To put into perspective the scale of the Iranian regime’s massacre this month of its own people, it’s worth recalling that over 1,200 Israelis and foreign nationals were murdered in the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7, 2023, while just under 3,000 people perished in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The Battle of Antietam, the single bloodiest day in American military history, claimed some 3,600 lives, Union and Confederate alike.
So far, a U.S.-based Iranian human rights group says it has verified the killing of more than 5,500 protesters and is still reviewing 17,000 additional cases. Many thousands more were injured, and independent reports indicate that tens of thousands of Iranians have been arrested or arbitrarily detained. An Iranian doctor in the city of Isfahan told The Times that they had seen “young people whose brains were smashed with live bullets, and a mom who was shot in the neck, her two small children were crying in the car, a child whose bladder, hip and rectum was crushed with a bullet.”
That’s just one eyewitness report among many. Meanwhile, the head of Iran’s judiciary promises punishment “without the slightest leniency.” His name is Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei. Will the world let him get his way?
That’s the question that, at this writing, confronts the Trump administration. Not the United Nations Security Council, where Iran can rely on diplomatic cover from its close friends in Moscow and Beijing. Not the European Union, which has condemned and sanctioned Iran, but lacks any additional means to punish it. Not Arab leaders, who would prefer a weakened Iran that brutalizes its own people to a broken Iran that exports instability — or a liberated Iran that inspires emulation.
And not the campus activists and global do-gooders who care so deeply about Palestinian lives but not about Iranian ones.
So it’s left to the United States to impose meaningful consequences on the Iranian regime for one of the worst atrocities of this century. Donald Trump told Axios Monday that the Iranians “want to make a deal” that would forestall a military strike. Yet Tehran shows no sign so far of agreeing to America’s core demands that it ban all independent uranium enrichment, end its support for Hezbollah and other proxies, and put caps on its long-range missile program.
And something else: Do we really want to live in a world in which people like Mohseni-Ejei, the judicial leader, can terrorize people with utter impunity? Have decades of vowing “Never again” — this Tuesday marks the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz — taught us nothing more than to offer pro forma condemnations when thousands of protesters are gunned down by modern-day Einsatzgruppen?
I know that, for now, thoughtful Americans are much more alarmed by the thuggish killing in Minneapolis on Saturday of Alex Pretti and by the smears to which he’s been posthumously subjected by senior members of the administration. I also know that the president who is so grotesquely at fault for inflaming the situation in Minnesota makes an unlikely champion of protesters in Iran.
But if Pretti’s death is a tragedy, what do we say or do in the face of the murder of thousands of Iranians? Are they, as Stalin might have said, just another statistic?
I wish the Iranian protestors the best, but anything the current US administration would do in Iran wouldn’t be out of any care for them or their welfare, but rather to install a right-wing, pro-American puppet in their place. They deserve democracy, not another form of autocracy.
This is the second such piece I’ve seen from the NYT in as many days. The masters over there must really be frothing at the mouth for war with Iran.
And not the campus activists and global do-gooders who care so deeply about Palestinian lives but not about Iranian ones.
Fuck the author of this article, and OP - you should know better. Comparing YEARS of genocidal actions to mere days is absurd right off the bat, and the “logic” only gets worse from there.
Unless there is a genocide going there’s little legal basis for intervention so I’m guessing NY Times is simply unsatisfied with current amounts of US interventions?
