By Arlene Bridges Samuels
As President Donald J. Trump builds a coalition to confront Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and protect American bases across the Middle East, the world again stands at a crossroads. Brigadier General Amir Avivi, founder of Israel’s Defense and Security Forum, has warned that war with Iran is imminent. He outlines three possible scenarios for such a conflict, including a joint U.S.-Israeli operation. Israel has already urged Iranian civilians to evacuate military areas.
In this climate, the United States has launched a massive military buildup—an uneasy backdrop to International Holocaust Remembrance Day, observed on January 27.
In 2005, the United Nations General Assembly designated January 27 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. It marks the date in 1945 when Soviet forces liberated the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps. The soldiers were hardened veterans of war, yet even they were horrified by what they found: unburied corpses stacked like refuse, nearly seven thousand skeletal survivors, and a death toll that would exceed one million Jewish men, women, and children. Those who survived did so through starvation, disease, forced labor, and the grotesque medical experiments of the Nazi regime.
Eighty-one years later, the world witnesses echoes of that same evil. In Iran, the Islamic Regime has turned its nation into a death camp for its own people. Citizens protesting for freedom face bullets, imprisonment, and torture.
Since mass protests began on December 28, the United Nations has largely ignored the Iranian regime’s atrocities. Many observers have compared its cruelty to Nazi methods: mass killings, overflowing prisons, and systemic torture. Even as the world prepares each year to commemorate the Holocaust, the U.N. fails to act when confronted with contemporary barbarism.
Each year the U.N. chooses a theme for its remembrance ceremony. The 2023 theme was “Home and Belonging.” Yet only nine months later, Hamas—funded and armed by Iran—carried out the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust. This year’s theme, “Holocaust Remembrance for Dignity and Human Rights,” rings hollow. The irony is painful, as dignity and human rights are trampled daily under the boots of Iran’s Islamic dictatorship.
Some reports estimate that the regime’s massacres in early January killed as many as thirty thousand civilians. If confirmed, this would rank among the deadliest single episodes of state violence in modern history. The horror is intensified by the regime’s methods: executions designed for maximum fear, victims shot in the eyes, and bodies discarded in warehouses. Like the Nazis who forced Jewish violinists to play as their families entered the gas chambers, the Islamic Regime isolates and murders its victims in silence, cutting off the internet to hide its crimes.
Despite its stated commitment to human rights, the United Nations continues to exhibit an alarming bias. In 2023 alone, out of twenty-one resolutions condemning nations, fourteen targeted Israel. Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, has rightly called this “an absurd obsession.” As he observed, “The purpose of the lopsided condemnations is to demonize the Jewish state.”
The U.N.’s inaction regarding Iran’s atrocities reinforces this hypocrisy. For weeks, it ignored the killings, arrests, and torture of civilians until public outrage forced it to respond. Neuer commented that the international campaign “shamed the U.N. into action.”
Historically, Jews and Persians share a remarkable connection. When King Cyrus the Great ruled the Persian Empire, he freed the Jewish people from Babylonian captivity and permitted them to return to Jerusalem. His decree, recorded in 2 Chronicles 36:22-23, fulfilled the prophecy of Jeremiah: “The Lord, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth and has appointed me to build a temple for him at Jerusalem in Judah.”
Today, both Jews and Iranians suffer under the same oppressive force—the Islamic Regime. It funds terror abroad while brutalizing its citizens at home. Its Revolutionary Guard Corps acts as both army and executioner, crushing dissent and enforcing loyalty through fear.
Iranian-born Christian activist Marziyeh Amirizadeh, now an American citizen, experienced this cruelty firsthand during her nine months in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison. She explains that “most Iranians support Israel and do not share their government’s anti-Israel view.” Many Iranians, she says, see Israel as an ally against their mutual enemy: the Islamic regime itself.
Similarly, Iranian-born journalist Mahyar Tousi, now a British citizen, has become one of the most reliable sources of information about Iran. His online program, Tousi TV, is among the most-watched news channels in the United Kingdom. His reporting exposes the regime’s brutality while amplifying the voices of those still fighting for freedom.
The parallels between the Holocaust and Iran’s current oppression are deeply sobering. Once again, innocent lives are being destroyed while the world hesitates to intervene. Once again, evil is being called good, and good is being called evil.
For Christians and Jews alike, Holocaust Remembrance Day is not only a day of mourning but also a call to vigilance. The atrocities of the past demand that we confront the evils of the present with courage and clarity. Silence and indifference only embolden tyranny.
The Hebrew word shalom means far more than peace. It signifies wholeness, harmony, and well-being—spiritual, communal, and personal. Let us pray for shalom for Jews in Israel, for Iranians under persecution, and for both peoples who share a bond of faith and history older than any modern regime.
Our CBN Israel team invites you to join us in prayer during this critical time in world history.
Prayer Points:
- Pray for President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu to act with wisdom and effectiveness in supporting Iranian freedom.
- Pray for the protection of U.S. and Israeli forces as they defend against Iranian aggression.
- Pray for Israelis involved in covert operations inside Iran, that they remain safe and successful.
- Pray for the thousands of Iranians who live in anguish, not knowing whether their friends and loved ones are dead or alive.
Arlene Bridges Samuels is the weekly feature columnist for CBN Israel since 2020. Working on the staff of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) as their SE Regional Outreach Director for nine years, International Christian Embassy Jerusalem USA engaged her as the Leadership Outreach Director part-time for their project American Christian Leaders for Israel. Arlene is an author at The Blogs-Times of Israel, is published at AllIsrael.com and The Jerusalem Connection, and has traveled to Israel since 1990. By invitation, she attends Israel’s Government Press Office Christian Media Summits as part of Christian media worldwide. In 2024, Arlene and her husband Paul co-authored Mental Health Meltdown: Illuminating the Voices of Bipolar and Other Mental Illnesses. www.TheMentalHealthMeltdown.com.
