Iranian actress and activist Nazanin Boniadi has issued a heartfelt plea to the Western protest class that I fear will fall on deaf ears. Just as the Palestinians who have made it out of Gaza and can speak freely tried, in vain, to convince the anti-Zionist demonstrators to not lionize Hamas, so are Iranian democracy activists learning about the Western fascination and identification with tyrannical regimes.
The Iranian regime “unleashes its fury, first and foremost, on its own people,” Boniadi told PBS’s Newshour. The regime has shut down Internet access across Iran and has been arresting dissidents to ensure that those who want freedom cannot organize against the government while it is weak. Therefore “we have to separate the Islamic Republic from Iran because most of the Iranian people believe [the regime] is an occupying force.”
She closed with a plea: “I urge Westerners, please, if you want to stand for Iran and the Iranian people and their sovereignty, please don’t conflate that with the Islamic Republic’s sovereignty, they are two different things. Do not raise the Islamic Republic’s flag in your rallies. That is a slap in the face to every dissident, every Iranian who has risked everything for freedom.”
Yet of course this weekend there were those very Islamic Republic of Iran flags on the streets of New York City. The flags of Hamas and Hezbollah—which are also, by the way, Islamic Republic of Iran flags, technically—were replaced by the logo of a tyrannical regime in Tehran. In London, where Boniadi grew up, Islamic Republic flags intermingled with large signs displaying the face of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the words “choose the right side of history.”
To the protesters in the West, the “right side of history” is the unrelenting oppression and repression of the Iranian people.
Just how upside-down is the world of campus-style activism can be seen in another sign going around the world of “pro-Palestinian” activism. Students for Justice in Palestine, the overarching organizing arm of the Hamas support network on campus, has been promoting a new line: “The Empire Will Fall: From Gaza to Tehran.”
This is meant to evoke both places as graveyards of Western capitalist and militarist “imperialism,” but I had to pause for a moment to make sure I was reading it right. Because the empire that runs from Gaza to Tehran (or the reverse) is falling. But it’s certainly not an American one.
The “occupying force” of which Boniadi speaks is an exponential one. From its seat in Tehran it had—prior to the October 7, 2023 attacks—established satrapies in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen. Three of those were sovereign states made satellites by Iran, which also has its militias in the West Bank and in Iraq. It is our era’s textbook case of imperial expansionism much as the Soviet Union was in the preceding era.
But on October 7 the first domino was tipped. Iran’s proxy in Gaza, Hamas, was the vanguard force of a war waged against Israel, and Hamas has been brought to its knees. Next came Hezbollah, easily Iran’s most dangerous imperial product. The Lebanese occupying proxy was so overwhelmed by Israeli counterforce that it refused to lift a hand to help its creator when the IDF eventually came for Tehran’s military installations. Along the way, Syria, too, fell—not at Israel’s hands but almost certainly because Israel’s destruction of its allies left it vulnerable to the rebel forces that had been fighting to overthrow the House of Assad for over a decade. At this point the Houthis in Yemen must feel left out, for they have not yet been smashed to pieces.
If the Iranians are ever freed from the occupying force in Tehran, it will be against the wishes of the Western activist class, which is fully invested in the status quo of tyranny anywhere it can be found. And they will almost certainly not be dissuaded by those who actually have to live under those regimes.
