President Trump should take urgent action to put pressure upon the Khomeinist regime. Cartoon by: Reza Rish

In the year that the Revolution seized power in Iran, the Islamic regime’s terror agents shattered international diplomatic standards, by causing the first “Iran Hostage Crisis.” Their excuse for launching that criminal plot was petty Islamic rage over the dying Shaw, who had been admitted into the United States for cancer treatment.

Weeks later, on November 4, 1979, the conspiracy plan was put into action. That day, the regime’s Islamic street thugs, organized as the “Muslim Student Followers of the Imam's Line”, invaded and took armed siege of the U.S. embassy compound, holding its staff hostage.

Masoumeh Ebtekar is known to have been one of those criminal hostage takers. Decades later, she has now risen to power in the Rouhani regime, where she holds office as Vice President of Iran for Women and Family Affairs.

That 1979 invasion of an international embassy by armed agents of the embassy’s host state was an outright act of war. The outraged world should have united to confront that obscene violation of international sovereignty, by responding with immediate pressure against that outlaw regime. Islamic Iran should have been dismantled as a criminal state. But to ward off any such response, the Islamic agents of the regime held fifty-two American diplomats and citizens hostage for the next 444 days, from November 4, 1979 until President Reagan’s inauguration on January 20, 1981.

It marked a loss for long-standing standards of international diplomacy, and a win for supremacist Islamic thuggery. “No student regrets the U.S. Embassy siege”, the IRGC-run Tasnim News quoted Ebtekar.

But it was only the first of such diplomatic standoffs that would occur between Islamic Iran and the United States of America. And western tolerance of it set the pattern, because the Islamic regime has since become well-experienced in hostage-taking as a tactic of war against the passive West. Having seized the land of Persia for Shia Islam, the terror-propagating regime has proven that it will hold the so-called “laws” of the Islamic cult above any other law of any nation or international treaty or diplomatic standards.

The regime’s MPs set fire to a U.S. flag in parliament and chant “Death to America”.

Today, as Iran is approaching the 40th anniversary of the Islamic regime, several dual citizens and foreigners are being held hostage. And none of the regime’s officials are responsive to any pleas by humanity. The Islamic cult does not care about humanity. The cult of Muhammad only cares about doing whatever will achieve the stated goal of making the whole world Islamic for Allah.

So even now, after four decades, the Islamic regime of Iran still abducts and captures foreigners. Siamak Namazi, Baquer Namazi, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, Xiyue Wang, Nizar Zakka, Michael White, and Robert Levinson are some of the hostages, who have been arrested in Iran and are being kept in the jails of Iran’s Intelligence Services.

The Dubai-based businessman Siamak Namazi, and his father, Baquer, were both jailed in 2016 for alleged espionage.

Iranian-British mum, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who works for the Thomson Reuters Foundation, was arrested in April 2016 while traveling to Iran on vacation with her toddler daughter. She is serving a five-year prison sentence, for a crime she didn't commit. Nazanin’s British husband, Richard, started a petition to free her, which has gained over two million signatures. But the supremacist Islamic regime continues to disregard and defy humanity in her case.

Xiyue Wang has been jailed in Iran since 2016 after traveling to Tehran as a Princeton University graduate student while researching 19th-century political history.

Lebanese-born U.S. resident Nizar Zakka, who has been imprisoned since 2017, was sentenced to ten years in prison, for allegedly committing espionage through cooperating with the “hostile” U.S. government.

The U.S. Navy veteran, Michael White, 46, was arrested while visiting Iran. He has been held since July, 2018 on unspecified charges. It was the first arrest of an American during President Trump’s era.

Ex-FBI agent, Robert A. “Bob” Levinson, disappeared 12 years ago from a hotel on Iran’s Kish Island during a reportedly secret CIA mission [Tortoise].

This regime targets dual national citizens and foreigners, whom they perceive to have links with Western governments, organizations, or academic centers. By the same tactics used by Muhammad fourteen centuries ago, these political prisoners are held as hostages for ransom, to bring pressure upon westerners to decrease the weight of sanctions. It is a cruel weapon of war, by which the Islamic regime can balance its political and international ambitions against more powerful opponents.

For example, the hostages played a special role in the Iran Nuclear Deal. In that 2015 agreement, the blackmailer-state gained more favorable terms from American President Barack Obama, as ransom in exchange for the freedom of some U.S. citizens whom the Islamic police state had been holding captive.

Meanwhile, relatives of the Khomeinist regime's officials live and move around freely inside the United States. These include the son of the 1979 hostage-taker, Masoumeh Ebtekar. Their children live inside the United States, while those regime parents bash America from Iran.

Rouhani’s cabinet member, Masoumeh Ebtekar, as Vice President of Iran for Women and Family Affairs, tramples the U.S. flag. Image by: IRGC-run Tasnim News.

“The U.S. administration is looking into the visas of relatives of Iranian officials who are residing in the United States with an eye to possible action to expose hypocrisy within the ranks of Iran's government”, RFERL quoted Brian Hook, Washington's special envoy for Iran.

In this regard, the Washington DC-based independent journalist, Ali Javanmardi, who currently works for VOA, has created a petition to deport such children of Iranian officials from the United States (کمپین اخراج آقازادەها از آمریکا); at least 142.000 people, including Iranians, have signed the petition.

Now, we will see if President Trump will end the policy of caving to ransom demands from the Islamic Iranian hostage-takers; and if the Trump White House will put an end to these Quranic criminal acts of war.

By Kaveh Taheri (Twitter: @TaheriKaveh) , co-founder and chairman of the ICBHR.Com, is a Turkey-based Iranian Human Rights researcher and journalist who has worked exclusively on Middle East. Kaveh, who was a former political prisoner in Shiraz, had been sent to prison for his writings and statements on his Websites and Weblogs, in Iran and fled the country through Turkey to save his life.