Amer­i­ca is not some frag­ile thing.  We are large, in the words of Whit­man, con­tain­ing mul­ti­tudes.  We are bois­ter­ous and diverse and full of ener­gy, per­pet­u­al­ly young in spir­it. Pres­i­dent Barack Oba­ma, March 7, 2015, Sel­ma, Alabama

The days when the Jew­ish peo­ple remained pas­sive in the face of geno­ci­dal ene­mies, those days are over….Even if Israel has to stand alone, Israel will stand. Prime Min­is­ter Ben­jamin Netanyahu, March 3, 2015, Wash­ing­ton.

Two speech­es, deliv­ered just four days apart, remind­ed us how lead­ers can moti­vate and inspire, stir our pas­sions and call us to great things.  Most of all, they can bring moral clar­i­ty to the com­plex real­i­ties of a messy world.

The address­es by Pres­i­dent Oba­ma and Prime Min­is­ter Netanyahu were oases in the rhetor­i­cal desert of con­tem­po­rary polit­i­cal dis­course.  That waste­land is pop­u­lat­ed by jad­ed chat­ter­ers who would rather incite than inspire, manip­u­late than per­suade, obfus­cate than enlighten.

Netanyahu was Churchillian, remind­ing us that no good comes of com­pro­mis­ing with evil.  The Pres­i­dent turned phras­es wor­thy of Dr. King, who led the march from Sel­ma to Mont­gomery 50 years ago to defy the evil of racial segregation.

And though the two men are thought to despise each oth­er, the speech­es are marked by a com­mon moral lucid­i­ty.  Each called us to what the Pres­i­dent termed “moral imag­i­na­tion.” Each urged his audi­ence to choose the hard­er path.  Both speech­es were steeped in his­to­ry but fixed on the future. Both appealed to Scrip­ture, exhort­ing us to be “res­olute and strong,” to “run and not grow weary.”

The Pres­i­dent praised Dr. King and the Sel­ma marchers for their “faith in God [and] also faith in Amer­i­ca.”  King’s “faith in the Amer­i­can exper­i­ment,” the Pres­i­dent said, lay in his “belief that Amer­i­ca is not yet fin­ished,” that it can “more close­ly align with our high­est ideals.”

“Sel­ma,” he said, “is not some out­lier in the Amer­i­can expe­ri­ence.”  It stands in a long tra­di­tion of reform and renew­al that thrives “not by reassert­ing the past, but by tran­scend­ing the past.”  And though “the march is not yet over … the race is not yet won,” Amer­i­ca is in a much dif­fer­ent – a much bet­ter – place with regard to racial atti­tudes than it was when Dr. King led that march.

“We hon­or those who walked so we could run,” he con­clud­ed.  “We must run so our chil­dren soar.  And we will not grow weary.  For we believe in the pow­er of an awe­some God, and we believe in this country’s sacred promise.”

Netanyahu remind­ed us that Israel, too, is a nation born of sacred promise.  Like Oba­ma, he invoked his country’s his­tor­i­cal iden­ti­ty.  “In our near­ly 4,000 years of his­to­ry,” he said, “many have tried repeat­ed­ly to destroy the Jew­ish peo­ple.”  He sum­moned the mem­o­ry of Haman, an ancient Per­sian viceroy who plot­ted geno­cide against the Jews 2,500 years ago. Haman’s foiled plot, Netanyahu argued, is today being revived with “Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons.”

A nuclear Iran would be posi­tioned to achieve the Aya­tol­lah Khamenei’s stat­ed goal of anni­hi­lat­ing Israel.  But Iran’s regime, he argued, “is not mere­ly a Jew­ish prob­lem, any more than the Nazi regime was mere­ly a Jew­ish prob­lem.”  The coun­try has been “hijacked by reli­gious zealots,” whose con­sti­tu­tion “pledges death, tyran­ny and the pur­suit of jihad.”

Netanyahu paint­ed a dark pic­ture of Tehran’s cur­rent gov­ern­ment, which is thought to be more mod­er­ate than its pre­de­ces­sor.  He notes that Iran now dom­i­nates four Arab cap­i­tals (Bagh­dad, Dam­as­cus, Beirut and Sanaa), spon­sors glob­al ter­ror­ism, and “hangs gays, per­se­cutes Chris­tians, jails jour­nal­ists and exe­cutes more pris­on­ers” than its pre­de­ces­sor, the Ahmadine­jad government.

And while ISIS is “armed with butch­er knives, cap­tured weapons and YouTube,” Iran is deter­mined to acquire nuclear weapons.  “The great­est dan­ger fac­ing our world,” he argued, “is the mar­riage of mil­i­tant Islam with nuclear weapons.”

He warned against U.S. sup­port for a deal with Iran that would legit­imize its nuclear enrich­ment pro­gram and lift eco­nom­ic sanc­tions.  Such a deal, he said, “doesn’t block Iran’s path to the bomb; it paves Iran’s path to the bomb.”  The deal wouldn’t be a “farewell to arms; it would be a farewell to arms con­trol” that would turn the region into a “nuclear tinderbox.”

The alter­na­tive to such an agree­ment is nei­ther war nor a refusal to nego­ti­ate with Tehran.  “The alter­na­tive to this bad deal is a much bet­ter deal,” he said, a deal that would require Iran to renounce its geno­ci­dal inten­tions, aggres­sion against its neigh­bors and sup­port for glob­al terrorism.

“Stand­ing up to Iran is not easy,” he said.  “Stand­ing up to mur­der­ous regimes nev­er is.”

The Pres­i­dent has no inten­tion of stand­ing up to Iran.  He regards Netanyahu’s clear-eyed assess­ment of the Iran­ian brand of Islamism as obstruc­tion­ist. He wants an accord with the aya­tol­lahs and has made enor­mous con­ces­sions to secure one.  It will be up to his suc­ces­sor – and those who will live in the shad­ow of a resur­gent Per­sian colos­sus – to deal with the consequences.

Pres­i­dent Oba­ma is con­vinced that accom­mo­dat­ing Iran’s mani­a­cal regime is a rea­son­able thing to do.  Though he speaks with moral pre­ci­sion against racism at home, fog envelopes his moral imag­i­na­tion when con­front­ed with the vir­u­lent hatred spewed by the ayatollahs.

Their geno­ci­dal ambi­tions are, for the Pres­i­dent, mere­ly a “nar­ra­tive” to be coun­tered, as the recent­ly con­clud­ed White House Sum­mit on Coun­ter­ing Vio­lent Extrem­ism laid out.   He refus­es to con­cede that this nox­ious agen­da, though expound­ed by Koran­ic schol­ars and prac­ticed by peo­ple will­ing to die (and kill) for their faith, bears any rela­tion­ship to that reli­gion.  It is mere social phe­nom­e­non, the detri­tus of colo­nial­ism, a “vio­lent extrem­ism” that can be reme­died by a pro­pa­gan­da and social wel­fare offen­sive to “counter extrem­ists’ nar­ra­tives, rein­te­grate for­mer vio­lent extrem­ists, and pro­mote tol­er­ance and non-vio­lent dis­pute resolution.”

A Pres­i­dent who elo­quent­ly lament­ed “the stain of slav­ery and anguish of civ­il war, the yoke of seg­re­ga­tion and tyran­ny of Jim Crow” grows strange­ly clin­i­cal and blood­less when faced with the vile and fero­cious creed of his Per­sian nego­ti­at­ing part­ners.  And while it would be fool­ish to hold the aya­tol­lahs to the Amer­i­can val­ues Oba­ma has praised, it is equal­ly fool­ish to dis­count their dark ambi­tions and mur­der­ous intentions.

Tehran is as com­mit­ted to glob­al jihad and Israel’s extinc­tion as Bull Con­nor was to Jim Crow and white suprema­cy.  The Pres­i­dent would be wise to bring the unblink­ing moral clar­i­ty of his Sel­ma speech to his bar­gain­ing ses­sions with Iran.