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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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He may have been the world’s most famous mime, but in this play, he won’t shut up
There is a kind of sublime poetry in Marcel Marceau’s first act.
As a young man in occupied France, Marceau (then Mangel) forged identity papers and shepherded dozens of Jewish children across the Alps to Switzerland. In scenarios where staying quiet was essential for survival, Marceau soothed his charges into silence with his own.
In Marcel on the Train, Ethan Slater and Marshall Pailet’s play of Marceau’s pre-Bip life, the world’s most famous mime is anything but silent.
The action of the play, which bounces through time back to Marcel’s father’s butcher shop and forward to a P.O.W. camp in Vietnam (don’t ask), unfolds over the course of a train ride. Slater’s Marceau is chaperoning four 12-year-old orphans, posing as boy scouts going on a hike.
The kids — played by adults — are a rambunctious lot. Marceau tries to put them at ease juggling invisible swords, performing Buster Keaton-esque pratfalls and exhausting his arsenal of Jewish jokes that circle stereotypes of Jewish mothers or, in one case, a certain mercenary business sense.
Pailet and Slater’s script toggles uncomfortably between poignancy and one-liners with a trickle of bathroom humor (the phrase “pee bucket” recurs more often than you would think.)
The terror of Marceau’s most melancholy escortee, Berthe (Tedra Millan) is undercut somewhat by her early, anachronistic-feeling declaration, “Wow, we’re so fucked.” The bumptious Henri (Alex Wyse) would seem to be probing a troubled relationship with Jewishness and passing, but does that discussion a disservice when he mentions how it wouldn’t be the biggest deal if he “sieged a little heil.” Adolphe (Max Gordon Moore) is described as “an exercise in righteousness” in the script’s character breakdown. Sure, let’s go with that.
The presence of a mute child, Etiennette (Maddie Corman), is tropey and obvious. It doesn’t suggest that she inspired him to abandon speaking in his performances, but it doesn’t dismiss that possibility either.
But the chattiness and contrived functions of the fictive children are made more disappointing by the imaginative staging maneuvering around the shtick. Slater, best known for his role in the Wicked films and as Spongebob in the titular Broadway musical, is a gifted physical performer.
When things quiet down, Pailet’s direction, and the spare set by scenic designer Scott Davis, create meadows of butterflies. Chalk allows Marceau to achieve a kind of practical magic when he writes on the fourth wall. One of the greatest tricks up the show’s sleeve is Aaron Serotsky who plays everyone from Marceau’s father and his cousin Georges to that familiar form of Nazi who takes his torturous time in sniffing out Jews.
Surely the play means to contrast silence and sound (sound design is by Jill BC Du Boff), but I couldn’t help but wonder what this might have looked like as a pantomime.
While the story has been told before, perhaps most notably in the 2020 film Resistance with Jesse Eisenberg, Slater and Pailet were right to realize its inherent stage potential. It’s realized to a point, though their approach at times leans into broad comedy that misunderstands the sensibilities of its subject.
Like Slater, who learned of the mime’s story just a few years ago, Marceau was an early acolyte of Keaton and Chaplin. But by most accounts he cut a more controlled figure — that of a budding artist, not a kid workshopping Borscht Belt bits on preteens.
The show ends with a bittersweet montage of Bip capturing butterflies (not jellyfish — you will probably not be reminded of Mr. Squarepants). It means to frame Marceau’s established style as a maturation that nonetheless retains a kind of innocence, stamped by the kids he rescued.
“You’ll live,” Berthe tells him in a moment of uncertainty. “But I don’t think you’ll grow up.”
In Marceau there was, of course, a kind of Peter Pan. But there’s a difference between being childlike and being sophomoric.
Marcel on the Train is playing through March 26 at Classic Stage Company in New York. Tickets and more information can be found here.
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US soldier who protected Jews in POW camp during WWII to be awarded Medal of Honor
(JTA) — An American soldier who is credited with saving the lives of 200 Jewish comrades in a prisoner of war camp in Germany during World War II will receive the U.S. military’s highest decoration, the Medal of Honor.
The award to Roddie Edmonds, who died in 1985, was announced last week. It comes more than a decade after Israel’s Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem, recognized him as a “Righteous Among the Nations” for his bravery and six years after President Donald Trump recounted his heroism during a Veterans Day parade.
Edmonds, a sergeant from Knoxville, Tennessee, was the highest-ranking soldier among a group taken prisoner during the Battle of the Bulge in January 2045 when the Nazis asked him to identify the Jews in the group. Understanding that anyone he identified would likely be killed, Edmonds made the decision to have all of the soldiers present themselves as Jews.
When a Nazi challenged him, he famously proclaimed: “We are all Jews here!”
The show of solidarity came to light only after Edmonds’ death, when a Jewish man who had been among the soldiers at the camp shared his recollection with the New York Times as part of an unrelated 2008 story about his decision to sell a New York City townhouse to Richard Nixon when Nixon was having trouble buying an apartment following his resignation as president.
When they found the article several years later, it was the first that Edmonds’ family, including his pastor son Christ Edmonds and his granddaughters, had heard about the incident. Soon they were traveling to Washington, D.C., and Israel for ceremonies honoring Edmonds, one of only five Americans to be credited as Righteous Among the Nations, an honor bestowed by Israel on non-Jews who aided Jews during the Holocaust.
As the family campaigned for a Medal of Honor, Edmonds was also the recipient of bipartisan praise from two American presidents.
“I cannot imagine a greater expression of Christianity than to say, I, too, am a Jew,” President Barack Obama said during remarks at the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., on International Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2016.
Three years later, President Donald Trump recounted the story at the New York City Veterans Day Parade. “That’s something,” he said. “Master Sergeant Edmonds saved 200 Jewish-Americans — soldiers that day.”
Last week, Trump called Chris Edmonds to invite him to the White House to receive the Medal of Honor on his father’s behalf, Chris Edmonds told local news outlets. The Medal of Honor ceremony is scheduled for March 2.
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Jewish hockey star Jack Hughes’ overtime goal propels US to historic gold medal in Olympic hockey
(JTA) — Jewish hockey star Jack Hughes scored the game-winning goal Sunday to clinch a gold medal for the U.S. men’s hockey team, its first since 1980.
The New Jersey Devils star center, who had scored twice in Team USA’s semifinal win, sent the puck between the legs of Canadian goaltender Jordan Binnington 1:41 into overtime to give the American team a 2-1 win.
“This is all about our country right now. I love the USA,” Hughes told NBC. “I love my teammates.”
The win broke a 46-year Olympic drought for Team USA, which had not taken gold since the famous “Miracle on Ice” team that upset the Soviet Union on its way to gold in 1980. The United States also won in 1960.
“He’s a freaking gamer,” Quinn Hughes, Jack’s older brother and U.S. teammate said, according to The Athletic. “He’s always been a gamer. Just mentally tough, been through a lot, loves the game. American hero.”
Quinn Hughes is a defender for the Minnesota Wild and a former captain of the Vancouver Canucks who won the NHL’s top defenseman award in 2024. He was also named the best defender in the Olympic tournament by the International Ice Hockey Federation after scoring an overtime goal to send the U.S. team to the semifinals.
The third Jewish member of the U.S. team, Boston Bruins goaltender Jeremy Swayman, won the one game he played, a Feb. 14 preliminary-round victory over Denmark.
The Hughes family — rounded out by youngest brother Luke, who also plays for the Devils — has long been lauded as a Jewish hockey dynasty. They are the first American family to have three siblings picked in the first round of the NHL draft, and Jack was the first Jewish player to go No. 1 overall. They are also the first trio of Jewish brothers to play in the same NHL game and the first brothers to earn cover honors for EA Sports’ popular hockey video game.
Jack, who had a bar mitzvah, has said his family celebrated Passover when he was growing up. Their mother, Ellen Weinberg-Hughes, who is Jewish, represented the U.S. women’s hockey team at the 1992 Women’s World Championships and was on the coaching staff of the gold-medal-winning women’s team in Milan. Weinberg-Hughes is also a member of the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame.
Hughes’ golden goal ushered in a burst of Jewish pride on social media, with one user calling it “the greatest Jewish sports moment of all time.” The Hockey News tweeted that Hughes was “the first player in hockey history to have a Bar Mitzvah and a Golden Goal! Pretty cool!”
Jewish groups and leaders also jumped on the praise train. “Special shout out to @jhugh86 on scoring the game-winning goal!” tweeted Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League. “Beyond his incredible skill on the ice, Jack makes history as a proud representative of the American Jewish community, reminding us that the Jewish people are interwoven into America in her 250th year! Mazel Tov, Jack!”
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