President Joe R. Biden,

The White House

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue

Washington, D.C. 20500

Dear Mr. President,

We write with urgency to ask for your administration’s strong and immediate actions in support of the Iranian people’s desire for a democratic, secular, and nonnuclear Republic of Iran. Your administration’s impactful actions must be directed towards blocking Iranian regime’s violation of human rights, and their export of terrorism in the region and beyond. As you craft your policy, defending human rights and democracy in Iran should be the central and enduring element of your policy on Iran.

We were encouraged by your words that you will not offer sanctions relief to the Iranian regime to get them back to the negotiating table. This gives us hope that your administration’s policies on how to deal with Iran would avoid the mistakes of the past four decades that resulted in lost opportunities, devastating outcomes, and tremendous suffering by the people in Iran and in the region. At the heart of past policy miscalculations has been the fable that there is a “moderate” faction inside the regime that can be eventually empowered. After trying for years to find such elusive faction, the world has realized that the Iranian regime in its totality is an unchangeable dictatorship that cannot give birth to a less repressive government. Policies based on this myth of “moderation” are bound for grave failures.

People, and in particular younger generations’ uprisings in Iran, with increased frequency and intensity in the last few years, have received brutal responses from the regime. The economic conditions in Iran continue to deteriorate, largely due to systemic corruption and the concentration of the wealth of the nation under the control of the Supreme Leader and the Revolutionary Guards. Thus, the regime either ignores or is incapable of attending to people’s needs. In the last 4 years, hunger, poverty, and dire economic conditions have been the initial trigger of the uprisings, but people’s demands quickly evolved to regime change. Their call is loud and clear, and cannot be ignored.

To repress people’s revolt, regime has paired domestic intimidation with terror abroad. As a tool of statecraft, terrorism has been on the regime’s agenda since it came to power in 1979. In recent years, the clerical regime has expanded its terrorist operations in Europe and the U.S. Several European court cases and judicial decisions have confirmed that all the regime’s terrorist acts are ordered at the highest levels. Embassies have provided the safe haven for Iran’s intelligence apparatus, and its active and dormant terrorists.

We, respectfully request that your administration develop and implement decisive policies and roadmaps that side with the Iranian people and their legitimate desire for a free, secular and democratic Iran, and will end Iranian regime’s malign and dangerous expansion of its terrorism in the world, and funneling Iranian people’s resources to fund extremists in the region, as Iranians chant, “leave Syria alone, think about us.”

Furthermore, no sanctions relief or concession should be provided to the Iranian regime, unless the Iranian regime, would verifiably end its human rights abuses in Iran, terrorism abroad, and abandon its destructive support for proxies in the region.

There is a historic opportunity to support the people of Iran. We trust that you would use this opportunity to do so.

Respectfully