In 2009, a fourteen-day event was held in the Indian city of Lucknow—home to a large Muslim minority—where films about the Shoah were shown and lectures on the subject delivered. Its purpose was to counteract Holocaust-denial propaganda emanating from Iran, a country with long and deep-seated cultural connections to Lucknow. There Anwar Nadeem, a distinguished Urdu-language poet, read a poem he had written about the extermination of European Jewry. Navras Aafreedi explains its significance:

The Urdu language is the lingua franca of linguistically diverse South Asian Muslims, who make up almost a third of the global Muslim population. . . . In the 18th century, it emerged as the language of Indo-Persian Muslim high culture. It is spoken as a first language by nearly 70 million people and as a second language by more than 100 million people, primarily in Pakistan and India.

In India, even those with university degrees are often completely unaware of the Holocaust, and history textbooks that cover Nazism at all often omit mention of the Holocaust. Moreover, textbooks and curricula often focus on Hitler’s abilities as an “impassioned speaker,” who “devised a new style of politics,” sometimes portraying him with outright admiration. Worse still is the attitude found in Urdu media:

As a consumer of news provided by the Urdu press, Nadeem had read much that aimed at either denying the Holocaust, minimizing its scale, obfuscating it, or simply reversing it by describing the Jewish Israelis as the present-day Nazis. Even when the Holocaust films retrospective was taking place in Lucknow, . . . the Urdu press there published front-page stories denying the Holocaust and calling it the biggest hoax of the 20th century, with the intention of sabotaging the ongoing event. . . . Muhammad Iqbal, the national poet of Pakistan, revered as the ideological father of Pakistan and one of the greatest Urdu poets ever born, is regularly cited by Urdu columnists for his anti-Jewish statements and couplets.

It was precisely these attitudes Nadeem sought to combat. A translation of his poem can be found at the link below.

If Iran succeeds in obtaining nuclear weapons, the war in Gaza, let alone the protests on college campuses, will seem like a minor complication. Jonathan Schachter fears that this danger could be much more imminent than decisionmakers in Jerusalem and Washington believe. In his view, Israel seems to be repeating the mistake that allowed it to be taken by surprise on Simchat Torah of 2023 and Yom Kippur of 1973: putting too much faith in an intelligence concept that could be wrong.

Israel and the United States apparently believe that despite Iran’s well-documented progress in developing capabilities necessary for producing and delivering nuclear weapons, as well as its extensive and ongoing record of violating its international nuclear obligations, there is no acute crisis because building a bomb would take time, would be observable, and could be stopped by force. Taken together, these assumptions and their moderating impact on Israeli and American policy form a new Iran concept reminiscent of its 1973 namesake and of the systemic failures that preceded the October 7 massacre.

Meanwhile, most of the restrictions put in place by the 2015 nuclear deal will expire by the end of next year, rendering the question of Iran’s adherence moot. And the forces that could be taking action aren’t:

The European Union regularly issues boilerplate press releases asserting its members’ “grave concern.” American decisionmakers and spokespeople have created the unmistakable impression that their reservations about the use of force are stronger than their commitment to use force to prevent an Iranian atomic bomb. At the same time, the U.S. refuses to enforce its own sanctions comprehensively: Iranian oil exports (especially to China) and foreign-currency reserves have ballooned since January 2021, when the Biden administration took office.

Israel’s response has also been sluggish and ambiguous. Despite its oft-stated policy of never allowing a nuclear Iran, Israel’s words and deeds have sent mixed messages to allies and adversaries—perhaps inadvertently reinforcing the prevailing sense in Washington and elsewhere that Iran’s nuclear efforts do not present an exigent crisis.