Summary
Iranians are described as enduring executions, arrests, torture, and internet blackouts while receiving limited meaningful support from the international community. The regime is framed as the true enemy of the Iranian people, not the country itself. The piece argues that negotiations have failed and that outside powers should do more to help Iranians seek freedom.
Key Takeaways
- Iranians are portrayed as broadly united against the Islamic Republic.
- International attention and support are depicted as inconsistent and selective.
- The central argument calls for stronger action to help Iranians challenge the regime.
When world leaders cut deals, their spokespeople step in front of the cameras. Everyone posts about it on X. But who actually shows up for the people left behind?
“Help is on the way,” President Trump tweeted. The help arrived, then disappeared halfway through.
Iran is a country spanning 1.6 million square kilometers and home to 93 million people across dozens of ethnic groups. That complexity is essential to understanding not only Iran, but much of the Middle East. What is less understood, or perhaps deliberately ignored, is that Iran today is the only country in the region where the population is almost entirely united against its own government.
The Islamic Republic executes anyone who dares to speak out or protest. And still, people do.
Back in January, when Iranians took to the streets to fight for their homeland, no one said, “You’re a Kurd, I won’t stand beside you.” In Iran, every ethnicity and every region speaks with one voice: the Islamic Republic must go.
Meanwhile, Greta Thunberg, draped in a keffiyeh and posting about a cause she clearly does not understand, raged over Trump’s threat to Iran, calling it a threat to destroy an entire civilization. Social media answered her quickly. A video posted by an Iranian woman went viral: “When 45,000 of my brothers and sisters were murdered in the streets, when more are being tortured in prison right now, you said nothing. But when Trump said a civilization might die, and meant the brutal regime doing the killing, suddenly you find your voice?” She ended with a question that answered itself: “You speak now because this regime funds Hamas.”
Speaking of Hamas, the “freedom fighters,” as their admirers insist on calling them. As someone who has worked in film and television, I have seen professional productions. Nothing, however, compares to what people online have started calling “Pallywood.” People were genuinely hurt. Hamas was using civilians as human shields in a real war. But the staged videos were something else entirely. A Kurdish-Turkish man posted a video in Farsi: “In Iran, 50,000 people were killed and nobody supported them. You know why? Because nobody filmed children getting stage makeup and treated it like a cinema production.” He had a point.
The West continued supporting Hamas. Terrorist chants echoed through major capitals. “Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism,” the signs read, as though the distinction still carried meaning. And throughout all of it, the people who consistently stood in solidarity with Israelis were Iranians, both inside Iran and across the diaspora.
Have you ever heard of a population welcoming an attack on its own country by a foreign military? Neither had I, until now. Iranians did. Because for them, the enemy is the regime, not the bomber.
We came close to helping. Then we stopped. The negotiations collapsed, exactly as expected. Whatever happened to “we don’t negotiate with terrorists”? Now Iranians are living through the longest internet blackout in the country’s history. People are being arrested simply for trying to use Starlink. At least 114 people have been executed in the past three weeks alone. More are dying under torture in prison.
I do not know who will read this or how far it will travel. But if you are Donald Trump, or anyone advising him, the Iranian people are still waiting. All they are asking for is for Reza Pahlavi to call them back into the streets, and for the U.S. Air Force and Israeli Air Force to provide cover while they answer that call.
Here is something worth considering: it is far more effective to remove the people in power permanently, so they no longer possess weapons to use, than to spend years hunting for those weapons across 1.6 million square kilometers of hostile territory.
While leaders negotiate deals, spokespeople hold press conferences, and everyone posts online, the Iranian people remain where they have always been: waiting to be free. We could actually help them. The only question is whether we will.
