Cantor: When will it be ‘too late’?

House Minority Whip Eric Cantor says there are a lot of threats to Israel and the Jewish people, and the Jewish community needs to "remove the blinders from our eyes" and speak out more vocally against them.

"Too many Jews have become desensitized" and believe "it can’t happen to us," said Cantor as he spoke at the opening session of The Jewish Federations of North America’s General Assembly on Sunday afternoon. So Cantor outlined the threats, as he sees them, saying Israel is in "dire straits" and "mortal danger" and stating that"many men are pointing guns at Israel, indeed at Jews, everywhere.

Cantor quoted "Shoah" director Claude Lanzmann wondering when was it "too late" to stop the Holocaust, and listed a number of issues that led him to wonder whether it was becoming "too late" for today’s Jewish community. They included the Goldstone Report’s charges that Israel committed war crimes to a Scandnavian newspaper article earlier this year that accused Israel of harvesting human organs, to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s alliance with Iran. (For the record, various Jewish organizations have spoken out on all of these issues.)

"When we allow ourselves to be lulled ourselves into silence when political correctness beckons, it may be too late," said Cantor. "When we dally and threat and wring our hands but fail to do anything to really stop" Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, "where are we then?"

"We must answer our enemies’ dangerous resurgence with renewed vigilance, lest we invite greater dangers for both Israel and the United States," he said.

"I await your leadership before it it too late," he said.

Cantor also said that "the case I press before you is not a Jewish cause or an Israeli issue, but challenges to America," adding that "Israel’s security is synonymous with our own."