Iran’s barbarity has no modern equal, and it goes largely unpunished - opinion

A US war with Iran is becoming inevitable.

My father was born in Isfahan, the ancient capital of Iran, rated by UNESCO as one of the most beautiful cities in the world. Although he left Iran in his youth, in the 1950s, Iran never left him. 

He played Persian music and we loved Persian cuisine. Even my Ashkenazi wife, Debbie learned to cook Persian dishes such as ghormei sabzi, which endeared her to my father.

However, from the age of my bar mitzvah, I began to hate Iran. 

It was 1979, and I watched a wobbly and irresolute US president Jimmy Carter unable to provide a credible response to the millions of people, chanting “Death to America” on the streets of Tehran, as they toppled a foremost American ally. 

I remember the day the Shah’s palace was finally overrun by Islamist extremists. Within weeks, the American Embassy, too, was overrun and our country endured 444 harrowing days, not completely dissimilar to what Israel and American Jewry are enduring now with the hostages held by Hamas.

Lesser of two Persian evils

Two things are under no doubt. First, the shah was no saint, but compared to the brutality of Khomeini and the mullahs, he was a benevolent autocrat who raised his nation from poverty. And second, Carter’s abandonment of the shah led to the rise of Islamist fundamentalism from which Muslims and non-Muslims alike suffer to this day.

Historians estimate that the shah’s SAVAK internal security service may have killed a maximum of 3,000 Iranian dissidents. This is an unforgivable number but a decimal point compared to the hundreds of thousands who would die under Khomeini and his successor Khamenei’s reigns of brutality. This doesn’t even factor in the tens of thousands of innocents they have murdered the world over in terror attacks, including thousands of Americans in Lebanon, Iraq, Argentina, and Europe.

A few years back, my wife and I spent an evening with empress of Iran Farah Diba Pahlavi. It was a surreal experience. On the piano were photos of her, her husband, and her children, as if they were any ordinary immigrant American family. 

She is a woman of noble bearing, who remains popular in Iran until today. I asked her how her husband had lost power. Not that I would endorse immoral behavior – I was a public champion of the failed Arab Spring – but why didn’t he repress the rebellion with greater force? 

I will never forget her answer, which she spoke with the sincerity of truth. “His generals begged him, but he told them he refused to slaughter his own people.”

Today, the shah’s reputation remains mixed, at best. His son, crown prince Reza Pahlavi – whom our organization, The World Values Network, honored at a New York City gala for friendship with the Jewish people – supports the complete democratization of Iran rather than any return to a royal prerogative.

Four decades later, the Iranian government, run by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is easily and undeniably the most evil on earth.

What else can be said of a government that works toward a second Holocaust, hangs gays from cranes, and tortures and stones women to death for showing strands of hair in public? This is aside from the terrorism it sows throughout the world and its trajectory toward nuclear armament with which to either blow up the world or, at a minimum, keep it terrorized for the next century. 

Iran barbarity unmatched

In short, Iran’s barbarity has no modern equal. This has gone on for half a century with Iran rarely being punished. 

On Tisha B’Av, the most mournful day on the Jewish calendar, Israel was waiting for Iran to attack it again.

In a briefing, IDF Chief International Spokesman (Res.), Col. Jonathan Conricus – who we brought to Times Square to speak to thousands of people at a pro-IDF rally – was clear: Any belief that Iran’s initial attack in April was just a feint is preposterous. Its aim was to murder as many Israelis as possible, firing missiles the size of school buses and using state-of-the-art drones.

Why is Israel just sitting around waiting to be attacked? Is that how Israel achieved victory in 1967, by waiting for Nasser, who promised to push the Jews into the sea, or by using his threat to strike first and destroy all his air forces?

A week ago, US Attorney-General Merrick Garland confirmed in a press conference that Iranian agents had hired assassins in the United States to murder President Donald Trump. Luckily, those hired were undercover American law enforcement agents. Seriously? Iran is planning to murder a former American president and Republican nominee, and there is no American response?

Three years ago, on the first yahrzeit of my father of blessed memory, we hosted then-secretary of state Mike Pompeo with a crowd of 1,000 on the streets of Manhattan in what constituted a reopening of sorts after COVID-19. Although Pompeo had left office four months earlier, he arrived with a hundred agents to protect him. The size of the security cordon perplexed me until I read that Iran was actively trying to murder him and Trump’s former security advisor John Bolton, on American soil, in retaliation for the killing of Qasem Soleimani, the terrorist head of the IRGC.

'Death to America'

When the Islamic Republic of Iran chants “Death to America,” in addition to riling up its populace and terror proxies to target American servicemen and women and civilians, it is threatening the elimination of our nation’s top leaders. 

Has America fallen so low that we’re allowing terrorists to decapitate our government possibly?

Can you imagine what the United States or Britain would have done to Japan or Germany if they had tried to assassinate president Franklin Roosevelt or prime minister Winston Churchill during the war?

I hate war, particularly as my two sons are combat soldiers in the IDF in special forces units. I wish the war in Gaza would end this moment, so my sons can come home in peace.

But I also recognize that failure to destroy Hamas utterly will see Israelis die well into the next generation. In truth, there would be no Hamas, there would be no Hezbollah, and there would be no Houthis without Iran to back them.

The head of the snake has one name and one name only: Iran.

Americans are understandably in an isolationist mood, knowing how the patriotic rhetoric that we heard during the Bush years ended with 10,000 dead American heroes in Afghanistan and Iraq, $2 trillion dollars down the toilet, and nothing to show for it. Afghanistan is ruled by the same misogynist knuckle-draggers, the Taliban, that we dislodged two decades ago, and Iraq is one of the most vocal governments supporting Hamas.

From former president Donald Trump to President Joe Biden to Vice President Kamala Harris to my friend Sen. Bobby Kennedy, every leading American candidate for the presidency has been opposed to the “forever wars” in the Middle East. And yet, when it comes to Iran, it’s time to ask an uncomfortable question. What alternative is there? 

Appeasing the West's biggest hater

Former president Barack Obama sought to appease Iran and, in an act of stupidity, actually thought to grant it not only $150 billion but essential hegemony over the Middle East, in the hope that it would civilize. 

Then, Donald Trump, in an act of great political courage, threw out the JCPOA Iran deal and nearly bankrupted the mullahs, a policy that the United States must continue regardless of criticism. Yet even that did not fully bankrupt the mullahs, as China rushed to Iran’s aid and bought their oil illegally, which leads us to one conclusion. Whoever occupies the White House may face no choice but this: a military campaign against Iran, joined with all our NATO, EU, and international allies – and every nation that wants to see a civilized Earth – finally disarming Iran, destroying its nuclear capability, and offering the long-suffering people of Iran an opportunity at liberation.

The writer is the international best-selling author of the newly published guide to fighting back for Israel: The Israel Warrior. Follow him on Instagram and Twitter @RabbiShmuley.