When we think of the theocratic regime of Iran, we usually talk about stopping them from getting a nuclear bomb. They already wreak so much havoc in the region, the last thing they need is the leverage of a nuclear device.

President Obama struggled for years to get the mullahs to agree to a nuclear deal, which was signed in 2015, freeing up more than $100 billion in sanctions relief for Iran.

Regardless of how one feels about Obama’s controversial deal, which President Trump rescinded in 2018 and President Biden failed to resuscitate, there is one significant fact about Iran that is widely recognized:

Six years before he got his deal, Obama kept his mouth shut as an uprising began that came to be known as the Green Movement.

From June 2009 to early 2010, up to 3 million Iranians turned out on Tehran streets to protest a fraudulent presidential election that claimed Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had won in a landslide. Their simple slogan was: “Where is my vote?”

No doubt, many were also wondering, “Where is Obama?”

“Obama wasn’t just reluctant to show solidarity in 2009,” Eli Lake wrote in 2016. “He feared the demonstrations would sabotage his secret outreach to Iran.” Lake quotes a book from Wall Street Journal reporter Jay Solomon showing how far Obama went to avoid helping Iran’s green movement. “Behind the scenes, Obama overruled advisers who wanted to do what America had done at similar transitions from dictatorship to democracy, and signal America’s support.”

All of this was on my mind the other night as I watched scenes of courageous Iranian women fighting against violent troops on the streets of Tehran. These women were being persecuted, beaten and jailed for, among other things, the sin of not properly wearing their hijab.

I saw them in the must-see movie, “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” a film that captures the spirit of a people literally dying for the sin of wanting their freedom. Through the eyes of a family, with the father, an investigative judge, caught between his wife and two daughters and the demands to rubber stamp death sentences, we see one of the great dramas of our times unfold.

It’s a drama that pits millions of young, vibrant and courageous Iranians against fully-armed, misogynist bullies who hide behind religion to rationalize their relentless oppression.

What struck me as I saw the film, which is set in modern Tehran, is how 15 years after the Green Movement, the fire of the uprising is still burning. “Kill one of us and a thousand more will come,” a protestor yells in the film.

The other thing that struck me is how these faces of a revolution, who are fully fluent in the ways of social media, remind me of the grit and feistiness of Israelis, and especially of the freewheeling spirit of Tel Aviv. Replace the regime with a modern leader who values freedom and human rights and Tehran becomes a Persian version of Tel Aviv.

This is why this obsession with negotiating with dogmatic mullahs has got to end. While they toyed with the world with their nuclear threats, they built the largest factory of terror in the world. We also know that agreements with them are useless, because they’re experts at cheating while collecting billions in sanctions relief.

Those billions have not gone to their people but to their terror proxies. The good news is that they’ve never been weaker. Iran’s losses at the hands of Israel in Lebanon, Gaza, Syria and Yemen, combined with a worsening economy, has made regime change a viable and realistic option. I can assure you not one of the demonstrators in the movie would pick “negotiations” over “regime change.”

Indeed, regime change is the surest, most efficient way to block Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. The fact that it will be tricky to pull off is no reason to abandon the goal; it’s reason to double down. An evil, wily regime with genocidal intentions against Israel and the West belongs to history, not current events.

I read recently that Obama regretted his failure to help the movement in 2009. “In retrospect, I think that was a mistake,” he admitted in 2022. Of course, he didn’t just not help a people’s movement; he honored and empowered a terror regime. Now, many years later, he says about the movement: “Every time we see a flash, a glimmer of hope, of people longing for freedom, I think we have to point it out. We have to shine a spotlight on it. We have to express some solidarity about it.”

Yes we do.

Those flashes, those glimmers, that longing for freedom, permeates “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” just as it permeates millions of brave Iranians. Those lonely demonstrators need to know we have their back.

We can start with a screening at the White House, followed by an executive order in support of the Iranian people.

A bruised people is crying out, and these are not actors.