Last week, a member of the UK parliament named Mike Freer announced that he is not seeking reelection and plans to withdraw from politics altogether. The reason? Repeated threats and harassment due to his support for Israel, and an attempt to burn down his office on Christmas eve. Douglas Murray comments:

It strikes me that had it been far-right extremists who had been targeting Freer, MPs might have had something to say. They might even—rightly—have said that this country should do everything it can to stop far-right extremists attacking MPs. But this was different. The hatred comes from a different direction, so they were silent. Freer himself gave an interview last week in which even he tried to get around the truth of his own situation. He refused to identify the ideology of the people who have been targeting him.

I remember a different Britain. A Britain where Margaret Thatcher stood in Brighton after an attempt on her life and told the world that the men of violence must not be allowed to win. But we don’t live in that society anymore. We have decided that the men of violence are winning, and that we must as a result all just keep our heads down.

Between the explosion of thousands of Hizballah pagers on September 17 and now, Iran’s geopolitical clout has shrunk dramatically: Hizballah, Iran’s most important striking force, has retreated to lick its wounds; Iranian influence in Syria has collapsed; Iran’s attempts to attack Israel via Gaza have proved self-defeating; its missile and drone arsenal have proved impotent; and its territorial defenses have proved useless in the face of Israeli airpower. Edward Luttwak considers what might happen next:

The myth of Iranian power was ironically propagated by the United States itself. Right at the start of his first term, in January 2009, Barack Obama was terrified that he would be maneuvered into fighting a war against Iran. . . . Obama started his tenure by apologizing for America’s erstwhile support for the shah. And beyond showing contrition for the past, the then-president also set a new rule, one that lasted all the way to October 2024: Iran may attack anyone, but none may attack Iran.

[Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s] variegated fighters, in light trucks and jeeps, could have been stopped by a few hundred well-trained soldiers. But neither Hizballah nor Iran’s own Revolutionary Guards could react. Hizballah no longer has any large units capable of crossing the border to fight rebels in Syria, as they had done so many times before. As for the Revolutionary Guards, they were commandeering civilian airliners to fly troops into Damascus airport to support Assad. But then Israel made clear that it would not allow Iran’s troops so close to its border, and Iran no longer had credible counter-threats.

Now Iran’s population is discovering that it has spent decades in poverty to pay for the massive build-up of the Revolutionary Guards and all their militias. And for what? They have elaborate bases and showy headquarters, but their expensive ballistic missiles can only be used against defenseless Arabs, not Israel with its Arrow interceptors. As for Hizballah, clearly it cannot even defend itself, let alone Iran’s remaining allies in the region. Perhaps, in short, the dictatorship will finally be challenged in the streets of Iran’s cities, at scale and in earnest.