Iran’s ‘Death to America’ Isn’t Rhetoric—It’s Strategy
Why negotiating with Iran has always been a losing battle.
No reasonable person would sit idly by if a neighbor who had repeatedly threatened to kill their family armed himself and began plotting to carry out the threat. Yet, for decades, that was essentially the United States’ foreign policy approach toward Iran.
Now, the threat is no longer distant—it’s on our doorstep.
Iranian leaders have long pushed the slogan, “Marg bar Āmrikā," meaning, “Death to America.” Schoolchildren begin their days with that chant. Though the current regime forces many to speak these words or face death, the nation’s upper class and leaders are radicals willing to do anything to further their extremist religion.
Those criticizing President Trump’s actions argue Iran wasn’t an “imminent” threat—yet recent actions suggest otherwise.
Diplomacy’s Downfall
Iran has a theocratic regime that forces its people to support and defend their Islamic religion or face death. If anyone questions the religious tenets of Islam, they are killed—especially so-called infidel Christians and Jews.
For decades, the leadership under Ayatollah Ali Khamenei made it abundantly clear that Iran’s goals included the destruction of the United States and Israel. When an enemy’s stated goal is your annihilation, diplomacy will never alter their ideological ambition. It will only delay the inevitable.
Prior American presidents’ weak attempts at diplomacy with Iran only strengthened the regime, allowing more American deaths and injuries. When former President Barack Obama failed to enforce consequences against Syria for obtaining chemical weapons—despite proclaiming a “red line”—it was a signal of American weakness to Iran and other adversaries.
Former President Joe Biden refused to enforce sanctions against Iran, allowing it to increase its oil exports to fund its military and bankroll Hamas. Biden even unfroze $10 billion in Iraqi energy payments to Iran, claiming Iran would use it for humanitarian goods. Biden’s foreign policy toward Iran was nothing more than appeasement.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has repeatedly claimed Iran does not have long-range missiles, most recently saying, “we kept the range of our missiles below 2,000 km [1,242 miles], so we don’t have that capability.”
Yet, on March 20, Iran fired two ballistic missiles at a joint U.S.–U.K. military base in Diego Garcia—2,500 miles from Iran. Clearly, Iran lied.
Such deception cannot be dismissed as a one-off transgression. The Islamic concept of taqiyya, or lying to further their religion, is a well-known and accepted practice in the Muslim world. This reality, along with the Iranian regime’s hatred for the United States, makes good-faith negotiations an impossibility.
Past presidents’ denials of this have had disastrous consequences for Americans, whom Iran has been targeting and killing since 1979. Here are numerous examples just since 2020 reported by the White House:
- January 2020: 109 U.S. troops suffered traumatic brain injuries in an Iranian ballistic missile attack on the Ain al-Asad airbase in Iraq.
- September 2020: U.S. intelligence indicated the Iranian regime was considering a plot to assassinate the U.S. ambassador to South Africa.
- February 2021: An Iranian-backed militia fired a rocket at coalition forces in Erbil, Iraq, wounding a U.S. service member and four U.S. civilian contractors.
- July 2021: Iranian-backed militias wounded two U.S. service members in a series of rocket and drone attacks against U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria.
- September 2022: An Iranian rocket attack killed an American citizen in Iraqi Kurdistan.
- November 2022: An Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) captain orchestrated the killing of an American citizen in Baghdad.
- March 2023: An Iranian drone attack killed an American contractor and wounded five U.S. service members and another contractor in a strike on a coalition base in Syria.
- October 2023: Iran-backed Hamas terrorists killed 46 Americans and kidnapped at least 12 Americans in the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre in Israel.
- December 2023: Iran-backed militias wounded three U.S. service members in an attack on Erbil Air Base in Iraq.
- January 2024: Iran-backed Kataib Hezbollah terrorists killed three U.S. service members and wounded more than 40 other service members in a drone attack against the Tower 22 military base in Jordan.
- October 2023 through November 2024: Iran and its proxies conducted more than 180 attacks against U.S. forces in the Middle East, wounding more than 180 U.S. service members and killing three.
- November 2024: An Iranian national and IRGC asset was charged with plotting to assassinate President Trump and other American citizens.
- June 2025: Iran-backed militias attacked at least three U.S. bases in Syria and a U.S. base in Iraq.
In a May 2025 speech, Khamenei said Israel was “the lethal cancerous tumor of the region” and said it “has to be uprooted.” At various intervals during the speech, scripted chants called for the deaths of America, Israel, hypocrites, and infidels.
Adherents of Islam push the notion that it’s a religion of peace, yet between 1979 and 2024, more than 66,000 Islamist terrorist attacks killing at least 250,000 people have been recorded. This includes 60 attacks in the United States that caused 3,121 deaths.
Thankfully, President Donald Trump has chosen to end the carnage by forging a path of peace through strength.
Islamism in the United States
A popular, mainstream media narrative is that extremists represent a minority of Muslims. Acts of terrorism worldwide and in the United States in the name of Allah and the radical statements of prominent U.S. Islamic leaders may indicate otherwise.
On March 12, 2026, a terrorist shot up an ROTC classroom at my alma mater, Old Dominion University (ODU), in Norfolk, Virginia. As he opened fire, killing Army Lt. Col. Brandon Shah and injuring two others, Mohamed Jalloh yelled “Allahu Akbar,” a war cry used by Islamic terrorists. Jalloh previously served time for providing material support to the foreign terrorist organization ISIS.
The FBI’s preliminary investigation traced Jalloh’s movements prior to the attack via his iPhone. The afternoon before the shooting, Jalloh’s phone was in “the vicinity of the Islamic Center of Hampton, Virginia.” Jalloh remained there for nearly nine hours.
Restoration News reached out to Dr. Ahmed Noor, a trustee of the mosque, to ask why Jalloh was at the Hampton mosque for so long and whether he had interacted with anyone. Noor, a professor emeritus at ODU, did not respond.
Iranian-born Michigan Imam Mohammad Ali Elahi is the spiritual leader of the Islamic House of Wisdom, one of Michigan’s largest religious institutions. Elahi gave a eulogy on Feb. 28 for the late Khamenei, saying he was a martyr and his death was an honor. He added: “I know that you love to end this life this way—to be remembered forever and ever, that you were killed by the most wretched hands on earth.”
Khamenei was a brutal dictator responsible for killing tens—if not hundreds—of thousands of his own people, specifically persecuting Christians and Jews.
Imam Elahi was a former head of the Iranian Navy’s political ideological office. His mosque is funded through the Alavi Foundation, a pro-Iranian propaganda think tank. George Washington University detailed his extremist ties in a 2024 report.
Despite Elahi’s extremism, he led a prayer at Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s 2019 inauguration. He has also been photographed over the years with prominent Democrats, including former Vice President Kamala Harris in 2021.
State campaign finance reports show Elahi twice donated to Michigan Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist. He also made numerous donations to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee—the official campaign arm of the Democratic Party in the U.S. Senate.
Elahi’s Islamic House of Wisdom received $330,000 in taxpayer-funded federal grants in 2023. He also received $13,400 in rental subsidies from the state of Michigan for “newcomers.”
There are many more recent examples of Islamic extremist terrorism, such as the March 14 attack on a Detroit-area synagogue and the March 1 shooting at an Austin, Texas, bar in which a terrorist wearing a “property of Allah” shirt killed three people and injured 13 others. Despite these attacks in the name of Islamism, there is no widespread condemnation from Muslim leaders. That silence speaks for itself.
Lt. Col. Brandon Shah did not die on a foreign battlefield; he was murdered by a terrorist in a Virginia college classroom. Until the United States is willing to name the ideology driving these attacks and confront it, the list of names will only grow. President Trump is eliminating the religious zealots in Iran who refer to America as “the great Satan,” but more must be done to root them out here at home.
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