Iran: Slaughter In The Streets And The Left Is Silent

While the Iranian government is shooting protesters in the streets by the thousands, where is the hue and cry among our college protesting class? Where is it? Why have they gone so silent?

According to reports coming out of Iran, thousands, perhaps even tens of thousands of Iranians are being killed in the streets by the Iranian regime. The Iranian people are now rising up against the Ayatollah-led regime, their mullah rulers, who have been leading them down a primrose path to both economic and despotic hell for the past 47 years.

Hundreds of thousands of people, apparently overnight, were still in the streets in Iran, braving actual bullets.

For all the people who pat themselves on the back for their bravery online, what actual bravery looks like is walking into the streets, arm in arm, standing up against people with machine guns who are firing live ammunition at you in order to achieve freedom for your people.

A bombshell new report from CBS News suggests the Iranian government has murdered somewhere between 12,000 and 20,000 protesters since the ongoing national revolt began.

Meanwhile, there are apparently zero protests on college campuses in favor of the protesters. I have yet to see a major movement of congressional Democrats getting together in solidarity with the Iranian people.

The media coverage until the last couple of days has been scant on what is now a weeks-long, ongoing protest revolt against the regime, which is happening because the Iranian regime is absolutely weak in economic terms. The rial is now trading at a fraction of a penny.

The Iranian economy is running at low ebb because of the maximum sanctions that were placed against the regime by the Trump administration. It is also because of the overwhelming military successes that Israel has experienced since October 7 in cutting off the terror arms of the Iranian regime and of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in places ranging from Iran to Syria to Yemen to Iran itself. That obviously includes the 12-day war that happened last year, in which Iran proved to be a military paper tiger, unable to prevent the Israelis from flying sorties in broad daylight over Tehran and culminating in the American strike against Fordow, the nuclear facility in Iran.

There’s also a lack of water and power in Iran.

The mullahs, who promised an Islamic utopia, simply delivered an Islamist hell, and the people of Iran are sick of it. They are tired of it.

This is not the first protest movement in Iran. In 2009, there was a major protest movement that Barack Obama not only ignored, but undercut by negotiating with the Iranian regime, calling them “moderates,” and then trying to bring them into the fold of nations, which, as it turns out, was a horrifyingly bad idea that allowed them to strengthen themselves at the expense of America’s actual allies in the region.

Then, of course, he signed the 2015 JCPOA, which was designed to allow Iran and the mullahs a pathway to a nuclear bomb. The Trump administration came in, reversed the polarity, and put the pressure on the Iranian regime. Then Joe Biden came in, took his foot off the pedal, and started to talk again about a revived JCPOA.

By October of 2023, the Iranians were helping to spur the October 7 terror attacks in a seven-front terror war against Israel that ended, ironically, with Iran’s forces being absolutely devastated.

So now people are out in the streets, literally by the millions. And Iran is doing what Iran does best —they turn off the internet for the last several days, no information getting in, no information getting out, and they shoot people in the streets.

At this point, we are talking about a minimum of at least 3000 people who have been murdered on the streets of Iran. The number is probably significantly higher. We have seen pictures emerging of stacks of body bags. We’ve seen videos emerging of Iranian Revolutionary Guard forces and members of Iranian militias mowing people down.

President Trump is taking a strong position, telling Iranians to keep protesting, take over the institutions, save the names of the killers and abusers.

If the Iranian regime were deposed, that would be a sea change in geopolitics. Iran is a large-scale supplier of oil to China and a large-scale supplier of Shahid drones to Russia. Iran is the chief sponsor of global terrorism on planet Earth, having spread its terror tentacles not only throughout the Middle East, but also into Europe and into Latin America.

If the Iranian regime were to change, that would weaken Hezbollah in Lebanon. You might see an actual decent government with the capacity to destroy Hezbollah. You might see the possibility of an actual, broad Abraham Accord-like agreement between Iran and Israel.

I’m going to say it for the 100th time: This does not mean that the United States ought to put hundreds of thousands of troops on the ground in Iran to topple the regime. No one is talking about that. What we are talking about is a risk-reward calculation, whereby targeted American action could have a disproportionate effect on the future not only of the Middle East, but on geopolitics as a whole.

Imagine if the Houthis stopped harassing shipping in the Red Sea anymore because their sponsor state, Iran, was gone. Imagine if the Chinese had to be a little bit more careful about their playing around with anti-American forces in the Middle East, because the mullahs weren’t there to help them out. Imagine if the Russians did not have a gigantic supply of weaponry coming in from Iran.

A lot of people on the horseshoe theory Right are mirroring Ben Rhodes’ and Barack Obama’s foreign policy; many of them are simply dismissing a lot of the numbers coming out of Iran. You might notice that these are the same people perfectly willing to trust Hamas’s numbers in the Gaza Strip.

The same people who, in specious fashion, were labeling Israel’s targeted action in the Gaza Strip a genocide, have now gone extraordinarily silent when it comes to Iran literally mowing down protesters in the streets. That’s pretty incredible stuff from our human rights-loving friends.

The silence of the Left in the face of the brutality of the Iranian regime toward an innocent citizenry is staggeringly hypocritical and vile.