The Iranian regime has finally done the despicable deed: murdering Arvin Ghahremani, a 20-year-old Jew who was attacked by a gang of seven Muslims, including one who owed him money. That same man stabbed Ghahremani, who fended off his attacker and courageously killed him in self defense with the attacker’s own knife.

Ghahremani, in the classic application of dhimmi laws, was sentenced to death for the crime of killing a Muslim. Self-defense was irrelevant. A Jew cannot kill a Muslim and expect to live.

His announced death sentence was greeted with international uproar, as the world applied Western principles of justice, and decried a monstrous verdict and sentence.

Ghahremani’s sentence was stayed for almost half a year. Until now.

Sometimes small gestures bespeak volumes. Such might be the case with the killing of Ghahremani now.

Why now? Why at all?

Why would the regime punctuate its endless open soliloquy about its response to Israel’s recent retaliatory strike against Iranian targets with this killing?

Is this supposed to show how strong the regime is? Is this intended to strike fear into the hearts of Jews everywhere as to the willingness of the mullahs to strike at them?

Sorry, but quite the opposite seems to be more realistic. This seems like an act of desperation, a wildly misplaced and inappropriate gesture.

Iran’s act is nothing more than gratuitous viciousness and is the geo-political equivalent of a school yard bully showing how tough he is by ripping the wings off flies.

Unwittingly but poignantly, the execution of Ghahremani pulls back the curtain of the mindset of the mullahs. These are men who, by many accounts, have been reeling from the ability of the Israel Air Force to penetrate Iranian air space, to neuter its air defenses and to conduct pinpoint attacks all around the country, including faraway Parchin, that are vital for the Iranian missile effort.

All of this is unnerving and frightening. Ironically, the execution plays to the mullahs’ “Protocols of Elders of Zion” mindset that sees Jews as an all- consuming evil force, standing and preventing the coming of the Hidden 12th Imam.

In this context, Ghahremani gave the mullahs the pathetic opportunity to strike back, to show the world, and most especially themselves, that Jews could be defeated.

But it is not the defeating of Jews that the mullahs are showing the world, but rather their insatiable hatred of Jews. To the mullahs, it seems clear that Jews are sub-human, and the effrontery of daring to kill a Muslim, even if it was only to save one’s own life, cannot be tolerated.

The reaction to the execution has been relatively mute, certainly less pronounced than to the original announcement of a death sentence. There has not been massive condemnation of Iran, perhaps because the all-forgiving Western Progressives have concluded that Iran is so beset by Israel right now, that of course Iran would be going crazy over anything and everything Jewish.

More principled people would totally reject that.

Iran is guilty of a crime against a human, and a crime against humanity. It has shown the world its true colors, the colors of a rigid theocracy impervious to equity and mercy.

Arvin Ghahremani, through no choice of his own, now stands as a martyr of the Jewish People. Regardless of how he identified as a Jew, he died because he was a Jew.

Those in the Obama Administration and its ensuing iterations would be well advised to see the Iranian regime, thought to be so moderate, responsible and worthy of support, for what it actually is: paranoid, venal and merciless.

Tragically, we have had the opportunity to see, with Arvin Ghahremani’s killing, the true picture of our hateful enemy. May Arvin’s memory be for a blessing, and may we elevate his memory through our clearer understanding of the despicable figures who killed him.

Douglas Altabef is Chairman of the Board of Im Tirtzu and a Director of the Israel Independence Fund.