Every year around this time, Jews read the ancient Scroll of Esther and remember a Persian courtier named Haman who plotted ‘to destroy, to kill and to annihilate all the Jews’ of the empire in a single day. The story feels less like distant history and more like a chilling parallel to our present reality, because, once again, a regime in Persia — today’s Islamic Republic in Iran — openly dreams of annihilation and domination, with Jews as a central target but far from the only ones.
The holiday of Purim is often presented as a children’s tale of costumes and noisemakers, but at its core is a political battle between good and evil. A powerful ideologue identifies a people as an intolerable obstacle to his vision, secures state power behind his hatred and issues a bureaucratic death sentence. It takes courage, unity and a willingness to fight back to stop this brutal plot. Replace scroll and signet ring with rockets and proxies, and you have the worldview of today’s Iranian regime toward Israel, the United States and now, several neighboring Persian Gulf States.
When Hamas stormed Israeli communities on Oct. 7, murdering, raping and kidnapping civilians, it did not act in an ideological vacuum. Hamas has long relied on Iran’s regime for training, funding and supplying weapons.
The terror group sits within a wider ‘axis of resistance’ Tehran has painstakingly built around Israel and across the region. Whether or not Tehran signed off on the exact timing, the regime has spent decades forging a regional ‘ring of fire,’ including Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, militias in Syria and Iraq, the Houthis in Yemen, explicitly to make good on its promise that Israel is a ‘cancerous tumor’ to be removed and that American power in the Middle East must be driven out.
But in the 21st century, the Iran regime’s war is not only against Jews and not only fought with rockets and drones. It is fought with code, cameras and carefully crafted narratives aimed at Israelis, Arabs, Americans, Europeans, dissident Iranians and anyone who stands in the way of the regime’s revolutionary project. The regime has developed a sophisticated influence apparatus that uses botnets, fake personas and social media influencers to shape how global publics understand the conflict and how free societies see themselves.
Investigations have exposed networks of inauthentic accounts on X, Facebook, Instagram and Telegram pushing divisive, demoralizing content at scale. In one documented campaign, bots flooded Hebrew‑language discourse with tens of thousands of posts in under two days, amplifying internal Israeli divisions and sowing panic about the fate of hostages. Other operations have impersonated Israelis, Americans and Europeans online, pushing narratives that call for Western retreat, civil conflict and the abandonment of allies from Israel to Ukraine.
This is not the random trolling we’ve seen for years. It is state‑directed information warfare intended to achieve strategic goals, including to weaken Israeli morale, to crush the Iranian opposition, to fracture Western support, and to invert victim and aggressor in the eyes of the world. When regime‑linked operations amplify incendiary content about ‘Zionist control,’ repackage anti‑Jewish conspiracy theories as anti‑Israel ‘anti‑colonialism,’ and simultaneously smear Iranian dissidents as foreign agents, they are targeting anyone who challenges Tehran’s ambitions.
The West should recognize how a hostile regime is using every tool, including terror proxies abroad, repression at home, campus activism in the West, and algorithm‑hacking online to delegitimize democratic allies and normalize violence against minorities and dissidents. The same regime that arms Hamas and Hezbollah also guns down women removing their headscarves in Tehran, supplies drones to Russia for use in Ukraine and threatens Persian Gulf Arab states that dare to work openly with Israel. The ideological hatred that animated Haman has simply been updated and universalized.
That is why this Purim, we can all be considered like the Jews who were in the regime’s crosshairs in the sense that the story demands a vulnerable minority singled out by a power that cannot tolerate their existence, ordered to bow and vanish for the sake of someone else’s totalizing ideology. To stand with Israel after Oct. 7 is not to ignore other victims of Iran’s regime; it is to understand that the same system that dreams of erasing the Jewish state also dreams of crushing Americans, Europeans, Sunni Arabs, women on the streets of Mashhad, Shiraz or Esfahan, and students on Western campuses who refuse to chant its slogans.
Purim ends with the intended victims standing up, fighting back and surviving. For Israel and the Islamic Republic’s other targets to do the same today, free nations must be willing to confront the regime across all fronts: degrade its military capabilities, defeat its terror proxies on the battlefield, support its domestic dissidents, harden our information space against manipulation and deny Tehran the impunity it has enjoyed for far too long. The lesson of the Scroll of Esther is not parochial. It is that when a regime builds its identity around annihilation, indifference is complicity and by the time the decree reaches your own door, it may be too late.
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