The premier castigated Europe on Monday, as Israel ushered in Holocaust Remembrance Day in a pre-recorded ceremony from Yad Vashem, amid ongoing hostilities with Iran and the Hezbollah terror group in Lebanon.

In his speech, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Europe today is “afflicted by deep moral weakness,” and that Israel is now defending the continent, “which has forgotten so much since the Holocaust.”

He accused Europe of “losing control of its identity, of its values, of its responsibility to defend civilization against barbarism.”

“It has much to learn from us,” the premier said, “especially the essential lesson of the clear moral distinction between good and evil, which in moments of truth demands that we go to war for the sake of what’s good, for the sake of life.”

“Israel, on the other hand, doesn’t forget that eternal responsibility,” Netanyahu said.

“Along with the US, and along with other countries with which we are creating alliances that will be spoken about in the future, we are defending ourselves — we are defending the entire world,” he said, adding that “Israel stands with the United States at the forefront of the free world.”

He said that the two countries “have dealt a crushing blow to the evil regime in Iran” in their two joint operations in the past year.

“If we hadn’t acted [against Iran’s nuclear, missile, and other military targets],” said Netanyahu, “the names Natanz, Fordow, Isfahan, and Parchin would likely have been remembered with eternal dread, precisely like Auschwitz,........

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