In “Persepolis,” the author Marjane Satrapi recalls the story of Niloufar, an 18-year-old communist activist sentenced to death by the clerical regime. The religious jurists have no problem with the death penalty for Niloufar, but they worry that as a virgin she may go to heaven. So they arrange for her to be raped by a prison guard before her execution. Later the authorities send Niloufar’s family a small dowry to commemorate this “marriage.”

Ali Khamenei led this murderous medieval regime for nearly forty years. This is a regime that beat women for showing their hair and publicly hanged homosexuals from cranes. It’s a regime that ignored the needs of its own people to fund jihadist groups in, among other places, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen and the Palestinian Territories. It’s a regime that committed murder in dozens of countries, including Germany, France, India, Australia, Argentina and Saudi Arabia. Just weeks ago, it slaughtered thousands - possibly tens of thousands - of its own citizens for protesting its repressive policies.

The Iranian revolution offered a template for Islamist rule, albeit a Shia variant crafted by Ayatollah Khomeini, Islamists of all stripes took inspiration from it. Few countries adopted the extreme measures favored by the mullahs of Iran, but the revolution’s malign influence was felt from Morocco to Mindanao. In the 1980s it also sparked a theological arms race with Saudi Arabia, which spread its own regressive brand of Islamism around the world.

Of course, most people aren’t actually upset that Khamenei is dead. You get the nutjobs like Students for Justice in Palestine who are openly antisemitic and anti-American; of course they’re unhappy on principle, he was a hero to them for standing up to their enemies. Progressives in democratic countries who mourn the death of Khamenei come in different flavors. Some are simply Islamists or Islamist adjacent. Their ideology conceals the deeper religious passions that motivate them. Others are so blinded by their hatred of America and Israel that they reflexively oppose any action by them. Yet others are simply ignorant of the nature of the Iranian regime. But all of these people have one thing in common. They spit on the suffering of the talented Iranian people who have had to endure nearly 50 years of brutal clerical rule.

Khamenei and the IRGC have been a continuous background threat in the Middle East for decades, fomenting chaos and war wherever they could and trying to undermine all of the other regional powers so they could become the seat of Islam. The problem is there is not actual good plan for getting rid of them that won’t involve the mass slaughter of Iranian civilians with them.

I share skepticism that Iran would go on the offensive with nuclear weapons, but you can’t really tell with religious nutjobs - what they would definitely be used for is as a defensive shield to allow Iran to step up its efforts to destabilize the other nations in the Gulf and continue to plunge the region into total chaos.