In the summer of 2019, two FBI agents showed up at Roya Hakakian’s door to inform her that she was likely the target of a plot by the Islamic Republic’s operatives in the U.S. Like Masih Alinejad, whom the ayatollahs’ thugs had recently been planning to kidnap from her Brooklyn home, Hakakian is an Iranian-born American citizen who writes frequently of the clerical regime’s abuses. Hakakian was initially skeptical, but knew all to well that Tehran has few qualms about punishing its critics abroad:

From its inception, the ayatollahs’ regime murdered whomever it considered to be its enemy, often gaining access through a target’s own confidants. In 1991, the former prime minister, Shapour Bakhtiar, who had fled Iran days before the triumph of the Islamic revolution and whose son—a police intelligence officer in France—kept him under tight security, was stabbed to death in his own home in Paris by an assassin who had had the help of Bakhtiar’s most trusted assistant. Since then, the regime has only grown bolder and bloodier.

Back in 1993, Iran’s former ambassador to the United Nations, Mansour Farhang, wrote an op-ed for the New York Times titled “Iran Wants to Assassinate Me. Why?” Then, too, it was the FBI that had informed him of a regime plot: they had discovered his name on a hit list of some 500 individuals Iran planned to liquidate. . . . Ultimately, he concluded that the regime simply wished to prove that it had the power to destroy its critics, no matter how far they had tried to put themselves out of reach.

International borders are no obstacle to Iran’s henchmen. Hundreds of opponents have been murdered on foreign soil since 1979, starting in Bethesda, Maryland, in 1980. . . Most of these dissidents died in near-obscurity, their political murders barely publicized at all. . . . The European Union, especially, turned a blind eye, perhaps because a handful of dead refugees were not worth jeopardizing international trade relations.

The rise to power of the Taliban in Afghanistan once again is expected to bolster other terrorist groups in the region. In retrospect, the spying, assassination, and terrorism operations that Iran carried out in the West for the first fifteen years after the establishment of the Islamic Republic may have similarly inspired other militant groups that were to launch their assaults on the continent in the 2000s.

In October, a young Mauritanian national murdered an Orthodox Jewish man on his way to synagogue in Chicago. This alone should be sufficient sign of the rising dangers of anti-Semitism. Nathan Diament explains how the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act (AAA) can, if passed, make American Jews safer:

We were off to a promising start when the AAA sailed through the House of Representatives in the spring by a generous vote of 320 to 91, and 30 senators from both sides of the aisle jumped to sponsor the Senate version. Then the bill ground to a halt.

Fearful of antagonizing their left-wing activist base and putting vulnerable senators on the record, especially right before the November election, Democrats delayed bringing the AAA to the Senate floor for a vote. Now, the election is over, but the political games continue.

You can’t combat anti-Semitism if you can’t—or won’t—define it. Modern anti-Semites hide their hate behind virulent anti-Zionism. . . . The Anti-Semitism Awareness Act targets this loophole by codifying that the Department of Education must use the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of anti-Semitism in its application of Title VI.