AMERICAN INTEREST
by Jeffrey Herf
June 30, 2015

A lesson from German history for our dealings with Iran today: take the ideas of others seriously.

Since 1979, the leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran have said many despicable things about the state of Israel, including that they want to see what they call a “cancer” removed from the Middle East. They repeat a now familiar litany of abuse composed of a mix of Nazi propaganda, Islamist ideology, and a peculiarly Iranian vision of world domination. The convergence of this torrent of abuse with Iran’s desire to possess nuclear weapons has led many observers, including myself, to fear that we are facing the specter of a second Holocaust. We do not do so because we are pessimists by nature nor because we make simplistic comparisons between the Nazi years and our own. Rather, we take that view because we see sufficient similarities between the years preceding the Holocaust and our own time to err on the side of pessimism. READ MORE