In an opinion piece published by American Thinker, columnist Eric Utter describes a 26-page document produced by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and addressed to “the honorable people of the United States of America” as one of history’s more absurd attempts at persuasion. The letter, according to Utter, repeatedly urges Americans to vote against President Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans, and does so, in his characterization, amidst a steady stream of falsehoods and projection.
Utter does not treat the document as a serious diplomatic overture. He calls it sophisticated only in the narrow sense that it aims to exploit what he terms “low-information” Americans and their capacity for what he describes as suicidal empathy. In his reading, the letter whitewashes both the Quran and the record of Iran’s leadership to such a degree that it reads less like an argument than like farce.
The Quran as a factor in ‘victory’
The commentary focuses on a section of the letter titled “The Main Factors Underpinning Iran’s Victory,” in which the document points to “the Quran’s superior doctrine and worldview” as a decisive element. Utter quotes that section at length, noting its claim that the primary factor behind Iran’s success against “two armies that enjoy almost limitless resources” was its system of leadership — a leader selected according to criteria rooted in Quranic tenets, whose virtue, justness and competence are said to be established beyond reasonable doubt by a body of independent and learned jurists appointed directly by the people.
Utter’s response to that passage is dismissive. He writes that it could not be further from the truth, and he treats the description as an invitation to consider other stories of comparable credibility.
The letter, he notes, goes further, asserting that “Quranic doctrine” rests on principles of honesty, liberty, equality, social equity, respect for the rights of others, political discernment, compassion, and the priority of human values over personal desires. Utter goes through that list one item at a time, questioning first the claim of honesty in a document he regards as fundamentally deceptive, then the claim of liberty, which he ties to the period before Iran’s 1979 revolution.
On the questions of equality, social equity and respect for the rights of others, he points to the families of what he describes as countless thousands of citizens killed across a list of countries — Israel, Argentina, Iraq, Bulgaria, France, Syria, the United Arab Emirates and the United States — attributing those deaths to Iran and the militant groups he says it sponsors. He also turns to the situation of women in Iran, describing dress requirements and restrictions on movement and, in many cases, on driving or leaving home without a male chaperone, as well as what he frames as the nominal right not to be beaten by a husband beyond a certain implement size.
The ‘Death to America’ passage
Utter devotes particular attention to a passage in which the letter asserts that the phrase “Death to America,” chanted by Iranians since the Islamic Revolution, does not in any way express ill will toward the American people. He calls the framing Orwellian, and argues that wishing for the death of America is inseparable from wishing harm on Americans — a population the same rhetoric has labeled “The Great Satan.” He compares the logic to other phrases he considers similarly evasive, before veering into an unrelated aside in which he criticizes the phrase “women’s health care” and comments on a recent criminal case involving a mother who killed her children.
The letter, he continues, eventually asks, “How Can the U.S. Be Saved?” In that portion, according to Utter, the document cites both the Old Testament and Quran 13:11, stating that God does not alter the affairs of a people until they alter their own affairs. Utter concedes that this proposition may in fact be true, and suggests that if it is, Americans ought to laugh at the letter and then set about trying to save their country. Iran’s leaders, he writes, have already altered their own affairs — and those of the tens of thousands of their own citizens he says they have killed. He closes that passage by saying the world will be watching to see what God does next.
Another portion of the message, as quoted in the piece, reads: “Despite all the hardships that our enemies impose on us, we will continue fighting, as we have done for the past 47 years, for the liberation of humanity from tyranny and ignorance.” Utter counters by returning to his earlier themes — the treatment of women and the 52 Americans held hostage for 444 days during the crisis he associates with the Carter administration.
He also highlights the letter’s assertion that “We can live together in peaceful coexistence,” and its closing prayer for “an imminent end to oppression and aggression, for the liberation of all nations from the grip of tyrants, for a life of loving fellowship and universal peace.” Utter compares that language to the rhetoric of Hitler, Stalin and Mao.
The columnist’s bottom line
Utter’s conclusion is that the 26-page document can be reduced to a single proposition: that “Death to America” and “vote Democratic” amount to the same thing. He then adds, almost as an afterthought, that on second thought the truer words were never spoken — a line that signals his broader argument that the letter’s professed goodwill should not be taken at face value.
The piece is written from an explicitly partisan vantage point and makes no pretense of neutrality. It is a polemic aimed at American readers, and it functions in part as an argument about domestic politics: the columnist’s central charge is that a foreign adversary is attempting to influence how Americans vote, and that the appropriate response is ridicule rather than engagement. Whether the letter will have any effect at all is, of course, a separate question — and one that Utter leaves open, framing the document less as a threat than as an object of contempt.
What the piece does not offer is any independent verification of the letter’s authorship or distribution beyond the columnist’s own description, nor any indication of how the document reached him or how widely it has circulated. Readers looking for the full text will have to seek it out; Utter quotes selectively and for rhetorical effect. What he provides is a reading — hostile, sardonic and unapologetic — of a message that presents itself as an appeal to the American people, and that he insists is nothing of the kind.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/10/iran-sends-an-open-letter-to-the-honorable-people-of-the-united-states-of-america/