Commendably, the Trump administration is set to initiate a new Iran policy, which will be announced in October. Such change is imperative.
The flawed nuclear agreement in 2015, provided too many concessions, including tens of billions of dollars to the Iranian regime, following decades of deceit and lying in pursuit of the nuclear bomb.
Tehran’s nuclear program continues, and its military sites remain off limits to inspectors. But more than that, the Obama administration’s agreement has resulted in more egregious conduct by the ayatollahs, in terms of sponsoring terror and Islamic extremism, cooperating with North Korea in pursuit of ballistic missiles, and cracking down on domestic dissent.
The new policy will reportedly include clipping the Iranian regime’s wings in Syria and Iraq, plus more pressure on Tehran in response to its repeated ballistic missile tests.
During her White House press briefing alongside National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster on September 15, the US Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley articulately said: “Now more than ever, human rights matters. We say all the time if the government does not take care of its people, bad things will happen.”
Iran is a prime example. It remains the country with the highest reported rate of executions per capita and "since the beginning of the year at least four children have been put to death, and at least 89 other children remain on death row."
In some cases, specific instances of human rights abuse have become rallying points for comprehensive movements to bring totalitarian regimes to justice. This was the case, for instance, with the massacre of thousands of Chilean dissidents following the coup by General Augusto Pinochet. Iran has a similar archetype for the current regime’s abuse.
In an effort to stamp an overwhelmingly popular pro-democracy movement, in summer of 1988, the clerical regime’s founder, Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa ordering that all the regime’s political prisoners who did not repent should be summarily executed, without mercy.
As a result of the edict, “death commissions” were set up in prisons throughout the country, with the mandate to hold minutes-long trials of existing political prisoners and determine which of them would remain loyal to democratic resistance. Over the course of a single summer, some 30,000 political prisoners, the vast majority of them activists of the main Iranian opposition movement, the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK) were sent to the gallows and were secretly buried in mass graves.
The ayatollahs enforced a conspiracy of silence on the 1988 massacre for nearly 30 years. But in August 2016, an audio recording was released of a meeting held in 1988 with Khomeini’s heir-apparent at the time, Hossein Ali Montazeri, who lambasted the officials responsible for the massacre, c
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