This letter was originally published in the Hub as a part of their commentary, There is no going back’: the Hub reacts to the one year anniversary of the October 7th attacks on Israel.
By Kaveh Shahrooz, October 7, 2024
As an activist who works on the cause of democracy in Iran, I have for years framed my argument to Western policymakers in the following way: “You may think that Iran’s regime is only a problem for Iran’s people, but they are not. They are a problem for you.”
The absolute barbarism on display on October 7th was a vindication of that thesis.
For years the West has tried to contain Iran’s regime. The nuclear deal, for which much was sacrificed, was entirely about containment.
But October 7th proved that Iran’s regime cannot be meaningfully contained. Antisemitism isn’t just a policy position the regime has adopted that they can rein in as part of a political bargain. The desire to destroy Israel and the Jewish people is part of their DNA. They can no more abandon it than a fish can abandon swimming.
October 7th and the subsequent actions by the Lebanese Hezbollah proved that Iran, and not its proxies, is really the core problem. The threats, primarily to Israel but also to other Western countries, will continue so long as the Iranian regime is in power.
Mercifully, the events of the past year, and in particular the absolute humiliation of Hezbollah in the past few weeks, have also shown something else: Iran’s regime is much weaker than it claims.
It can be overthrown.
October 7th showed that it must be.
Kaveh Shahrooz is a lawyer, human-rights activist and senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
