Iran’s Regime Exposed: More Deadly Than 9/11?

On Fox News’ Special Report this week, exiled Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi laid down a brutal claim: Iran’s theocratic rulers are slaughtering their own people at a scale worse than the terror attacks on America two decades ago. Pahlavi’s raw appeal to the world and to brave Iranians on the streets was unvarnished and unflinching, the kind of wake-up call that patriotic Americans should hear with their hearts and their heads.

The unrest did not come from nowhere — protests erupted late December amid an economic collapse that left ordinary families unable to feed their children and business owners watching their life’s work evaporate. Streets and bazaars that sustained generations suddenly filled with chants for freedom and the old national flag, a powerful symbol of popular rejection of the clerical elite.

Independent monitoring groups and journalists have tried to pierce the regime’s information blackout and the results are chilling: rights organizations report mass arrests, brutal crackdowns and death tolls that number in the thousands according to the latest tallies. Those figures are not fanciful political rhetoric — outside monitors say the body count is staggeringly high, pushing past the familiar thresholds of tragedy into a humanitarian calamity.

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have documented the same pattern: security forces using live ammunition, beatings, and other unlawful tactics to stamp out dissent, while the regime muffles the truth with internet shutdowns and coerced confessions. This is not a domestic policing problem; it is a systematic repression of a people daring to demand basic dignity, and the world cannot pretend it is merely an internal matter.

Pahlavi’s calls for coordinated civil resistance and for state employees to refuse to obey criminal orders are dangerous for him and hopeful for Iranians who crave liberty, and every free nation should be on the side of the brave, not the butchers. President Trump and other leaders have been clear that the United States will not stand idly by while Tehran murders its citizens, and that posture of strength is exactly what deters tyrants and comforts the oppressed.

Americans who love freedom must recognize the moral clarity here: when a tyrant kills his own people, appeasement and platitudes are not options. We should back sanctions, expose the regime’s crimes relentlessly, and keep every diplomatic and economic lever aimed at the clerics until the bloodshed stops and Iranians can choose their own future without fear.

This moment calls for courage from free nations and clarity from conservatives who still believe in American exceptionalism: stand with the protesters, call out the killers, and let Tehran know that liberty has more friends in the world than it has enemies. The people of Iran are showing the same American virtues we teach our children — resolve, faith in freedom, and the willingness to risk everything for a better tomorrow — and we should stand with them without apology.