‘Westerners,” said Ayatollah Ali Khamenei last Saturday, “act in a different way.”
The audience, the Islamic Republic’s Assembly of Experts, may or may not have been impressed by the supreme leader’s wisdoms about our civilization – the man, after all, has never visited even one Western land.
Others, however, particularly Jews, should be impressed and, in fact, alarmed, and so should be every member of Khamenei’s circle and regime.
Never mind the 85-year-old cleric’s brave claim that Iranian elections – a mockery of democracy that excludes most leaders and puts off most voters – is “God’s will, mercy, and grace.” (See www.Khamenei.ir, March 8, 2025) Tragicomic as this assertion is, it is the Iranian people’s business, not ours.
That cannot be said of Khamenei’s insight concerning freedom of speech, which included unabashed Holocaust denial. “In the European countries that claim to be civilized,” he complained, “when a person expresses his objection to the myth of the Holocaust and announces that he does not believe in it, they throw him into prison.”
And in case this accusation’s gravity was not fully clear, the serial killer of demonstrators and dissidents elaborated: “They sentence him to jail for denying a fictitious event.” To make his point even clearer, Khamenei turned to what he hoped would come across as his example’s flip side: “When they openly insult the Holy Prophet of Islam… nobody is allowed to protest against their actions.”
Set aside the fact that his claim is unfounded – no democracy forbids demonstrations against Islam’s critics – Khamenei’s statements reveal fundamental ignorance of which he must be disabused: ignorance about who we Jews are, what truth and memory mean to us, and what our history’s Persian chapters mean about him and what he represents. Hence these brief, Middle Israeli lines to the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
DEAR AYATOLLAH, Jews the world over have read with great interest your comments last weekend concerning our people’s famous trauma, last century’s effort to exterminate the Jewish people.
So first of all, for the sake of the unlikely possibility that you actually believe that the Holocaust is a “myth,” as you just declared, and in fact “fictitious,” as you implied, let us say here for the record that millions of today’s Jews have known personally the victims of that bloodbath, by far the most barbaric and best documented crime in human history.
Many of us were actually raised by the Holocaust’s survivors and thus lived with the echoes of what they went through. Any attempt to deny, twist, or just question the historicity of what they endured will therefore result in our exposure and pursuit of the denier as an enemy of truth, justice, and mankind.
That’s in terms of your personal situation. However, your statement threatens not only your image, but also the cause you think you serve, since your Holocaust denial effectively declares war not only on the Jewish state but also on the Jewish people.
And that’s where the second thing you doubtfully know about us Jews comes in: we never forget.
The Jewish calendar is checkered with memorial days
Our calendar is checkered with memorial days: Every spring we salute our ancestors’ defeat of slavery, every autumn we commemorate their journey through the desert, and every Saturday we praise God for his creation of the world in six days. And in the same spirit, despite the passage of centuries and millennia, we remember our enemies’ each and every abuse.
Every winter we recall the Seleucid Empire’s ban on the practice of the Jewish faith, every summer we lament Rome’s torching of our Second Temple and Babylonia’s razing of our First Temple, and every spring we recall Pharaoh’s command to his people concerning ancient Israel – “every boy that is born you shall throw into the Nile.”
And last Saturday, while you denied the Holocaust, Jews in synagogues the world over read the biblical command: “Remember what Amalek did to you… after you left Egypt… how – undeterred by fear of God – he surprised you on the march when you were famished and weary and cut down all the stragglers in your rear… do not forget!”
That happened in the Sinai Desert, but this morning Jews on six continents retold a tale that happened in your country, in the days of Xerxes I, some 2,500 years ago. Your statement’s timing was therefore perfect, and also proverbial, both because of the analogy that this part of Jewish memory evokes, and because of its main protagonist’s end.
THAT PROTAGONIST is one of your spiritual forebears – Haman son of Hammedatha – who engineered a royal decree “to destroy, massacre and exterminate all the Jews, young and old, children and women, on a single day, the 13th day of the 12th month.” That date was yesterday – five days after your own statement – according to the calendar that still governs Jewish life, heritage, and thoughts.
Haman, like you, hated the Jews – irrationally, pathologically, and fatefully. Fatefully, that is, because according to the tale that the Jews commemorate today, he ended up hanging on a tree “50 cubits high” in the Persian capital of the day, Shushan, several hours’ drive south of your abode in Tehran.
Catharsis thus arrived, and your forebears at once restored the heritage of King Cyrus, the toleration that would be Persia’s hallmark until the Khomeinist intrusion that you embody and uphold.
Staring from the gallows at the jeering Persian crowd, did Haman ask himself: “Why I did pick this fight? Why did I wage war on the Jews?” The Bible doesn’t say. It does, however, say that Haman was forewarned – by his wife.
“If,” she told him, the enemy “before whom you have begun to fall is of Jewish stock – you will not overcome him; you will fall before him to your ruin.”
www.MiddleIsrael.net The writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is the author of Ha’Sfar Ha’Yehudi Ha’Aharon (The Last Jewish Frontier, Yediot Sefarrim 2025), a sequel to Theodor Herzl’s The Old New Land.