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It is exactly 64 years since the surrender of Nazi Germany. It's worth parsing a line Winston Churchill said in his Victory Day broadcast: "Finally, almost the whole world was combined against the evil-doers, who are now prostrate before us."

There is much to unpack in that sentence. "Finally" -- the world should have recognized the evil earlier and sent help sooner. "Almost the whole world was combined against the evil-doers" -- it takes the free world to defend freedom around the world. "Who are now prostrate before us" -- we are the victors; freedom has won.

This victory was especially sweet for Churchill, because he had been chasing Adolf Hitler for 13 years on the Jewish issue, and finally had won.

Sir Martin Gilbert, Churchill's biographer, pointed me to a story from his book "Churchill and the Jews: A Lifelong Friendship" (Free Press, N.Y.) recounting a scheduled meeting between Churchill and Hitler in November 1932. "It was Hitler's reluctance to discuss the anti-Jewish aspects of Nazism, as Churchill wanted to do -- that led Hitler to cancel the meeting at the last moment," he wrote.

But Churchill would not rest until victory. Back on that Victory Day, he said: "I say that in the long years to come, not only will the people of this island but of the world, whenever the bird of freedom chirps in human hearts, look back to what we've done and they will say 'do not despair, do not yield to violence and tyranny, march straight forward and die if need be -- unconquered.' Now we have emerged from one deadly struggle -- a terrible foe has been cast on the ground and awaits our judgment and our mercy."

Sixty-four years later, Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad -- a leader already guilty of genocide-related crimes, who seeks to eradicate the Jewish people, fueled by an ideology inseparable from its Nazi elements, and whose country, under his direction, has been waging expansionist wars in a bid to control the region -- is on the verge of obtaining the means to make his threat a reality. Even Hitler was afraid of Churchill. Does the West possess such a leader?

Churchill's pro-Jewish flair didn't arise out of wartime opposition to Nazism. In March 1921, discussing the Balfour Declaration in Jerusalem, Churchill responded to a Muslim questioner that a Jewish national home was a no-brainer; "and where else but in Palestine, with which the Jews for 3,000 years have been intimately and profoundly associated?"

In March 1936, he ranted on and on in the British House of Commons about what the Germans were doing to the Jews. He concluded by practically spitting that the world simply watched "every form of concentrated human wickedness cast upon these people by overwhelming power, by vile tyranny."

In May 1939, he took once again like a hurricane to the House floor, when it was proposed that Jewish immigration to Palestine be brought to a close. "[The Jews] have made the desert bloom," he admonished. "They have founded a great city on the barren shore. They have harnessed the Jordan and spread its electricity throughout the land."

Yet, he stormed, now the Jews were to be thrown to the wolves? He threw the words of then-Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain -- "[to the Zionists] will be the task to build up a new prosperity and a new civilization in old Palestine" -- back at Chamberlain.

"Well, they have answered his call," Churchill said. "They have fulfilled his hopes. How can he find it in his heart to strike them this mortal blow?"

Hard to believe, but it was 64 years ago exactly that such a man stood over his felled adversary and observed, with an almost smug satisfaction, that Zionism would outlive Nazi Germany.

And what of the Iranian nuclear threat? The world watches, but it isn't quite silent. Faintly, "the bird of freedom chirps in human hearts." Let us pose the question to the president of the United States and his Western allies on the British Isles and elsewhere: Will we yield to tyranny? Or, as Churchill once crowed, will we march straight forward, unconquered?

If diplomacy continues to fail, action must be taken -- and soon. Perhaps it will be left to Israel. If that is the case, Churchill will be rooting for Israel from the great beyond. As Gilbert recounted in his book, at the establishment of the Jewish Brigade Churchill wrote to Franklin D. Roosevelt: "They wish to have their own flag, which is the Star of David on a white background with two light blue bars. I cannot see why this should not be done. Indeed, I think that the flying of this flag at the head of a combat unit would be a message to go all over the world."

If need be, let that flag fly and let that message be sent. And let the Jewish community, as Churchill would, stand with Israel.

Seth Mandel is the managing editor of The Jewish State.