Why Pittsburgh’s Jewish Community should care about the massacre in Iran

This past year has seen an Iranian convulsion: first in a 12-day armed confrontation with Israel and the United States in June 2025, and now in one of the deadliest internal crackdowns in modern Iranian history. Since nationwide protests began in late December, Iranian security forces have responded with overwhelming force.

Multiple monitoring groups estimate a death toll of more than 20,000 protesters and as many as 330,000 injured under a regime-wide campaign of lethal violence. Many of the victims are young people: high-school students, university students and young adults. Hospitals report thousands of serious injuries, including hundreds of eye injuries caused by live fire, indicating tactics designed not only to kill, but to maim.

Any regime that deploys this level of violence against its own population has forfeited its legitimacy. But dismantling a government that views nothing as off the table, mass killing included, will be extraordinarily difficult.

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For many in Pittsburgh, Iran may seem like just another crisis in a region already marked by instability. But what is happening in Iran today directly affects Jewish communities in Israel and around the world, including here in the United States.

For Jews, Iran has long mattered not only because of its hostility toward Israel, but because of the regime’s global reach. Iran is the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism. Through long-standing networks with Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Iraqi militias, the Assad regime in Syria and the Houthis in Yemen, Tehran has exported violence across the Middle East, destabilizing entire societies and normalizing attacks on civilians.

That record includes direct attacks on Jewish communities far from the region. In 1994, Iranian operatives working through Hezbollah bombed the AMIA Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires, killing 85 people. It remains the deadliest antisemitic attack in the post-Holocaust era. This was not an isolated incident. It was part of a broader pattern of state-backed violence that has made Jews — and others — targets well beyond Iran’s borders.

Today, this strategy has expanded beyond physical violence into influence operations within Western societies. Over the past year, U.S. intelligence officials have publicly stated that actors linked to the Iranian government sought to financially support and encourage anti-Israel demonstrations in the United States following Oct. 7. The explicit goal was not to direct individual student protesters, but to amplify unrest, escalate rhetoric and deepen social divisions.

On campuses, we have seen clear patterns: rapid replication of slogans, coordinated messaging across universities and protest playbooks that appear simultaneously in multiple locations. These dynamics are consistent with organized influence efforts rather than purely organic student activism. In too many cases, protests moved beyond criticism of Israeli policy into rhetoric that denied Israel’s right to exist, justified violence, or created hostile environments for Jewish students and faculty.

Analyses of social media activity surrounding campus activism reinforce this concern. Researchers have identified clusters of accounts linked to Iranian-aligned messaging ecosystems amplifying inflammatory narratives, calls for escalation, and rhetoric that crosses the line from political protest into hostility toward Jews. Civil society organizations have documented how Iranian state media and affiliated outlets disseminate antisemitic content including Holocaust denial, conspiracy tropes, and dehumanizing language, which circulates globally and seeps into activist spaces.

This does not mean most protesters are acting at the discretion of Tehran alone. They are not. But Iran is a hostile actor that has deliberately sought to magnify tensions and normalize extremist rhetoric. For Jewish students and faculty, the consequences are real.

For Pittsburgh’s Jewish community this matters deeply. Antisemitism today is not only domestic. It is global, networked and increasingly shaped by regimes that view Jewish vulnerability as strategically useful. Iran’s efforts to foment antisemitism abroad do not remain abstract.

Their actions put my children and my family at risk.

There is, however, another part of this story that deserves attention. Since Oct, 7, 2023, the Iranian diaspora in the United States has been one of the most consistent sources of public solidarity with Jewish communities. Iranian activists — Persians, Kurds, Azeris, Baloch and others — and ordinary citizens spoke out clearly against the atrocities of Hamas when many others were silent or equivocal.

This should not surprise us. Many Iranians recognize the language and methods of extremist movements because they have lived under them: violence justified by ideology, dissent erased by force, repression normalized through state rhetoric. Those same voices are now among the targets of the regime’s lethal crackdown.

Yet many Iranians feel abandoned, by parts of the international progressive left that focus almost exclusively on American power as a source of evil, while overlooking or excusing repression by regimes like Tehran, or by groups such as Hamas. Increasingly, they are also ignored by elements of the antisemitic right. This selective outrage leaves both Iranians and Jews increasingly isolated in public discourse and more insecure.

Caring about what is happening in Iran means recognizing a regime that has targeted Jews globally, exported terrorism across an entire region, and is now responsible for the mass killing of its own youth. It also means understanding how that regime seeks to exploit divisions here at home.

What is happening in Iran is not a domestic concern for Iranians alone. It is a warning about how extremism operates, how it
spreads and how quickly violence becomes normalized when societies become driven by ideology. This is something we cannot afford to ignore. PJC

Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili is the founding director of the Center for Governance and Markets and a professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Public and International Affairs.