Recognizing the obvious on Iran
Masih Alinejad is an Iranian-born American journalist perhaps most known for her vociferous condemnation of the Iranian regime. For years, Alinejad has led a primarily digital campaign against compulsory hijab in Iran, highlighting Iranian women removing the hijab and dancing – two actions expressly forbidden by the oppressive theocracy in Iran. In response to her activism, the Iranian regime has persecuted her family members who remain in Iran, as they often do with dissidents.
But the bombshell story about Alinejad is the one that broke last week – her attempted kidnapping by the Iranian regime. If there’s one thing we need to take away from this, it’s that the US and others are vastly underestimating the sinister efforts of the Iranian regime. It’s time for a wakeup call.
Last week, Iran’s ongoing operation to kidnap Alinejad on US soil was exposed by the FBI. The operation was directed from the very highest levels of the government in Iran and involved four agents, all of whom are still at large in the US. The plan was to kidnap Alinejad, force her onto a Venezuelan-bound boat, and ultimately bring her back to Iran to face what the US government characterized as an “uncertain at best” fate.
The FBI also says that Iran intended
to target several other dissidents, luring them to other countries. This escalation marks the first such activity on US soil by the Iranian regime, and follows a series of bold moves by Iran against the United States in recent weeks. But it’s hardly the first such operation to assassinate or kidnap Iranian regime critics on foreign soil.
In 2019, Iranian dissident Ruhollah Zam was tricked into leaving his country of refuge, France, for a trip to Iraq. But his trip was in fact a ruse to get him back to Iran to stand trial for daring to oppose the regime. Zam had been a major player in the 2018-2019 Iran protests against the regime with his Telegram channel, and had long been vehemently opposed to the regime, even serving time in an Iranian prison before fleeing to France. Upon his forced return to Iran, he was sentenced to death and murdered in December 2020, a move that numerous human rights organizations and France strongly condemned.
In July 2020, Iranian-German journalist Jamshid Sharmahd, who resided in the US, was visiting Dubai when the Iranian regime kidnapped him and took him to Iran. Sharmahd fled Iran over four decades ago and was a fierce critic of the regime’s corruption and violence against its civilians. In 2009, the regime had attempted to assassinate him on US soil. Now, he is sitting in an Iranian prison on charges of orchestrating an attack on a mosque in 2008 in Shiraz.
The tragic reality is that these horror stories of Iran hunting down dissidents around the world are not unusual, and provide pristine evidence of how the current regime is not to be trusted. Since the Iran deal, the regime continued developing their nuclear facilities, exported and funded terrorism around the world, armed and funded proxies launching wars in Yemen, Lebanon, and Syria, and murdered their own civilians for daring to dissent. Yet somehow, the world thinks that restarting diplomatic talks will solve any of these problems?
It is unrealistic to expect that Iran is suddenly going to change its tune with a newly-brokered Iran deal, especially when it has spent the last few months carrying out targeted military action via proxy against US troops in Iraq and Syria. Others may be shocked by Iran’s brazen kidnapping attempts, but these actions confirm what we already knew: Iran is not to be trusted. It’s time to recognize the obvious for the sake of Iranians, Iranian dissidents, and civilians throughout the world who are being impacted by Iran’s violence and human rights violations.