While the rest of us were celebrating, the Iranian people rang in the new year with a nearly weeklong series of nationwide anti-government protests against corruption and austerity. And they’ve found some unlikely allies in this effort: the same neoconservatives who have spent the past few decades demanding they meet a fiery death.

The prospect of Iranians from all walks of life — not just the academics and urban youth of Tehran, but residents of more conservative, rural regions — rising up in anger against the government is naturally frightening for the country’s leadership, leading a host of conservative leading lights in the US to suddenly perk up and start cheering their rebellion on. But aside from their sudden devotion to the Iranian people, what virtually all of these individuals have in common is the years they spent advocating that the same people they now regard as courageous, freedom-loving heroes to be either incinerated in a surprise blitz of US firepower, or be starved and sickened through crippling sanctions.

One need look no further than Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, who has spent the past week calling the Iranian people “our real allies,” quoting Thomas Jefferson in support of their uprising, urging Washington to back them, and retweeting Garry Kasparov as he advised the US to “support the people of Iran” because “the people will remember if you do.” Unfortunately for Kristol, people will also remember if you spend the entirety of a century urging that they be murdered, as National Iranian American Council President Trita Parsi demonstrated when he called out Kristol for his hypocrisy on MSNBC.