Imagine the courage Iranians need to roar in 72 cities: “Death to the dictator” … “Iranians, raise your voice, shout out for your rights,” or “Palestine and Gaza,” sacrifice (both) for Iran.”
Imagine how betrayed these dissidents feel when Western reporters, students, professors, and the Brits ignore them, and streets worldwide remain quiet - while many seem angrier at President Donald Trump for attacking a corrupt, anti-democratic Venezuelan narco-terrorist than Iran’s anti-democratic mullahs.
Moreover, how could the Iranian citizens’ noble fight against a repressive, homophobic, sexist, anti-American theocracy be met with yawns, while democratic Israel’s heroic acts of self-defense trigger worldwide protests?
Right now, Jewish activists and liberty-lovers globally should have one priority: supporting the Iranian people’s push for freedom - doggedly and creatively. Although success isn’t guaranteed, it’s testing everyone’s moral fiber.
Considering how much safer the world would be if these protests were to produce a democratic or merely inward-looking Iran, there’s only one path ahead. Every responsible global citizen should ask: “What can I, any organizations I belong to, my community, and my country do to make this happen?”
The stakes here are sky-high – for Iran, for Israel, for Jews, for America, and for the world. Iran’s totalitarian mullahs and Revolutionary Guards have spent 47 years persecuting any doubters, along with free spirits resisting Islamist coercion, including people who are gay, feminists, or simply young girls who dare walk around without head coverings.
As Iran’s economy collapsed, even water and oil became scarce. Yet these self-destructive haters kept bankrolling bad actors everywhere, especially Iran’s “ring of fire” around Israel, from Hamas to Hezbollah to the Houthis to Palestinian terrorists.
Their bank-breaking, ultimately futile, missile program and rush to go nuclear threatened Israel, which it terms “Little Satan.” But it endangers “Big Satan” – America - and the entire West too. Meanwhile, deploying terrorist proxies, Iran exported its reign of terror worldwide, targeting Jews and other innocents.
If Westerners had a healthy desire for self preservation or moral clarity, undermining the Iranian regime would be a lockstep political cause, uniting the Left and Right. Instead, it’s a sidestep issue. Few defend this abominable regime, but the bovine majority won’t stand up to facilitate change and demand that their governments defend democracy proudly and proactively.
We’re not passive bystanders. We can help. America and its allies can impose more sanctions, tightening the economic screws. They should deploy satellite technology enabling Iranian protesters to communicate freely, rather than being thwarted when the regime shuts down internet interaction.
They can fill Iranian smartphones with protestors’ messages while launching cyberattacks that crash Iranian infrastructure, further exposing the dictatorship’s incompetence. And beyond lobbying for these actions, Westerners should take to the streets, creating global displays of solidarity with these Iranian heroes. Such support will embolden Iran’s activists who need to hear: “We’ve got your backs!”
Supporting Iran’s heroes
Instead, an unconscionable silence muffles the immobilized moral minority. My always-astute Jerusalem Post colleague Herb Keinon noted on Friday: “The New York Times did not have a single article about the protests on its front page this week.”
There was “not even a blurb at the bottom of the front page where articles on the inside pages are promoted.” In today’s polarized politics, fighting Iran is frequently miscast as a Right versus Left issue - its right versus wrong.
Shortly before attacking Venezuela, which should unnerve Iran’s leaders, Trump declared that if Iran “violently kills peaceful protesters… America will come to their rescue.” In Unherd, a British online news and opinion site, David Patrikarakos quoted a friend living in Iran proclaiming, “God bless Donald Trump!”
Patrikarakos wondered whether these protests would finally succeed. The friend replied: “We don’t know. But now we have the US president behind us! This has never happened before. The regime can murder us, but it cannot take on America.”
If Trump supports the protesters, anti-Trump fanatics and pro-Mullah manipulators will claim he’s recommitting America’s 1953 crime of dumping the “democratically elected” former Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh in a coup. Don’t buy this balderdash.
This story has been oversimplified to bash America for decades.
As usual, history is more complicated. Iran’s Parliament, the Majlis – not the people – chose Mossadegh, with the Shah formally appointing him, in 1951. Within months, this supposed democratic saint manipulated parliamentary elections and tanked the economy, infuriating religious leaders, merchants, and the middle class. In 1952 Mossadegh seized emergency “dictatorial decree” powers.
We can debate whether those abuses still justified a now-exaggerated CIA participation in the broader coup unseating him. But let’s reframe this one-sided anti-American story.
In 2009, psyched out by years of Iranian theocrats and American progressives weaponizing that myth, then-president Barack Obama failed to encourage the Iranian people’s Green Movement.
Thirteen years later, in what even CNN called “a rare moment of public self-criticism by a former president” – Obama admitted: “In retrospect, I think that was a mistake.”
He added: “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.”
On the streets, in markets, and on campus, Iranian heroes are overcoming their reasonable fears of torture and murder, flashing, glimmering, and demanding their freedom.
We must all do what we can to “shine a spotlight” on their actions, expressing lots – not “some” - solidarity, boosting government leaders ready to sanction Iranian exiles worldwide and the long-suffering people of Iran, ready to rumble. Do you want to tell your kids that Iranians fought for freedom while you slept – or cowered?
The writer is an American presidential historian and a senior fellow at the JPPI, the global think tank of the Jewish
People. Last year he published To Resist the Academic Intifada: Letters to My Students on Defending the Zionist
Dream and The Essential Guide to October 7th and Its Aftermath. His latest e-book, The Essential Guide to
Zionism, Anti-Zionism, Antisemitism, and Jew-Hatred was just published and can be downloaded on the JPPI – Jewish People Policy Institute – Website.