LIZ PEEK: Democrats rage over Trump’s Iran strikes as exiles cheer ayatollah’s fall
Leftists in the U.S. are seriously confused. While Iranians around the world celebrate the death of the thuggish Ayatollah Khamanei, who ruled their country with an iron fist, liberals in the U.S. are condemning President Donald Trump’s war to liberate the Persian nation.
Opposition to the U.S.-Israel joint attack on Iran was broad and swift, powered in part by Trump Derangement Syndrome — if he’s behind it, they’re reliably against it — and also tinged with antisemitism.
The smoke had not yet cleared from the bombings in Iran before Democrats started shrieking their objections, with Connecticut Democrat Sen. Chris Murphy, for instance, calling it "dangerously illegal and a mistake of staggering scale," and denouncing the president as a "would-be dictator." Murphy has also called Israel's policy in Gaza and in the West Bank "immoral" and recently announced that he would not support additional military aid to Israel.
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Anti-Israel Democrats in the House were especially strident, with "Squad" member Rashida Tlaib from Michigan posting, "It's clear that the genocidal govt of Israel doesn't care about children + human life including our own loved ones in the military." She also posted, "The government of Israel is addicted to bombing hospitals, schools, refugee camps which are all war crimes."
Democrats have been pulling away from their traditional backing of Israel for some time, and especially since the far left took hold of their party. Axios reported in December that the DNC’s still-secret "autopsy" of why Vice President Kamala Harris was defeated by Trump in 2024 concluded that the former VP "lost significant support because of the Biden administration's approach to the war in Gaza…"
That is, in sifting the ashes of the 2024 election for clues as to why an inarticulate candidate who admitted she couldn’t think of a thing she’d do differently from the wildly unpopular Joe Biden went down in flames, Democrat officials determined…it was Israel’s fault! Democrats are quick learners — their support of the Jewish state is dwindling fast.
It isn’t just Democrats piling on. Criticism also came from far-right conspiracy theorists, too.
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We also heard criticism from the utterly worthless and anti-Israel U.N., with Secretary-General António Guterres condemning the U.S.-Israeli airstrikes on Iran and demanding immediate negotiations "to pull the region, and our world, back from the brink."
Guterres has overseen a U.N. with "a glaring anti-Israel bias, advancing biased and one-sided efforts to isolate and delegitimize the Jewish state," reports the pro-Jewish group AIPAC. A bias AIPAC can document and which, astonishingly, has "escalated dramatically since Hamas’ October 7 attack."
Spineless European leaders stood on the sidelines, initially distancing themselves from the U.S.-Israeli initiative. U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer at first declined to give the U.S. permission to use its air bases, thus forcing American jets to undertake a 20-plus hour flight to carry out their mission. He then relented, earning ridicule from all sides.
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Of course, witless students also weighed in, with Columbia University’s most renowned anti-Israel group, responsible for last year’s "encampment" built to protest the Gaza conflict, posting "death to America" in Persian after the U.S. and Israel killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. That prompted Sen. Tex Cruz, R-Texas, to demand that foreign students sending out such anti-American messages be "deported immediately." He’s right.
One student protester told an interviewer that the U.S. "should align with Iranian regime instead of Israel because Iran 'is not fascist.'"
Zohran Mamdani, the newly installed Muslim mayor of New York, harshly condemned President Trump’s war with Iran, saying, "Today’s military strikes on Iran — carried out by the United States and Israel — mark a catastrophic escalation in an illegal war of aggression." He also said, "Additionally, I want to speak directly to Iranian New Yorkers: you are part of the fabric of this city — you are our neighbors, small business owners, students, artists, workers and community leaders." The mayor assured them, "You will be safe here."
Mamdani misread the room, assuming that Iranians living in the U.S. would react as he had to the attack on the mullahs. Instead, joyful Iranians gathered in Times Square to celebrate the end of one of the most hated and savage regimes in history.
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They apparently felt perfectly safe, as indeed they were.
There are certainly valid reasons to fear a military confrontation with Iran. The country hosts a huge arsenal of ballistic missiles, it has a well-trained and now vengeful military, and it can disrupt the world’s oil supply by mining the Straits of Hormuz. Also, it is a large country of 90 million people; Iran’s citizens may hate the mullahs, but they have no weapons with which to bring down the theocracy.
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But Iran has brought nothing but bloodshed and destruction to Israel, the United States and the Middle East for decades. There could be no peace or progress in the region while Iran continues to fund its terror proxies and doggedly pursues long-range missiles and a nuclear bomb.
Democrats who mourn the scrapping of President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, protesting that the JCPOA was preventing the regime from acquiring a nuke, surely know better. The deal was seriously flawed, it was unverifiable and from day one the mullahs prevented U.N. inspectors from carrying out agreed-upon certification of the pact.
President Trump has ended the mullahs’ reign of terror and united the region in a manner no one could have imagined.
This is a righteous endeavor. Let us hope that on the other side, a free Iran will become a trusted ally.