By slaughtering, torturing, raping, and intimidating thousands of innocent protesters, Iran’s regime exposed its inherent evil. The moral challenge remains: will the world notice – and act decisively?
After bamboozling many Westerners, the Mullahs’ half-century-long con is crashing – although too many Progressives still forsake Iran’s heroic rebels. Hopefully, as Iran’s internet resumes, photos illustrating the brutal crackdown will go viral. Perhaps then Iran’s Mullah-resisters will get the worldwide left-to-right cheers they deserve, along with vigorous sanctions and satellite support.
In Iran, antisemitism stars as yet another dictator’s best friend. While fueled on Jew-hatred, this tyranny abuses its own people. Since their 1979 Revolution, the Mullahs keep offering textbook illustrations of why so many tyrants’ favorite sport is Jew-bashing – and now Israel-bashing.
These Islamo-monsters, using petro-dollars and ICBMs, fester in a historic swamp, recycling haters’ slurs. Like Roman legionnaires, Muslim conquerors, Spanish inquisitors, Nazi mass-murderers, Soviet communists, and Islamist terrorists, the brutes target the world’s oldest scapegoat – the Jews.
Obsessing about Jewish power conjures up every black-hearted despot’s all-purpose rationale: I’m not oppressing my people! I’m protecting them from this blue-and-white enemy that I have imagined – be it individual Jews or the Jewish state.
Iran’s Revolution hijacked a society that wasn’t antisemitic and had befriended Israel. Even in 2014, after decades of Mullahs demonizing Jews with cradle-to-grave Jew-bashing, genocidal threats and Holocaust denial, ADL pollsters found that “only” 56% of Iranians were antisemitic. While still despicably high, it represented a regional low. Iranians hated Jews far less than Turks (69%) and a sky-high 93% of Palestinians.
The regime’s ideological engine
The Mullahs’ use of the world’s “Swiss-knife hatred” – versatile, reliable, adaptable – differs from modern Western antisemitism. Most liberal-democratic politicians, Left to Right, reject the bottom-up Jew-hatred of the streets and the internet’s polluted byways.
By contrast, Iranian Jew-hatred is top-down and politically expedient. Jihadi firebrands cultivate it in the mosques for export and import. Leaders bond with Jew-haters worldwide, while justifying the internal mass-production of fear every dictatorship needs.
Antisemitism is the secret decoder ring initiating Iran’s regime, Hezbollah, Islamists, Venezuelans, Russians, and both Palestinian leaderships – the PA and Hamas – into the world’s Injustice League. It shapes the conspiracy theories Mullahs love so they can justify clampdowns needed to stabilize their corrupt, collapsing kleptocracy. They even claimed women had to remain in hijab to avoid Jewish degeneracy.
Admittedly, it’s worked.
As with the Palestinian national movement – and Hitler’s Nazism – Jew-hatred is in the Iranian Revolution’s DNA. It is central to the ideology and methodology. It’s not incidental; it’s not curable. Like Jew-haters worldwide, they merge anti-Zionism and antisemitism, using both as effective but lethal props.
That’s why in his foundational 1970 work, Islamic Government (Velayat-e Faqih), Ayatollah Khomeini claimed that from Islam’s founding “to our present day,” the Jews kept “distorting the reputation of Islam,” by “assaulting it and by slandering.” That’s why Khomeini called the shah “a Jew” and Israel a “cancerous tumor” that “must be removed from existence” – a rhetorical line his successor Ayatollah Ali Khamenei continued.
And that’s why, despite hostility to Western thought, Europe and Christianity, these Islamists embraced one imported idea from those “dhimmis”: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and other lies portraying Jews as evil, menacing, all-powerful, and deserving of elimination.
Warnings for the West
That’s why in 1979, the Revolution turned Israel’s embassy into PLO headquarters. And that’s why, every day since, it has spread Jew-hatred among its subjects and worldwide, hosts conferences in Holocaust denial, justifies nuclear ambitions by invoking its anti-Zionist mission, and wastes half a trillion dollars trying to eliminate Israel – only to have it expose the regime as a flaccid serpent with fewer and fewer fangs injecting ever-diluted poisons.
Like a patient with metastatic Stage-4 cancer, the mullahocracy is riddled with “Death to Israel” anti-Zionist antisemitism. Jews, Israel, and the Zionist conspiracy serve as the all-purpose explainer, the perfect patsy for any failure – economically, militarily, politically. In shouting “Neither Gaza nor Lebanon! My Life for Iran,” and in trashing the Palestinian ambassador’s residence in Tehran, Iran’s protesters knew exactly what they were doing: draining the regime’s ideological lifeblood.
Western leaders shouldn’t underestimate these tyrants’ viciousness. They should avoid echoing foolish Westerners like former secretary of state John Kerry, who said in 2015, “I haven’t seen anything that says to me” the regime would take “active steps” to “wipe” Israel off the map. Yet a decade later, Iran targeted Israel with hundreds of lethal missiles.
While illustrating how antisemitism serves fear-mongering dictators, Iran’s perverse autocracy also warns partisan Westerners addicted to demagogic leaders who demonize their opponents. Democracies should repel antisemites, like all bigots. Jew-hatred’s spread is a warning sign of social and political rot.
The fates of US and Israel are intertwined
Iran proves how antisemites are obsessive, reductive, and destructive – oversimplifying reality and ultimately sabotaging themselves. That should terrify liberal-democrats about leaders who cut their political teeth on anti-Zionist activism, like Zohran Mamdani. It should encourage greater skepticism toward the Palestinians’ national movement, which uses antisemitism as superglue cementing together jihadism, anti-Zionism, illiberalism, and anti-Americanism.
Operating globally, these anti-democratic saboteurs provide clarity, continuing to fuse anti-Zionism with antisemitism. That leaves the burden of proof on anti-Zionist haters to demonstrate how they can possibly love Jews while detesting anything Jewish because they hate the Jewish state. They also combine anti-Zionism with anti-Americanism, burning Israeli and American flags together.
Ultimately, Americans and Israelis shouldn’t need haters to remind us how closely our two countries are interconnected – with aligned values, overlapping liberal-democratic ideologies, and intertwined fates.
The writer is an American presidential historian and Zionist activist born in Queens, living in Jerusalem. Last year he published, To Resist the Academic Intifada: Letters to My Students on Defending the Zionist Dream and The Essential Guide to October 7th and its Aftermath. His latest E-book, The Essential Guide to Zionism, Anti-Zionism, Antisemitism, and Jew-hatred was just published and can be downloaded on the website of JPPI – the Jewish People Policy Institute.