When US President Donald Trump urged “Iranian Patriots” in January to keep protesting, take over their institutions, and save the names of the “killers and abusers,” he added a promise that should not be treated as mere political rhetoric: “Help is on its way.”
That is a promise that the people of Iran paid for in blood.
The world has spent the past several weeks debating whether the US-Iran memorandum of understanding was good for oil markets, bad for Israel, sufficient for shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, useful for Lebanon, or convenient for a White House that wanted the war to end.
Israel has every reason to oppose any arrangement that leaves Tehran’s nuclear infrastructure, missile program, proxy network, and regional leverage intact. Yet amid the diplomatic churn and economic analysis, the actual victims of the Islamic Republic have again been pushed to the margins.
They are the women, students, workers, parents, and young people who came into the streets against a regime that has impoverished them, censored them, beaten them, jailed them, and shot them as they are forced under its thumb.
They know Iran’s prisons, morality police, Revolutionary Guards, propaganda machinery, and habit of spending national wealth on foreign wars.
January protests began with anger at Iran's state failures
The January protests, which began exactly six months ago, began amid economic collapse, soaring inflation, and anger over state failure.
But they also became something larger. The slogans chanted across Iranian cities were about sovereignty, dignity, and the right of Iranians to decide that their country belongs to them rather than to a clerical-military regime and its regional project.
That is why the world’s relative quiet has been so shameful.
Too many governments and commentators have allowed Tehran to recast a struggle for freedom as foreign agitation or reduce it to sanctions, exchange rates, oil routes, and negotiation tactics.
Economic suffering helped bring people into the streets, but the answer is not to rescue the regime that produced it.
Rights watch groups said in January that Iranian security forces carried out mass killings after the protests escalated on January 8 and that thousands of protesters and bystanders were believed to have been killed while the authorities restricted communications.
Amnesty International described that month as the deadliest period of repression by Iranian authorities in decades of its research.
One victim said, “If we do not go into the streets for Iran’s freedom today, one day our children will have to do it instead. Today, it is our lives so that they may have a better future.”
The comment was made before their death by regime forces in the January protests, according to testimony shared with The Jerusalem Post ahead of the six-month marking.
That sentence and the sentiment behind it should haunt every leader who encouraged Iranians to rise and then reached for the language of orderly process when the cost became too high.
Trump must not abandon the Iranian people as he awaits collapse of MoU
Trump is right that dealing with this regime is a waste of time. He is also right that a regime that shoots protesters in the street cannot be trusted to reform itself through polite diplomacy.
The conclusion, though, cannot be to abandon the Iranian people until the next round of negotiations collapses or the next oil shock alarms global markets.
The conclusion must be that regime change in Iran is not the only strategic and moral horizon that fits the reality before us. Such change cannot be imposed by outsiders; it must be Iranian-led.
It must respect Iran’s people, history, culture, and future but must be supported by the free world with sanctions on killers, technology to break censorship, documentation for accountability, diplomatic isolation of regime officials, and refusal to reward Tehran for surviving crises of its own making.
A free Iran would not solve every problem in the Middle East, but it could transform the region in ways no memorandum with the Islamic Republic ever will.
It could weaken Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and militias sustained by Tehran’s money and ideology. It could allow one of the region’s great civilizations to rebuild.
This is not something that can be done by one power alone; it requires collaboration, and must remain the clear goal of every actor involved.
