In Manhattan’s Washington Square Park recently, chants of “Death to Israel!” and “Death to America!” were shouted during a vigil for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Demonstrators held signs of his face and waved flags of the Islamic Republic. Standing on American soil, they glorified a dictator who spent decades exporting terror and threatening democracies worldwide.
Ali Khamenei succeeded Ruhollah Khomeini, but there is no difference between the two: They share the same will to destroy America and Western civilization. Over the decades that followed, Khamenei’s regime funded global terrorism, armed violent proxies and openly called for the death of Israel and the United States. What I never expected was to see Westerners defend the very regime responsible for terrorizing the world, especially in the United States of America.
No civilized society should tolerate crowds celebrating terror in its streets. In the name of freedom of speech, they’re chanting “Death to America!” right here in America and, cynically, using American democracy to destroy it.
For 47 years, the Iranian regime has been driven by an inherent hatred toward the United States and Israel. In 1979, it held U.S. diplomats hostage in Tehran. In the 1980s, it masterminded Hezbollah’s suicide bombings that killed hundreds of Israeli, American, and French citizens in Lebanon.
But the hypocrisy could not be clearer. Many Westerners who advocate for human rights are now rallying behind a regime that embodies the very opposite.
They claim to care about women, but protest in defense of a government that imprisons, beats and kills women for how they dress. They say they care about free speech, but march for a regime that has murdered thousands of demonstrators for speaking out against it. And they champion fundamental rights, but support a society that pours billions into nuclear and ballistic missile programs while its own citizens face shortages of food, water and electricity.
Iran is the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, providing funding, weapons and strategic direction to terrorist proxies such as Hezbollah and Hamas. It runs and arms networks of terrorist groups across the Middle East, Latin America, Asia and even the United States.
In recent years, Iran has accelerated its nuclear program and ballistic-missile development, and moved key military and nuclear infrastructure deep underground to prevent neutralization. These steps were designed to make Iran’s most dangerous capabilities increasingly difficult for even the most powerful nations to stop. We could leave the most dangerous weapons in the hands of the most dangerous regime.
Allowing the regime to reach that point would have been unforgivable. Responsible leaders had to act before the threats became realities.
Israel and the United States had tried to find other ways to mitigate these dangers, but the ayatollahs repeatedly refused to change course. The window to stop these threats was closing. Waiting was not an option to prevent these imminent and existential threats from becoming irreversible.
The regime was ready to threaten parts of Europe (as demonstrated earlier this month when its proxy Hezbollah fired a missile at Cyprus). It had a long-term goal of expanding those capabilities to put the United States in its crosshairs.
Iran also sits astride one of the world’s most vital energy routes. Permanent control of these waterways for transporting oil and gas would be disastrous for the global economy.
Despite these real dangers, too many loud voices still claim the operation against the regime was unnecessary or a threat to peace. But no sane person calls mobs calling for the death of their country or mine “peace.”
The chants heard in Lower Manhattan earlier this month were not just a harmless protest. They were an endorsement of terror and paralleled the same hateful ideology that has driven the Iranian regime for nearly half a century. It is the ideology that we courageously defied when striking Iran.
The world must stop being alarmed by those who are fighting the threat. It instead needs to be alarmed by those who are defending its violent, terroristic ideologies.
