On Jan. 27, 2022, the world marked Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Yet within less than two weeks, three events illustrated just how little the "lesson of the Holocaust" has been learned.

Notably, the media coverage of each was inversely proportional to its importance.

Event #1: Comedian Whoopi Goldberg's foolish denial that the Holocaust involved race-based hatred: "Let's be truthful about it.  Because the Holocaust isn't about race.  No ... these are two white groups of people!"  Calls for Goldberg's firing fueled a media feeding frenzy.  And Whoopi was ritualistically shamed, suspended for two weeks from hosting The View.

Denying Hitler's overtly racist motive for genocide is indeed offensive.  How anyone could miss that fact about a Jew-hating dictator whose chief talking point emphasized the superior "Aryan race" is mind-boggling.  And yet, a fair reading of Goldberg's statements also indicates an absence of malice.  Deeply misinformed commentary?  Yes.  Deliberate Holocaust denial?  No.  But this story drew far more attention than two other events presenting far greater risks to Jewish survival.

Event #2: Amnesty International's massive, 280-page report charging Israel with "Apartheid Against Palestinians" through "a Cruel System of Domination and a Crime Against Humanity."  This document shouts from virtually every page, the illegitimacy of Israel's very right to exist as a haven for the Jewish people.  But it rests upon a foundation of inaccuracies and contextual omissions.

Chief among those omissions is the virtual absence of any reference to this reality: for the entire century from the 1920s to the present, the leaders of Israel's Palestinian Arab neighbors have pursued just one goal through just one strategy — namely, the prevention and eradication of a Jewish state in the Middle East, through a never-ending terror and propaganda war.

A reader of the Amnesty Report would never know that the "doctoral thesis" of Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president, was an exercise in Holocaust denial and that the P.A. continues through its state-controlled schools and media to saturate its people in genocidal Jew-hatred on a scale comparable to Nazi Germany.  Nor would such a reader know that since the 1930s, the P.A. and its predecessors have systematically threatened, tortured, and murdered their fellow Arabs who genuinely seek cooperation, peace, and "two states for two peoples" with their Jewish neighbors.

Unlike Whoopi Goldberg's gaffe, the Amnesty Report supplies a perniciously impactful roadmap for the spreading global wildfire of anti-Israelism, now institutionalized in the U.N.'s unprecedented permanent monitor to investigate Israel — and only Israel — for "abuses of international human rights law[.]"  And what principally facilitates this eliminationist campaign is the head-in-sand blindness of the world's opinion-shaping classes toward the Palestinian leadership's commitment to eradicating the world's only Jewish state.  The unstated message: never mind "Never Again."

Event #3: The Biden administration's decision to reinstate waivers of sanctions against Iran — waivers canceled by the Trump administration — yielding a $29-billion cash windfall to the tottering Iranian regime.  Like the Amnesty Report, this received noticeably less media coverage than Whoopi-gate.

This is just the latest Biden administration concession seeking to appease Iran into re-entering the Obama administration's deeply flawed JCPOA nuclear weapons deal.  That deal did nothing to limit Iran's export of terror across the Middle East, nor to restrain its long-range missile development.  And its "sunset" provisions allowed Iran to build nuclear bombs as of ten years from now.  Nor was there an effective compliance mechanism: the JCPOA banned "no-notice" inspections.

Recent reports confirm that the Biden deal is even worse than the JCPOA — despite Iran's continued support for Middle East terrorism, its recent attacks on U.S. troops in the region, and its long-running pledges to annihilate Israel by any means possible.  Former Canadian attorney general Irwin Cotler has compellingly made the case that Iran, besides being the world's leading exporter of terrorism, is also the world's leading fomenter of incitement to genocide.

In sum, with less media scrutiny than that given to a comedian's ill chosen words about the Holocaust, the United States is about to bestow on the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism — a regime explicitly committed to the nuclear annihilation of Israel — the funds to rescue that tottering regime, the freedom to expand its pernicious export of terror, and the capacity to complete the construction of the arsenal needed to nuke Israel to smithereens.

Winston Churchill said it best in 1938 when his own prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, made a similarly craven deal with Adolf Hitler in Munich: "You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor and you will have war."

But unlike Chamberlain — and thanks to his abominable Munich deal — our world now knows exactly what a regime committed to genocide will do in the face of craven appeasement.  We, unlike Chamberlain, live with the lesson of the Holocaust — namely, when a regime publicly committed to genocide seeks to assemble the tools to carry it out, take that regime at its word, and do whatever it takes to stop it.

The Biden administration chooses to ignore that lesson, and instead practically begs Iran to accept the very concessions that would make possible its long-sought nuclear genocide of Israel.  Will anyone stand up to stop that?  Or is the real end game here "never mind 'Never Again'"?

Henry Kopel is a former federal prosecutor and the author of War on Hate: How to Stop Genocide, Fight Terrorism, and Defend Freedom (Lexington Books, 2021).

Image: Pixabay, Pixabay License.