Dirty words: In the year 2000, when I was living in Prague, a woman I came to know introduced me to her grandfather, a pie-faced man well into his 80s who told me that during the Nazi occupation he had reluctantly served in the city’s law courts. This experience had marred his life, and he was now glad, he said, to be in the presence of a “good” American, as it was our efforts that slayed Nazism and later helped eliminate Communist rule. In flawless English, he recollected his law clerk days in 1941. Daily, dozens of citizens, mostly Jews, were summarily tried and convicted. Sometimes the offenses were absurd, perhaps walking down a certain street that was barred to Jews or trying to rescue a pet cat that had jumped on the fender of a military truck. Most all were given immediate death sentences and hanged in gallows located in the building’s courtyard. Others were guillotined in an abandoned tannery nearby. He remembered repeatedly having to pen the words “exterminated,” “eliminated,” and “extinguished” in his legal ledger. Those days left him so vacant in spirit that he spent many postwar years ambling through the local countryside and collecting grasshoppers whose delicate frames he preserved in cataloged jars. Now, nearly a century after those bleak Occupation days, it is the Jews of Israel and the “good” Americans who speak of extermination, since the hard-line leaders of Iran are portrayed as ugly specimens who very literally should not exist. Astonishingly enough, since both men were brought up in the immediate post-war, neither the American president nor his Israeli counterpart seem cognizant of the Nazi-era diction they apply almost daily. The Nazis rationalized their Prague law courts by saying they sought to re-order a contaminated city. Unwittingly, perhaps, America and Israel are providing similar rationalizations. As my friend’s grandfather said, “May God have mercy on me for those times.” That same God is now being asked to extend His mercy. There is no telling if He will.