At the end of Casablanca, the corrupt French police prefect (Claude Rains) clears the casino by bursting in and declaring, “I am shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here.” Of course we all snicker, since he has been wagering all through the movie.

Likewise we chuckled when Democrats carped at Benjamin Netanyahu that his trip to address the U.S. Congress without the invitation of President Obama, was “political,” and when Netanyahu started his speech by primly denying it.

Of course such a speech is political, in the primordial sense of politics as the art of wresting order out of chaos, and preserving human values by imperfect means in a fallen, wicked world. Netanyahu is one of the few partisans of order and rational discourse in that region.

Other rational actors include the brave Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who uses the necessary force to suppress the vicious bigots of the Muslim Brotherhood from imposing Islamic uniformity on that country, and the government of Algeria, whose tanks prevent that country’s Islamist majority from stifling its society with Sharia. Indeed, the secular despot Assad of Syria is less unappetizing than the various religious bigots squabbling for power there.

The roster of sane, if undemocratic leaders in the region was once a whole lot longer. It included the Shah of Iran, whom President Jimmy Carter helped shove out of power in the name of “human rights.” The Shah was followed by what Netanyahu called “a dark and brutal dictatorship,” which tries to overcome its taint of Shi’ite heresy by outbidding its Sunni neighbors in the game of baiting Jews, and planning for their extermination in Israel.

As a good diplomat, Netanyahu led his speech with a strong bipartisan outreach to Democrats, thanking Obama for the help he provided Israel over the years. No one was fooled: Netanyahu has come to talk to Congress as a desperate schoolteacher contacts a troubled students’ parents. He needs to speak with the grownups, because the Obama administration has so bungled American involvement in the region that our folly now threatens the existence of Israel.

Just a short list of Obama’s blunders would have to include: toppling the pliant Qaddafi in Libya, which threatens to become the next conquest of ISIS; appeasing Turkey, which moves by the day further away from moderate, secularized Islam toward outright, explicit Islamo-fascism; fleeing Iraq without leaving behind a competent government; siding in Syria with so-called “moderate rebels,” themselves not much less Islamist than ISIS; abandoning Christians and other minorities to their fate at the hands of ISIS; and finally, leaving Iran on a sure, certain course to developing nuclear weapons.

The deal Obama has on the table, Netanyahu explained, would “virtually guarantee” that Iran becomes a nuclear power — on the model of North Korea, which likewise finessed inspections, and now is on track to an “arsenal of 100 nuclear bombs.” That would set off, Netanyahu warned, a nuclear arms race in the “most dangerous part of the planet,” which would soon be “crisscrossed by nuclear tripwires.”

Even as Iran stages mock-attacks on U.S. ships, no Iranian leader has reason to fear the U.S. use of force against Iran. In fact, the nearest the U.S. came to firing a shot in that burgeoning conflict was when (according to credible news reports which the White House denies) Obama threatened that if Israel sent planes to attack Iranian nuclear sites the U.S. would shoot them down. Got that? We won’t fire on Iran, but we might fire on Israel.

But Netanyahu has been unpardonably rude by going behind Obama’s back and speaking to the House and Senate. We are shocked, shocked to learn that politics is taking place in Congress.

There’s no time for good manners when the house is on fire, and the blaze is one that Obama has fed through repeated follies. Israel, a tiny country almost entirely surrounded by implacable enemies who dream of driving millions of Jews “into the sea,” won’t get a second chance. Its citizens are always just one lost war away from extermination, the fate that their grandparents narrowly escaped just 70 years ago — when half of Europe’s Jews perished, and which Israeli leaders have again and again avoided through skilled diplomacy and courageous acts of war.

Currently, the only real guarantee that Israel has of safety against the one billion or so Muslims whose scriptures tell them to persecute the Jews is Israel’s nuclear monopoly. Iran aims to break that monopoly, and craft the weapons needed to finish Hitler’s work in a single afternoon.

Meanwhile, the American president who claims that he has derailed Iran’s aspirations describes Islamists gunning down Jews at a kosher butcher in Paris as, essentially, “folks shootin’ some other folks at random.”

In contrast, Netanyahu reminded Congress of the ancient story of “Persian potentate” Haman, a story related in the book of Esther, one in a long line of rulers who have sought to exterminate the Jews. Haman’s heirs in Teheran now hope to revive his efforts. But “the days of the Jewish people remaining passive in the face of genocidal enemies . . . are over,” Netanyahu told Congress, to appropriate applause.

The U.S. has no business attacking Iran, or any other country that hasn’t attacked us first. But if Israel wishes to use its last remaining advantage to preserve its citizens’ safety against a country whose leaders have questioned the Holocaust and tweeted in English “that Israel must be destroyed,” the U.S. should cheer it on and assist it. Iran’s intolerant regime led by fanatics deserves to meet the same fate as Pharaoh’s armies in the Red Sea.