While we measure the ayatollahs’ threat in centrifuges and ballistic missiles, the regime’s real doomsday weapon is striking the Iranian people with a force far greater than any missile barrage: despair. Nothing makes it clearer that the struggle against the ayatollahs is a struggle against absolute evil than what they have managed to do to the Iranians themselves.
One example is Mojtaba Pourmohsen, an exiled Iranian writer, poet and journalist, who is in no way connected to Khamenei’s son of the same name. Pourmohsen was born in the northern Iranian city of Rasht in 1979. After an impressive career in writing and editing, he left his country for London about seven years ago and became one of the most prominent, clear and recognizable voices against the regime. Tens of millions of Iranians listen to him every day.
Yet it is not Pourmohsen’s analysis that offers the strongest argument against the ayatollahs’ rule, but the choices he has made, and those made by members of his generation. Although he comes from a family of five children, Pourmohsen is unmarried and has no children. By choice.
“Only two years after I moved to London did I first think positively about bringing children into the world,” he tells me. “Bringing a child into the world the ayatollahs created seemed like madness.”
Pourmohsen’s choice is not an anecdote. It is a stunning and horrifying social phenomenon. Earlier this week, it was reported that Iran had recorded a negative “historic record”: the annual number of births fell below 900,000 for the first time since 1960. For comparison, in the early 1980s, shortly after the ayatollahs came to power, the number of births stood at more than 2 million a year, more than twice as high.
The collapse of Iran’s birthrate is unprecedented. In just 40 years, it fell from 6.5 children per woman to the shocking figure of 1.35. The ayatollahs’ regime may not have physically eliminated tens of millions of Iranians, but the despair it managed to sow in a great civilization thousands of years old has caused this proud people simply to choose to withdraw from the world.
The regime is trying to fight the phenomenon
At pro-regime demonstrations, the authorities have set up matchmaking booths. On the supreme leader’s orders, the state organizes mass weddings at its own expense for dozens of couples in an effort to reverse the trend. Unsurprisingly, these efforts are failing, because the problem runs deeper than this or that financial incentive. Over the lives of Iranians hangs the long shadow of an authoritarian, capricious, murderous and corrupt regime that has drained life itself of its meaning.
For clarity, it should be noted that Iran’s fertility collapse has been far faster and more sudden than in the West, which also suffers from low birthrates. While in Europe and Asia the decline was a byproduct of rising living standards, Iranians under the ayatollahs have become poorer, and nevertheless have stopped bringing children into the world.
In fact, among the 20 nations most similar to Iran in per capita income, countries such as the Philippines, Morocco, Sri Lanka and Bolivia, Iran has the lowest birthrate. Miraculously, Iran’s rival on the other side of the divide, Israel, has the highest birthrate in the developed world. The number of children per Israeli family stands at about three, and even after excluding the ultra-Orthodox population, it is nearly a full child higher than in any other country with a similar level of wealth.
Rotem M.SellaWe can complain, protest, argue and fight with one another fiercely, even hatefully, while claiming that the other side of the debate is trying to turn Israel into that Iran. Yet despite this, and perhaps because of a fire of this kind that is hard to find in other countries, when it comes to the most personal and profound decision a person makes, we vote again and again for life, creating families that will continue the Jewish and Israeli chain.
The struggle between Israel and Iran is not merely a geopolitical struggle between peoples divided by language, religion and culture. It is a struggle between a failed regime that brings darkness, death and despair to every corner of the Middle East it invades, including its own country, and a state on the other side of the barricade that is not only full of a lust for life, but also creates and loves life more than any other country in the West.
We do not yet know how the titanic struggle between Israel and the ayatollahs’ regime will end. But we can hold our heads high and know that in defeating this regime, we are fighting not only for our own lives and peace, but also for truth and freedom. For the freedom of Israel, Iran and the Middle East.