We never met, but we know who you are.
We know you are not the guy who last December set fire to a synagogue in Melbourne. You are also not the Iranian who two months earlier ordered a Jewish restaurant in Sydney to be torched. You are also not the spook who masterminded these atrocities, or the ayatollah who hates the Jews and their state.
You are just one of some 80 million Iranians who have nothing to do with your regime and know precious little about what your government has done in Australia – in your name.
That is why we will now tell you what they did in your name, what it means, and what it might cost – to your leaders, your country, and yourself.
WHAT HAPPENED is that your leaders have sent people to attack Jews in their houses of worship, 11,000 km. away from Tehran. This accusation was made by Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, following an investigation by his government’s security services.
The evidence is so unambiguous that Australia expelled your ambassador, a drastic measure the like of which Canberra has not taken in more than 80 years.
The problem is much larger than the two incidents that were specified by Albanese. All now suspect that your leaders were behind the entire wave of anti-Jewish attacks that has swept Australia lately – more than 2,000 incidents in the 12 months following October 2023 alone, according to the Executive Council of Australian Jewry.
You must now understand that your leaders have effectively attacked Australia, unprovoked. That hasn’t happened to Australia since 1942, when the city of Darwin was bombarded by Japanese warplanes. Australians, you should know, are fighters. They responded harshly then, and will respond harshly now.
Yet the problem is even larger than that, because most people’s conclusion from this week’s news is that your leaders have been actively kindling anti-Jewish fires not only in Australia, but in multiple countries worldwide.
Such an effort costs millions, but its financial price tag – all paid for with your money – is the lesser cost. The real cost lies in the catastrophic results of riding the tiger that your leader has chosen to ride, with you on his lap.
THE TIGER under your pants is called antisemitism. It’s been around for thousands of years, and has repeatedly, and fatefully, tempted bigots like the ayatollahs who seated you 10 inches from this animal’s teeth.
Antisemitic writers defamed us through contradicting theories – religious, atheist, economic, and biological – but antisemitic leaders were driven not by theories but by emotions, the feelings of shame and fear.
Nazi Germans were ashamed of their country’s defeat in World War I. They had to suggest an explanation, and so claimed the Jews plotted it. Medieval Christians had to explain how Jesus could have been killed. They decided the Jews killed God. Tsarist Russia had to explain its masses’ poverty and despair.
It thus forged The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which said the Jews were plotting to conquer Russia. Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad had to explain his currency’s collapse. He said the Jews had done it. And the list goes on.
Your own leaders have failed to deliver jobs, housing, and a solid currency, not to mention justice, equality, opportunity, and dignity, or even just water and electricity. That’s why, like all antisemitic leaders before them, they fear the masses – people like you – and that’s why they spent your money fomenting anti-Jewish mayhem.
This way, they thought, the world would be looking elsewhere while they subjugated the Iranian people and conquered the Arab world. Better yet, antisemitic turbulence would allow them to tell you, and the rest of the Iranian people, that whatever doesn’t work in Iran is not its leaders’ fault, but part of a Jewish plot.
Your leaders did not invent this, as we have explained. It was done before them, not only in Nazi Germany and Tsarist Russia but also in the Soviet Union, which caged within its borders 2 million Jews while unleashing – through hundreds of dailies, weeklies, monthlies, TV channels, and radio stations – an armada of reporters, editors, anchors, and cartoonists who blamed all the world’s woes on the Jewish state.
Their motivation was as sinister and pathetic as your own leaders’ motivation, but that – from your viewpoint – is the lesser problem. The bigger problem is also not that the ploy didn’t work. The problem is that the ploy backfired, colossally.
The dangers of being antisemitic
Antisemitism, it turned out, kills its bearers, filling their guts with so much hatred that they lose their mental peace and rational balance. Catholic Europe, after centuries of abusing the Jews, had become so awash with hatred that it turned on itself, broke in half, and drowned in a religious war that killed one-fifth of its population.
Tsarist Russia altogether disappeared, after triggering a civil war that killed some 7 million people. The Soviet Union also lost the war it waged on the Jews. First, it released its Jews, then it made peace with the Jewish state, and finally it unraveled.
The same thing happened in Germany. Yes, Nazi Germany murdered every third Jew and, before that, torched hundreds of synagogues – the way your leaders just tried to do in Australia. But 80 years on, the Nazis are dead and the Jews are alive – running a country in their homeland, praying in synagogues from Moscow to Melbourne, and flying fighter jets above Tehran.
Yes, not all of antisemitism’s engines disappeared. The Vatican is still there, except it abandoned its antisemitism, first renouncing its theological theories, and then making peace with the Jewish state.
What, then, will happen with antisemitic Iran? Will it unravel like the Soviet Union, drown in blood like Nazi Germany, or change its ways like the Vatican?
That choice is not ours to make. It’s yours.
www.MiddleIsrael.net
The writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is the author of Ha’Sfar Ha’Yehudi Ha’Aharon (The Last Jewish Frontier, Yediot Sefarim 2025), a sequel to Theodor Herzl’s The Old New Land.