The high stakes in Iran
Ending the Islamic regime in Tehran would help reset the West’s moral compass.
By Melanie Phillips
JNS
Jan 15, 2026
Iranians attend an anti-government protest in Tehran, Iran, January 8, 2026.
The stupendous courage of the Iranian people has inspired awe at this massive display of unquenchable human spirit. Hundreds of thousands of Iranian demonstrators literally walked into the guns in their struggle for freedom from the monstrous Islamic regime.
At the time of writing, it’s unclear whether U.S. President Donald Trump will come to their aid as he promised. An apparently planned U.S. attack on Wednesday night was reportedly called off at the last minute.
The enormous risks of such an operation may mean that it will take place when all ducks are finally in a row. It’s hard to believe that Trump would be happy to be seen to have been played by the regime and thus leave it in place.
He must be aware that this wouldn’t merely be a stunning betrayal of the Iranian people. It wouldn’t merely torch his own reputation. The resulting weakening of America and strengthening of the axis of evil in the world would be a dire outcome.
For decades, the West has refused to face up to and deal with the threat posed by Iran.
Just as in the 1930s a refusal to grasp the true extent of the danger posed by Nazism led to the Holocaust and a terrible world war, so the eventual reckoning with the mullahs is turning out to be far more difficult and deadly than if the Iranian jihadi bullet had been bitten years ago.
Whatever may happen over the next few days or weeks, the terrible result of this vacillation is that many thousands of Iranians have now been murdered while the world did no more than wring its hands. And some haven’t even done that.
The stunning indifference of so much of the West to the Iranians’ heroism and the vicious savagery of the regime reflects the persistent inability of Western nations to understand the stakes. And that’s rooted in turn in a moral perversity to which much of the West has succumbed.
This was on unsavory display by Ken Martin, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Considering the massacres by Iran’s regime and the disputed killing of anti-ICE protester Renee Good by a U.S. law-enforcement officer last week, Martin equated the two.
“If comparing the U.S. to Iran makes you angry, ask why,” he wrote. “Killing protesters. Crushing dissent. Kidnapping and disappearing legal citizens. Ignoring courts. Threatening critics. Terrorizing communities. That’s authoritarian behavior—anywhere.”
Martin thus defamed his own country and diminished the evil of the Iranian regime. His obtuse comparison reflected the general loss of moral compass in the West—the collapse of the distinction between right and wrong, and the insistence on moral equivalence.
This empowers bad people and punishes their victims. With the “post-colonial” narrative that the Muslim world is the victim of the West and therefore can never do wrong, while Israel and America are oppressors and therefore can never do right, it’s produced Western complicity with Islamism.
It’s made it blind to the ways in which jihadi Islam is steadily dominating society, as well as distorting its response to antisemitism and even to the Islamist murder of Jews.
This has been spectacularly demonstrated by the new legislation introduced by Australia’s government under Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to combat antisemitism, hate and extremism in the wake of the Dec. 14 Bondi Beach massacre of 15 people by Islamist terrorists on the first night of Chanukah.
With startling perversity, this new law could criminalize Jews for identifying Muslims as being responsible for the atrocity against them. The mass murder of Christians would not constitute an offense, but “Islamophobia” may be punishable by up to five years in prison. And an exemption for religious texts could empower radical preachers to use the Quran and the hadiths to promote murderous hatred of Jews, as some do now.
In the storm of criticism that followed, Albanese defended this exemption by appearing to falsely suggest that the “Old Testament” promoted hatred or called for the murder of others. So he managed to turn an ostensible protection against antisemitism into an ignorant and prejudiced attack on the Hebrew Bible.
In Britain, which has long plunged down this rabbit hole, the police are now doing the Islamists’ bidding. In Birmingham last November, the West Midlands force decided at the behest of local Islamists to ban away-fans of Maccabi Tel Aviv from attending their team’s match with Aston Villa. It’s now been revealed that they then fabricated intelligence to obscure their own conclusion that the Israelis would be at risk of violence from “armed” local Muslims, and instead stated falsely that the Muslims were at risk from the Maccabi fans.
As Nick Timothy, a Conservative Member of Parliament, has written: “Britain is in danger of veering into something that should alarm us all: the surrender of the criminal justice system to the politics of communalism. Islamist thugs and the mob know what they want and are determined to get it.”
Britain is an extreme outlier in this baleful process. But the refusal to confront the danger of Islamism led to the election of Zohran Mamdani as New York’s mayor, whose first act was to dismiss the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism and repeal an executive order put into place by his predecessor, Eric Adams, prohibiting boycotts of Israel.
Mamdani insists that he will protect the city’s Jews. But while he has been speaking out against the recent torching of a synagogue in Mississippi and incidents of antisemitic graffiti in New York—and accepted the resignation of a high-level appointee who had peddled a trope about “money-hungry Jews”—he has made it plain that he will not do the same for Jews who are seen to support Israel.
“We must distinguish between antisemitism and criticism of the Israeli government,” he said. But it’s not mere criticism of Israel but anti-Zionism to which he himself subscribes by his refusal to recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.
The distinction between antisemitism and anti-Zionism is specious. It’s only the Jewish people who are singled out as having no right to their own ancestral homeland. The very attempt to divide the Jewish homeland from the Jews—the people whose faith is centered in that land—is an attack on Judaism.
In Britain, a Jewish Member of Parliament was barred from visiting a school in his Bristol constituency by Israel-haters among the teachers and their union on the grounds that he is the vice chair of Labour Friends of Israel.
This has caused widespread shock as an assault against the principles of education and parliamentary democracy, as well as against a Jewish politician.
But no one should be at all surprised. In the United Kingdom, as in America, the education system (with some honorable exceptions) has been in the grip of teachers who are teaching schoolchildren through a Marxist lens that represents all human behavior as a struggle between the powerful and the powerless.
They subscribe to the belief that the capitalist West is fundamentally oppressive and colonialist, that the Jews are behind capitalism, and that the State of Israel is therefore colonialist and oppressive.
Generations of this brainwashing have resulted in American sympathy for Israelis hitting an all-time low, falling last year to 46%—the lowest level in almost 25 years of Gallup’s annual tracking of this measure.
And in Britain, polling by StandWithUs UK found that 29% of British students see Hamas’s Oct. 7 pogrom as an “understandable act of resistance,” with 40% believing that those publicly supporting Israel should “expect” abuse on campus.
It’s clear that the Palestine cause is a portal to obliterate Israel by suborning Western elites to the cause; the desire to obliterate Israel is a portal to the desire to obliterate Jews; and the desire to obliterate both Israel and the Jews is a portal to the destruction of the West through a broader and deeper loss of moral compass and civilizational spine. Ending the Islamic regime in Iran would be a way of resetting the West’s moral compass. Enabling it to survive would leave that compass broken and the West in continuing freefall.
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