To Rafael Medoff, the winter games that opened in Beijing on Friday are strongly reminiscent of their 1936 precursors, which took place in Nazi Berlin. He writes:

Countries that host the Olympic Games derive an array of financial benefits, from tourism dollars to corporate sponsorships. Regimes that are perpetrating human-rights violations enjoy an even more important benefit: an opportunity to gain international legitimacy and whitewash their abuses. For Adolf Hitler in 1936, The games were a chance to make the Nazi regime seem reasonable and distract from his oppression of German Jews. For the Chinese leader Xi Jinping, the Olympics represent an opportunity to turn the world’s attention away from what the United States government and human-rights groups have said is his genocidal persecution of China’s largely Muslim Uighur minority.

Then and now, the international community has largely gone along with the deadly charade. . . . China invited the skier Dinigeer Yilamujiang, an ethnic Uighur who will be competing in the games, to take part in the torch-lighting ceremony. . . . Hitler did something very similar. During the months preceding the Berlin games, critics pointed out that Jewish athletes were being systematically excluded from the German team. The Nazi leader sought to deflect the critics by signing up a token fencer who had a Jewish father, Helene Mayer.

Mayer later explained that she gave the Nazi salute from the Olympics podium because her family members were still in Germany, some of them in concentration camps. One can imagine that Yilamujiang may well be laboring under similar pressures. . . .

Even President Franklin D. Roosevelt was taken by the spectacle. He told Rabbi Stephen S. Wise how impressed he was to learn from two tourists who attended the games “that the synagogues are crowded and apparently there is nothing very wrong in the situation [of Germany’s Jews] at present.”

Early Friday morning, Israel attacked military installations near the Iranian cities of Isfahan and nearby Natanz, the latter being one of the hubs of the country’s nuclear program. Jerusalem is not taking credit for the attack, and none of the details are too certain, but it seems that the attack involved multiple drones, likely launched from within Iran, as well as one or more missiles fired from Syrian or Iraqi airspace. Strikes on Syrian radar systems shortly beforehand probably helped make the attack possible, and there were reportedly strikes on Iraq as well.

Iran itself is downplaying the attack, but the S-300 air-defense batteries in Isfahan appear to have been destroyed or damaged. This is a sophisticated Russian-made system positioned to protect the Natanz nuclear installation. In other words, Israel has demonstrated that Iran’s best technology can’t protect the country’s skies from the IDF. As Yossi Kuperwasser puts it, the attack, combined with the response to the assault on April 13,

clarified to the Iranians that whereas we [Israelis] are not as vulnerable as they thought, they are more vulnerable than they thought. They have difficulty hitting us, but we have no difficulty hitting them.

Nobody knows exactly how the operation was carried out. . . . It is good that a question mark hovers over . . . what exactly Israel did. Let’s keep them wondering. It is good for deniability and good for keeping the enemy uncertain.

The fact that we chose targets that were in the vicinity of a major nuclear facility but were linked to the Iranian missile and air forces was a good message. It communicated that we can reach other targets as well but, as we don’t want escalation, we chose targets nearby that were involved in the attack against Israel. I think it sends the message that if we want to, we can send a stronger message. Israel is not seeking escalation at the moment.