When the Iranian government celebrated the 40th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution, few celebrated outside regime rent-a-mobs in Tehran. After all, while the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini promised Iranians and diplomats that he had no interest in personal power and only wanted an Islamic democracy, he instead ushered in a dictatorship more brutal, corrupt, and capricious than the shah’s regime which he demonized. There’s also the Iranian support for terrorism. The notion that this is just “resistance” or legitimate opposition to Israeli occupation of the West Bank is belied by the fact that its targets are not only Israelis and often civilian. The 1994 Buenos Aires bombing, for example, targeted civilians for the sole purpose of killing Jews. And Iranian regime support for Hamas actively undercuts the Middle East peace process.

Curiously, however, Iran was not alone in its festivities. The German government joined the Islamic Republic to celebrate the anniversary of Khomeini’s return to Iran. The Jerusalem Post’s Benjamin Weinthal has been on top of the story for a month. German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier sent a congratulatory telegram to Iranian President Hassan Rouhani. Both Foreign Ministry State Minister Niels Annen and an Iran desk officer attended the celebrations. The irony, of course, is that German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas has said he went into politics “because of Auschwitz” and now celebrates a regime both whose official position is to deny the Holocaust occurred and which has repeatedly stated its goal to eradicate the Jewish state. These goals and beliefs extend to Rouhani who, as secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, oversaw the launch of Iran’s then-covert nuclear weapons program, and also was a general policy coordinator when Tehran granted asylum to Jürgen Graf, a Swiss Holocaust denier, and to Wolfgang Fröhlick, an Austrian engineer who argued in court that Zyklon-B could not kill humans.