For students condemning Israel in protests on America’s campuses, the October 7 terror attack is to be ignored, whitewashed, denied, justified, and even celebrated. To really think about the savagery and profound suffering of October 7 would elicit empathy for other humans who are Jews. To speak honestly about the killing, gang rape, mutilation of even babies, torture, scorching, public humiliation, and hostage-taking would require reflection on the existential threat to the Jewish people and the state of Israel by Islamists. It would require thinking about how Islamists’ genocidal hatred for Jews is one and the same as the Nazi dehumanization that resulted in the Holocaust, the singular horror that forever marks mankind’s capacity for evil. It would require an examination of the modern ideological drivers of such terror, and the training, financing, technology, weaponry, and international propaganda needed to sustain it.
It is easier for student protestors to begin and end their outrage with only Israel’s bombing of Gaza and the suffering of Gazans – and this is just what Hamas and its backer, the Islamic Republic of Iran, intend. Iran’s regime has demonstrated its willingness to kill via execution, assassination, torture, and indiscriminate shooting on the streets of Iran, as well as through its sponsorship of terror and wars abroad, and notably through Bashar Assad’s war on the Syrian nation that has taken the lives of over 500,000. For 45 years Tehran has promulgated “Resistance” in the name of the Palestinian people but in reality, has sacrificed the lives and livelihood of Palestinians at every turn to sustain its rule.
The war that Israel has been forced to wage has resulted in the deaths of Palestinian civilians as well as losses for Hamas, the Houthis, and other Iran regime terror proxies, but for the Ayatollahs these are expendable lives and proxy forces; their “martyrdom” ensures the survival of the Islamic Republic itself as a revolutionary state and an imperial Islamist project founded on hatred of Jews and Israel as oppressors. , It transcends the Shia and Sunni split and even the geography of the Middle East, seeding resentment and conspiratorial, anti-Semitic worldviews at even the most elite of American universities, as evidenced by the Hezbollah flag displayed at Princeton University, not to mention the physical assault of Jewish students and persecution of Jewish professors.
Israel’s killing of Gazans is what Iran’s regime wants: it fuels global outrage and is a propaganda victory, mobilizing opposition to the Israeli state from the most educated and privileged milieus of the West. Liberals in the West may be united in support of Ukraine, but Israelis fighting for the very same values and right to exist are not only denied support, they are publicly shamed. Israel’s war produces a universal propaganda victory for Iran’s regime in the form of an illiberal, reactionary solidarity for Palestine. Secondarily, the effects in America - the Great Satan – are especially potent, including social polarization, a sense of chaos, self-loathing, cynicism, and the breakdown of respect for the university.
This a moral failing of the West but one that is a calculated political strategy on behalf of the Islamic Republic of Iran to weaken democratic states, exert its soft power, export its ideology, and buttress itself as it pursues a nuclear weapons program and expands global dominion for its Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) mafia overlords. These overlords and the Hamas leadership are comfortably ensconced in their luxury homes in Tehran and Doha, exalting in the damage to Israel’s international image from the war they have forced upon it. Meanwhile, the Islamic Republic sells oil to China despite US sanctions, and its diplomats and lobbyists manage to shield the IRGC from terrorism designations and sanctions by the European Union, Canada, Australia, and other democratic nations.
The Islamic Republic wins from both the October 7 attack itself and from Israel’s response to it. The regime’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was quick to celebrate the slaughter with a video on X showing young Israelis running for their lives at the outdoor Nova music festival. Shortly after, he provided plausible deniability of any Iranian involvement, a claim President Joe Biden affirmed publicly just days later, despite reporting of the Khamenei regime’s direct involvement by the Wall Street Journal. An IRGC spokesman even claimed the October 7 attack was retaliation for the US assassination of former Quds Force Commander Qassem Soleimani (before retracting the statement because of a spat with Hamas). The Biden administration has compartmentalized Hamas from its backer the Islamic Republic, with which it continues to hold mediated bilateral negotiations, that its state media have also confirmed, even after its direct bombing of Israel.
The October 7 attack was timed to shift the focus from fundamental challenges to the survival of the decayed, inept Islamist theocracy. Iranians’ unprecedented nationwide mobilization for peaceful overthrow – the Woman, Life, Freedom movement – was being brutally suppressed at home as Hamas butchered in Israel. Had the community of democratic nations seized the opportunity and found the will to support the mass uprising in Iran (rather than give mere lip service to the violation of Iranians’ human rights), the seat of Islamist revolutionary terror could have been sacked and a difficult but viable transition to a responsible, reasonable Iran at peace with Israel and the world could well have been fostered. Instead, with the October 7 attack Khamenei and his IRGC henchmen sealed the indifference of Western politicians toward Iranian liberal aspirations and enabled the regime to tighten its grip on the thousands of young protestors it was torturing and raping inside its prisons.
The expansion of the Abraham Accords was also in the sights of the ayatollahs. It was imperative that a new bilateral peace between Saudi Arabia and Israel be thwarted. The shock and awe of October 7 was so severe, and the Israeli response to it so massive, that it forced the Saudis to cancel overtures to the Israeli government. October 7 took the Middle East backward to a time when world media attention on the region was dull and flat, concerned only with the seemingly implacable “Arab-Israeli conflict” rather than hopeful transformation by Iranians and Saudis pressing for an entirely new future.
The Iran regime’s role in the October 7 attack is fundamental and a manifestation of its daily “Death to Israel” chants and call to wipe Israel off the map. The Biden administration, however, has chosen to minimize the fact that Hamas has been developed and directed by Tehran, deflecting scrutiny from the world’s top state sponsor of terror. This appeasement mindset helped Tehran to believe it could get away with a massive terror attack on Israel in the first place. The Biden foreign policy is predicated on a worldview that seeks to end American presence in the Middle East region, has little interest in aiding democracy movements to topple authoritarians, rejects as the Obama administration did the post-9/11 vision to link democratization with security and sustainable peace in the region, sees appeasement of the ayatollahs as means to minimize instability and its own involvement in the region, and so has lifted the Maximum Pressure placed on the regime by the Trump administration. But feeding the crocodile has resulted in only a bigger appetite, as the delisting of the Houthis, a first move by the Biden administration to show its willingness to please Tehran, quickly proved. On the nuclear file, too, Iran’s regime has taken advantage of Washington’s overtures and willingness to turn a blind eye on sanctions to up its enrichment.
The October 7 attack on Israel is part and parcel of the Islamic Republic’s larger, multifaceted war on the West and liberalism. It has resulted in suffering and insecurity for the Israeli people, rising antisemitism across the globe, and moral confusion within democracies. Terror that should have been met with global condemnation and solidarity with the Israeli people instead resulted in the proliferation of the hate projected by Iran’s regime. Any policy truly designed to prevent Islamist terror and cultivate peace for the region must begin with a strategy to bring down that regime, but as evidenced by messages of condolences on the passing of the mass executioner Raisi, Western governments remain determined to appease it.
