Iran is a living hell for women, as well as anyone of Christian, Jewish, or Sunni Muslim faith. As Obama and Biden paid Iran’s radical Islamic Mullahs $400 million in pre-nuclear blackmail money, Iran pushed terror, harassed, tortured, and killed women by the millions. Iran’s people have had it. The powder keg is exploding.
Last week, Iran’s regime tortured and killed another woman – this one 22-year-old Mahsa Amini – for “showing too much hair” under her “loose” scarf. Public outrage boiled over. Nationwide protests are erupting, the greatest hope for reform, if not genuine regime change, in years.
Already, protests have taken the north, destroyed at least one military base, spreading across cities. Iranians know what few Americans do: Millions of Iranian women suffer physical, emotional, psychological, and life-ending abuse at the hands of Iran’s government annually – the same leaders Biden wants to refinance.
The Iranian people know better. They know their government is the world’s top terrorist, know it has killed thousands in a day, no one safe from regime violence, their lives of no value. That is why they are finally in full revolt.
This uprising appears different. How different is unclear, but implications are serious.
First, this popular uprising, unlike others in recent years, is widespread and growing. If it reaches fever pitch nationally, concern for public safety overtaken by outrage, all bets are off.
If a genuine popular revolution is to occur in Iran, it will coalesce around such an event. Whether this is the event, whether more cities ignite, remains to be seen. That said, the Iranian government seems to have been taken by surprise, is struggling to respond.
Second, this should be the death knell for further US or European negotiations with this despotic, arguably demonic Islamic theocracy. Any further talk of a “nuclear deal,” lifting of sanctions, further indulgence, indifference, or appeasement of Iran should end, as a moral imperative.
Third, US pressure should be exerted for the Iranian people, public statements of moral condemnation, introduction of UN resolutions, elevated sanctions, and coordination with Iran’s top trade partners – China, UAE, India, Turkey, Brazil, and Germany – to isolate the regime. If not now, when? If not led by the US, then by whom?
Fourth, even as Iran’s brutal inhumanity is condemned, China will be watching. Count on it. While China is Iran’s top trading partner, and flouts ever human right in the name of communism, atheism, and “Democratic Socialism,” they are also observant and practical.
Watching Iran’s population rise against an oppressive regime’s unapologetic brutality, specifically to support human rights, women, self-determination, faith, and basic liberty, where else? If a nation oppressed can – in an instant – explode, fire rage, population rise, where next?
China is brutal, but not ignorant of power politics, not unaware that they are also an unapologetic oppressor, their economy in retrograde, political rights shunted, debt inordinately high, “mortgage boycotts” smoldering. If things can change fast in Iran, China is not immune.
Add meltdown of China’s new ally Russia, implosion of Russia’s conventional military, trade relations, and credibility – plus Western and regional pushback against China’s own bellicose behavior. The world is speaking up for Taiwan, China’s aim of dominance contested.
All this adds to a possible “perfect storm,” internal loss of control by Iran’s radical Islamic regime, Western interest in ending Iran’s nuclear ambitions and terrorist run, weakness of Iranian allies Russia and China, hesitation by China to follow too closely Iran’s example.
Where this ends, like so much of history in the making, is the stuff of crystal balls and countless unknowns. But what is known is new, powerful, and overdue – Iran has, for too long, suppressed women, harassed, detained, tortured, and killed them for nonconformity. Iranians are sick of it.
Like Communism, radical Islamic theocracy is objectively intolerable, illegitimate from the point of view of liberty-loving individuals, and has a limited shelf life.
To borrow from Churchill’s description of history at another juncture, this may not be the end, nor even the beginning of the end, but it may be the end of the beginning. From here, we will see. The Iranian people are, for now, rising against Iran’s brutality toward women. Godspeed.