Nazanin Boniadi is an Iranian-born human rights activist, actress and 2023 Sydney Peace Prize Laureate. Roya Boroumand is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran.
The Islamic Republic authorities in Iran are going on an execution binge, using the spiraling instability and conflicts in the Middle East — in which they are complicit — as a smokescreen for their crimes against the Iranian people.
On January 22, the mother of Mohammad Ghobadlou, a 23-year-old street protester in the “Woman Life Freedom” uprising in Iran, made an emotional videotape pleading for her son’s life to be spared. Ghobadlou was bipolar and his death sentence had been quashed by the Supreme Court. A retrial involving an adequate mental health assessment had been ordered in July 2023.
Despite this, his execution took place a day after his mother’s appeal, with only a 12-hour notice to his lawyer because Iran’s Chief Justice vetoed the retrial and made sure Ghobadlou was secretly sentenced to death. This is not the first nor the last execution carried out in Iran in flagrant violation of the Islamic Republic’s international human rights obligations, and with utter contempt for the rule of law. He is at least the ninth protester to be executed in connection to the 2022 protests. Farhad Salimi, an Iranian Kurdish political prisoner subjected to torture-tainted “confession" and whose decade-long pleas for a fair retrial were ignored, was arbitrarily executed on the same day as Ghobadlou. Less than a week after their execution, four more Kurdish dissidents who were forcibly disappeared in July 2022 — Pejman Fatehi, Mohsan Mazloum, Mohammad Hazhir Faramarzi and Wafa Azarbar — were also executed after grossly unfair and secretive trials, and allegations of torture. Adding insult to injury, the authorities are refusing to return the bodies to the families for burial.
Let’s go through the list:
So no, your attempt at whataboutism, which you tried even though I said no matter what the USA has done, none of it justifies Iran being a menace, falls flat on its face.
Colonialism has created many of the issues this region has today, yes, and the second Gulf War - which I protested in the streets against, by the way - is a more recent example of detrimental Western involvement, as is the installation of the Shah in Iran a few decades earlier. However, blaming most or all of the issues the Middle East has on Western powers is in a way infantilizing, robbing the people and their governments in this region of their agency, which they clearly have and which was clearly the main force since the 1940s that shaped this part of the world. You cannot understate the massive impact the pan-Arabic movement had for example - or more recently, the Arab Spring.
Saudi Arabia managed, through intense diplomatic efforts since WW2, to enamor itself with the West. They offered two things: Oil and a strategic partnership. The West was willing to overlook that it’s an autocratic hellhole, Saudi Arabia was willing to pinch their noses whenever said West dared to make the most benign attempts at encouraging a more open and tolerant society. There is no denying however that patience is running out just as much as oil is, but since Saudi Arabia is a more than willing counterweight to Iran, which fundamentally threatens it through centuries-old religious animosity and its entirely different style of autocratic governance.
Iran set itself up, through their own will, as an opponent of the West. The Islamic Revolution was not just a revolution against the Western-backed Shah, but also one against the West and its ideals itself. Saudi Arabia isn’t a fan of Western ideals either, but it managed to toe the line just well enough to never anger it to the point that the economic and military alliance was endangered. Iran could have easily played the same game, but decided to stubbornly and arrogantly push against a foe that is ultimately far more powerful and could, if enough political will accumulated, annihilate it - never the other way around though, which is why Iran is still trying to get its nuclear weapons program off the ground, as both a deterrent and a potential first strike weapon.
It is. Just going by the aforementioned number of executions, it is.
Don’t put words in my mouth. The most important value to the West after ensuring its own security and that of its allies is the free flow of goods and people. Iran endangers both. They are endangering the close ally Israel through Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis, they are endangering the far less close, but still important ally Saudi Arabia and they are hurting global trade, which impacts everyone, even you. A nation like Iran can only push so many buttons before something happens in response. This bombing campaign is a warning. It tells them both that America knows exactly what its gaggle of proxies are up to and where they are and it’s an unspoken warning that these precise strikes hitting those plausibly deniable groups could just as easily hit official Iranian assets, which would hurt far more.
Autocratic theocracy: There is no Western autocratic theocracy. Yes there is, although it is still developing.
Let’s say all of these “developing” aspects equate the US to Iran - even though none of them are even close, which is why you had to use that crutch of using the word developing, implying there is a clear development in one direction, even though it’s far more complex than that: So what?
It’s still just whataboutism, still an intentional or unintentional attempt at normalizing a rogue state. Like I said, none of this gives Iran the right to behave in the way it does. You could easily use that same logic to excuse what North Korea, Russia, Cuba, Belarus, Vietnam, China are are doing, but that’s all this argument does, it’s not productive; there is nothing of substance coming out of it. Hell, the user I initially replied to even argued that because America is bad, it should leave Iran alone, which makes zero sense. We can list the faults and issues America has all day and I have been more than critical of the many issues the sole remaining world power has, but at the end of that day, this changes nothing about the asymmetric warfare Iran is conducting based on the same nihilistic zero-sum principle that Russia is using. This is the last thing we should encourage, as everyone gets hurt by it, not just the long list of nations and individuals affected by it, but also ordinary Iranians.
I never said it makes Iran and America equal. I simply argued against you saying America was totally different in every way.
Sure, let’s roll with that, but why did you argue this? What’s the point?
The point is America’s hands are not spotless when it comes to being authoritarian or murderous.
I thought I made that fairly clear.
So tldr whatabout.
Way too many words for “the US protects its interests”. It will kill, torture, maim, level cities, topple governments, invade, occupy and embargo whenever it sees fit (which is a lot). The degree to which the US does these things is unmatched in scale in contemporary times. All our living presidents ought to face trial at the Hague.