Everything in the Middle East has changed and yet has somehow stayed the same. As internet services are slowly restored in Iran, the landscape of brutality directed at the population daring to protest poverty, corruption, and the bleakest of futures cannot be concealed nor can it be erased by forcing homage to the regime’s capacity to control by violence and fear. The carnage in Iran coming into view displays mountains of body bags with corpses beheaded and tortured. High ransoms are extorted from parents desperate to give their children a proper burial. There is no doubt many of the casualties are young, cut down simply for what they imagined freedom and peace could bring.

The glory of regime survival will be braided forever with the tragedy of its victims—36,000 or more murdered in two days—a tally of brutality amplified by an armada of terrorist militias from Iraq and Afghanistan and from a cavalry of countries whose leaders show a flair for equal fluency in expanding or diminishing peace.

How is it possible to view the slaughter in Iran without recalling the horrors unleashed by Hamas? Every picture of loss in Iran is strikingly familiar to the photos of the slain at the Nova festival. Slaughter across these lands follows a pattern, if not a ritual. But so does hope albeit never fully realized but never totally smothered.

Still, the responses to these massacres have been quite different. On October 7, Hamas........

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