Saving Iran from itself
American college students and faculty who have been supporting terrorist Hamas or related terrorist groups in Gaza must reconsider and focus anew. Hamas and its allies, some expecting Iran to join their battle, started the war in Gaza by invading Israel, raping and killing some 2000 mostly civilians and then dashing home with 251 living and dead hostages. One can decry the deaths of civilians in Israel’s military response to the attack; but the war was started by Hamas and company, guided by a brutal medieval policy of Muslim hegemony, eliminating Jews. Instead, college students and faculty devoted to activist political lives should face the horrors inflicted by ruling Islamists on the people of Iran. Though negotiating a cease fire agreement, they are sill locked in the war with America and Israel. Iran’s grim medieval oriented Islamist clerical leaders of the self-declared “Islamic Republic of Iran” have been killing thousands of their own people, college students and faculty among them, who seek a nonreligious democracy with good relationships to the rest of the world, including the United States and Israel. Muslims with a contemporary view of religion see Islam as the one among many acceptable faiths in which they believe.
Iran’s reading of Islam, like that of Hamas, is devoted to the elimination or subjugation of other faiths and nations, and unlike Gaza, a tiny rectangle of land, roughly the size of Philadelphia, Iran is immense, 636,372 square mile in size, more than three times larger than France and populated by about 93 million people. The Islamic Republic of Iran repeatedly suppresses women among others, demanding with such intensity that they cover up that their “Morality Police” in 2022 not only arrested Mahsa Amini for not fully covering her hair with a hijab but killed her.
The most recent protest against the “Ayatollah” led government began as a movement by shopkeepers and businesspeople, outraged by the Iranian riel’s drop in value around the turn of this century to between 1.42 and 1.75 million riels to a dollar. A 40 percent inflation resulted, with food prices in some places rising over 70 percent. But the religious leaders in their commitment to destroy Israel spend money on arms for their religious terrorist groups, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Hothes in Yemen and Hamas in Gaza. They want to transform the land of Israel into a Muslim fiefdom. While the shopkeepers in Iran demanded that the government address the financial problems of the state, other secular protesters wanted to rid the nation of religious orientation entirely.
The initial financial demands of shopkeepers and businesspeople fed into widespread dissatisfaction with the entire Islamist government. The economic situation resulted in massive unemployment, businesses downsizing or failing; the employed receiving no increases in pay and the unemployed finding constructive employment impossible. Not only are there severe financial difficulties, but there are resource difficulties as well, cuts in electricity, reduction in available drinking water and the closing of schools. High school and college graduates, who wanted political and social freedom, democracy, productive jobs and positive relations with the rest of the world, find themselves not only unemployed but forced to obey religious dictates or tortured and murdered. Those people look back at ancient Persian history, at Cyrus the Great, who in 539 BCE freed the Hebrews from Babylonian captivity, and they long for freedom themselves. They want an end to the Islamic Republic and chant for the downfall of of the Islamist theocracy, or the supreme religious leaders to be replaced by a secular democracy that features positive relations with the rest of the world, including the United States and Israel, a people they admired for their political, economic and social commitments.
The Islamic Republic’s government responded to their demonstrations by killing between 6,000 and 30,000 citizens and arresting between 24,000 and 50,000, many of whom they then tortured and murdered. The United States, appalled by those numbers, threatened to intervene, sent the US Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier and accompanying warships to the coast of Iran and engaged in negotiations in an attempt to have it cease to torment, arrest and murder protesters and minorities and relinquish its 60 percent enriched uranium. Negotiations failed. Iran refused to stop near nuclear weapon enrichment of uranium and responded to the American Warships’ presence off its coast with a drone that the U.S. Navy shot down. Unproductive negotiations have led to the ongoing war in which American and Israeli aircraft have been gradually destroying the Islamic Republic’s war machine and forces of suppression. They are now negotiating a ceasefire, but the underlying problems with Iran’s positions remain.
Iranian protesters – women, faculty, college and high school students, continue to be shot, imprisoned, tortured and murdered under the direction of the medievalist Ayatollah. Activist American college students and faculty should cry out for their aid.
