Regime change in Iran isn't war. It's liberation.

The world became safer and more stable when Hitler was gone. So too it will be when Khamenei is given the same fate.

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei (photo: Khamenei.ir/Wikipedia)

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Can you imagine a world where the architects of genocide are allowed to continue untouched, still clutching power, still believing they were right?

That’s not an alternate history. That’s a warning.

Because in the wake of more than two weeks of protests within Iran, and the number of deaths already reportedly standing at over 1,000, that’s exactly what the world is flirting with. Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran, survives. His regime is still guarded. His propaganda machine still broadcasts. His Revolutionary Guards still march. His regime may be weakened, his proxies rattled, his nuclear program set back, but he remains untouched.

And that is a grave mistake.

In the 1930s, the world looked away from a rising menace. Then-British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain met with Adolf Hitler, smiled for the cameras, and returned home waving a piece of paper he claimed guaranteed “peace for our time.”

But Hitler’s goals were never peace; they were conquest, domination, and genocide. The signs were all there: Mein Kampf (Hitler’s autobiographical and political manifesto), the systematic discrimination against Jews and other minorities, the remilitarization of the Rhineland, the annexation of Austria. But leaders preferred delusion to confrontation.

Hitler was given time. And with that time, he built a death mega-machine.

Ali Khamenei has been given time, too. Over three decades of it. He has used it to build a rogue nuclear program, bankroll global terrorism, and export a fundamentalist ideology that fuels proxy wars from Beirut to Baghdad to Sana’a. His slogans — “Death to America!” and “Death to Israel!” — are not metaphors. They are mission statements.

For decades, the international community has treated the Iranian regime like a problem to be managed rather than a threat to be neutralized. But Iran under Khamenei hasn’t stayed in its box; it has habitually set the region on fire. Containment doesn’t work when a regime thrives on death.

Make no mistake: Khamenei is the Hitler of our generation. And just like Hitler, his greatest threat isn’t in the weapons he has, but in the ideology he commands. His regime, built on radical Shi’a messianism, believes in ushering in a global cataclysm to pave the way for divine salvation. You cannot deter a man who wants the world to burn.

Most certainly, there’s a rebuttal you can already hear: “You can’t compare Khamenei to Hitler. Hitler killed six million Jews. Khamenei hasn’t.”

Let’s be honest about why that is: It’s not because Khamenei didn’t want to, it’s because he couldn’t. Because this time, the Jews have F-35s. We have cyber units. We have missile defense systems, submarines, satellites, special forces, an extraordinary intelligence community, and nukes.

Hitler met Jews who were stateless and powerless. Khamenei met a Jewish state armed, defiant, and unwilling to die quietly. That is the only difference.

So, no, Khamenei hasn’t murdered six million Jews, but he chants for it. He funds it. He arms it. He dreams of it. He calls Israel a “cancer” that must be removed: “The Zionist regime is a cancerous tumor and it will undoubtedly be uprooted and destroyed,” he said in 2020.

Furthermore, he surrounds Israel with terrorist organizations in Lebanon, Syria, Gaza, the West Bank, Iraq, and Yemen — and arms them to the teeth, while instructing the “leaders” there to teach children that martyrdom is the highest virtue and that Israel must be wiped off the map. To add insult to injury, Iranian textbooks promote martyrdom and jihad from an early age, just like Hitler Youth trained boys to die for the Führer.

He commands the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a paramilitary empire that not only enforces brutal domestic repression but exports terror abroad. The Quds Force (part of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps) is essentially a global terrorist agency operating in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Gaza, and beyond. Like the SS, they are fanatically loyal to the Supreme Leader and operate above the law.

He conquers land across the Middle East to surround the Iranian regime’s two self-proclaimed enemies (Israel and Saudi Arabia), while developing terrorist “sleeper cells” in Europe, North America, and even Australia. Iran’s expansionism is slower and subtler than Hitler’s blitzkrieg, but just as deliberate, and far more global.

He executes political dissidents, jails journalists, censors the internet, and violently cracks down on women and student protesters. His regime has killed thousands of Iranians for daring to demand basic freedoms, just like Hitler’s regime did to Germans and minorities.

He radicalizes diaspora Muslim communities, funds mosques and centers in Europe and Latin America that promote Khomeinist ideology, and grooms terrorist cells abroad. His proxies don’t just fight in the Middle East; they plan attacks in Buenos Aires, Bulgaria, France, and beyond.

Many suspect that Khamenei (or at least his regime) was behind the Bondi Beach Chanukah massacre in Australia last month. According to a senior Israeli intelligence official, Israel’s foreign intelligence service provided Australian authorities with concrete warnings well before the Bondi Beach attack about Iranian-directed terror activity operating inside Australia and Iranian efforts to establish terror networks designed to target Jewish sites and communities.¹ We also know, definitively, that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps was responsible for at least two antisemitic arson attacks on Jewish sites in Australia last year, prompting Australia to expel Iran’s ambassador.

Khamenei’s regime has also been trying to build nuclear weapons for decades. This alone may make him worse than Hitler. The latter had to invade countries and build camps; Khamenei seeks a bomb to finish the job in seconds.

Of course, Khamenei calls the Holocaust a myth — and then threatens a second one in the next breath. Intent, preparation, and opportunity are precisely how you define the threat. Khamenei has the first two. The only thing stopping him is Israeli strength.

Worst of all, he has been Iran’s “supreme leader” since 1989. That’s over 35 years, and counting. He’s had 23 more years than Hitler to poison minds, build alliances, and reshape the region to fit his regime’s hegemonic ambitions.

And still, Khamenei survives and rules because the West whispers its usual fears: “Regime change is complicated.” “What comes next could be worse.” “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.” And thus we fall back on the old cliché: Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.

But would anyone today argue that the world was better off with Hitler in power? Would anyone claim we should have let him be, simply because removing him might have created chaos?

Of course not.

The world became safer and more stable when Hitler was gone. So too it will be when Khamenei is gone. The Iranian people are not our enemies; many have risked and continue to risk their lives protesting Khamenei’s savage rule, shouting “death to the dictator” in the streets. Ending Khamenei’s regime once and for all would be liberation, not invasion.

And make no mistake, this is not a war against Islam, even though Iran’s ruling system has tried to convince the world that it somehow represents the religion. In reality, it represents a political ideology that weaponizes religion to maintain power. Islam is practiced by nearly two billion people across dozens of cultures, schools of thought, and political systems. To suggest that a single clerical regime in Tehran speaks for all Muslims is a bad joke.

Iran does not hold a monopoly on Islam any more than ISIS does, any more than the Taliban does, and any more than Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Indonesia, Morocco, or Jordan do. In fact, many of Iran’s harshest critics are Muslims themselves, who see Khamenei’s regime as a perversion of faith rather than its fulfillment. The Iranian people have repeatedly made this distinction clear, chanting “death to the dictator,” burning images of clerics, and risking their lives not to abandon Islam, but to escape a system that uses it as a tool of repression.

Labeling opposition to Iran’s theocracy as “Islamophobia” is not a defense of Muslims; it is a shield for tyrants. It reduces a rich, diverse, global religion to the dictates of an unelected elite and treats dissenting Muslims as collateral damage in a cynical moral argument. Ending Khamenei’s rule would not be an attack on Islam; it would be a rejection of the idea that any religion should be held hostage by men who rule through fear, violence, and the promise of death rather than the dignity of life.

Plus, the Middle East deserves a shot at peace without the poisoned hand of the Ayatollah pulling every string. Imagine a Middle East where Lebanese children grow up without Hezbollah rockets above their heads, where Iraqi cities aren’t staging grounds for Shi’ite militias, where Yemen rebuilds without the growing grip of the Houthis, and where Gaza belongs to builders instead of terrorists. That world is only possible if the iron grip of Iran’s theocracy is broken. And it starts with ending the reign of Khamenei.

Instead, our reality looks like this: Israel is held to higher standards of warfare than Iran is held to basic standards of humanity. Khamenei funds child soldiers in Yemen, censors women to death, and promotes genocide — yet it is Israel that is lectured: “Diplomacy is the preferred path.”

Let’s be clear: There is a cost to restraint, and there is a cost to moral confusion. Allowing a genocidal theocracy to emerge from these protests still intact is not a gesture of maturity; it is an act of negligence.

The world already knows what happens when you let hatred fester in the halls of power. It doesn’t weaken; it metastasizes. We do not need more lessons from history. We need courage to apply the ones we already learned.

The 86-year-old Khamenei should not die of old age. He should not live to pass on power to another fanatic. He should not be allowed to rebuild, rearm, and reassert. Justice delayed is not justice; it is permission.

In 2025, Israel did what no one else dared to do. It acted preemptively, again, and reminded the world that Jewish safety is not up for debate. But that boldness must not be half-finished.

Giving Khamenei and his cronies another free pass would be like letting Hitler retreat to Berlin in 1944 with his army bruised, but his ideology intact. The civilized world cannot afford to leave this generation’s Hitler untouched.

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1. “Intelligence warned Australia of Iranian-linked terror activity months before Bondi attack, officials say.” Fox News.