Hundreds of thousands of Iranian women and men have flooded the streets of over 80 cities over the past two weeks, expressing outrage over the regime’s violent enforcement of religious dress codes imposed on women, particularly the hijab.
But don’t just call them protesters — they aspire to be revolutionaries.
We recently spoke with a woman inside Iran before the regime shut down internet around the country. She recounted how her friends had been beaten on the streets by regime security forces earlier that day and had likely been dragged to secret detention facilities. We asked her what message she wished to share with America. “Be our voice,” she said, “because the regime won’t let our videos and messages out for much longer.” Finally, she implored: “We need international sanctions against this regime,” similar to those imposed by the international community against South Africa during apartheid.
“Apartheid” is a fitting word to describe the system imposed by the Islamic Republic of Iran against Iranian women, who are not only prohibited from showing their hair in public but cannot study certain subjects in school, have fewer rights as victims of physical and sexual violence, and even face one-year prison sentences for singing in public. Six Iranian women were sent to prison in August for that particular “crime,” while eight of their male friends were also jailed just for helping produce or record the music.
Surely the protester we spoke with who asked for Americans to be the Iranians’ “voice” wasn’t asking much. The plight of Iranian women should be a cause celebre of feminists and liberals worldwide. Yet nearly two weeks after the killing of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini by the Iranian regime’s enforcers, statements of support by many prominent feminists in Congress have been meek or nonexistent.
And that’s the least they can do. True solidarity with the Iranian people requires more than mere rhetoric, especially for a member of Congress. Actions must be taken against the despotic regime that imposes gender apartheid on the 42 million women who live under its thumb. The Iranian protesters are up against a brutal regime willing and capable of massacring large numbers of its citizens to stay in power. We should start by demanding nations stop aiding Iran, whether through funds or moral equivalence.
It was encouraging that the Biden administration recently issued sanctions against the regime’s so-called morality police and other security officials. Those tyrants won’t be able to travel to the United States and will have their foreign assets frozen. But that won’t do much to curtail their brutality against Iranian women and men. To do that, the regime’s budget itself must be squeezed.
That was the outcome of the “maximum pressure” policy. Because of U.S. economic sanctions, the regime’s economy shrunk by around 5% each year from 2018 to 2020. The regime’s accessible foreign currency reserves plunged from over $120 billion in 2018 to a mere $4 billion at the end of 2020. Under the strain of reduced revenues, the regime had to cut the budget for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps terror group by double digits in 2019 and 2020.
Those cuts echoed down to the government entities responsible for attacking Iranian women and men on the streets right now: the Law Enforcement Force under the Ministry of Interior and the Basij, an IRGC paramilitary group responsible for quelling dissent. During protests in 2019, Iranians recorded just how Basij forces carry out that mission. Outside the city of Mahshahr, they surrounded protesters hidden in marshes with machine guns mounted on trucks. The soldiers sprayed the marshes with thousands of bullets. Afterward, the regime demanded the victims’ families pay a tax to recoup the cost of each bullet that pierced their loved ones’ bodies.
In the last year, these groups’ funding has soared. The Iranian regime’s latest budget provided $13 billion for “maintaining public order and security,” 25 times more than it spent on environmental programs and six times its budget for water programs. The Ministry of Intelligence, which detains and tortures protesters, got a 30% bump.
The budget also included a 386% funding increase to the Shahid Ebrahimi program, an initiative for the IRGC to “strengthen the security infrastructure of the country.” (Translation: funding to take hostages and kill dissidents.) Several programs run by the regime’s Law Enforcement Force had their funding increased by between 50% and 150% this year, too.
The new Iranian budget funds an 326% increase to the Shahid Shateri program, named after an IRGC commander who advanced the regime’s secret operations in Afghanistan, Syria, and Lebanon. That program was used from 2005-17 to secure at least 23 properties in Tehran that were turned into “safe houses.” Many of these properties also serve as clandestine sites to torture and extract confessions from detainees and political prisoners.
Where did all this money come from? It is a direct result of the Biden administration’s refusal to enforce U.S. sanctions against Iran, which enabled the regime to increase its oil revenues by over 400% from 2020 to 2022. Iran’s economy leaped from a 5% economic contraction in 2019 to a 6% growth this year. Its foreign currency reserves soared from $4 billion to an expected $41 billion by the end of this year. Biden’s dangerous nuclear negotiations, and the accompanying cessation of sanctions enforcement intended to keep Iran at the table, allowed the regime to pour funds into its departments of oppression.
To help the Iranian people, nations must stop funding Iran’s machine of terror and oppression. They must stop buying Iranian oil, metals, and petrochemical products. They must stop letting the regime elites hoard their illicit wealth abroad. They must kick out the Iranian terrorists masquerading as diplomats across the world who have conducted over 360 assassinations in the past four decades.
And finally — we can’t believe we even have to write this — they must remove Iran from its perch on the United Nations’s Commission on the Status of Women. The four European nations who secretly voted it on the panel should apologize to the women of Iran who have suffered for 43 years.
The Iranian people don’t expect the West to roll into Tehran and depose the regime they hate so much. They know the responsibility to secure their future rests with the Iranian people, not with outsiders. But they have one simple demand we must heed: Stop supporting our oppressors.
Morgan Ortagus is the founder of Polaris National Security and served as spokeswoman for the Department of State under Secretary Mike Pompeo. Gabriel Noronha is the executive director of Polaris National Security and a fellow at JINSA, and he served as the special adviser for Iran under Pompeo.
