No beating around the bush here. Admittedly, your correspondent is a longtime defender of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a devotee of his Jewish state. But I’m also a four-decade-plus observer of speechifying at the highest levels of politics, business, and the non-profit community. So I can attest beyond a shadow of a doubt that Bibi’s oration before a joint session of Congress Wednesday was one for the ages.

The world may not within a generation see a more perfect combination — from the first syllable to the stentorian finale — of substance and style, statesmanship and storytelling, dynamism and determination, real people and realpolitik, bluster and blarney, political correctness and principled clarity, turns of phrase and twists of the foil, historic veracity and heroic vision.

Punctuating mellifluous tones with mighty thundering, flawless in his timing, tempo and technique, the head of government delivered a clarion call to distinguish the forces of good and evil, democracy and despotism, beneficence and barbarism, civilization and savagery, temperance and terror.

Alongside an inspiring and incontrovertible case for America to continue to make common cause with Israel in its indomitable, multi-front war not just in combat but on campuses, in courts and in the court of global public opinion.

Perhaps never has an address of this import been launched with such passion and precision — immediately both setting out the world’s moral choice between “civilization and barbarism,” and setting the stage for his later dead aim at the source of the latter: “Iran’s axis of terror.”

After powerfully yet poignantly relating the horror of October 7, Netanyahu masterfully employed the Gipper-originated stagecraft of introducing gallery guests who exemplified the heroism and human spirit that came equally to the fore in Israel’s response. 

A hostage whose release in a courageous rescue mission fulfilled a dying mother’s last wish. 

The father of a fallen soldier, quoted as pointing out how his son’s sacrifice, alongside the birth of Israel, ensured that the Jewish people are “no longer helpless in the face of our enemies” and that, in Netanyahu’s stirring assertion, “’never again’ is now.”

Most of all — in a deft demonstration of Israel’s tolerance in contrast to its opponents’ malevolence — courageous soldiers of diverse backgrounds, races and creeds who illustrated how “Muslim soldiers of the IDF fought alongside their Jewish Druze, Christian, and other comrades in arms with tremendous bravery.”

Pivoting from admiration for his countrymen into ire at their antagonists in the outside world, Netanyahu wondered aloud how campus and other protesters in the U.S. could possibly “choose to stand … with rapists and murders” — and “refuse to make the simple distinction between those who target terrorists and those who target civilians.” He then baldly stated the simple truth too many American leaders are too cowed to utter: “They should be ashamed of themselves.”

Turns out he was only warming up for the high point of his address — a series of devastating takedowns of protesters:

• Whose “signs proclaiming gays for Gaza” might as well read “chickens for KFC.” 
• Whose chants of “from the river to the sea” without “a clue what river and what sea they’re talking about” earn them “not only … an F in geography” but also “an F in history” for decrying the homeland of the Jewish people for nearly 4000 years  as “a colonialist state.”
• And most devastatingly, who, “when the tyrants of Tehran, who hang gays from cranes, and murder women for not covering their hair, are praising, promoting, and funding” them, “have officially become Iran’s useful idiots.”

After laying out the facts to counter further manifestations of “the world’s oldest hatred,” anti-Semitism, on the part of academic administrators and at the International Criminal Court — in the form of “outrageous slanders that paint Israel as racist and genocidal” — Netanyahu settled on the most persuasive point of his nearly hour-long declamation.

Quoting the foreign minister of Iran’s other main terrorist proxy, Hezbollah, the embattled leader revealed that “Israel is merely a tool. The main war, the real war, is with America.”

Running down examples of Iran’s execution of that war, including death squads dispatched to hunt down U.S. leaders on its own soil, he countered: “Yet in the heart of the Middle East, standing in Iran’s way, is one proud, pro-American democracy: my country, the state of Israel.”

When Israel fights Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis, he asserted, “We’re fighting Iran … the most radical and murderous enemy of the United States of America.”

After buttering up both the current and previous administrations for their support in that effort, Netanyahu presented the “day-after” vision many have demanded of Israel.

First, a demilitarization and deradicalization of the Gaza strip that could “lead to a future of security, prosperity, and peace.” And, second, a NATO-like joint security agreement uniting Iran’s enemies in the Middle East — one he suggested could be named the “Abraham Alliance” after the historic Donald Trump-driven accords with Israel’s Arab neighbors. 

To make that vision real, the onetime Israel Defense Force Captain channeled the pre-World War II plea of Winston Churchill with a potent push of his own: “Give us the tools faster, and we’ll finish the job faster.”

The shameful boycotting of Netanyahu’s tour de force by the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee and many of her colleagues in Congress, the headline-stealing protests outside, and the current administration’s moral fence-straddling show just how high a hill he and his nation have to climb to achieve those goals.

Yet this modern-day David’s oratorical Goliath-slaying provides a robust rhetorical roadmap for Israel’s allies – including, one might hope, in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue once again after January 20.

And just as important, it provides an example of the power of the well-crafted and delivered spoken word in defense of a noble cause that America’s own tongue-tied, self-absorbed and air-headed political combatants would do well to emulate (as if they could).