On Thursday the U.S. Treasury Department announced sanctions against six companies for their support of a petrochemical firm that does business with the Islamic Republic of Iran. Based in China, Iran and the United Arab Emirates, the firms were sanctioned for doing business with Triliance Petrochemical Co. Ltd., a Hong Kong-based broker that has paid millions of dollars for Iranian petrochemicals, crude oil and petroleum products — Triliance has been targted by the Treasury Department since January.

“The Iranian regime uses revenue from petrochemical sales to continue its financing of terrorism and destabilizing foreign agenda,” said Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. “The Trump administration remains committed to targeting those contributing to Iran’s attempts to evade U.S. sanctions by facilitating the illicit sale of Iranian petroleum products around the world.” 

Such sanctions have been part of President Donald Trump’s “non-belligerent” crusade to halt the Islamic Republic of Iran’s jihad, especially after he withdrew the U.S. from the JCPOA (Iran nuclear deal) two years ago. Unfortunately, Trump has been the only leader of the “free world” to recognize Iran’s global threat.

As the preamble of Iran’s constitution reads:

[T]he Army of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps are to be organized in conformity with this goal, and they will be responsible…for fulfilling the ideological mission of jihad in Allah’s way; that is, extending the sovereignty of Allah’s law throughout the world (this is in accordance with the Quranic verse: “Prepare against them whatever force you are able to muster, and strings of horses, striking fear into the enemy of Allah and your enemy, and others besides them.”

This is why Iran, as a state, sponsors terrorism. Yet unlike the Trump administration, it appears that the rest of the “free world” has turned a blind eye to the mullahs’ hawkish acts. In those countries’ collective failure to hold Iran responsible for its international and domestic crimes — naively holding that the regime has good intentions — they have only empowered Iran to continue its aggression, simultaneously becoming complicit partners to their atrocities.

Dr. Majid Rafizadeh, president of the American Council on the Middle East, explains those who  — most member states of the United Nations, the European Union and U.S. lawmakers (predominantly of Democrat Party) — advocate pursuing a policy of appeasement toward the Iranian regime as a means of getting Tehran to soften its bellicose policies willingly fail to comprehend is that the more leeway it gets from the international community, the more belligerent and emboldened it will become. 

Just one day, for example, after the UN Security Council voted in favor of lifting the arms embargo on Iran, the regime unveiled a ballistic missile that reportedly can reach the U.S. homeland. As per the headline of a report by Iran’s state-controlled Afkar News read: “American Soil Is Now Within the Range of Iranian Bombs.” It braged about the damage that the Iranian regime could inflict on the US:

“By sending a military satellite into space, Iran now has shown that it can target all American territory; the Iranian parliament had previously warned [the U.S.] that an electromagnetic nuclear attack on the United States would likely kill 90 percent of Americans.”

The report also threatened the EU, which voted in favor of lifting the arms embargo against Iran:

“The same type of ballistic missile technology used to launch the satellite could carry nuclear, chemical or even biological weapons to wipe Israel off the map, hit U.S. bases and allies in the region and US facilities, and target NATO even in the far west of Europe.”

Aside the fact that Iran since May 2019 has been violating its commitments under the JCPOA by amassing more enriched uranium at higher levels and spinning more centrifuges, it has made the Middle East region more hostile by funding Hamas and Hezbollah — two organizations classified by the U.S. as terrorist groups. The regime also continues to sponsor Shi’ite militias in Iraq using them to exert its hegemony over its neighbor.

Another aspect of Tehran’s terror policy is its domestic repression and massacres like the events of 1988, in which the regime executed more than 30,000 political prisoners in a short time.

This past Friday the Organization of Iranian American Communities (OIAC) held a photo exhibition and rally on the U.S. capital Hill grounds to expose the Iranian regime’s four decades of systematic human rights violations. Of specific acknowledgement were the aforementioned 1988 massacres, the November 2019 killing of 1,500 protesters and the assassination of political dissidents abroad. The OIAC also appealed to the international community to bring justice and to verdict the regime.

According to Human Rights Watch, after the JCPOA and after sanctions were lifted, Iran escalated the imprisonment and executions of human rights and political activists. The regime became “the top executioner of women and holds the record on per capita executions in the world,” and, according to Amnesty International, the world’s leading executioner of juveniles — even the despotic government in Saudi Arabia stopped putting minors to death.

Despite all this, the Trump administration has thus far been the only Western government to take on the theocratic body politic in Iran — a main reason why U.S. sanctions have not been able to effect a change in the country’s political climate. The extreme reluctance of nations who can help brig about a change for the better in Iran only empowers the mullahs to pursue their malign and devious jihad. And they should be ashamed of themselves for this.

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Mario Alexis Portella is a priest of the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore and Chancellor of the Archdiocese of Florence, Italy. He has a doctorate in canon law and civil law from the Pontifical Lateran University in Rome; he also holds a M. A. in Medieval History from Fordham University, as well as a B.A. in Government & Politics from St. John’s University. He is also author of Islam: Religion of Peace? – The Violation of Natural Rights and Western Cover-Up.

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