The ongoing protests in Iran following the murder of Mahsa Amini have demonstrated significant matters that deserve our attention. They embody and sum up the situation of the regime in Iran, which has used and continues to use all forms of violence against its citizens.
With regard to the current protests, they should not be seen only in terms of whether or not they will bring down the regime. Instead, we should look into what they tell us about the regime’s real problem, which is not international but domestic. More specifically, their issue is with the Iranian citizens, and we are now seeing the women of Iran standing up to the clerics in a way that none of the traitors to their countries working for it would dare to.
Thus, no matter how much the regime talks about conspiracy, no one will believe its lies any less the Iranians themselves. They are very well aware that the regime exploits crises to push conspiracy theories in order to escape forward, working on the assumption that a common enemy unites. But the enemies of the Mullahs are the citizens.
We should also know that the latest protests and the brutal crackdown launched by the Iranian regime embarrass the United States and Europe, and expose the scale of their hypocrisy and the double standards with which they treat the countries of the region, be it Saudi Arabia, Egypt, or the others on the one hand, and the crimes of the Iranian regime on the other.
My colleague Mohammed Al-Yahya wrote an article entitled ‘There Is No Future for the Middle East if Its Youths are Hopeless’ on the fifteenth of June 2022. In it, he notes that the “biggest difference between the Saudi and Iranian models, the radical difference, is how each of them treats youths.”
He said: “While Iran moves further in the direction of radicalism, regression, and hostility to the West, enabling Islamist forces’ repression of its youths’ aspirations, Saudi Arabia has been keen on benefiting from the capacities of its youths and employing them to confront dangerous and regressive Islamic movements. Since the failure and success of these two contradictory models could contribute to reshaping the region and the broader Muslim world for decades to come, it has become necessary for the West to choose wisely between the two.”
Everyone in the region is now talking about the hypocrisy and double standards of the West.
Of course, the Mullahs of Tehran do not commit crimes in Iran alone. Rather, their criminal behavior has been seen across the region. Normalizing assassination, be it material or moral, with accusations of treason. And on top of all of that, it is destroying the Arab state as a concept.
Iran is not undermining the concept of the Arab state through its force of arms and militias alone but also by ripping apart the social fabric of Arab countries like Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen with abhorrent sectarian incitement.
Of course, it is not only the US, or the Westerners in general, who are embarrassed, but even the Assad regime, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the armed sectarian militias in Iraq, and, of course, the Houthis in Yemen and Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza.
All of them are in a tight spot. They must be apprehensive about their futures in the event that Iran is shaken by these protests and because of the future of the leadership in Iran. Indeed, we are reading reports of disputes over who to appoint as the next Iranian supreme leader. We must keep in mind that Iran has yet to recover from Qassem Soleimani’s assassination, so we can only imagine how things would play out if the supreme leader were to die.
Based on the above, it is evident that Tehran’s problems are domestic and that the enemy of the regime is the Iranian people. To sum up, the Iranian regime is weak. The United States and Europe are the only powers to have failed to comprehend this fact, as some within these countries are still caught up in the superficial illusions of Obama’s legacy.
