless lives that might have been saved were lost. We wonder how much bloodshed would have been averted had Hitler been killed.
Indifference in the face of mass cruelty is itself a moral failure. When a regime openly brutalizes its own citizens and threatens others, the world has a responsibility to respond.
We hate war, and we do not seek violence, which always brings suffering, uncertainty, and loss. Yet remembering the catastrophic consequences of inaction during the Holocaust, we also recognize that there are moments when confronting a violent, repressive regime and its proxies is tragically necessary to protect innocent lives and uphold the most basic norms of human decency.
We pray for the safety of United States service members, for our friends in Israel, in the Gulf states, and for all civilians across the region who are caught in the crossfire. We pray especially for the people of Iran—men, women, and children who yearn for a future free from fear and tyranny, and who deserve a government that respects their rights instead of crushing their dreams.
May the world act with courage, wisdom, and restraint, and may this moment of crisis ultimately lead to a more just, more peaceful, and more tolerant future.