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To Combat Iran’s Assassination Attempts, the US Must Project Strength
Iranians take to the streets during nationwide rallies on Nov. 4, 2025, marking the anniversary of the 1979 takeover of the US embassy by waving flags and chanting “death to America” and “death to Israel.” Photo: Screenshot
“It is highly relevant that this was a cross-border crime,” declared US Federal judge Colleen McMahon, regarding an Iranian assassination attempt on US soil.
She added, “It is highly relevant that foreign citizens who were agents of a foreign power conspired to commit, and tried to commit, and almost succeeded in committing, a murder inside the United States — where, presumably, an American citizen like Ms. Alinejad should be safe in her own home.”
The context: In 2022, an assassin dispatched by agents of Tehran stepped onto the Brooklyn porch of Iranian American dissident Masih Alinejad.
Fortunately, the attempted murderer — Khalid Mehdiyev — failed to achieve his goal. Alinejad was on a Zoom call at the time, and didn’t answer the door.
After his arrest, Mehdiyev pled guilty to attempted murder, and awaits sentencing. In late October, the two agents who hired him, Rafat Amirov and Polad Omarov, faced justice, receiving 25-year prison terms at McMahon’s orders.
The judge’s statement reflects her understanding of the longstanding ambitions of the Islamic Republic of Iran — and it points to the vulnerability of the United States to attacks on its soil.
In fact, according to the US State Department, Tehran has killed hundreds of dissidents in more than 40 countries since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The Trump administration should not forget that the Iranian threat to the US homeland remains real and ongoing — and that a posture of strength constitutes the best way to combat it.
Iran’s malignant ambitions have always transcended its borders, reflecting the regime’s authoritarian and revolutionary creed.
Tehran seeks not only regional hegemony, but also global leadership rooted in its radical, pan-Islamist interpretation of Shiite Islam. Its assassination attempts have spanned the entire globe, including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Pakistan, Turkey, Cyprus, Iraq, India, Azerbaijan, France, Austria, Germany, Iraq, Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, Thailand, and the Philippines, among others.
“The Islamic Revolution does not have any borders,” said Ahmad Qolampour, a senior official of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which has committed the bulk of the assassinations, in 2016. The paramilitary force, he added, “does not have the word ‘Iran’ in its title. This means that it seeks to defend the Islamic Revolution and its achievements without regard to particular borders.”
Qolampour understood his marching orders. As the Islamic Republic’s constitution states, the IRGC seeks to fulfill “the ideological mission of jihad in God’s way; that is, extending the sovereignty of God’s law throughout the world.” Or, as the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Islamic Republic’s first supreme leader, said, “Islam is a sacred trust from God to ourselves and the Iranian nation must grow in power and resolution until it has vouchsafed Islam to the entire world.”
How does Iran choose its targets? The regime’s decisions often stem from its perception of the value and prominence of the potential victim, frequently selecting well-known dissidents — like Alinejad — whose death could send a deterrent message to like-minded individuals.
At the same time, in the absence of a clear organizing calculus, Tehran also attacks obscure or little-known dissidents — sending a message that nobody is impervious to the long arm of the Islamic Republic. In so doing, Iran seeks to sap the resolve of all dissidents, both at home and abroad, who continue resisting the regime.
Perhaps more importantly, Tehran’s decisions also emerge from its conception of an assassination’s likely political fallout. If the target appears unwilling or unable to exact retribution, or if Tehran judges that a government’s reprisals would not be painful, prospects for assassinations rise. All too often, particularly in Europe, governments have chosen to offer token condemnations of Iranian assassinations without taking significant countermeasures, thereby emboldening Tehran.
Thus, Iran has rarely targeted the United States. After all, America maintains a powerful security infrastructure geared toward discovering and foiling potential plots and thwarting other Iranian illicit activities, such as sanctions-busting and export control violations.
This reality, along with Iran’s fear of US retaliation, likely explains why Tehran has carried out only two successful assassinations in America prior to its attempted murder of Alinejad — and those were way back in 1980 and 1992. An additional foiled attempt occurred somewhat more recently: In 2011, America charged two agents of Tehran with plotting to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States at a restaurant in Washington DC.
And the 2022 assassination attempt against Alinejad was hardly the first or last time that Iran targeted her. In 2021, for example, the United States unsealed an indictment alleging a plot by Iranian intelligence officials, beginning in at least June 2020, to kidnap the activist and take her back to Iran. And in November 2024, the US Department of Justice announced another murder-for-hire plot and related charges against three men engaged in an IRGC-directed plot to kill Alinejad.
What emboldened Tehran to target Alinejad after years of reluctance to traverse US soil? The answer remains unclear. But the timing may be instructive.
At the start of the first plot, a US election was on the horizon, with the possibility that President Donald Trump would soon leave office. And during the second and third plots, President Joe Biden had been advancing an extraordinarily conciliatory policy toward Iran.
In all three cases, Iran’s decisions to act when it did may have stemmed from its perception that Washington lacked the will to retaliate. In particular, Trump’s preoccupation with remaining in office potentially led Tehran to believe, rightly or wrongly, that he sought no new conflict with Iran. Biden, for his part, sedulously sought the revival of the 2015 nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which Trump had abandoned in 2018. To achieve this goal, Biden lifted key sanctions on Iran, refused to enforce many sanctions still on the books, and failed to take meaningful action against Tehran’s aggression in the Middle East.
In response, the Islamist regime likely concluded that it had golden opportunities.
Biden’s efforts to resuscitate the JCPOA failed. And to its great credit, the Trump administration rendered the accord largely irrelevant when it bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities in June, restoring the posture of US strength that Biden had dismantled. The agreement became effectively dead when Trump triggered the reimposition of United Nations sanctions on Iran in September (though as of right now, it’s unclear how sanctions against Iran’s nuclear program will play out).
But the case of Alinejad offers a lesson: When Washington lowers its guard against Iran, the regime feels emboldened to strike, harnessing its founding impulses to eliminate those who stand in the way of its violent ideological agenda — no matter where they may reside.
Tzvi Kahn is a research fellow and senior editor at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Follow him on X @TzviKahn.
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Over 300 rabbis and Jewish leaders call for removal of UN official who denied Oct. 7 rapes
(JTA) — Over 300 Jewish leaders, including women’s rights advocates and rabbis, urged the United Nations on Tuesday to remove Reem Alsalem, the U.N. rapporteur on violence against women and girls, for denying that rape occurred during Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
The letter, which was addressed to U.N. secretary-general Antonio Guterres, came two weeks after Alsalem claimed in a post on X that “No independent investigation found that rape took place on the 7th of October.”
In the letter, its signatories express their “horror and outrage” at Alsalem’s rhetoric, and cite two U.N. reports from March 2024 and July 2025 that concluded that there was “reasonable grounds” to believe that sexual violence had taken place during the attacks “in multiple locations, including rape and gang rape.”
The petition was organized by Amy Elman, a professor at Kalamazoo College who has authored books on antisemitism and state responses to sexual violence, and Rafael Medoff, the director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies. It was shared with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency soon after being sent to Guterres.
“The targeted sexual abuse of Israelis by Hamas and its supporters is one weapon in the arsenal of those seeking Israel’s obliteration,” Elman said in a statement. “It’s outrageous that deniers such as Reem Alsalem are aiding and abetting the sexual violence by claiming it never happened. These apologists should be ashamed of themselves.”
The letter’s signatories include Deborah Lipstadt, the former antisemitism envoy; Judith Rosenbaum, the head of the Jewish Women’s Archives; Rabbi Irving Greenberg, the former chairman of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum; Rabbi Deborah Waxman, the president of Reconstructing Judaism; and Hebrew College president Rabbi Sharon Cohen Anisfeld.
Dispute over whether sexual violence took place as Hamas murdered about 1,200 people in Israel on Oct. 7 has solidified as a point of sustained interest for some of Israel’s staunchest critics who allege that Israel and its supporters are using claims of rape as propaganda. Even the United Nations, frequently maligned by Israel and its supporters over its record toward Israel, has drawn allegations of complicity in the propaganda campaign from pro-Palestinian voices — though the U.N. rapporteur on Palestinian rights, Francesca Albanese, who has faced her own calls for dismissal from the Trump administration, has also publicly questioned the claims.
In addition to the U.N. reports, independent reporting and research by an Israeli nonprofit have validated claims of sexual violence on Oct. 7.
In the X exchange that spurred the new letter, Alsalem was arguing with another user about the Israeli government’s prosecution of soldiers accused of abusing a Palestinian detainee.
A day later, Alsalem posted a link to a Substack podcast from October where she criticized the credibility of the March 2024 U.N. report and said she had sought contact with the Israeli government to confirm its findings but had not received a response.
“The media, certain organizations and the world basically fell into the trap that Israel set up, which is to project that there was barbaric sexual violence being committed by these barbarian Palestinian men, and it was spun around and disseminated and very much used in order to then justify the genocide,” said Alsalem on the podcast.
Medoff said in a statement that Alsalem’s continued employment reflected inconsistent standards when it comes to Israel and antisemitism.
“If a UN official made such a remark concerning rape victims from any other ethnic or religious group, there would be an international uproar,” he said. “The same standard should apply to Israeli Jewish women who were sexually assaulted by Hamas terrorists.”
The post Over 300 rabbis and Jewish leaders call for removal of UN official who denied Oct. 7 rapes appeared first on The Forward.
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Rome synagogue memorial for 2-year-old killed in 1982 Palestinian terror attack vandalized
(JTA) — A synagogue in Rome and a memorial for a 2-year-old boy killed in a 1982 attack by Palestinian terrorists on the city’s Great Synagogue were vandalized on Monday by unknown individuals.
The plaque dedicated to Stefano Gaj Taché, who was killed in the attack that also left 37 injured, is located on the Monteverde synagogue, also known as the Beth Michael Synagogue, in Rome.
The unknown vandals spray painted black on the memorial, and also wrote “Free Palestine” and “Monteverde anti-Zionist and anti-fascist” on the facade of the synagogue, according to the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera.
The vandalism was condemned by Victor Fadlun, the president of the Jewish Community of Rome, who said in a post on Instagram that the incident came amid a “a climate of intimidation” where antisemitism has “become a tool of political protest.”
“We place our trust in the police and call for the government’s strong intervention to halt this spiral of hatred,” Fadlun continued.
The incident comes amid a recent series of antisemitic vandalism in Rome, an epicenter of pro-Palestinian activism that has continued to see large demonstrations even after the ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.
In October, the words “Dirty Jews, may you all burn” were spray-painted on the shutters of a kosher bakery, and in June a sign at another local synagogue was defaced with the words “Sieg Heil” and ”Juden Raus.”
“This is an act that outrages the Jewish community and deeply wounds it, because the plaque is dedicated to a child murdered by Palestinian terrorism and because this is a meeting place where young people and children meet, where they pray and create a sense of community,” Fadlun told Corriere della Sera. “Attacking the synagogue in this way means disavowing and violating the right of Jews to be able to come together and lead a normal life.”
In a subsequent post on Instagram, Fadlun said Italian President Sergio Mattarella had spoken to him over the phone to express his “solidarity” in relation to the synagogue vandalism.
Antonio Tajani, the Italian minister of foreign affairs, also condemned the vandalism in a post on X, adding that he has called Fadlun as well.
The European Jewish Congress also condemned the vandalism in a post on X. “This is not ‘anti-Zionism.’ It is antisemitism: the targeting of Jewish memory, Jewish mourning and Jewish history,” the group said. “Stefano’s name is a symbol of one of Italy’s darkest terror attacks. His memory should be protected, not desecrated. We stand in solidarity with the Jewish community of Italy and call on authorities to investigate this hate crime and ensure that such acts are treated with the seriousness they deserve.”
The post Rome synagogue memorial for 2-year-old killed in 1982 Palestinian terror attack vandalized appeared first on The Forward.
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Danny Wolf will see you now
When the Brooklyn Nets drafted Danny Wolf this summer out of the University of Michigan, scouts said they were getting a versatile big man who could get buckets, create for his teammates and rebound.
But the last few days of NBA action have shown the Jewish seven-footer picking up a surprising new habit: putting his opponents on posters.
After scuffling through the first two months of the season with a bum ankle, Wolf announced his arrival Saturday with a thundering jam on the Milwaukee Bucks’ Kyle Kuzma, for two of the forward’s career-best 22 points.
He claimed his next victim, in a 10-point, 7-rebound outing two days later, driving from the top of the arc before leaping off his left foot and dropping the hammer on the Charlotte Hornets’ Miles Bridges:
“That may get two howls!” Nets play-by-play announcer Ryan Ruocco cried.
Early returns have been limited since the Brooklyn Nets grabbed Israeli point guard Ben Saraf and Wolf with the 26th and 27th picks this summer. The learning curve for young floor generals is notoriously steep, and Saraf — who wears the number 77 to represent the Hebrew word mazal, meaning good fortune — has struggled to stay in the playing rotation.
But Wolf, an American-Israeli who was bar mitzvahed in Israel, is finding his footing — at least when he’s not taking off for a dunk. He dropped in five high-arcing three pointers against the Bucks, eliciting excited howls from Nets color commentator Sarah Kustok; before the Charlotte game, he apparently told teammates he was going to posterize somebody.
“I was kinda saying that as a joke,” he said, “but looking at it as an opportunity, and just trying to attack the rim, I did it, with rewards.”
“He manifested it,” said teammate Nic Claxton.
Let’s enjoy one more picture of Claxton and Wolf:
And here’s a Danny Wolf meme for good measure, courtesy of the Nets social media.
The post Danny Wolf will see you now appeared first on The Forward.