I have to ask something that should not be controversial, but somehow is.

If we take the lower end of the estimates—around 4,000 Iranians killed since January 2026 for opposing their own government—and place that in proportion to population, the number becomes something else entirely.

Iran has roughly 90 million people. The United States has about 340 million. Adjust for scale, and we are looking at the equivalent of roughly 15,000 Americans deliberately killed by their own government for having the wrong opinion.

(Scaled to Israel, that same conservative estimate would mean roughly 350–400 Israelis killed by your own government for dissent.)

Just imagine that for a moment. Fifteen thousand people!

Not in a distant war. Not in some ambiguous fog of conflict. Not as unintended casualties. But singled out—tracked, detained, executed or killed in custody—for dissent.

That is the scale we are talking about, even using the most conservative numbers.

And this likely understates reality. Estimates vary. Some are significantly higher. Documentation in such environments is always incomplete, always contested, always subject to intimidation and suppression. So if anything, this proportional comparison is not inflammatory—it is restrained.

When we speak with representatives of the Iranian government, or when they appear on international platforms, we should carry this reality with us. Not as a rhetorical weapon, but as a baseline fact. A moral context. Something that shapes how we listen, how we question, how we weigh what is said.

Because there is something deeply unsettling—creepy, even—about watching officials of a regime accused of killing thousands of its own citizens speak in the polished language of diplomacy, as though this were just another policy disagreement among equals.

And yes, the deflections come quickly.

One common response is to point to reckless or inflammatory rhetoric from Western leaders. “What about Trump saying he would destroy your civilization?” The implication is that this levels the moral field.

There is a categorical difference between irresponsible or even dangerous political speech and the systematic use of state power to imprison, torture, and kill one’s own citizens for dissent. One can—and should—criticize reckless language. But words, however ugly, are not the same as sustained, documented acts of repression and killing. To pretend otherwise is to collapse distinctions that matter.

Another response is comparative: “What about Israel? What about Gaza?”

Again, this shifts the frame in a way that obscures more than it reveals.

War is tragic. War is often brutal. War raises profound legal and moral questions, especially in densely populated areas. Those questions deserve scrutiny. But even the harshest critique of military conduct in war does not erase the distinction between external armed conflict—however contested—and a government turning inward, using its coercive machinery to eliminate domestic opposition.

If everything is the same, then nothing is.

And that is precisely the problem.

We have, in some quarters, developed a reflex to flatten all moral categories into one indistinct field of accusation and counter-accusation. Everyone is guilty, therefore no one is accountable. Every act is just another example of power behaving badly.

But that way of thinking does not clarify. It anesthetizes.

It allows us to move past the reality that, by credible accounts, thousands of people in Iran have been killed not because of war, not because of accident, but because they opposed those in power.

It allows us to treat this as just another talking point in a broader geopolitical argument, rather than what it is: a sustained assault on the basic human right to dissent.

None of this requires us to defend Western leaders when they speak recklessly. None of it requires us to suspend criticism of military actions elsewhere. Serious people can hold multiple thoughts at once.

What it does require is a refusal to blur fundamental distinctions.

A refusal to pretend that all forms of violence, all uses of power, all moral failures are interchangeable.

Because once we lose that ability—once we give up on drawing those lines—we are left with something far worse than disagreement.

We are left with indifference dressed up as sophistication.

And from that place, truth erodes—by degrees—until even the most basic moral facts feel negotiable, and the suffering of others becomes just another argument to win.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)