Two countries. Two protests. And a world between them.
Everyone in Israel is waiting for Donald Trump’s Tomahawk shoe to fall. Most everyone takes it for granted that the president will attack Iran for a couple of obvious reasons:
- The massive military build-up. You don’t put together that kind of power for nothing.
- The president’s tweets about coming to the aid of the Iranian people.
- The unique moment in history when the mullacracy seems to be at its weakest.
Israel does not figure directly in the reasons above, but most locals feel that should the president order an attack, Israel will get free Iranian missiles. I was surprised when our parking garage, turned bomb shelter, had its gate closed this past Saturday. Nobody wants to have missiles returning here, but everyone takes it as a given that they may well return.
Though the internet is mostly down in Iran, it would appear that the theocracy is sparing no bullets to put down the greatest threat ever to its continued rule. Thirty thousand dead? Thirty-six thousand dead? Fifty thousand dead? One hundred thousand dead? From the little that comes out, we see regime forces shooting at civilians and piles of black body bags. We see burning government buildings and funerals for those killed. Just as the brave Iranian people know that it’s showtime, so does the leadership. They have brought in hired muscle and apparently have given their forces a free hand to kill and torture as they please. There are reports here that on the evening of January 8-9, 30,000 people alone were killed. They compared it to the Babi Yar massacre during World War II.
Far, far away in Minnesota, there are riots of a different kind altogether. Leftists have chosen their affinity for illegal aliens over the explicit laws of the United States and the federal officers tasked with enforcing them. There can be no comparison to Iran as to the size of the protests, but one might argue that the locals are also trying to throw off the official power, as in Tehran. The stakes in the Twin Cities go far beyond the fate of Somali and Mexican aliens. The paid and organized protesters want to put their agenda before the laws of the country. This is a dangerous direction, but not new. Who gave anybody the right to declare a city or state a sanctuary from federal laws?
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One place where we can make a comparison is in the response to the uprisings. As noted, in Iran, there are tens of thousands or more dead and potentially hundreds of thousands wounded. It has been reported that IRGC soldiers are going to hospitals and private homes to find wounded and drag them to jail. This kind of response, while possibly somewhat extreme, is not that unusual. Muslim countries routinely respond to threats to power with overwhelming violence. During the Arab Spring, threatened dictatorships all played the same song: shoot the protesters until there are no more protests. In such countries, there is no concern for human rights or “proportional response.” When the junta is threatened, then it is time to destroy the threat. People disappear. Families of protesters are threatened. Internet vanishes. This is the way power is yielded in much of the non-Western world. They claim that Iran is demanding payment to get some bodies back.
Whereas the mullahs’ forces shoot to kill, ICE and the other feds barely shoot. At the time of this writing, there appear to be four deaths related to the current multi-week unrest in the normally peaceful Land of 10,000 Lakes. Two tried to run over ICE officers, one guy had a gun and magazines in his pocket, and the fourth case I don’t have too much information about it. Now, in Iran, Basij terrorists kill four people for every five bullets they have in their weapons. If the head of the Revolutionary Guard came back and told his bosses, “Yeah, we wiped out four of them this afternoon,” he would be the fifth casualty. The ayatollahs know that the more you kill, the fewer you have to face. They are not ashamed of or saddened by the massive death toll, whatever the actual number is. That is their plan. On the other hand, when a woman seems to direct her car toward an ICE officer or when another fellow appears to have a Sig Sauer handgun in his hand, the country spends weeks going over every pixel to determine if the killings were legally justified.
And this is our teachable moment: a completely Islamic country is butchering its people by the thousands in order to stay in power—and the Western lefties stay silent. A constitutional republic has killed four people during unrest of a serious period of time. In Minnesota, you’ll get unpleasant pepper spray; in Iran, you’ll get lead coming from the end of a machine gun.
Donald Trump is smart for not jumping into any Iran action too soon. Military and other events are remembered by their outcomes. The pre-Maduro build-up took time, but the removal of the dictator was smooth as silk. The Iranian people need help, but President Trump—if he has decided to get involved—needs a clear victory. Blowing up a couple of buildings here and there is not a win. If the U.S. does come in and weaken regime organs and forces to the point where the people can take over and win, then the U.S. will have performed a huge service not only to Iranians but to all of mankind. Think of all of the Iranian-sponsored terror throughout the world, and imagine it going out of business. The U.S. has no obligation to help the locals, and Israel has no obligation to absorb fast-flying, exploding projectiles. But both the U.S. and Israel realize that a post-theocracy Iran could be a boon not only to them but to the whole world. It was not for nothing that the head of CENTCOM found himself in Israel this past weekend.
What those in Europe who seem to be passively allowing Muslims to take over their countries might want to note is that when their countries become part of some new caliphate, the authorities will behave more like the folks in Tehran than Minneapolis. If they expect Islamic rule but Western etiquette, they are deluding themselves. When Muslims have arrived and reproduced to the point where they rule England, France, Germany, and the Netherlands, their response to the locals demanding all of those old rights now lost will look like the Iranian solution. They’re not going to body block people or shoot pepper spray into their mouths. Nope. They will shoot to kill. Like the Nazis, they do one-time, one-way elections. Once they come to power and establish Sharia as the law of the land—for everybody—there is no going back to free elections and Western ways. God is giving the Europeans a choice between the measured, generally low-key Western way of dealing with protests and the Iranian heavy-handed kill first, ask questions later method.
Khameini is supposedly in a deep bunker. They say that he put his third son in charge of the show; apparently, he does not care much for him and left him for the mob after the Tomahawks finish with the regime infrastructure. Iran cannot go back to anything. The rial is approaching 1.5 million to the dollar. The people are burying their dead, while there is no business to reopen. Even if the mullahs stay in power, they no longer have a country to rule. Their desperation tells of how serious the challenge is to their leadership. They even admit to some number of their own forces being killed. Their response is fitting to their ways—it is not the outlier.
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