Ayatollah Khomeini versus Jews, An Analysis

The Ayatollah Khomeini, not only recognized the mobilizing power of anti-Semitism in the struggle against the shah, he made use of it himself, as far back as the 1960s.

“I know that you do not want Iran to lie under the boots of the Jews,”



he cried out to his supporters on April 13, 1963. That same year, he called

the shah a Jew in disguise and accused him of taking orders from Israel.



This drew a huge response from the public. Khomeini had found his theme. Khomeini’s biographer Amir Taheri writes: “The Ayatollah was by now convinced that the central political theme of contemporary life was an elaborate and highly complex conspiracy by the Jews—’who controlled everything’—to ‘emasculate Islam’ and dominate the world thanks to the natural wealth of the Muslim nations.”

When in June 1963 thousands of Khomeini-influenced theology students set off to Tehran for a demonstration and were brutally stopped by the shah’s security forces, Khomeini channeled all their anger toward the Jewish nation:


“Israel does not want the Koran to survive in this country. . . . It is destroying us. It is destroying you and the nation. It wants to take possession of the economy. It wants to demolish our trade and agriculture. It wants to grab the wealth of the country.”



After the Six Day War of 1967, the anti-Semitic agitation, which drew no distinction between Jews and Israelis, intensified. ”[i]t was [the Jews] who first established anti-Islamic propaganda and engaged in various stratagems, and as you can see, this activity continues down to the present,” Khomeini wrote in 1970 in his principal work, Islamic Government.


”[T]he Jews . . . wish to establish Jewish domination throughout the world. Since they are a cunning and resourceful group of people, I fear that . . . they may one day achieve their goal.”



Then in September 1977, he declared,


“The Jews have grasped the world with both hands and are devouring it with an insatiable appetite, they are devouring America and have now turned their attention to Iran and still they are not satisfied.”



Two years later, Khomeini was the unchallenged leader of the Iranian revolution.

Khomeini’s anti-Semitic attacks found favor with the opponents of the shah, both leftists and Islamists.
His anti-Semitism ran along the same lines as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the turn-of-the-century hoax beloved of the Nazis that purports to expose a Jewish conspiracy to rule the world.

The Protocols was published in Persian in the summer of 1978 and was widely disseminated as a weapon against the shah, Israel, and the Jews. In 1984, the newspaper Imam, published by the Iranian embassy in London, printed excerpts from The Protocols. In 1985, Iranian state authorities did a mass printing of a new edition. Somewhat later, the periodical Eslami serialized The Protocols under the title

“The Smell of Blood: Jewish Conspiracies.”