The radical Islamic regime has responded to these protesters with brutal force and bullets. As Jews in America who have always championed civil rights in the US and advocated for human rights causes around the globe, it is now our duty to speak up for the suffering people of Iran. After 42 years of living under the brutal totalitarian Islamic regime of the Ayatollahs, millions of Iranians are crying out to the world for help in their cause for freedom.
As Jews, we also have an ancient friendship with the people of Iran which we must not forget. It dates back to time of their nation’s founder, Cyrus the Great, who freed us from Babylonian captivity in 539 BCE. Today, as America’s Jews we must continue this proud tradition of standing with those in Iran who seek freedom from the oppressive regime holding them hostage.
While I was born in Iran, my family fled the antisemitic nightmare of the Ayatollah regime in Iran 41 years ago. Many in my Iranian Jewish community, who fled Iran during the last four decades, were embraced by Southern California’s American Ashkenazi Jewish community. As a young child who attended Ashkenazi Hebrew schools, I discovered that American Jews have always championed the principle of tikkun olam – the Jewish concept of healing the world – for advancing social justice causes and supporting movements for freedom throughout the world.
The American Jewish community in the last 60-plus-years has been very vocal in speaking out not only against antisemitism in the world, but against the evils of hate, war and lack of freedoms worldwide. During the Cold War was it not American Jewry, who were among the most vocal against the tyranny of the former Soviet Union and championed the cause of Soviet Jewry? Weren’t American Jews among those who proudly voiced support and stood with Polish Solidarity union activists during their protest against the Communist Polish regime in the late 1980s?
WEREN’T AMERICAN Jews among the many that stood shoulder to shoulder with Nelson Mandela and his freedom movement against the oppressive apartheid system in South Africa? Did Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and other American Jewish activists not march arm in arm with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and champion the Civil Rights Movement during the 1960s? Even today, many American Jewish congregations and organizations have proudly taken on issues of oppression the Uighurs face in China, or the genocide that occurred in Sudan’s Darfur region or protested against racial bigotry in many US cities.
Today, I call on the American Jewish community – long a strong key champion of social justice causes, equality and freedom movements – to support the noble people of Iran who are fighting to rid themselves of an oppressive radical Islamic regime. This cause for social justice and human rights in Iran is not an issue associated with the political left or right; it’s an issue of basic human freedom and human survival.
People today are clamoring in the streets for better lives and to live their lives free of the intolerant dictatorship ruling over them for the last 42 years in Iran. They want decent living wages, fresh running water, electricity, job opportunities, education for their children, proper health care and basic freedom to live without the intrusion of Islamic laws into their private lives. They want to live normally without fear of being beaten, shot, imprisoned, or even killed by Iran’s Ayatollah regime’s thugs.
As Jews, we are a people who have faced unspeakable violence, hatred, injustice, pogroms and even genocide over millennia. As a result, we have always spoken out in every part of the world in support of those who were downtrodden and oppressed.
Today, our support for the peace-loving people of Iran should be no different. How much longer can we stand by idly and not speak up while the regime in Iran not only slaughters and imprisons its own citizens, but whose leaders constantly deny the Holocaust and call for a second annihilation against our people in Israel?
More importantly for Jews and non-Jews who love peace and abhor war, standing in solidarity with the people of Iran protesting today is a moral and just cause to support because it avoids unnecessary conflict between nations when the people of Iran will eventually internally overthrow their country’s oppressive leaders. We as American Jews, Ashkenazi and Mizrahi, conservative and liberal, secular and religious have a duty to speak with one voice for freedom and in support of those innocents in Iran who want to liberate their own country from a repressive regime.
As American Jews, today we must recall the gift of freedom the ancient Persian king, Cyrus the Great granted us from the bondage of Babylonian captivity. In turn, we must stand today with his descendants in Iran who seek international support to free themselves from the yoke of radical Islamic bondage and oppression upon them.
The writer is an Iranian American journalist based in Southern California.