The Nazis and the Mullahs

Like Hitler, Iran, its proxies, and fellow travelers embrace death.

If we take any lesson from the deadly struggles of the 20th century, it is to take our enemy’s ideologies seriously.  Hitler’s opponents read their own motivations into him. But Hitler had been perfectly clear years before he seized power. In Mein Kampf, he laid out his core belief that he has a divine mission: I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord. This key idea stayed true throughout his life. Biographer John Toland wrote:  He carried within him [the] teaching that the Jew was the killer of god. The extermination, therefore, could be done without a twinge of conscience since he was merely acting as the avenging hand of god. And the idea remained pre-eminent to the very end. In his 1945 last will and testament, Hitler wrote: Above all I charge the leaders of the nation and those under them to scrupulous observance of the laws of race and to merciless opposition to the universal poisoner of all peoples, international Jewry.  Associating his hatred with God showed that this was ultimate. He invoked the centuries of European culture that placed God as superordinate to whom all else is subsidiary. Warring against Jews, he was saying, came before all else. That is why, even when his armies were starved of transport and weapons, he gave top priority to the use of the railroads and transport to annihilate the Jews still left under his control rather than to aid his hard-pressed military. Despite the influence of fabulist supporters of today’s Nazi heirs, reality has reasserted itself. In dealing with the mullahcracy of Iran, the role of ideology is the same and we ignore it at our peril. That ideology is deeply akin to the Nazis’: they make the Jews their first enemy; “Death to Israel” always precedes “Death to America” in regime demonstrations throughout its 47-year rule. Because they identify America as spiritually akin to Israel, its death is called upo...