Blinded Hezbollah Terrorists Shouldn’t Expect Sympathy in Iran

The Iranian government defaulted to its influence operations playbook in the aftermath of the September 17, 2024, systematic explosion of Hezbollah pagers, presumably enabled by Israeli infiltration of the supply chain. Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon, a post that a Quds Force general always fills, is now blind in one eye. The Iranian media released video of a plane it described as full of Hezbollah members bound for Tehran to receive emergency surgery to restore eyesight after exploding pagers blinded them.

Perhaps such cheap theatrics work on a Western audience when alleging massacres from Israeli operations in Gaza, but the Iranian press shop should not waste their time if they believe they can get Iranians to sympathize with blind Hezbollah terrorists.

After all, “Operation Below the Belt” exploded onto the scene just one day after the second anniversary of the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian Kurdish woman beat to death in custody after they arrested her for allegedly violating the regime’s strict dress code.

Outrage exploded across Iran as millions of women and their male supporters poured into the streets of cities and towns across Iran in the largest and most sustained protests the Islamic Republic had weathered in its more than 40 years.

To crush the protests, the Islamic Republic took its brutality to the next level. It did not just engage in mass arrests, but it deliberately sought to blind protestors across Iran with buckshot and pellets aimed at the eyes. The tactic worked: The regime blinded thousands of young Iranians. The tactic should not surprise; deliberate blinding has long been a punishment in the Islamic Republic’s judicial system.

Because the regime worried that even some of their own security force members would not fire indiscriminately on Iranian schoolgirls, they allegedly imported Lebanese Hezbollah to do their dirty work and reinforce Iran’s mechanism of repression, a role Hezbollah members conducted with relish.

Iranians protest with increasing frequency and in increasing numbers because their regime has lost its legitimacy. It has forfeited any effort to win hearts and minds and relies instead solely on the barrel of the gun. They recognize Hezbollah for what it is: cogs in a machine of repressions and thugs for hire in service of the theocratic police state. Ordinary Iranians look at a Hezbollah member blinded in one eye as a job half done, and a Hezbollah member completely blind as appropriate vengeance for what the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its proxies did to them.

The Iranian regime might fool the West’s useful idiots—UN Secretary-General António Guterres and European Foreign Policy Chief Josep Fontelles chief among them—but Iranians know better. They understand their regime and its Arab proxies, and the horror they regularly inflict on civilians. Lebanese, too, will have limited sympathy to those who regularly harass their compatriots on behalf of a foreign power. That does not mean they are immune to outrage for nationalist reasons, but behind that outrage will be a satisfaction that Hezbollah, rather than others, suffered for the war that Hezbollah solicits with Israel. As for Iranians, they are inured to their regime’s propaganda; if Tehran does not see that, they are even more isolated than most outsiders realize.

About the Author: Dr. Michael Rubin

Michael Rubin is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and director of policy analysis at the Middle East Forum. A former Pentagon official, Dr. Rubin has lived in post-revolution Iran, Yemen, and pre-and postwar Iraq. He also spent time with the Taliban before 9/11. For over a decade, he taught classes at sea about the Horn of Africa and Middle East conflicts, culture, and terrorism to deployed US Navy and Marine units. Dr. Rubin is the author, coauthor, and coeditor of several books exploring diplomacy, Iranian history, Arab culture, Kurdish studies, and Shi’ite politics.