From the persecutions of the Middle Ages to the Holocaust of the 20th century to the modern anti-Israel activists, Germany has had a particular problem with violent and genocidal antisemitism. And when a German journalist tried to make a false accusation against the exiled Iranian crown prince in order to smear both Israel and Persian dissidents, the crown prince delivered an emphatic response that exposed Germany’s history of antisemitism.
The reason that Prince Reza Pahlavi’s comments are relevant at the moment, even though he actually seems to have made them during an April interview at a Berlin press conference, is that numerous accounts that support the Persian people and condemn the Iranian regime are sharing varying translations of them now on social media. Since the Iranian regime is still bombing troops and civilians and killing its own people, while antisemites in the West irrationally blame Israel, Pahlavi’s exposure of Germany’s antisemitic history is as fresh as ever, sadly.
German journalist Tilo Jung reportedly asked Pahlavi if he was an Israeli asset. “Of course not. But I’m a friend to Israel and the Jews and I tell you why,” Pahlavi said. “Because again, as a descendant of Cyrus the Great, we take pride of the fact that the very cornerstone of human rights happened at the time that Cyrus the Great … coined the very principles of liberty when he freed the Jewish slaves in Babylon and helped them rebuild their temples in Jerusalem. Iranians and Jews have a biblical relationship. In fact, the only two [peoples] that can claim that.”
That relationship was renewed in the 20th century. “In modern history, Iran … harbored Jews that were escaping Hitler and his regime and were given refuge in Iran. That’s part of our history. That’s part of our tradition of harboring persecuted people,” Pahlavi said. “Jews in Iran were free to practice their faith before the revolution. I’m fighting for their rights to be restored and that of any other religion in Iran.” The crown prince was not only defending his family’s record, but pointing out that the German Nazis fueled the problem that Persia had to help solve. He was indirectly reminding the German journalist to do a little self-reflection. Israel is not the problem; fundamentalist Islam is — and Western antisemitism is.
Iranian leaders of the past have sometimes been harshly opposed to Judaism and Christianity also, but all the facts that Pahlavi brought up are true. And at least he is much more honest about the historical results of antisemitism than any German leftist is.
The history of Germany is complex and lengthy, and even to refer to that area as Germany is somewhat deceptive, given that for many centuries it was broken up into numerous jurisdictions and semi-independent states. But unfortunately, one constant through numerous changes of religion, political system, and levels of unification was the antisemitism.
For example, while the tragedy is that medieval European (and Muslim) monarchs in general tended to be antisemitic, German knights and soldiers in particular used the excuse of the First Crusade against the Muslims to massacre Jews in the Rhineland. The slaughter was horrific enough to draw censures from some other Christians who were roughly contemporaneous, including Albert of Aachen.
Unfortunately, this was just one of multiple bloody attacks on Jews in areas of what we now call Germany during the medieval period, and even when German authorities were not killing Jews, they were treating them as second-class citizens. Martin Luther, who launched the Protestant Revolution, began by talking more moderately about Jews and ended by encouraging violent persecution of them, which Lutheran German princes later used to justify harmful policies. Then in the mid-20th century, as Germany became actively anti-Christian, it also became increasingly filled with hatred of Jews.
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Hitler’s Holocaust murdered six million Jews, an unimaginably heinous number, and almost a century later the global Jewish population has yet to recover. There were Iranians who helped save Jews from the Nazis, including the Pahlavi monarchy, from which the current crown prince descends.
But Germany does not seem to have learned its lesson. There are parts of Berlin where Jews are told not to go because the Muslim migrants there are so violently antisemitic. The German government has repeatedly smeared Israel and promoted lies from Palestinian terrorists. Pahlavi was right to point out that while Iranian dissidents are friends of the Jews, German leftists are friends of the fundamentalist Muslims who are trying to commit a second Holocaust.
