‘Never Again’ must apply to the Iranian Regime’s Ayatollahs

With Yom HaShoah or Holocaust Memorial Day just around the corner I am reminded of the very real threat of a nuclear genocide the Iranian regime possess to the population living in Israel and to Jews worldwide. The Iranian regime’s ayatollahs and military leaders have not only called for Israel’s destruction for the past four decades, but they have funded and armed terrorist groups to achieve the objective of annihilating the Jews. The Iranian regime’s leadership has not only developed a nuclear weapons program and missile technology to potential launch strikes at Israel, but the regime has also advanced Holocaust denial and anti-Semitic ideology worldwide. The Iranian regime’s leadership has even gone as far as placing writings in English, Farsi and Hebrew on their missiles stating that they wish to destroy Israel! As we remember the six million victims of the Nazi genocide against our people, so must we today seek to prevent another potentially catastrophic mass genocide of our people at the hands of the Iranian ayatollahs.

We cannot and must not remain silent as the Iranian ayatollahs fund and advance Holocaust denial ideology in the world today. Since the early 2000s the Iranian regime has spread anti-Semitic propaganda on their state-sponsored television programs and online sites. In 2016 and 2017, the Iranian regime’s Islamic Propaganda Organization that runs the “Sarcheshmeh Cultural Institute” organized the second official Holocaust Cartoon competition in Tehran that offer up to $50,000 to cartoonist who featured the most “interesting Holocaust denial and anti-Israel cartoon”. Another backer of this Holocaust cartoon competition is the “Owj Media and Arts Organization” that is directly affiliated with the Revolutionary Guards. Both of these organizations and Iranian state-run media outlets boasted about their organization of such disgusting anti-Semitic events.

Yet the anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial garbage spewed by the Iranian regime is nothing new for the Iranian regime. This disgusting behavior has a long and proud tradition dating back to the inception of the Islamic Republic in Iran. The regime has always maintained warm relations with notorious anti-Semites, including former KKK Grand Wizard, David Duke and other American neo-Nazi groups. Furthermore, the Iranian regime has a long history of ties to European neo-Nazis groups and Holocaust deniers. For example, the Iranian regime proudly announced many years ago that it paid for the legal defense in France of French Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy, who was convicted and fined $80,000 in 1998 in France for denying the Holocaust. Garaudy was subsequently welcomed in Tehran as a hero, where he met with the Iranian Supreme leader Ali Khamenei. In 2012, Khamenei publicly grieved the death of Garaudy in a personal Twitter message. Additionally Iranian state-run media outlets have also frequently cited the writings of the neo-Nazi American leader William Pierce. In October 2014, the Anti-Defamation League reported that the regime’s annual Holocaust denial conference in Tehran hosted Maria Poumier, a French denier; Claudio Moffa, an Italian denier; and Kevin Barrett, an anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist and frequent contributor to Iran’s English-language, state-run news network, Press TV.

Long before Iran’s former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made a name for himself among the anti-Semites, the Iranian regime, under the supposed “moderate” President Mohammad Khatami, had begun funding Holocaust deniers and publishing their materials in Iran and all over the world. During the Green Revolution in Iran from 2009 to 2010, several “moderate” leaders in Iran staged public media campaigns of attacking the Islamic hardliners in Iran, not for their atrocities against the Iranian population or their Islamist fanaticism, but for allegedly being of Jewish descent! To accuse someone of being Jewish in Iran is equivalent to calling someone a child molester in the U.S.

After six million of our brethren were slaughtered at the hands of Nazis more than seven decades ago, we cannot ignore or disregard such massive anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial campaigns carried out by the Iranian regime. Moreover the Iranian regime’s overt actions of giving thousands of lethal missiles to terrorist groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah to launch potential attacks on Israel are a reality.The Iranian regime has very openly and proudly displayed their long range ballistic missiles which have Farsi and Hebrew writing on them calling for Israel’s destruction. Is there no other more clear display of the regime’s very real genocidal threat against the Jewish people? Let us not fool ourselves, when the Iranian regime says it wants to “wipe Israel off the map” it means they want to slaughter Jews on a genocidal scale… plain and simple. The Iranian regime’s threats must be taken seriously because their actions also speak volumes. When we say “never again” it must also apply to the threat of genocide coming from the Iranian ayatollahs.

Over the last near four decades, we the Jews of Iran who live in the West, have spoken out about the anti-Semitic, violent and unpredictable nature of the current Iranian regime to our brethren in America by retelling our stories of imprisonment, torture, property confiscation, anti-Semitism and even execution of our family members. Our stories have all fallen on deaf ears as American Jews and other Americans who supported the Obama administration falsely believed administration officials who made claims that the Iranian regime had spontaneously turned a page and miraculously become “moderate”. These were all lies as we see the Iranian regime become more anti-Semitic and increased their threats against Israel.  One genocide at the hands of the Nazis was utterly devastating, we cannot afford a second genocide of the Jewish people and must not remain silent in the face of a potentially second genocide carried out by the Iranian ayatollahs!