Is it a coincidence that the continent where six million Jews died is now protecting Iran, the country that has made it a mission to wipe out the State of Israel?

Iranian president Rouhani inspects a nuclear facility

What exactly is wrong with the Europeans?

I feel like I’ve written that sentence in a number of different ways over the past two years or so, but it seems like the most direct way to express a general bewilderment. What, exactly, is wrong with them?

At a time when the Iranian economy is tottering, when people are rising up on the streets in Beirut, Baghdad, and Tehran to protest the Iranian regime’s brutality and corruption, the Europeans are throwing the mullahs a lifeline. Last week, six European countries joined INSTEX, a barter system that facilitates trade with Iran by skirting US sanctions. Nine European countries are now partnering in the project to save the Iranian kleptocracy, the world’s leading terror state.

Just so we’re clear on the facts: The United States estimates that the Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps and other security forces have killed 1,000 demonstrators, and jailed another 7,000, during a recent crackdown on a rising protest movement. Here’s how Brian Hook, the Trump administration’s special representative for Iran, described one particularly brutal episode in which demonstrators blocked a road in Mahshahr, a city in southwest Iran:

“The IRGC tracked them down and surrounded them with machine guns mounted on trucks” and began spraying them with bullets, he said. “Between the rounds of machine-gun fire, the screams of the victims can be heard. In this one incident alone, the regime murdered as many as 100 Iranians and possibly more. When it was over, the regime loaded the bodies into trucks.”

These are the methods of a regime that Europe seeks to protect. And it should be noted that the profits from the commerce the Europeans will be supplying to the Iranians will not be spent building schools and roads and job-training centers, but on funding foreign wars in Syria, Yemen, and Lebanon, and exerting control in Iraq. The online journal the Intercept recently published an investigation based on 700 pages of leaked internal cables from Iran’s spy agency that shows just how effectively Tehran controls Iraq’s politics and internal affairs. It is a near-vassal state. Yet the report (also published by the New York Times) got passing mention in the international media. There are more pressing matters at stake at the United Nations, like preventing a few Jews from building homes in Chevron.

But I am fairly certain that heads of state in Paris, London, and Berlin saw those cables and know quite well how Iran is abusing its people. Is it a coincidence that the continent where six million Jews died is now protecting Iran, the country that has made it a mission to wipe out the State of Israel? You tell me.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 789)