In an April 24 news conference, President Trump and French president Emmanuel Macron narrowed their rift toward the current state of the Iran deal, known as the JCPOA.  Macron defended discussions with Trump for a new plan to curb Iranian nuclear weapons.  Speaking to reporters before leaving Washington on Wednesday night, the French president said the new four-pronged agreement would be a "very important complement" to the existing 2015 accord.

This new framework will add measures curbing Iran's nuclear drive after 2025, when "sunset clauses" are set to pass away, terminating the regime's ballistic missile program and ruling in an end to its malign regional meddling as a criterion for the revised deal.

By April 26, 2018, Iran's supreme leader had reacted to this news conference and called on Muslim nations to unite against the United States, saying Tehran would never yield to "bullying," state television reported on Thursday.

It seems that Iran's supreme leader has forgotten the meaning of the word "bullying."  Bullying is a distinctive pattern of harming and humiliating others.  Bullying is when someone is being hurt either by words or actions on purpose, usually more than once; feels bad because of it; and has a hard time stopping what is happening to him.  We also have different types of bullying to consider: verbal bullying, social bullying, physical bullying...

Iran's supreme leader must know that bullying is now institutionalized in Iran by clergymen.

Let's take a glance at what has happened in Iran the last week, starting with physical bullying.

Wednesday, April 18, 2018, the suppressive forces of the Guidance Patrol attacked and badly beat up a young woman until she went unconscious.  They did so under the pretext of her being improperly veiled, despite appeals by her friends who said she suffered from a heart condition.

While the beating of a girl by the Iranian regime's so-called "Guidance Patrol" caused outrage, the head of the regime's judiciary said police "must not retreat a single step."

According to the state-run IRNA news agency, on Monday, April 23, Sadeq Larijani, head of the judiciary, said: "We should not allow any person to resist the legal actions of law enforcement or insult an agent."

Sadeq Larijani.

"Security forces must not step back a single step at all ... because then all hell breaks loose, and the road to the law enforcement's authority and action to secure the country will be closed," Larijani emphasized.

He added: "If some people were to confront the police force and thus try to polarize the community in order to make a cultural debate appear a political or social discussion, this is not acceptable at all."

The release of the video of beating of a young girl by the agents of the "Guidance Patrol" has led to people's anger and a wave of massive protests.

Meanwhile, the head of the judiciary also said on Monday: "When the system concludes that in order to preserve the authority of the country ... our [military] advisers should continue their presence in Syria and Iraq, no one else should question this policy, but everyone should be sympathetic altogether to defend and support it."

Mrs. Maryam Rajavi, president-elect of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, said the brutality and savagery committed against a young ailing woman once again revealed the ugly, inhuman, and anti-Islamic visage of the misogynistic mullahs ruling Iran.

She called on Iran's courageous youths to counter and confront such disrespect and violation of Iranian women's dignity by the clerical regime's Revolutionary Guards and mercenaries and not to allow their sisters to be insulted, suppressed, and tortured.

Hassan Mahmoudi is a human rights advocate, specializing in political and economic issues relating to Iran and the Middle East.