Exiled Iranian warns regime was 'aggressively patient threat waiting to pounce' on America

Anti-war activists gathered in cities across the U.S. to condemn military strikes against the Iranian regime. One Iranian exile, however, says the protesters have it wrong and is warning Americans not to fall for what she calls a dangerous narrative.

The U.S. and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury after nuclear negotiations with Tehran failed, which President Donald Trump cited as justification for the military campaign. While critics described the mission as a "war of choice," Iranian American scholar Nazee Moinian argued the strikes constituted an act of self-defense.

"I want the American people to understand that if it was not an imminent threat, it was a solidly, aggressively patient threat waiting to pounce at any moment to do great damage to American interests," Moinian said of Iran on "The Fox News Rundown" podcast.

In the hours after the first strikes on Iran, demonstrations were held across the country in places like Times Square and outside the White House to protest the military action.

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Moinian, an associate fellow at the Middle East Institute who left Iran following the 1979 Islamic Revolution, pushed back against media outlets portraying the conflict as "another endless war."

"They framed that as a war of choice. It is a war choice, but whose choice? It's not our choice. Iran was given so many exit ramps," Moinian told Fox News Radio's Tonya J. Powers on Friday.

She pointed to major protest movements in 1999, 2009 and 2022, during which Iranian authorities used force to suppress demonstrators.

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"They took to the street in 1999. It was a student riot. They were shot in [the] thousands. And some of the bodies never were recovered," Moinian said.

"If they were recovered, the Islamic regime would ask the parents of the students for the cost of the bullets that they killed their children with. That's how heinous and brutal that regime was in 1999," she added.

Moinian warned that the threat of Iran isn't just overseas. With "porous" borders and the reach of cyberspace, she said the regime's ideology already stretches into America.

"We may not have liked to go to war with them, but they were very willing and gradually very capable to do great damage to us," she said, adding, "This is a justified war to safeguard the American people."

During the strikes, Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed, along with several other key leaders. Iranian officials named his son, Mojtaba Khamenei, as the next supreme leader.

Trump signaled disappointment with Mojtaba Khamenei's appointment, telling Fox News chief foreign correspondent Trey Yingst, "I don’t believe he can live in peace."