"I don’t care what you think about Israel, but here is a fact:
There is a direct relationship between standing against Israel and the expansion of Islam in a country.
This is a package deal. If you believe that Israel is the oppressor, you empower Islam in your country. If you believe that the jihad against Israel from the beginning was a territorial dispute, not a religious war, you will be blind to Islamic jihad against your own country. If you accuse Israel of genocide, you will be crippled in the face of terrorists."
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"I’m really tired of seeing this soft moral equivalence between the Islamic Regime and America, casually described as a “Christian fundamentalist regime,” as though the two occupy the same category of repression.
I never thought I’d see the day people in the mainstream were openly running defense for the Islamic Republic of Iran by equating it to the United States. Yet here we are. Recently, one person did exactly that, claiming: “we in the United States live in a regime no different from Iran.”
The fact that she can say this on video, in front of millions of viewers, without fear of arrest, is itself proof that the comparison mistakes political disagreement for persecution.
Try broadcasting criticism of the Islamic Republic from inside Tehran. Or even from abroad, if you’re well known — critics have been harassed, surveilled, and threatened by Iranian agents operating overseas, and dissidents, particularly dual nationals, have been kidnapped in foreign countries, taken back to Iran, and imprisoned or executed.
Try mocking the Supreme Leader on live television. Try organizing a protest demanding women’s rights, religious freedom, or political reform.
People have been shot or imprisoned for far less in Iran.
Whatever issues you have with the Trump administration, these two systems are not remotely comparable. One is a pluralistic democracy where dissent is constant and protected, where we argue endlessly about the limits of power and the overreach of leaders. The other is an authoritarian theocracy where dissent can be punished with prison, torture, or death, not as an aberration, but as routine governance.
This is not a partisan point. It is a factual one.
In the United States, journalists criticize presidents daily. There is a separation of church and state. Courts block executive actions. Citizens protest in the streets. Religious minorities worship openly. Women choose how to dress. Political opposition is legal.
In the Islamic Republic, journalists are jailed. Courts serve the regime. Protests are met with bullets. Elections are tightly controlled. Religious minorities are persecuted. Women can be beaten or imprisoned for refusing to wear a hijab.
I know that this is something many commentators in comfortable democracies struggle to grasp, but for many Iranians, war may be terrifying, but the regime is worse.
Just try looking past your privilege long enough to ask yourself how repressive a government must be for its own citizens to prefer the sound of missiles and bombs to the sound of their rulers remaining in power.
Calling these two systems morally equivalent is profoundly insulting to those who have lived under the repression of the Islamic Republic — the dissidents, the prisoners, the women risking their lives for basic freedoms, and the families who have buried them.
It is the rhetorical equivalent of looking at a locked door and a prison cell and declaring them the same thing because both have walls.
They are not remotely the same. And pretending they are requires a level of historical amnesia that borders on moral negligence."
