Israel and USA Blow Wheel off Axle of Evil, But …

Today the world awoke to a breathtaking new reality. The Iranian regime’s efforts to develop and deploy the nuclear-tipped missile capability to “wipe Israel off the map” in a second, atomic Holocaust — and to threaten the U.S.¹ — has finally and almost certainly been crushed.

Israel’s non-stop (since June 13) attacks on the ayatollah’s nuclear-weapons-development sites, ballistic missile launchers and other military, IRGC² and regime leadership targets — coupled with yesterday’s U.S. bunker-buster bombardment of Iran’s three most deeply buried nuclear-weapons-development sites — has almost certainly blown the wheels off the “Islamic Republic’s” efforts to develop the nuclear-tipped missile capability to inflict another Holocaust on the world’s Jews, nearly half of whom live in Israel.³

If the Israeli and American attacks on the ayatollah’s atomic enterprise have indeed blown off his regime’s wheels, they have also undoubtedly blown one of the wheels off the Axle of Evil⁴ — the unholy alliance of Putin’s Russia, Xi’s China, Kim’s North Korea and the ayatollah’s Iran — in what distinguished historian Niall Ferguson and others call Cold War II.

As a Jewish American, I feel enormous relief at the obliteration of Iran’s ability to threaten my country and inflict such a fate on my Israeli kith and kin.

However … while I’m glad Trump ordered yesterday’s fatal blows against Iran’s most impregnable nuclear sites, I find it impossible to thank or praise him, even as others who share my disgust with so many of his other policies⁵ have done.

My No. 1 problem with Trump is his abandonment of the people of Ukraine to the tender mercies of his friend Vladimir Putin. Russia’s military has not only invaded Ukraine — without provocation! — but is subjecting its people to a ceaseless bombardment that inflicts countless deaths, untold physical destruction and enormous economic damage. Russia has also kidnapped thousands of Ukrainian children with the aim of having them adopted by Russian families where their upbringing is intended to erase their Ukrainian identity — a practice that is widely considered genocidal.

I cannot understand how Trump can justify such radically differing behavior toward two friendly nations, each of which has been under deadly attack.

In regard to Israel, Trump has joined the fight to rid the world of Iran’s effort to develop nuclear weapons. Quite aside from the ayatollah’s threats against the U.S. and the fact that his regime has killed thousands of Americans over the past nearly 50 years, Trump’s willingness to support Israel in its struggle with that regime — the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism — can be viewed through the humanitarian lens of combating an attempted genocide.

However, in regard to Ukraine’s struggle to end Russian aggression, including its daily bombardment of civilian targets — hospitals, schools, markets, apartment buildings — Trump is clearly siding with an aggressor whom the civilized world justifiably views as a terrorist state. He has even been unwilling to sell Ukraine the interceptor missiles it needs to shield its people from Russia’s relentless barrages. He is also hindering, as best he can (without being too overtly and explicitly allied to Russia), the efforts of Ukraine’s European neighbors — America’s NATO allies — to help a friendly nation under attack.

It’s as if in 1940 U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, with Great Britain under deadly Nazi bombardment during the Blitz, were to have all but openly sided with Hitler rather than Churchill. Today, Ukraine’s Zelensky is Churchill’s counterpart, and Putin is Hitler’s.

I cannot in good conscience accept and be grateful for Trump’s good deed in attacking the ayatollah’s regime — which I viscerally feel is my personal enemy — while looking past his cruel abandonment of our Ukrainian friends to deal alone with Putin’s murderous invaders.

So thank heaven for the good guys — Israel’s Netanyahu and Ukraine’s Zelensky — and may the killers, the ayatollah and Putin, soon find themselves in hell. As for Trump, his refusal to help Ukraine cancels out, in my mind, any heavenly reward for the good he’s done in helping thwart the ayatollah’s intended holocaust.

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1. The “Great Satan” in contrast to what the ayatollah calls Israel, the “Little Satan”
2. Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps
3. A nuke explosion over tiny Israel (about the size of New Jersey) could well kill half or more of its nearly 10 million people, of whom about seven million are Jews and the majority of whom live in a relatively small coastal area. That would be a real genocide, much like Hitler’s deliberate killing of six million European Jews, as opposed to the so-called genocide in Gaza of which Israel is falsely and maliciously accused.
4. Most people call it the Axis of Evil, but I prefer “axle” because it calls to mind the image of losing a wheel.
5. Examples of Trump’s policies and actions that I abhor: deportations without due process; the threatened deportation of Afghani, Ukrainian, Venezuelan, Haitian and other refugees legitimately seeking asylum; the destruction of USAID; the evisceration of our international broadcasting (Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, etc.) and the State Department’s public diplomacy efforts; and the blunderbuss attacks on universities, in the name of opposing antisemitism, which are choking off much of the scientific research that strengthens America’s public health and economy.