https://www.frontpagemag.com/mullahs-reign-of-terror/
Iran has always stood apart from the rest of the Muslim world. Far more than the Arab countries that stretch from Marrakech to Muscat, Iran has proudly, even fiercely, protected its pre-Islamic cultural heritage. If other people from Muslim lands have relocated to the West in search of money – often in the form of generous government handouts – Iranians fled the Islamic Revolution in search of freedom. While other Muslims in the West tend to have come from remote villages and to have brought with them some of the most primitive of Islamic social practices, Iranians in the West tend to be urban, freedom-loving, and well-educated (no ethnic group in the U.S. holds more master’s or doctoral degrees per capita), with high levels of integration and intermarriage. If Dearborn has America’s largest Arab population, Minneapolis its greatest concentration of Somalis, and Hamtramck the first Muslim-majority city in the U.S. (with particularly large numbers of Yemenis and Bangladeshis), Iranians tend to be concentrated in posh places like Beverly Hills, which has the highest proportion of Iranians – 20.8% – of any municipality in California.
And while other immigrants from the Muslim world bring with them mosques and madrassas by the score, many Iranian-Americans are not believing Muslims, having been raised as Christians, Jews, Baha’is, or Zoroastrians, or having quit Islam at the same time that they quit the ayatollah’s Iran. In the aftermath of the spectacular Israeli and U.S. assaults on Iranian nuclear targets, it has been remarkable to observe groups of white young Americans waving Iranian flags at protest rallies – shouting fatuous slogans about a religion, a culture, and a part of the world they know virtually nothing about – even as Iranian-Americans cheer the U.S. and Israeli strikes and call for the fall of the odious Tehran regime that transformed a once extremely Westernized country into an Islamic autocracy.
Prior to the U.S. strikes on Iran, as well as in their immediate aftermath, politicians, diplomats, and commentators all over the Western world predicted that this would prove to be just the first volley of World War III – that Iran would be quick to retaliate, perhaps with the help of Russia or China. Instead, the sheer level of devastation, and the assurance by Trump that there was a lot more where that came from, caused the mullahs to react wisely – to do, that is, virtually nothing, and retreat, out of sheer self-protectiveness, from their long position of aggressiveness on the world stage.
Then again, it’s not quite correct to say that the mullahs did virtually nothing. According to various reports, each more alarming than the next, Iran’s leaders have turned inward, doubling down – or more – on their repression in an obvious effort to prevent the popular uprising that many outside observers have predicted and prayed for. What does it mean to intensify repression in an already repressive country? How to describe such an occurrence? In an interview with Fox News Digital (FND), Kasra Aaraby of United against Nuclear Iran said that Iran’s regime “has always been totalitarian, but the level of suppression now is unprecedented,” with authorities introducing a “North Korea-style model of isolation and control.” It’s now common, Aaraby said, for people to “vanish without explanation.” An article put out by the Oslo-based association Iran Human Rights agreed, speaking of prisoners being “transferred to unknown locations,” of suspected spies “at risk of torture or execution,” of a new law that greatly expands the list of offenses subject to the death penalty, and of mass actions against Iranian Jews and Baha’i. Le Monde reported on “the establishment of special courts around the country to try ‘traitors and mercenaries.’”
