OPINION:
When the nation’s negotiators shake on a deal at the bargaining table, the result ought to be peace and good feeling. But not when one of the parties agreeing to peace in our time is the Islamic Republic of Iran. Once it signed its long-sought nuclear deal with the United States and its global partners, the mullahs went home to search for more rope. Flush with success, they’re redoubling their devotion to terrorizing their own people and threatening others near and far. The hangman’s job has never been more secure.
A United Nations special investigator for human rights in Iran reports that the Islamic regime has accelerated the rate of executions and Iran is on track to hang a thousand of its own by the end of this year. At last count, 694 persons have paid with their lives at the end of a rope. That’s close to the number for 2014, when 753 persons died on the gallows, and that includes 10 women and even a child. The quality of Islamic mercy is not strained, because no one can find a strainer.
The mullahs appear to be dispensing injustice in an alternate universe. Both Democrats and Republicans in the United States are looking to find ways to reform the criminal-justice system, relaxing certain punishments for nonviolent crimes, and the federal government prepares early release for 6,000 prisoners convicted for drug-related offenses. But there are no reforms in Iran, where even advocating such reforms is worth a flogging, if not a hanging. The mullahs give no quarter for anyone guilty of a puff on an illegal substance.
Sixty-nine percent of this year’s hangings are punishment for drug-related offenses, and Iranian authorities confirm that 80 percent of inmates still awaiting an appointment with the noose were convicted of drug crimes. Tehran has the grim distinction of holding the world’s highest rate of executions in the world. The line waiting for death on the gallows is a long one.
The regime has taken two new hostages with ties to the United States. In October, Iranian police detained one Siamak Namazi, an Iranian-American businessman visiting his family in Iran. A second visitor, Nizar Zakka, a Lebanese “information specialist” with permanent American resident status, was arrested in September at an entrepreneur conference in Tehran. Their detention, together with the recent espionage conviction of Jason Rezaian, a correspondent for The Washington Post, demonstrates that the regime enjoys thumbing its nose at Barack Obama while it waits for the handover of $150 billion in Iranian assets by sanctions, confident that the president won’t do anything about it.
Those beyond the reach of the rope are nevertheless subjected to the rattle of the Islamic sword. Mr. Obama on Monday reinforced America’s military alliance with Israel, and tried to repair relations with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, disrupted by Mr. Obama’s sweetheart nuclear deal with Iran. The mullahs chose that moment to sign a long-anticipated contract to buy an advanced air-defense system from Russia. Moscow had frozen the sale of S-300 missiles in 2010 in compliance with U.N. sanctions, but President Vladimir Putin revived it when the nuclear deal opened the way for renewed trade with Iran.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and the beauty Mr. Obama sees in the land of the rope and scimitar is reflected in his timid record of offering only words in his dealing with the likes of Iran. That may be in his eyes the behavior of a gentleman, but in the land of the noose, the mullahs interpret a retreat of the civilized world as an act of submission.
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