Adolf Eichmann was arguably one of the most singular figures of 20th-century darkness. While Hitler conceived “The Final Solution” to exterminate world Jewry, Eichmann was the man who provided the math. He was the logistics manager of the Holocaust, a desk-bound killer who spent his days calculating train schedules and cattle car capacities with the cold efficiency of a corporate supply chain executive.
As the head of Department IV B4 of the Gestapo, Eichmann’s crime was the industrialization of murder. By transforming genocide into a spreadsheet problem, he stripped his victims of their humanity long before they ever reached the gas chambers. He proved that the most profound evil often wears a suit, carries a briefcase, and claims—as he did during his trial—that he was “just doing his job.” It was a concept Hannah Arendt famously characterized as the “banality of evil.”
Yet, when Israeli agents captured Eichmann in Argentina and brought him to Jerusalem, they didn’t march him through the streets to celebrate his capture. Instead, they placed the “architect of death” in a glass booth and allowed the entire world to witness a meticulous legal process. Israel funded his defense, providing him a German lawyer of his choice, and built an undeniable historical record based on 1,600 original documents and the testimony of 112 survivors.
When the verdict finally came, the end was quiet. Eichmann was executed at midnight on May 31, 1962, at Ramla Prison. No cameras. No crowds. His ashes were scattered at sea, ensuring no grave could ever become a shrine.
Israel chose to deliver its message in a courtroom, not on the gallows.
I thought of Israel’s treatment of Eichmann last week upon reading about the “justice” system in Iran—what happens when law is replaced by spectacle.
The Iranian regime last week publicly executed Saleh Mohammadi, a decorated 19-year-old wrestling champion, alongside two other young men in the city of Qom. The charge was moharebeh—“waging war against God.” It is a vague, catch-all accusation the theocracy regularly weaponizes to silence dissent.
State media claimed the men “confessed,” but human rights groups tell a different story. According to reports, these “legal procedures” consisted of forced confessions extracted through solitary confinement, threats to family members, and the brutal targeting of Mohammadi’s injuries during interrogation. There was no glass booth, no mountain of documents, and no independent defense.
I haven’t stopped thinking about Mohammadi since reading of his death. He was a kid who turned 19 in prison and dreamed of Olympic gold. Instead, he became a prop in a state-sponsored theater of terror.
I also keep thinking of the crowd that watched him swing from a crane. Perhaps some honestly believed he was a criminal, but you have to wonder about the humanity of anyone who can watch an execution as they go about their day.
What was Mohammadi thinking as they put the noose around his neck?
His execution wasn’t an isolated event.
The Iranian government’s growing ledger of its citizens’ blood has barely sparked outrage. In 2025 alone, the Mullahs sent more than 2,000 people to the gallows—the highest number in decades. By February 2026, Human Rights Watch was calling the crackdown a “tsunami” of state terror.
Thousands were killed in the January protests, with internal health ministry leaks suggesting the real number is far higher. Iran’s brutality isn’t in response to a system under strain. It’s operating as designed.
While the world holds its breath over every Israeli defensive move, it barely blinked last Friday when an Iranian missile struck Jerusalem, putting the Al-Aqsa Mosque at risk. The regime that claims to protect the Islamic faith is willing to risk its holiest sites for a higher Jewish body count.
In the twisted logic of 2026, if you’re a democratic state defending your citizens, you’re a war criminal. If you’re a theocracy executing teenagers and terrorizing your own population, you’re background noise.
This would be disturbing enough if it stayed in Iran.
It doesn’t.
You would expect Iran’s leaders and their associates to be pariahs in Western countries, their names etched on no-fly lists. Instead, Canada has effectively laid out a welcome mat.
At least 700 Iranian government officials and proxies are reportedly living in the greater Toronto and Vancouver regions—a reality that forced CSIS Director Daniel Rogers to step forward last November. Rogers warned that his agency had to “reprioritize” operations to disrupt “potentially lethal threats” against individuals within Canada’s borders.
This isn’t a failure of awareness. It’s a failure of will.
Rogers’ fears appear well founded. Earlier this month, seventeen bullets shattered the windows of a boxing gym north of Toronto owned by Salar Gholami, a Canadian boxing champion and vocal anti-regime activist. Gholami says his anti-regime activism is why he was targeted.
Four years ago, Justin Trudeau admitted that Canada was harboring individuals “who have benefited from the corrupt, from the horrific regime in Iran, and who are hiding amongst this beautiful community.” In three years, Canada has deported exactly one regime official.
One.
The rest—like former mining official Abbas Omidi—are now using the Canadian Charter of Rights to shield themselves from the very justice the Mullahs deny their victims.
Kaveh Shahrooz, an Iranian Canadian international human rights lawyer at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, has warned that Canada has created a safe haven for the Iranian hunters, while the hunted are left to fend for themselves.
Providing sanctuary to Iranian regime proxies isn’t an anomaly; it’s a Canadian tradition. A government investigation years ago found that Canada harbored some 900 Nazis and their collaborators but chose to keep their identities secret.
In September 2024, the Canadian Parliament gave a standing ovation to 98-year-old Yaroslav Hunka, a veteran of the Nazi Waffen-SS, while government leaders claimed they had not investigated his past.
That explanation collapses under minimal scrutiny. Chrystia Freeland, then Canada’s deputy prime minister, is a Rhodes Scholar who earned a master’s degree in Slavonic studies from Oxford—one of the world’s most academically qualified experts on the very history her government claimed to have misread. This is the same Freeland who in 2017 dismissed documented evidence of her maternal grandfather’s role as the editor-in-chief of a Nazi-seized antisemitic newspaper as “Russian disinformation.”
It should come as no surprise that antisemitic incidents are soaring in Canada.
This month alone, three synagogues and two Jewish-owned enterprises were fired on. In the Toronto neighborhood where I grew up protesters displayed caricatures of Jews reminiscent of the rise of Nazi Germany. Last December, protestors took over the Eaton Centre, an iconic mall in downtown Toronto, chanting for “intifada” while families, workers, and shoppers looked on.
“Intifada” is a rallying cry for violent uprising and murder of Jews.
A leaked federal report last week warned that a violent extremist attack targeting Canada’s Jewish communities is a “realistic possibility” within the next six months.
Michael Levitt, the president and CEO of Canada’s Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies, has called on Prime Minister Mark Carney “to stand up for Canadian Jews.” There is no indication he will.
Carney and Freeland remain fixtures of the Davos circuit, where the global elite gather to discuss how to make the world better while ignoring what’s unfolding in their own cities. Despite the global surge in antisemitism, it wasn’t discussed much.
Hard to believe Canadians once saw themselves as a peace-loving nation. Six Canadians were murdered by Hamas, including Vivian Silver, a peace activist who spent decades working to build cooperation between Arabs and Jews.
Canada was among the 33 countries that voted to create Israel, and former Prime Minister Lester Pearson was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for helping defuse a Middle East crisis.
I no longer recognize the country I grew up in.
Carney will not be remembered for peace. He will be remembered as the Canadian prime minister who looked away while Jewish communities were forced to fortify themselves just to pray.
Iran hangs teenagers from cranes in the name of God.
Canada looks the other way.
Canada is complicit in Iran’s terror.