Another False Dawn Or Beginning of the End?
A familiar sense of déjà vu hangs over Iran as protests spill into a second week, with tens of thousands filling the streets to rage against economic ruin and the collapse of Iranian currency.
The protests are morphing into collective fury against the ruling Islamic clergy in cities across Iran. Crowds have been caught on video clips chanting anti-regime slogans such as “Death to the dictator!” and “Freedom, freedom!” while protestors defiantly face down security forces.
As of Tuesday morning, 35 people have been killed and 1200 arrested in clashes with police in at least 40 different cities, according to AP News, with Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei vowing “to bring the enemy to its knees.”
Haven’t we been here before? In fact, we’ve seen scenes such as these play out repeatedly over the past two decades in the Islamic Republic, with hundreds of Iranian citizens killed and injured in police violence. Ultimately, the protests failed to make any significant change in the political and economic status quo.
Observers say the current crisis might turn out differently, as senior officials in Iran have acknowledged that the country has been “thrust into survival mode,” as increasingly violent protests threaten the regime’s grip on the nation.
That acknowledgment came amid reports of Khamenei preparing a contingency flight to Moscow if his security forces fail to halt the growing demonstrations, or desert the regime amid the uprising.
If that scenario plays out, according to an intelligence report cited by the British daily The Times, Khamenei will flee together with his aides and close circle of associates and family, including his son and nominated heir, Mojtaba.
Shaken Iranian authorities last Wednesday ordered a broad shutdown of banks, schools and other businesses, claiming it was to conserve energy due to cold weather. “The government first projected a somewhat conciliatory tone, offering to meet with union leaders and merchants to hear their grievances, but it’s clear the public isn’t buying it,” reported Bloomberg News.
The most intense clashes have been reported in western parts of Iran, but protests and clashes between demonstrators and police have also taken place in Tehran, according to an AFP report.
The report said that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps “opened fire on protesters in the Malekshahi county of the western Ilam province on Saturday, killing four more people.”
Rumors abounded that two other people had been killed, and that dozens more were wounded. The report also accused the authorities of raiding the main hospital in the city of Ilam to seize the bodies of the protesters. It said funerals for the dead took place on Sunday with mourners chanting slogans against the government and Khamenei.
Obsessed with Israel While its Nation Unravels
Although the protests have not yet reached the size and scope of the last two major uprisings in 2022 and 2019, Iran’s ruling clergy faces heightened challenges in the current crisis: in addition to public outrage over soaring inflation and Iranian currency reduced to half its value, the regime faces a military threat from both Israel and the United States.
That threat looms large as Iran’s fanatical rulers insist on pouring hundreds of billions into its nuclear obsessions, and on funding proxy armies to fight Israel, instead of feeding its own population.
Iran’s economic problems and the present crisis are rooted in the refusal of its leaders “to dial back their nuclear program, to give up the ability to enrich uranium. They insist this is needed for producing cheap power, but the U.S. and its allies believe the program is nothing but a cover for developing an atomic weapon,” a WSJ report said.
For years, international sanctions have restricted Iran’s ability to bank and trade with the rest of the world, cutting deeply into its economy. The government also cannot access the bulk of its bank reserves held offshore; international banks don’t allow transfers to Tehran due to sanctions.
Although Iran has enormous oil wealth, that resource isn’t doing it much good, either. “It possesses the world’s second-largest reserves of natural gas but is prevented from exporting most of it because of a U.S. oil embargo,” the WSJ article elaborated.
But it is the immediate aftermath of the ruinous war with Israel that brought the swift dive in Iranian currency—the rial—and with it, the latest crisis for the regime.
Threatening US Assets in the Middle East
Instead of yielding to international pressure and offering concessions purely in their own self-interest, Iran’s rulers continue to posture belligerently, insisting that no one can force them to abandon their nuclear program.
They deny their nuclear infrastructure sustained massive damage in their war with Israel which is widely known to have cost Teheran billions of dollars. Iran also lost its most powerful military proxies, after Israel decimated Hamas and significantly degraded Hezbollah. Yet none of this has softened the bellicosity of warmongering leaders increasingly out of sync with reality.
Iranian Defense Minister Aziz Nasirzadeh last week rejected any suggestion that the country’s missile power “could be destroyed by bombs, negotiations, or the cowardly assassination of scientists and commanders.”
“Our military power today is far greater than during the 12-day war, and if any threat is directed at the Islamic Republic, the Armed Forces will respond to it with full intensity,” Nasirzadeh ludicrously boasted, adding that Iran’s missile capability is “non-negotiable.”
Echoing his colleague’s bluster, Speaker of the Iranian Parliament Mohammad Ghalibaf warned that American troops and assets in the Middle East are now “legitimate targets” for military strikes, after President Trump announced that the United States was ready to support peaceful protesters in Tehran.
Meanwhile, addressing Iran in a speech to the Knesset, Prime Minister Netanyahu warned that Israel and the United States remain aligned on preventing Tehran from rebuilding its military capabilities. “President Trump and I will not allow Iran to restore its ballistic missile industry and nuclear program,” he said.
He added that Israel stands with the Iranian public while underscoring the gravity of the moment: “We identify with the struggle of the Iranian people,” Netanyahu said. “We may be standing at a crucial moment. If we are attacked, the consequences for Iran will be very serious.”
Previous Protests Were Brutally Suppressed
Over the last 25 years, various nationwide protests have swept Iran, only to be ruthlessly repressed by the Islamic regime. Iran’s most recent mass uprising followed the 2022 death of Mahsa Amini, a young woman who died in police custody after being arrested for not wearing a hijab (headscarf) properly.
That revolt came after the 2021 “water and bread” protests over economic hardship; the 2019 revolt sparked by fuel-price hikes; and the 2010 Green Movement, which erupted after former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s alleged election-rigging to keep himself in power.
Each time, the free world watched and hoped the corrupt clerical regime—willing to impoverish the nation in pursuit of nuclear ambitions—would topple. But the world’s sympathy for the Iranian people’s plight never translated into meaningful steps toward helping them achieve regime change.
With the powerful Revolutionary Guard continuing to back the mullahs, each uprising was brutally crushed.
When a reporter asked President Donald Trump this week whether he supports the overthrow of Iran’s regime, his answer captured the complexity of the situation on the ground, where the regime has the full backing of the nation’s elite strike force.
“I’m not going to talk about the overthrow of a regime,” Trump answered. He said the country has a host of serious problems and offered a bleak assessment drawn from his years of watching a pattern repeat itself.
“I’ve seen opposition groups form in Iran, as many as tens of thousands, even a hundred thousand. What happens? The regime starts shooting, people are killed and the groups disband. And nothing changes. I’ve been watching this for a very long time,” Trump commented.
The exchange came during a press conference with Prime Minister Netanyahu at the entrance to Mar-a-Lago where the two leaders met. After reports of more than a few deaths from violence surrounding the demonstrations in Iran, Trump modified his stance of non-interference, saying the United States could consider some form of intervention.
If Iran “violently kills peaceful protesters, which is their custom, the United States of America will come to their rescue,” he posted on social media. “We are locked and loaded and ready to go.”
When asked at the Mar-a-Lago press conference by another correspondent how the United States would react if Teheran continues trying to build a nuclear weapon, his response was unequivocal and blunt:
“I hear that Iran is trying to build up again, and if they are, we’re going to have to knock them down,” Trump said, warning that a future U.S. assault “may be even more powerful than the last time.”
Past Administrations Tiptoed Around the Mullahs
Past U.S. presidents have a history of tiptoeing around Teheran during a public uprising, fearing the regime would pin responsibility for it on foreign agitators. Barack Obama stands out as one of the most timid when it came to confronting Iran.
In 2009, during the “Green Movement” when Iranians took to the streets to protest Mahmoud Ahmajinedad’s tampering with the presidential election, Obama squandered a crucial opportunity and kept his silence. That allowed the despotic Ahmajinedad to strong arm his way back into office.
America’s silence did nothing to spare the protesters from brutal retaliation, and thanks to U.S. timidity, the corrupt regime – which at the time appeared to be teetering – survived to consolidate its power.
“Trump’s contrast with Barack Obama couldn’t be greater,” writes the WSJ. “Obama stayed mute in 2009 while the regime put down protests following a rigged election. Then again, Obama never would have joined with Israel to bomb Iran’s nuclear program, as Mr. Trump did in June.”
Non-Military Pathways to Restrain Iran’s Crackdown
Although Trump is unlikely to use the military to curb Teheran’s violence against protesters, he does have other options to support Iranians, a NY Post article observed. “U.S. intervention could take the shape of “more sanctions;” “covert or cyber operations;” “or giving the “green light” to Israel to take matters into its own hands.
The U.S. can also help protesters with opening up international communications, extending Starlink access when the regime cuts off the internet, the WSJ noted. “Washington can also expose regime thugs and cripple their communications, targeting Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps units who are directly involved in crackdowns.”
This can be accomplished by “publicizing the names of their commanders who order the shooting of protesters or make mass arrests, freezing their assets abroad, and restricting their travel. The idea is to heighten the personal and institutional cost for those who carry out the crackdowns,” the Post article said.
“Above all, Mr. Trump can enforce oil sanctions as he now is doing in Venezuela,” WSJ argued. “When Iran’s ‘shadow fleet’ can no longer take discounted crude to China, the regime will know he meant what he said. Iran is exporting two million barrels a day—20 times the “maximum pressure” target set out by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in February.”
There have been false dawns of protest in recent decades when the fall of the Iranian regime seemed imminent, but some analysts feel the mullahs running the government are more vulnerable now than in the past. As the waves of protest continue, they expose the regime’s dependence on violence and stoking fear.
False dawn or not, the protests have stripped away the regime’s mystique, revealing an ever more fragile hold on power deeply threatened by the current uprising and the new post-war realities in the Middle East.
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‘One of the Darkest Years:’ Iran’s Execution Rate Skyrocketed in 2025
A steep rise in executions in Iran, many without the victims receiving a trial, reveal a regime facing an enraged and explosive society resorting to the gallows for its survival, as per a recent report by an Iranian opposition group.
The document put out this week by the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), based in France, is entitled “More than 2,200 Executions in 2025.”
The report goes on to describe how the ruling “religious fascism” in Iran has made 2025 “one of the darkest years in Iran’s contemporary history,” with 2201 prisoners executed. “This marks an unprecedented high in the 37 years of the criminal rule of the regime’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei,” the NCRI document states.
A comparison of execution figures over the past five years with figures over the past 12 months, reveal that as Khamenei’s regime has weakened and its crises have intensified, the mullahs have increasingly resorted to executions to generate an atmosphere of terror and prevent popular uprisings.
The number of executions in 2025 is approximately 120% higher than in 2024, 160% higher than in 2023, and a staggering 280% higher than in 2022, the report documents. It is clear from the documents that the pace of executions accelerated unprecedentedly in the second half of 2025, during and after the June war with Israel.
The victims of Khamenei’s execution machine in 2025 were hanged in 97 cities across 31 provinces, the report said, noting that the purpose of this expansion in crimes against humanity, as well as the purpose of public executions, “is to spread terror to more parts of the country.”
“The regime is weaker and more fragile than ever and is at a complete impasse,” the document stated. It noted that the barbaric policy of using mass executions to prevent mass protests “has clearly failed to halt the current revolt” that threatens to bring the regime down.
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The Left’s Bizarre Silence on Iran
“During the Israel-Hamas War, as massive anti-Israel demonstrations – openly sympathetic to Hamas – swept capitals and campuses around the world, liberal activists spoke of little else,” an article in Spectator UK noted.
“They culturally appropriated Arab headwear, prancing about in China-made keffiyehs. They wrapped themselves in the Palestine colors. They frothed day and night about a ‘murderous regime’ – you know who.”
The Gaza demonstrations around the world, featured on the front pates everywhere, signaled to Hamas that it had global support. This reinforced their murderous hatred of Israel and refusal to release the hostages or lay down their weapons.But for Iran’s protesters, there has strangely been no such display of support. As a Middle Eastern people revolt against their genuinely repressive rulers, the Left has gone silent.
“These people love to yap about ‘resistance’ and ‘oppression.’ So where are the solidarity marches? Where are the gatherings outside Iranian embassies to echo the protesters’ cry for an end to the ayatollahs’ rule?” the article demanded. “Where are the Western anti-imperialists to cheer the demand for humanitarian spending on Iranian citizens, over the squandering of billions on a medieval war of attrition against Israel?” the article went on.
“This is where we get to the ugly truth of the left’s creepy silence on Iran. Where normal people understand that Hezbollah and Hamas are brutal outfits doing the bidding of a ruthless regime, our liberal class has a tendency to view them as ‘resistance’ movements.”
‘Israelophobia’
The Left and Islamists could never support the Iranian people’s cry for its government to put the Iranian people before Hezbollah and Hamas, the article pointed out. “That’s because these people are drunk with the delusion that these terrorist groups are an important bulwark against the ‘real menace’ in the Middle East: Israel.”
The disease of ‘Israelophobia’ has thoroughly shattered the Left’s moral compasses, the writer said. “We end up in the truly perverse situation where the privileged keffiyeh classes of the West instinctively want the Iranian regime to survive – in order that it might continue punishing ‘evil Israel.’”
For evidence of this twisted mindset, one has merely to witness how the left-wing media abandoned its journalistic principles when it came to covering the uprising in Iran. The New York Times did not print a single article about the surging protests on its front page for a full week after they broke out, a Jerusalem Post article noted.
“Not only was there no article, but there was also not even a blurb at the bottom of the front page where articles on the inside pages are promoted.”Front-page silence is itself a signal. Authoritarian regimes study global reactions, and when resistance dominates headlines in free societies, repression becomes riskier and harder to justify. On the other hand, media silence signals to the regime that it can crack down as brutally as it wants without major consequences.
The current revolt in Iran has laid bare not only the ayatollahs’ collapsing legitimacy, but also the bankruptcy of Western progressives, whose obsession with hating Israel clearly outweighs any solidarity with Iranians struggling for freedom.
Their silence on Iran reveals how far those on the Left have fallen prey to moral darkness and hypocrisy.
