This Editor’s Note was sent out earlier Wednesday in ToI’s weekly update email to members of the Times of Israel Community. To receive these Editor’s Notes as they’re released, join the ToI Community here.

The current protests against the regime in Iran are seen as the biggest since 2009, when masses took to the streets in outrage over the faked reelection of president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the expense of his challenger, the former prime minister and relative reformist Mir-Hossain Mousavi, who remains under house arrest to this day. And they are being suppressed with a brutality that may be unprecedented since the ayatollahs seized power in 1979, with anything from 2,500, to 5,000, to 12,000 people reported gunned down by regime forces, and tens of thousands injured.

Initially fueled by economic dissent, they have swelled to become what the regime recognizes as a threat to its rule. Doing its best to conceal the horrors it is unleashing by closing down the internet, it has moved to ruthlessly massacre its own protesting people.

As they did in 2009, the protesters are looking to the international community for support, and especially to the United States. Then-president Barack Obama declared gravely in June 2009 that “when I see violence directed at peaceful protesters, when I see peaceful dissent being suppressed… it is of concern to me and it is of concern to the American people.” But he provided no practical assistance.

Current President Donald Trump has been warning the regime for days that if it starts shooting its citizenry, “we will start shooting,” and on Tuesday threatened “very strong action” if the regime starts executing people. As of this writing, the ayatollahs and their security forces are doing precisely what the president warned them not to do, blithely ignoring his threats, and Trump has yet to act on them.

There can be no doubt that the murderous regime in Iran should go. It is ideologically and territorially rapacious, in the cause of a death cult iteration of radical Islam.

It incites and funds terror worldwide. It created Hezbollah to try and destroy Israel from the north. It armed and funded Hamas with its shared goal of destroying Israel........

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