Iranian Supreme Leader’S Office via ZUMA Press Wire / SplashNews.com
The Iranian regime is obsessive: It obsessively hates Israel and the United States, it obsessively persecutes women, and it obsessively targets dissidents, Jews and politicians abroad.
Even as the Revolutionary Islamic Government’s proxy forces falter, sapping the mullahs’ supposed strength, they show no signs of giving up their fixations.
That is why the United States must take up an obsession of its own — one that applies maximum pressure on Iran.
On Nov. 8, three men were charged in a New York court in connection with an Iranian attempt to assassinate President-elect Donald Trump. Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former Defense Secretary Mark Esper and former National Security Adviser John Bolton have also been on Iran’s hit list.
In late October, the regime executed Jamshid Sharmahd, 69, an Iranian dissident who was a citizen of Germany and a US resident. Sharmahd was abducted in 2020 during a layover in Dubai, taken to Iran and imprisoned on specious charges.
It wasn’t Germany’s first brush with the Iranian regime’s nasty habit of targeting dissidents outside its borders. In 1992, at Tehran’s behest, three members of the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan and a supporter were murdered at a restaurant in Berlin.
This has been the regime’s practice since it first came to power.
In 1980, via an American convert to Islam, the mullahs carried out the assassination of regime critic Ali Akbar Tabatabai at his home in Maryland.
In 1994, Tehran masterminded a terrorist attack on a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, killing 85 people and injuring more than 300 others.
In 2019, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps deceived Ruhollah Zam, an Iranian dissident living in France, into going to Iraq, ostensibly to speak with Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. There he was arrested by Iraqi officials, handed over to the IRGC and taken to Iran, where he was hanged.
One scholar who maintains a database of Iran’s operations abroad has counted 105 foreign attacks conducted by Iran between 1980 and 2022.
More than a fifth of them took place after the killing of Qassem Soleimani, the head of the IRGC-Quds Force, in January 2020 — and six of these latest strikes took place on US soil.
In other words, there has been a recent ramp-up.
Perhaps the most terrifying is the ongoing persecution of Masih Alinejad, an activist who defied the Iranian regime’s mandate to wear the hijab. She was forced to flee Iran and now lives in exile in Brooklyn.
In 2021, the US Department of Justice indicted four Iranian nationals for a plot to kidnap Alinejad and spirit her away to Venezuela. From there, she would have been taken to Iran. The inevitable result: her execution.
A year later, the doorbell camera at Alinejad’s home captured a man lurking on her porch. When police pulled him over a traffic infraction, they found a loaded AK-47 and 66 rounds of ammunition.
This was in the heart of Brooklyn.
There is nowhere Iran’s tentacles of terror do not reach. The regime is a terrorist mafia masquerading as a government.
Its murderousness, via its proxy Hamas, struck Israel on Oct. 7, including the Nova music festival, where I was in attendance with friends.
And its gaze recently landed close to home once again, when state mouthpiece PressTV ran an October hit piece about the organization I am proud to work for, the Combat Antisemitism Movement.
For me, it’s a badge of honor. If the regime sees you as its enemy, you must be doing something right.
But it means Tehran is fully aware of my employer — and, by extension, of me.
I am a vocal critic of the regime. I am a proud young woman of Iranian dissent, and I am not shy about voicing my opinions. In short, I am the sort of person the mullahs hate the most.
The Iranian regime is not just an Israeli problem. It is not just a Middle Eastern problem. It is a problem for the entire world.
Its barbarity makes a revival of President Trump’s maximum pressure policy, aimed at shattering the regime’s ability to spread terror throughout the region and across the globe, the only possible response.
Natalie Sanandaji is a survivor of the Oct. 7 Nova music festival massacre and a public affairs officer for the Combat Antisemitism Movement.