Stephen M. Flatow is President of the Religious Zionists of America (RZA.) He is the father of Alisa Flatow, who was murdered in an Iranian-sponsored Palestinian terrorist attack in 1995 and the author of A Father’s Story: My Fight for Justice Against Iranian Terror now available in an expanded paperback edition on Amazon. Note: The RZA is not affiliated with any American or Israeli political party.
The shocking images coming out of Iran today - security forces firing on protestors, mass arrests, swift executions, and families terrorized into silence - have horrified much of the world. Yet there is a serious question we should be asking: Why are we surprised?
The Islamic Republic of Iran has been exporting violence since its founding in 1979. Brutality is not an aberration of this regime; it is its organizing principle. What we are witnessing inside Iran today is simply the inward turn of a system that for more than four decades has projected terror outward - against Jews, Americans, Israelis, and anyone else it deemed expendable in service of its revolutionary ideology.
From the moment Ayatollah Khomeini seized power, violence became the regime’s chosen language. The seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and the 444-day hostage crisis was not merely an opening act of defiance against America; it was a declaration that Iran’s new rulers would reject international norms and embrace coercion as statecraft. That message has been repeated ever since, written in blood across continents.
In 1983, Iran’s newly created proxy, Hezbollah, carried out the suicide bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, killing 241 American service members. It was one of the deadliest terrorist attacks of its time and a clear demonstration that Tehran was prepared to target Western forces directly through proxies. That same network went on to kidnap, torture, and murder Americans and other Westerners throughout the 1980s, with Iran providing funding, training, and ideological direction.
The Jewish world learned this lesson in devastating fashion in 1994, when a massive bomb destroyed the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, killing 85 people. Investigations later tied senior Iranian officials and Hezbollah operatives to the attack. Two years earlier, the Israeli embassy in the same city had been bombed. These were not local acts of hatred - they were expressions of Iranian policy carried out thousands of miles from Tehran.
For my family, Iran’s violence is not abstract history. In 1995, my daughter Alisa was murdered by a suicide bomber from Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a terror group financed and supported by Iran. Alisa was 20 years old. She was studying in Israel, filled with life and purpose, when her life was stolen by an organization that exists only because Iran chooses to fund murder as a political tool. American courts later held Iran legally responsible, but no judgment can restore what was taken.
The pattern continued. In 1996, a massive truck bomb tore through the Khobar Towers housing complex in Saudi Arabia, killing 19 American airmen. The attackers were linked to an Iranian-backed terror network. In Iraq, Iran supplied weapons that killed hundreds of American soldiers. In Yemen, Tehran armed the Houthis, turning a regional conflict into a missile threat against civilians. Wherever instability and bloodshed serve Iran’s interests, Iranian fingerprints appear.
Most recently, Iran’s long-standing support for Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad culminated in the October 7 massacre in Israel. While Tehran may not have dictated every operational detail, it trained, armed, financed, and ideologically nurtured the terror organizations that carried out the slaughter. Mass murder does not happen in a vacuum; it happens when regimes reward it.
And now, the same regime is turning its violence inward with renewed ferocity. Protestors demanding basic freedoms - women refusing to submit, young people demanding dignity, minorities demanding equality - are met with bullets, batons, prison cells, and gallows. Thousands have been killed or imprisoned. Trials are rushed. Executions are public. Fear is deliberate.
This is not a government losing control. It is a regime behaving exactly as it always has.
The clerical leadership in Tehran rules through intimidation at home and terror abroad. The Revolutionary Guard is not a defensive force; it is an export agency for violence. Diplomacy has not moderated this behavior. Sanctions relief has not softened it. Engagement has not reformed it. The ideology of the Islamic Republic requires enemies, bloodshed, and repression to survive.
There should be no confusion and no surprise. The Islamic Republic of Iran is not malfunctioning - it is functioning exactly as designed. A regime built on hostage-taking, terror sponsorship, and ideological hatred will inevitably turn its guns on its own people. The same system that financed bombings in Buenos Aires, Beirut, and Jerusalem now executes protestors in Tehran. The lesson of the past 45 years is unmistakable: as long as the mullahs rule Iran, violence will follow.
Removing them from power is not reckless - it is necessary. The world will not be safer until the source of this brutality is gone.