Everyone but America’s Left now acknowledges reality: Iran’s theocracy is an irredeemable terrorist regime. Whatever shred of doubt remained before the current conflict has been removed over the last few weeks. Terror is what it does and why it exists.
The current U.S.-Israel conflict with Iran is due solely to the theocracy’s use of terror throughout its 47-year reign.
The theocracy has maintained itself through terror at home. The theocracy has sponsored terror groups and their activities around the world. The theocracy’s desire for terror to even greater degrees spurred its own desire to develop nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles to deliver them. And its steadfast refusal to renounce these finally provoked the U.S. and Israel’s military response.
Without Iran’s terrorism, there would be no current conflict. The U.S. and Israel’s military response was neither random nor unwarranted.
Americans know all these terrorist facts. Forty-seven years ago, the theocracy took U.S. embassy personnel hostage and held them for over a year. During the 47 years that followed, Iran and its proxies have perpetrated over 40 acts of terrorism against Americans, most resulting in Americans’ deaths. As a result, the theocracy has been on the U.S. State Department’s terrorist watch list uninterruptedly since 1984, a span that covers seven presidential administrations.
Israel knows all these terrorist facts, as no other country has been a more regular target of Iran’s terrorism. This terror has come from groups (Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and more) operating from numerous countries and taken forms that redefine the meaning of the word atrocity. Virtually all of it has come via proxies that Iran has funded and supported.
The Middle East knows all these terrorist facts, as the entire region has been terrorized by Iran. It has had its people killed. It has had its territories taken and used as bases for terrorist activity. It has seen its countries split internally by terrorist groups operating within them. And it has seen its hopes for peace routinely shattered by Iran’s terrorism.
Even feckless Europe knows all these terrorist facts. It is a large reason why they want nothing to do with the conflict, even to the barest minimum of allowing U.S. planes to leave from their bases and operate in Iran. They can see the missile strikes Iran has made on its Middle East neighbors; they know the range of Iran’s ballistic missiles. They also know how large a population of foreign nationals they now have living within their borders and how much easier drone attacks are to unleash. They know, too, what a small percentage of their oil comes through the Strait of Hormuz. And they know how limited their own military capabilities are.
The world knows all these terrorist facts. Any doubt as to what Iran’s theocracy is, or aspires to be, has been removed in its terrorist responses in the conflict. No longer hiding behind proxies, as soon as the theocracy was threatened, it unleashed its own terrorism: the indiscriminate use of missiles and drones on virtually anyone it can reach and whose harm could in any way increase the cost of ousting it. Iran is now lashing out in the same ways it used to sponsor. The theocracy has no friends, only victims whose pain it seeks to leverage.
Iran’s proxies know all these terrorist facts. They know what has been expected of them, what has been demanded of them, what they have been paid to do.
Better than anyone, the people of Iran know all these terrorist facts. No one has suffered longer or more than the people of Iran. They have lived terrorism’s misery every day for 47 years, seen numerous protests bloodily repressed, and lived with the constant threat that it will be unleashed on them at any time.
Democrat Sen. John Fetterman (PA) knows all these terrorist facts. Seemingly the only member of his party with a spine or a principle intact, he has stood when they have sat… or worse.
Only America’s Left refuses to accept these terrorist facts. Instead, they seek to recast the world’s terrorist leader as “avuncular and magnanimous” in an obituary. They claim that America and Israel’s actions are “a catastrophic escalation in an illegal war of aggression,” in a conflict that Iran has waged for half a century. They seek to deny the atrocities that Iran’s proxies have committed. They mourn the death of the terrorists. They echo Iran’s threats of “Death to America.” They ignore the theocracy’s killing of tens of thousands of its citizens. They ignore the public hangings. They ignore the theocracy’s oppression of groups they claim to champion everywhere else.
America’s Left refuses to accept all these things because they are following the dictum that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Despising the West and its values, they despise America, which most personifies them, and they hate Trump even more for defending them.
The whole world now knows Iran for the terrorist it is, because the obvious gives them no choice. Only America’s Left do not, because their ideology demands that they be oblivious to the obvious.
J.T. Young is the author of the recent book, "Unprecedented Assault: How Big Government Unleashed America’s Socialist Left," from RealClear Publishing. Follow him on Substack.