“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance,” former US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt once said.

As Israel was preparing to mark its annual Holocaust Remembrance Day on April 12, the killer from Damascus presented his Jewish neighbors with horrifying scenes, massacres of children and women. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad made it clear to survivors of the Holocaust and members of the second and third generations that genocide is still possible, here and now. The gut-wrenching photos from Douma must have failed to move Russian President Vladimir Putin, sponsor of the crimes against humanity that have claimed an estimated half a million lives over the past seven years. Moscow dismisses the evidence of a nerve gas attack on the Syrian town and at the same time castigates Israel, which is trying to distance the Iranian army from its border.

On Jan. 27, Putin stood at the side of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day at an event in the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow. Netanyahu took the opportunity to announce, “Seventy-five years after this hell, we are still determined to avert any attempts by such groups and ideologies, primarily Iran, which openly states that it wants to destroy us.” Netanyahu went on, “Our unwavering readiness to fight for ourselves and protect ourselves is an iron wall, a wall of steel that cannot be broken, and it will continue to protect us.” Turning to Putin, he added, “Mr. President, I am willing to testify that among the world leaders there are few who understand it as well as you do.”

Putin must also have been unimpressed by this attempt to link the conflict with Iran and the Holocaust. On April 11, he protested Israel’s efforts to block Iranian entrenchment on its Syrian border, warning Netanyahu against “destabilizing Syria.” On the same day, Netanyahu once again invoked the Holocaust in his campaign against Iran. Speaking at the opening ceremony for Holocaust Memorial Day at Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem Memorial, Netanyahu once again compared the 2015 agreement between world powers on curbing Iran’s nuclear weapons program to the 1938 Munich Agreement between Adolf Hitler and European powers allowing Germany to annex parts of Czechoslovakia. Netanyahu once more preached against indifference in the face of this renewed threat to Jews, pledging that an independent State of Israel will know how to protect them against their bitter Iranian foe.