America’s Amnesia About Iran

Talk about not carrying a grudge—for nearly 50 years! Is there anything Iran can do that we would not forgive?

There’s blood on Iranian streets; hijabs are flying in the wind as women set fire to pictures of the Supreme Leader; the internet is down; and those not already in body bags are being tortured by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.

What on Earth are we waiting for? Is this another sick JD Vance and Tucker Carlson “America First” joke? Concocting Zionist conspiracies rather than recognizing moral urgencies?

The maniacal mullahs of Iran are on the ropes. Their tyrannical grip on power has never been this fragile. We are on the cusp of a well-deserved unhappy end for the monstrous Islamic Revolution, which has produced such misery around the world—especially for all those Muslims who once faced toward the West and not in the medieval direction of Mecca and Medina.

Hard to imagine, but during the modernist days of the Shah, Iranians were more attuned to the Beatles than calls to prayers. Gays weren’t hanging from cranes. Women emulated the fashion of Jackie Onassis. The burqa was retro without any hope of a revival.

Ending the Islamist regime once and for all is also a categorical imperative called “payback.”

How soon we forgot what was justly owed. Back in 1979, the foot soldiers of the Islamic cultural revolution dethroned the Shah, rolled out the Persian rugs for theocratic thugs, and then ransacked the American Embassy in Tehran, taking 66 diplomats and civilians hostage for 444 days.

Embassies are supposed to be inviolable—except in Islamist societies where sharia supplants the rule of law and international norms.

It got worse. Iran landed on the list of state sponsors of terror. In 1983, its dependable shill, Hezbollah, detonated bombs that killed 241 American Marines in their barracks in Beirut. Over the past four years, Iran has been responsible for 350 attacks against American troops and military assets.

Aside from assisting Israel in defanging Iran’s nuclear arsenal this past summer, the United States has allowed the mullahs to get away with mischief and murder for far too long. We stayed on the sidelines while Iran skirted all red lines by becoming benefactors of terror outfits like the Houthis, Hezbollah, Al-Shabaab, Boko Haram and, of course, Hamas.

They assisted Syria in gassing its own people. They routinely flouted Article II of the United Nations Charter by threatening to wipe Israel from the map. Iran’s good standing among the family of nations was never tarnished.

It’s not like we didn’t have opportunities to rid the world of this geographic menace. President Obama hid in the White House during Iran’s Green Revolution in 2009 and again in 2011. President Biden similarly watched from a comfortable distance during the Hijab Revolution of 2022.

This time the casualty count far surpasses the sacrifices the Iranian people have made in past rebellions. Media reports indicate the death toll as high as 20,000, with thousands of arrests in Tehran, Mashhad, Shiraz, and even more remote cities.

Meanwhile, the West has been silent. The murder of Iranian civilians evokes no moral outrage. When it came to siding with the barbarians of Hamas, however, progressives and Islamists shouted, “human dignity!” and “justice!” loudly.

No surprise there. While Gazans willingly placed themselves in harm’s way, and a proper reading of international law made Hamas responsible for the use of human shields, the world ignored larger death tolls in other countries where the innocents were truly innocent—Nigeria, Sudan, Ethiopia and China.

Moral preening was mobilized only if it coincided with the demonization of Israel. Without Jewish fall guys, there was no moral outrage.

Moral preening was mobilized only if it coincided with the demonization of Israel. Without Jewish fall guys, there was no moral outrage.

The same could be said about the plight of Iranian women and the silence of the #MeToo movement. How could Western feminists have had nothing to say about the Hijab Revolution, where a young woman was beaten to death by the Morality Police for exposing a few strands of hair?

The mullahs have consigned Iranian women to decades of deprivations over their bodily autonomy, manner of dress, and freedom of movement. Islamic overseers enforced these regulations through surveillance, threats, rape and murder.

Women around the world surely cared about Palestinian women and were totally indifferent toward Israeli girls gangraped on October 7, 2023.

Now we know for certain—as if there was ever any doubt—that such concerns were mere pretexts for shouting death threats against global Jewry. The streets of major capitals and college campuses were gaga over Gaza, awash in falsehoods and lies.

Pro-Hamas demonstrations drew hundreds of thousands in European cities. All that rage-filled chanting about rivers and seas no one could actually name. Soft-pedalling intifada revolutions. Justifying the beheading of Jewish babies as a necessary means to a barbaric end.

European Parliaments convened emergency sessions. Arms sales to Israel were suspended. The Western left seemed to have no political priority other than obsessing about “genocidal” Israel and feigning distress over Gazans.

As for Iran . . . zilch. No bloody hand pins. No campus die-ins. No celebrities on red carpets wearing green, making sartorial statements that doubled as self-righteous memes.

Even the body count doesn’t add up. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard has killed far more of its own people than Israel’s war in Gaza. Israel would have had to fight for six months to reach the Iranian death toll at this point in the two-week conflict.

Why is Iran not on anyone’s radar? Because calling for the end of an Islamic regime is not as satisfying as demanding the annihilation of the world’s one Jewish state. In Iran, Jews aren’t doing the killing. And Iran is no beacon of Western white achievement that can be excoriated as colonialist.

No one envies Iran. There’s no resentment or bitterness over the flourishing of the Iranian people because Iran is a cultural backwater, a nation brainwashed into romanticizing the 13th century. Tehran and Tel Aviv are two different worlds. No one would want to live in the former; the latter just might be the most fun city on the planet.

Lastly, the Iranian people are rebelling against Islam itself. Standing up for Iranians is tantamount to rejecting the Prophet. Westerners know how free speech can morph into a fatwa.

The fate of the Iranian people should galvanize anyone opposed to censorship, the subjugation of women, the fate of apostates, and the torturing of dissenters.

The Iranian people are not terrorists. They haven’t gangraped or beheaded anyone. Why is no one screaming, “Free, Free Iran!”?

The Iranian people are not terrorists. They haven’t gangraped or beheaded anyone. Why is no one screaming, “Free, Free Iran!”?

With our naval assets maneuvering into position near the Persian Gulf and an American president not averse to demonstrating military might, perhaps we are preparing to make martyrs out of the ayatollahs—making their dreams of paradise finally come true. On January 13, Trump used social media to reassure Iranians: “HELP IS ON ITS WAY.”

Is it? After Israel and the United States crippled Iran’s nuclear capabilities, Trump forced Israel into a ceasefire—even after Iran violated that ceasefire. Had Trump allowed Israel to finish the job, Iranians slaughtered on the streets today would have already been liberated.

Let’s block out the isolationist MAGA noise and take credit for a long overdue regime change.