Did we just hear the Iranian regime’s last speech at the UN?

When Masoud Pezeshkian stood before the United Nations, he spoke in the name of Iran. That was the first deception.

The Islamic Republic — the Shia Caliphate — is not Iran. Khomeinist ideology has been imposed upon a civilization that long predates the order established in 1979. Yet Pezeshkian carried the same exhausted script: victimhood, Palestine, resistance, Israel, American hostility, and a regime perpetually surrounded by enemies.

What was conspicuously absent was Iran itself.

Where were the political prisoners, protesters shot in the streets? Where were those arrested, tortured or blinded, and families who have buried their children? Where were the millions crushed by inflation, poverty, censorship, and religious authoritarianism?

They were nowhere in his speech. Pezeshkian portrayed the Islamic Republic as a victim while ignoring its violence against Iranians. He spoke of infrastructure, but Iran’s most precious infrastructure is its people — a generation beset by repression, economic ruin, and isolation from the world.

This is the grotesque contradiction at the heart of the Islamic Republic. A notorious regime that has spent decades financing and arming terrorist groups abroad presents itself at the U.N. as an apostle of peace. A regime that suppresses dissent lectures the world about justice while branding all of its opponents as agents of America or Israel. It speaks endlessly of Gaza and Palestine while trying to hide the blood it has spilled in Iran’s streets. And still, the world is expected to call this “diplomacy.”

For decades, Washington has viewed Iran through the same narrow window: nuclear enrichment, sanctions, negotiations, terrorism, shipping, and the security of........

© The Hill