On April 4, 2025, the National Conference for Resistance of Iran (NCRI) U.S. office in Washington, D.C., hosted a vibrant Nowruz celebration, marking the Persian New Year with a gathering of distinguished guests, Iranian-Americans, and bipartisan American dignitaries. The event underscored the NCRI’s ongoing efforts to promote freedom, democracy, and human rights in Iran, as highlighted in a speech by a representative of the NCRI U.S. office. The celebration reflected hope and solidarity, with warm wishes for joy, hope, and prosperity extended to the people of Iran and advocates of democracy in the U.S., emphasizing the shared vision for a free and democratic Iran.
Remarks by Senator Robert Torricelli
Thank you very much. Happy Nowruz. You know, it is so much better to have a New Year’s in the spring. New Year’s is supposed to be about renewal, and growth, and life, and we have New Year’s on January 1st, in the cold and the dead of winter. Happy Nowruz, everybody, and happy spring.
Nothing gives me more optimism about the future than when you see young people taking a stand. Life’s pretty good in America, and you can come here from your parents’ homeland, and you can hear about your parents and your grandparents, you can know the struggle of their homelands, but you can just live the good life and let day follow day.
To every intern here, stand up. Everyone who’s interning with the NCRI, you’re here. There you are. It says so much about you, so much about your parents, so much about your culture that you didn’t forget, you didn’t turn your backs, you remembered Iran, you know where you’re from, and you didn’t give up the fight. Thank you, every one of you. You’re an inspiration.
I also want to say, like Rudy, I have so many years of my life that I have invested in helping the struggle for a free Iran. I have never been in a coalition of finer people. It is an unwritten story in American politics, but the coalition of Democrats, Republicans, liberals, and conservatives that have come together in these years to support Mrs. Rajavi and the NCRI is unlike anything I have ever seen in American politics. So to Linda Chavez, to Bob Joseph, to Link Bloomfield, to Colonel Martin, to all of you, and of course, to my co-chair of Italian Americans for Iran, Rudy Giuliani.
You know, I’ve often wondered, Rudy, somewhere in Tehran in Iranian intelligence, there’s someone who’s thinking, Louis Freeh, Giuliani, Torricelli, what did we do to these Italian Americans? Why are they on our case? But we are.
I want to tell you a simple story that may at least resonate with these interns today. As a young assistant in the White House in the late 1970s, I could find Iran on the map. I knew the Shah was a bad fellow, but frankly I didn’t know a lot. But every time a foreign leader would come meet the president, if they didn’t have a big enough crowd, they’d force you out of your office and make you stand on the South Lawn and applaud. And I was hustled out of my office one day and brought down to applaud, and who arrives but the Shah, where Jimmy Carter made his famous speech that you are an island of stability. He lasted about two more months.
As I was standing there, tear gas came floating from the streets onto the White House grounds. Thousands and thousands of young Iranians from universities all across America came to protest in the same spirit and the same determination that you have.
And I know in the long years of this struggle, you may say to yourselves, “But it’s been 40 years. So many people have died. We haven’t succeeded for so long. This isn’t going to happen.” Yes, it is.
Those students on those streets could have thought the same thing. They didn’t have half the support that we have against the Ayatollahs. They weren’t nearly as organized. They didn’t begin to have the resources. And they brought him down. As we will bring down the Ayatollahs as certain as you’re standing here today. It’s only time.
So, to all of you in this new year and a new spring, I know the struggle’s long and I know it’s been hard. And I know it’s easy for me to say and for my colleagues to repeat, we didn’t lose, brothers and sisters. Our children weren’t tortured or killed. Yours were. Not by the hundreds, but by the thousands, not for years, but for decades.
But there is a justice in history. It does come. Bill Clinton used to famously say it was his favorite quote, and he would add it in so many speeches, Martin Luther King’s, “The arc of history may bend slowly, but it bends to justice.” It does bend to justice.
The Ayatollahs are no Soviet Union. They’re no Nazi Germany. They’re no South Africa. They all fall. The arc of history does bend to justice, slower than we’d like, more painful than it should ever be, but it does.
To all of you who have not forgotten who you are or where you came from and have sacrificed so much. Your reward comes one morning when you probably least expect it.
As Rudy has suggested, this will not be a long, slow death. You will wake up one morning and the people of Iran will take back their country.
I don’t know what the spark is. It could be a shopkeeper who simply closes down his store and thousands follow. It can be a soldier who lays down his arms and says, “I will not fire on my people.” It could be a jailer who says, “I will not participate in this abuse.” It could come from a hundred directions. It’s a spark, and that spark will light a fire that will burn all the injustice and give a bright new light to the Iranian future.
There are good days ahead. Thank you for allowing me to be part of this struggle. Thank you all for not forgetting who you are and not giving up on the land of your ancestors. Thanks.