Moral clarity on Iran

THE EDITOR, Madam:

In September 2022, Mahsa Jina Amini – a 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman – was arrested by Iran’s Morality Police for an improperly worn hijab and died in custody three days later. Millions took to the streets chanting Zan, Zendegi, Azadi – Woman, Life, Freedom – a slogan rooted in the Kurdish liberation movement and now the conscience of a generation. The regime responded with bullets, mass arrests, and the torture and execution of teenagers like 16-year-old Nika Shakarami and 15-year-old Sarina Esmailzadeh. The world largely looked away.

The Islamic Republic was never inevitable. The 1979 revolution united secular liberals, feminists, socialists, and nationalists against the Shah, but Khomeini’s Islamist movement quickly devoured its allies. Women who had marched for freedom were ordered to veil. Thousands of political prisoners were executed in the 1988 “Summer of Blood.” What enabled this? A profound failure of Western intellectual judgement. Figures like Michel Foucault romanticised Khomeini’s movement as a rejection of Western modernity – a catastrophically misguided idealisation. Leftist groups such as the Tudeh Party collaborated with the Islamists, imagining they could control them. They were among the first hanged.

This “Red-Green alliance,” in which segments of the Western left excuse or romanticise authoritarian and Islamist movements, persists today – in academics defending Hamas, pundits downplaying the Maduro regime, and campus activists marching alongside ideologies that would imprison or kill them. Anti-Americanism too often substitutes for moral analysis.

The Islamic Republic’s record is unequivocal: it funds terrorist organisations including Hezbollah and Hamas, assassinates dissidents abroad, pursues nuclear weapons, persecutes minorities, imprisons and tortures journalists and activists, and enforces legal apartheid against women. These facts are documented by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the United Nations.

War is hell, and every innocent life lost is a tragedy. But pretending the pre-war status quo was “peace” ignores decades of systematic suffering. As writer Mariam Memarsadeghi argues, a painful reckoning may be the only path to Iranian freedom.

A free Iran – a nation of 88 million, heirs to a great civilization – is a hope worth defending with moral clarity. The women of Iran have shown extraordinary courage. The least the world can do is match their honesty.

#womanlifefreedom

FRANCESCA TAVARES