BDS activist couple:
US Campus protests disabled old levers of power
Iranians were anti-Israel before Revolution
There’s only so much one can discover about the cause, methods, and characteristics of a group of protesters across the world from pictures, videos, and news stories. The problem would be exacerbated if the regime the protesters are fighting against has a media hegemony committed to whitewashing its crimes and misrepresenting or even slandering its opponents. What arguably better breaks this access barrier is someone with close knowledge of both sides who has followed the struggle for years. Iran Daily has conducted an extensive exclusive with not just one but two such individuals, who are introduced in turn below. Blaine Coleman is an American resident of Ann Arbor and an activist fighting for the human rights of Palestinians. He is a frequent commenter at public meetings, including those of the Ann Arbor City Council and the Central Student Government at the University of Michigan. His profession in the past 22 years has avowedly been protesting “against military aid for Israel” in the Ann Arbor city council “in the capacity of human beings and a regular citizen of Ann Arbor”. He helped U of M students in organizing the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign and gathering a sizable audience during controversial deliberations. Dr. Mozhgan Savabieasfahani, a native of Iran and wife to Coleman, is an award-winning environmental toxicologist and an advocate for justice for Palestine. She has published extensively on the harmful effects of war-created pollution in the Middle East, particularly in Iraq post-2003, where birth defects, cancer, and other diseases have become epidemic. After many years of speaking out before the Ann Arbor City Council, Mozhgan Savabieasfahani is eyeing a seat at the table to, among other things, pass a resolution against military aid to apartheid Israel.
By Amir Mollaee Mozaffari & Mostafa Shirmohammadi
Staff writers
IRAN DAILY: This recent wave of pro-Palestinian protests and campus encampments that swept across the United States was the latest in a series of political activism by students that American universities pushed back against. With years of political activism under your belts, you two rushed to join several such protests on the campus of the University of Michigan before coming to Iran to spread the message of the students. What did you glean from your first-hand observation?
BLAINE COLEMAN: This October of 2023 was the very first time that we have seen massive, unrelenting demonstrations by the students for divestment from Israel, for cutting off the military aid to Israel. This is a new thing. You’ll notice that it’s a very openly anti-imperialist movement. This also is something you have never seen on such a big scale in the United States. Now, I know you’re thinking, “Well, there was the anti-Vietnam War movement.” Yes, that was extremely important and big, but it was not mostly anti-imperialist. It was mostly a nationalist kind of thing.
I think this movement is unmatched because it’s so big, so determined, so loud, so unrelenting, and so publicly anti-imperialist. The anti-Vietnam War movement was not led by Vietnamese students. In those days, there were very few Vietnamese students. This big anti-imperialist movement against Israel is led by Palestinian-American students. Of course, it has a very large participation of many Muslim students, many Jewish students, many Christian students, and other students.
Even ultra-orthodox Jewish students?
MOZHGAN SAVABIEASFAHANI: On the campus of the University of Michigan, we haven’t seen any, but they are everywhere else. There are other students who don’t believe in God or they have no religious bone in them. Most of them are not religious, but there are all kinds of students. There are Hindus. There are Buddhists. There are all kinds of students.
For 20 years, Blaine and I have been pushing these students to get out there and make a demand. In 2001, there were a lot of students who were talking about boycotting Israel, but it was very mild. They were not this serious about calling for divestment, for stopping investment in companies that benefit Israel, and for totally cutting Israel off. This continued up until the past six or seven months. The students were never this determined and convinced that it must be done. I never thought they would actually come out forcefully and not quit.
Coleman: Now, to give you some background, the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel movement started on the US campuses in 2001 in Berkeley. The first big victory of this BDS movement was at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, on April 17, 2003. It was a resolution for total divestment against Israel.
Upon hearing the students’ calls for divestment, many people assume that it must be impractical for universities to cut longstanding ties with Israel. Is it, though?
Coleman: When Russia attacked Ukraine in 2022, many institutions and universities including the University of Michigan instantly cut the Russians off completely. They just issued statements saying they’re divesting from Russia. That was it.
Divestment is complicated, but it’s also a political move that is not really a financial move. It’s not really a complex financial transaction. It’s really a political statement. When they said, “We’re divesting from Russia”, they were expressing outrage and demanding concrete action against Russia. Now, today, if they say they want to divest from Israel, it would be the same thing. Who cares about the dollars and cents? In my opinion, it’s a political statement.
Personally, I don’t care about the method. It can be divestment, boycotting, or cutting off military aid. The important thing to me is that you express outrage against Israel because it’s massacring people. So, if you feel comfortable with divestment, like the students feel, I’d say, “Go for it.” If you feel comfortable with a boycott because the word boycott is well-understood, I say go for a boycott. We’ve done that.
Savabieasfahani: But why is it unrealistic to reject a monster that is trained to murder humanity and proudly say, “We want to kill all of you”? Anyone who thinks it’s okay to continue to feed these kinds of monsters should stop and think about who they are. Israel is not just about killing Palestinians. Israel is about killing humanity, freedom, and dialogue. It’s about oppressing every human being in the Arab world so they cannot speak one word.
Why do you think Arab governments are so reluctant to do anything about Israel? It’s because they get support from Israel to oppress their own people and continue to milk their own people. So, Israel and the current governments of Arab nations are hand in glove to torture and kill Arabs. People who say that we cannot stop nurturing them should be ashamed of themselves. There is no time for nicety. The time is to expose these kinds of thoughts and tell them who they are. They are helping monsters and justifying terrible crimes.
The news just came out that Cornell University’s president will step down from her position next month, making her the third Ivy League leader who announced their resignation. Do you count this as a win?
Savabieasfahani: Is she resigning because the Zionists are forcing her to resign, or is she resigning because she’s objecting to the genocide in Palestine? That is the question.
Coleman: She is resigning because she caught heat from supporters of Israel. This is a part of the massive sound and fury around the issue of divesting from Israel that is reflected in this pressure coming from Congress to university presidents. Congress is pressuring university presidents to get rid of students who are demanding divestment and saying, for example, ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.’ The university presidents have no way of fighting this. So, they’re buckling and quitting.
Right now, they are dealing with it by throwing police at the students. It has a heavy cost for students, but once these students get released from jail a day later, they are out there demonstrating again and rebuilding their tents
People expect university professors to speak out against injustices and not to be chained by ties to Israel. Many professors in the US have indeed joined the students in the recent wave of pro-Palestinian protests. Why have some other professors stood against the protests?
Savabieasfahani: I think you are assuming a lot of things that are not true about the United States. You’re assuming that the professors there are all selfless people who think we should take the high road and make this a better world. That’s not true. People like me will never get to be the head of a university. They will kick you out long before you’re able to do any of these things. Human rights activists have all been kicked out of university a long time ago. For example, at a party, you may see a donor say to the head of the department in which an outspoken professor, such as Norman Finkelstein, is coming up for tenure, “By the way, this Finkelstein is not going to get the tenure, right? Right?”
Those pro-Israeli professors are not getting paid directly by the Zionists at all, but they have gone through a long process of elimination to get selected. By the time they arrive at their jobs, they are neutered. These are the kinds of people who will not stand up for human rights because if they do, they will be forced by these Zionists to step down.
Coleman: However, because of this upheaval, a change has begun. For all these 20 years that Mozhgan and I have been active, these professors were almost entirely useless. And now, a whole bunch of these professors are joining with the students. This is a new thing.
I have to say that we are all way too focused on university administrators, professors, members of Congress, and the police who are helping Israel. We are too focused on these levers of power because until now, these levers of power were powerful. That’s all changed. There’s a new normal now. The new normal is you have thousands and thousands of students marching all over the place and that these levers of power don’t work anymore. I’m not focused on these people. I’m not focused on how Biden is so bad and Trump is so bad. I’m focused on the students because they’re not stopping.
Savabieasfahani: Just a year ago, the general atmosphere at the universities was like, “Oh, no, no, we’re not political. Politics is bad.” That was a good thing to them. They would be proud that they are not political. Today, university students have been politicized, and they are demanding huge things. They do not stop at just Israel. They are against the whole shebang: imperialism. They talk about it very eloquently. They talk about colonialism, imperialism, and other things that really kill the American political establishment.
In America and Europe now, students know what Imperialism is, and they’re against it. If you’re against imperialism, you would be against capitalism and against colonialism. You would be very radical since you want a major change in the system of governance of the world. It’s a very, very good news that it’s waking up.
The general public and the general student body in Iran, however, do not know what imperialism is. Iranian students are extremely confused. They have the get up and go find out what is imperialism and why are students in America against imperialism.
You observed that American students are better learned about imperialism. However, videos have been circulating of interviews with a few American students who didn’t seem to know or recall what they were gathering for, aside from showing solidarity with arrested students across the country. Is that enough to write off all the protesters?
Savabieasfahani: Not at all. The students who come to these protests have different levels of understanding about the depth of the situation, but they know what’s going on. If they come, they will come to support you. Or, if they’re Zionists, they would come to beat you up.
Coleman: They’re very, very few Zionists who are able and willing to come and beat people. The one example you’re thinking of is UCLA. In UCLA, a Zionist gang was somehow recruited to come and beat the students at the encampment, among whom were Iranians, by the way. They had a hard time getting a sizable number of Zionists in that mob, but they got them together and attacked the pro-Palestinian students for four hours. The police sat and did nothing, but the pro-Palestinian students ended up winning. The Zionists were unable to break into their camp, and they were unable to force them to leave. The next day, hundreds of police came and forced the students in the Palestine camp to leave by force.
However, this has not happened generally on US campuses for the reason that there aren’t enough hardcore Zionist students who are willing and able to get out there and try to harm the pro-Palestinian students. There just aren’t. And all these levers of power like the Zionist federations and the Zionist institutions don’t have the power to mobilize people because there aren’t enough people who would agree with them in this holocaust against Palestinians.
They’re not dueling rallies, for the most part. You don’t see dueling rallies on these campuses. Mostly, you just see hundreds, sometimes thousands of pro-Palestinian students marching. The other side has nothing but pure racism and pure fascism. That is not something that attracts students on the campus.
This is a very inspiring situation. It’s like the civil rights movement of the 1960s. But it’s more widespread and it’s bigger, louder, more determined, and spread across more campuses. Thanks to the internet, it’s everywhere very quickly. It’s even bigger than the Black Lives Matter Movement. In that movement, you would have episodes of a rally here and there. This current Palestine movement is not episodic. It’s massive, it’s every day, and it doesn’t stop. Now, the anti-Vietnam War movement was big, but, again, it was not clearly anti-imperialist. And it was not something that had the kind of big staying power that this movement now for Palestine has.
You have participated in many pro-Palestinian protests in the US. Do you have anything to say to Iranian students who are not taking a stand against Israeli crimes in Gaza?
Coleman: I wish I could convince every Iranian student to get out there on the street and march for the cutting off of every kind of aid and trade from the US, Germany, etc. to Israel. If I could get at the students, I would tell them, “Guys, demonstrate against what Israel is doing in Gaza.” You know that Israel’s coming to kill you after they kill Gaza, right? So, it would not only be for idealistic reasons, not only for the reason that you’re crying because of this holocaust but, additionally, for a very practical reason. If you don’t stop Israel from committing a holocaust, they’re going to keep coming.
Savabieasfahani: And they tell you they’re coming. They proudly and loudly are saying, “We will do this to you.” They’re not hiding it. They’re not saying, “We will first kill Palestinians. Then, we will come and kill you Iranians.” How can you miss that?
When Iran hit Israel in a very thought-out and very effective way and took out three of their main installations, one of which was a highly protected military base, I was speaking to an Iranian documentary maker. The next day, he apparently went out into the streets and talked to people. He said the majority of people he talked to — which is, of course, a weak sample size — were very happy and proud. They were saying, “See, we can beat them.”
Coleman: I would say if you want to emulate Americans, don’t emulate Taylor Swift and Olivia Rodrigo. Emulate these thousands of American students who are marching against Israel. Be like these American students and give Israel hell. If these kids in Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, England, and America can do it, you can, too. I don’t care if you have political differences inside the campus with some other kids. Put that aside and show the world that you really hate what Israel is doing.
Savabieasfahani: It’s bad for Iran if its students are not yelling, “Stop this nonsense.” It makes us Iranians look bad. I go to a lot of protests in America a lot, and I’m pretty much the only Iranian there. There are Iranian student associations on campus in Michigan. They don’t come, except maybe a few. It’s an embarrassment for Iranians to not be standing clearly against Israel right now.
Iranians have been supporting Palestinians in words and in deeds for years, maybe even more than most countries.
Coleman: I know that well. Some Iranian students may think that being against Israel was something that was invented by Iran’s late Leader in 1979. Wrong. Iranians have hated the violence that Israel has committed ever since March 18, 1950, when an editorial came out in the newspaper Bakhtar-e Emrooz by Dr. Hossein Fatemi.
Savabieasfahani: Yes, Fatemi was asking why there was a massive rush to recognize Israel. He had been to Lebanon, I think, and he had seen waves of Palestinian refugees coming from Palestine, hungry and barefoot and starved. They had been ethnically cleansed. So, they poured into Lebanon. He saw how poor and desperate they were, and he talked about it. So, Iranian political minds have been thinking and siding with the people of Palestine since the beginning of the 1950s.
Fatemi cared for democracy, for human rights, and for freedom. If Shah had not killed him, Fatemi would be a giant. He was the foreign minister of Mossadeq, and he was the brain behind the nationalization of Iranian oil. He was the one who verbalized it, and Mossadeq admittedly picked it up.
Coleman: So, this is not a new thing. Iranian students should understand that they are standing with an old Iranian tradition here. They can emulate Fatemi.
A woman once said to me years ago, “Oh, we Iranians dream about America and we love America.” I said, “There is a lot to love about Iran and Iranian history. Read about Dr. Fatemi.” This guy was a major newspaper editor, he got a doctoral degree in France, and he came back and used all of his knowledge to build up this country. One of the things that England and America hated the most about Fatemi was that he knew all his facts. Mosaddeq was trying to be friendly and hide a little bit. He didn’t want to be immediately killed. But Fatemi said, “I’ll give you the facts. Right here. This is why we have to nationalize the oil. This is why the British have been starving us. Now, pay up.” So, this is why they killed Fatemi.
I want to talk about the labeling of these student protesters as anti-Semites. Mr. Coleman, you’re clearly a big proponent of the slogan, ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.’ By saying such slogans, are you and pro-Palestinian protesters in university campuses across the US implying that the historical land of Palestine should be near-empty of Jews?
Coleman: No, what we’re saying is the same thing that they basically said with apartheid South Africa: we want everybody to be equal, we don’t want some religion to be the boss, and we want there to be normal elections where everybody gets one vote. Now, this is what the students are saying in America. They’re all saying this apartheid state of Israel has to go. When you say the apartheid state has to go, you’re saying the state has to go; You’re not saying any people have to go.
There were a lot of white supremacists in apartheid South Africa who probably ran away after the apartheid state was dead because they wanted to be boss. They didn’t want to be your neighbor. They wanted to be your boss. It will probably be the same thing in Israel when the apartheid state has gone, which will be sooner than anybody thinks. There are going to be a lot of Israelis who want to be boss and they say, “We can’t live here if we can’t be boss,” and they’ll go straight to California.
Mozhgan and I are so old that we were part of the divestment from apartheid South Africa movement way into the 1980s. Nobody called us anti-White. That would have been stupid. But now they’re trying the same kind of argument against the divestment movement.
The importance of the shirt is the Zionists hate the slogan ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,’ and they have pretended that it is an anti-Semitic slogan. As I’ve said, these huge student demonstrations all over the United States have many Muslim, many Jewish, and many Christian students in them. It is crazy to call this thing anti-Semitic. It’s their weapon to distract you from what’s happening.
What’s happening is a real holocaust against the Palestinian people. We’re talking about 40,000 Dead Palestinians or even more. There’s an Arab-American human rights activist, named Ralph Nader, who is saying that it might be 200,000 dead in Gaza. Since there’s been so much destruction, it’s possible that more people are buried below rubble who are currently declared missing.
You don’t seem to believe in the two-state solution.
Coleman: No, there is no way. There has never been a two-state solution. There has always been one state until now. It has been this basically white supremacist dictatorship, which we call Israel. That’s the one state. Gaza has been surrounded by air, land, and sea by Israel.
So, what all the students are demanding in the United States and Palestine around the world is one state, in which is where apartheid is dead and gone and buried and never coming back. That’s what happened in apartheid South Africa; for sure, that’s what’s going to happen in Israel. Again, they are talking about the apartheid state, not the people.
All of this mass killing and holocaust that Israel is committing is only hastening the day that the apartheid state of Israel is gone. Mozhgan and I remember that the apartheid state of South Africa, to the end, had tanks, atomic bombs, and jet bombers. How come they’re gone? Because you can’t eat your tanks. You can’t eat your jet bombers. You can’t eat your atomic bombs. So, politically and economically and diplomatically, apartheid South Africa was isolated. Now, that apartheid state is dead. The same thing is starting to happen in front of our eyes to Israel. All we have to do is march with those students and demand no more aid or trade to Israel until that apartheid state is totally gone.
You might not remember this, but the white supremacist in South Africa, said at the very end, “Okay, okay, but can we just have one little white state inside South Africa to preserve our cultural heritage?” And Mandela said, “No, there’s not going to be a white state. It’s going to be one state where everybody’s equal.” What if Mandela had said, “Okay, you can have a little white state”? They would have white jet bombers and white tanks and white atomic bombs. They would have continued bombing all over Africa. In Israel, if you have even one small apartheid state left, they will use it to bomb and kill the Arab world and Iran if they can. So, you can’t have an apartheid state in this world. That’s why there are no more apartheid states.
Savabieasfahani: You cannot have parts of this land ruled by apartheid. It has to be clear of apartheid. It will be one system, where everybody has the right to vote and their vote has the same value. The whole system of apartheid, which is extremely violent in Israel and is doing all of this, has to be dismantled, and it is dismantling itself. We don’t have to do much except boycott them and keep fighting back. They’re going to go. They’re going.
Coleman: You keep thinking of this all-powerful Israel. That all-powerful Israel is dying right in front of your eyes. It’s committing suicide right in front of your eyes.
Now, South Africa is leading the charge against Israel in international courts. Why was South Africa the first country to step forward and challenge Israel in courtrooms?
Coleman: You can find a whole series of articles by a journalist named Chris McGreal in The Guardian, where he documented the tight, close relationship between apartheid Israel and apartheid South Africa. Apartheid Israel was trying to give atomic bombs to apartheid South Africa. That’s how close they were. So, to lose apartheid South Africa was a huge blow for Israel. Now, Israel is the last apartheid state. And the people of South Africa are doing what they can to get rid of that last apartheid state.
Savabieasfahani: I do hope that Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir, and Smotrich get arrested by the ICC. I have to believe that humanity is better than to just let these guys go. I hope that they will be put away. Hang them if you can, but I don’t think you can hang them.
We’re hearing that some Latin American nations are cutting political ties with Israel. The most recent one was Columbia. In the early days of the war, we heard that some other Latin American nations suspended ties with Israel and withdrew their ambassadors from Israel. Meanwhile, you’re hearing that major Muslim nations might be establishing ties with Israel. How can this be?
Coleman: Whenever I would hear someone refer to all the regional Arab countries as Arab regimes, I would jump to correct them. Some of them are dictatorships that were established through coups orchestrated by England or America. Those guys turned in their Arab cards a long time ago.
Savabieasfahani: They are oppressors of the people who live there. They have no empathy for any Arabs. So, what you said is nothing surprising to me because if you are installed by the US and England to oppress your people, then obviously you have no empathy for Arabs, even if you were a Muslim Arab.
Coleman: There’s a book, titled ‘The Israeli Connection: Whom Israel Arms and Why,’ by an Israeli sociologist named Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi. In this 1987 book, you will see a whole history of Israel heavily arming Latin American dictatorships — especially Guatemala but also El Salvador and Nicaragua, all through Latin America, and all three large parts of the world. So, when you see Colombia going against Israel, or you see, let’s say, people in Chile or Argentina going against Israel, you have to take into consideration that they remember when Israel had a major role in imposing dictatorships on them.
Savabieasfahani: People ask, “Why aren’t Arab countries empathizing with Palestine and cutting off this and that? Why aren’t they doing stuff to liberate Palestinians?” The answer is that the governments of those Arab countries that the world is thinking about are handpicked oppressors of their own people. Those governments don’t represent the people of those countries. So, it’s obvious that all of what’s happening is activating the populations in those countries. Their government is not actually picked by the nation. They are either handpicked or have risen to power through coups and oppressing the nation. They’re all puppets. They are hand in glove with Israel because they use the technology that Israel creates to oppress their own people.
Coleman: you’ve seen the demonstrations in Jordan against Israel. You’ve seen the demonstrations in Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, and all these places against Israel. These rulers that were imposed by the United States and Israel have nothing in common with the population.
In the wake of Iran’s strike against Israel, the only Arab nation that voiced support for Iran was Algeria. Its president thanked Iran for the move.
Savabieasfahani: If the people have a little bit more say in a government, then their government will do that. But if people have nothing to do with their government, you will get something akin to what’s going on in Jordan. There are thousands of people coming out every night in front of the Israeli embassy, just screaming for change. Has anything along those lines happened in the government of Jordan? No, the governor of Jordan is an Israeli sympathizer. It’s important to make sure your readers make that distinction.
Coleman: If you look at the history of Iran, this anti-imperialism goes back a long, long way — way before the current government. This is an Iranian tradition. When Mosaddeq and Fatemi visited Egypt in 1951 — before Nasser took over Egypt — there were massive demonstrations on the streets of Cairo, welcoming Mossadeq and welcoming Fatemi. So, this tradition of anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism all through the region, including in Iran and Egypt, goes back at least to the beginning of the 1950s. There was no stupid sectarian talk about Arabs versus the Iranians then. They loved Mosaddeq. This is a poisonous thing to try and put Arabs and Iranians against each other.
Savabieasfahani: I think the US and Israel have done massive amounts of propaganda to do this, to muddy the solidarity between Arabs and Iranians. I say we should stand in solidarity with all Arab nations in the Middle East right now.
Coleman: It’s a poisonous thing that some ask Iran to stop arming the Lebanese and the Palestinians in their fight against apartheid Israel and keep the money to itself because it turns Iranians against Arabs.
Savabieasfahani: Iranians, more than others, should support these liberation movements because they are fighting your fight because they are going to put their children and their young out to fight so that Israel does not reach you. Anyone who can’t see that is not in tune with the political reality.
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