Iran regime deserves no defense

The regime in Tehran is preparing to execute a woman for taking part in the recent antigovernment protests. That fact alone should strip away every illusion, every excuse and every dishonest slogan used to sanitize the Iranian regime. A government that answers protests with execution is not misunderstood, it is brutal. It is not complicated, it is cruel. And it is not acting out of strength, it is acting out of fear.
Bita Hemmati is not facing death because the regime believes in justice. She is facing death because the regime fears the truth. It fears women who refuse to bow. It fears young people who refuse to live on their knees. It fears a nation that has seen through the lies and no longer confuses intimidation with legitimacy.
For decades, Iran’s rulers have relied on arrests, torture, sham trials and executions to silence dissent. This is not a temporary excess — it is the system itself. Repression is not a side effect of the regime, it is its language, its instinct and its method of survival. Every few years, the world reacts with shock. Protests erupt, young people are arrested and families search for missing sons and daughters. Prisoners are forced into confessions, followed by death sentences handed down in the name of God by men who have turned faith into a tool of power.
Then the cycle repeats, because the outrage fades but the regime’s machinery of fear does not.
That is why Hemmati’s looming execution matters so much. It is not only a crime against one individual. It is a declaration. The regime is telling the Iranian people: we own your bodies, we own your voices and, if you challenge us, we will kill you. That is the message. Everything else is propaganda.
And yet, even now, there are protesters in the US and in Western capitals who defend the dictatorship, excuse this regime or treat it as a symbol of anti-Western resistance. That is a moral collapse.
Anyone marching in the name of justice while excusing Tehran should face a simple question: What exactly are you defending? A regime that hangs protesters, tortures dissidents and imprisons women for demanding dignity? A regime that silences students, crushes workers, terrorizes families and sends children into violence?
What part of that deserves applause from those who claim to care about human rights?
There is something especially obscene about Western activists lecturing democratic societies about oppression while romanticizing one of the most repressive governments on Earth. They speak endlessly about liberation but ignore the women of Iran. They chant about justice but forget the prisoners awaiting the gallows. They claim to stand with the oppressed yet somehow find endless excuses for the oppressor.
There is only one name for it: deliberate blindness. 

Repression is not a side effect of the Iran regime, it is its language, its instinct and its method of survival.

Dalia Al-Aqidi

This regime has brought misery not only to Iranians but to the wider region. It has attacked, threatened, infiltrated or destabilized countries across the Middle East. Saudi Arabia has faced Iranian-backed aggression. The UAE has been threatened and targeted. Bahrain has lived with constant subversion. Kuwait, Jordan and Qatar have all had to contend with Tehran’s reach. Iraq has been pulled into its orbit. Its proxies have torn Yemen apart. Lebanon has been held hostage to its influence.
This is a regime that claims to speak in the name of Muslims while harming Muslim societies again and again.
So, let us stop pretending that this is a normal government with a few policy differences. It is a revolutionary tyranny that has fed on fear for decades. It survives by manufacturing enemies, crushing reform and teaching its people that even peaceful dissent can end at the end of a rope.
That is why every defense of this regime is a betrayal of its victims.
When the left in America waves away the crimes of Tehran, it is not standing with the people of Iran — it is standing against them. When activists reduce this regime to a geopolitical talking point, they erase the men and women whose lives it has destroyed. When they excuse Iran because it fits their ideological hostility to the West, they reveal that their concern for human rights is selective, shallow and hollow.
Human rights do not disappear because the oppressor uses the right slogans; torture does not become acceptable because a regime calls itself anti-imperialist; and execution is not resistance, especially when the victims are standing against dictatorship.
A woman is about to be killed by the state for protesting. That fact should end the argument.
The truth is that Iran does not fear foreign enemies nearly as much as it fears its own people. It fears Iranian women who remove the veil of obedience. It fears young men who refuse to surrender their future. It fears ordinary citizens who have finally decided that enough is enough.
The woman now facing death is not just the victim of one ruling or one judge. She is the victim of an entire system built to crush courage. Her case is a reminder that this regime will not change, soften or reform. The pattern of repression will not stop; the only thing that changes is the face of the next victim.
For decades, Tehran has ruled through blood, fear and lies — demanding silence from the world and obedience from its people, while testing the conscience of anyone willing to see it for what it is. Iran is not merely governed by bad leadership, it is being held hostage by a regime that has turned cruelty into state policy.
And anyone still defending it has forfeited any claim to justice.

• Dalia Al-Aqidi is executive director at the American Center for Counter Extremism.