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More than 50 years ago, my parents moved from Iran to New York hoping to raise their children in a country where freedom is taken for granted.
Like so many immigrants throughout American history, they sought the freedom to speak openly, to build a life, to raise a family without fear of the government.
I’m grateful they came when they did: Had they stayed in Iran, the regime that took power in 1979 would have made that life, my life, impossible.
For nearly half a century, the Islamic Republic has terrorized its own people.
Dissidents have been imprisoned.
Protesters have been beaten and killed.
Millions of Iranians have fled the country they once called home.
And the Iranian regime has not confined its violence to the Middle East.
New York has been touched by its terror tactics, from the 2022 stabbing of Salman Rushdie to the attempts to assassinate journalist Masih Alinejad in Brooklyn to the Iranian agent convicted just this month for his New York-based plot to murder President Donald Trump.
So on March 1, as news of Operation Epic Fury broke here in New York City, hundreds of Iranian Americans gathered in our city’s streets carrying the Lion and Sun flag and chanting for a free Iran.
All of them, Democrats and Republicans alike, cried, hugged and celebrated our nation’s attempt to finally put an end to the regime that forced their families to flee decades ago.
That’s why I’ve been so disappointed to see many Democratic officials, including Mayor Zohran Mamdani, react to the American and Israeli strikes by condemning the two countries trying to stop this terrorist regime — rather than the regime itself.
When leaders cast Iran’s leaders as victims or treat their actions as morally equivalent to the democracies confronting Tehran, they distort reality in ways that embolden those who excuse the regime’s brutality.
We saw this dynamic on display when protesters held a vigil mourning Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Washington Square Park.
Many of those celebrating the regime’s leaders seemed to have little understanding of Iran’s history, or the brutality of the government that has imprisoned and killed countless dissidents.
Their slogans did not speak for the vast majority of Iranians who actually lived under that repression and were forced to flee it.
There is room for serious conversations about presidential war powers, about the need to protect innocent Iranians and about how to do right by our men and women bravely serving in uniform.
It’s valid to protest that the American people deserve to hear a clear strategy for how this conflict will unfold.
But it’s striking how many of the same politicians now condemning the US and Israeli military actions remain silent when Iranian Americans ask them to stand with the Iranian people themselves.
When I worked at City Hall, I spoke regularly with representatives of the Iranian American community.
These same advocates have reached out to the Mamdani administration and to other local and state elected officials, asking them to support the tens of thousands of innocent Iranians beaten, imprisoned or killed at the orders of Khamenei in the last few months.
Sadly, they have been met with silence.
As a lifelong Democrat and New York City’s first deputy mayor of Iranian descent, I know this issue must not be about political party or about who happens to be president.
Iran’s government has spent decades imprisoning journalists, executing dissidents and funding violent proxy groups across the Middle East.
Millions of Iranians have risked their lives, and thousands have died, protesting that system.
When public figures like Mayor Mamdani speak about Iran, we hope for something simple: clarity about what the Iranian regime is, what it has done to its own people, and why so many immigrants came to this country to escape it.
This war is not theoretical, nor is it a morality play about the role of the West in the Middle East.
It is affecting millions of people and will shape lives in ways none of us can fully predict.
But we cannot kid ourselves, either.
The despotic regime that has ruled Iran for nearly 50 years is evil.
If it falls, the world should mourn the victims it left behind — not the tyrants who ruled over them.
Fabien Levy served as New York City’s deputy mayor for communications and in the Obama administration’s Department of Health and Human Services.