View of the prisoners’ barracks soon after the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp 70 years ago. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

No matter the “bourgeois yearnings” of ordinary Iranians excited by the prospects of a newly open Iran, Iran’s leadership has committed itself to remaining on a steadfast, virulently antisemitic and anti-Israel course, and so the U.S. should be prepared to use its military to ensure the safety of the Jewish state, wrote Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen on Monday.

Writing from Dachau, Germany, where the Nazi regime inaugurated the first of many concentration camps to persecute those the fascist regime deemed dangerously redundant, Cohen explained how the Holocaust was an “immense national effort,” with much of the killing “done by men (and some women) who, on leave, went home to cuddle their kids and pet their dogs.”

“Ordinary men can do extraordinary things, evil included,” he explained.

So while Cohen — who supports implementing the current nuclear deal with Iran — rejects the more extreme posturing that the Vienna pact could lead to another Holocaust or worldwide apocalypse, he hammers home the point that Iran’s leaders, perhaps unlike the country’s people, uphold vastly different values than our own.

He quotes the Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who said of Israel: “This barbaric, wolf-like, and infanticidal regime of Israel which spares no crime has no cure but to be annihilated,” and stressed that in calculating foreign policy toward Iran, “only the country’s leadership matters.”

After all, Iranian leaders have historically played down or denied the Holocaust (see former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad), even pandering to Holocaust deniers by holding cartoon competitions depicting the genocide of European Jewry.

“The United States should make the deal with Iran but be prepared — belligerently so — to enforce it and to keep Israel safe,” he wrote.

Since signing the nuclear deal with Iran, the Obama administration has offered to boost Israel’s annual military aid beyond the current $3 billion the Jewish state receives, but Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rejected talks on the issue until Congress votes on whether to adopt the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which Netanyahu and many pro-Israel lobbies in the U.S. hope it will not.

Showing no sign of backing down from anti-Western rhetoric this week, Khamenei declared that the U.S. and Israel were the “real enemies” of Islam, accusing them of stirring violence in Muslim countries and pitting Muslim nations against one another, charges often leveled at Iran by several Arab states, Israel and the U.S.