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The Islamic Republic of Iran is increasingly unconstrained.
Of most immediate concern are Iran’s continued attempts to kill American citizens on U.S. soil. In recent months, the FBI has disrupted advanced Iranian assassination plots against former national security adviser John Bolton and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Alongside other former Trump administration officials, they continue to receive full-time security details in the face of this threat. This necessary security provision is costing taxpayers millions of dollars every month.
Others have been less fortunate. Despised by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s regime for her moral courage, dissident Iranian American journalist Masih Alinejad is high on Tehran’s hit list. In 2021, Iranian spies plotted to kidnap Alinejad from her New York home. Then, this July, a man wielding an AK-47 was charged after repeatedly lurking outside Alinejad’s home.
Novelist Salman Rushdie, long under an Iranian death sentence for writing The Satanic Verses, was stabbed multiple times in mid-August as he addressed a New York audience on the topic of free speech. His would-be assassin, a devoted follower of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Lebanese Hezbollah, has been praised as a hero by Iranian state media.
President Joe Biden should be confronting Iran over these provocations, which are all acts of terror inspired or ordered by Iran’s theocratic regime. Instead, he settles for issuing an occasional indictment and deploying more junior administration officials to condemn Tehran in the mildest terms possible.
