In defense of Iran:
A view from two Mideast peace activists
Amid growing foreign military warnings and threats against Iran’s national security, two prominent international peace activists, Blaine Marcel Coleman and Dr. Mozhgan Savabieasfahani —who were recently featured guests of the Iran Daily newspaper—have now turned their attention to Iran after over 22 years of continuous advocacy for global peace and justice. These two activists, who have long campaigned across various platforms, including the Ann Arbor City Council in Michigan, against military aid to the Zionist regime, have compiled an analytical report examining the historical roots and warning of the grave consequences of foreign intervention, driven by growing alarm over the aggressive designs of Israel and the United States. The present article reflects their profound concern to expose hegemonic agendas and preserve Iran’s independence.
We want to talk to two different groups of the Iranian people:
1- You who imagine that Israel and America are somehow your ally despite the oceans of blood they have spilled, and despite their history of cutting Arab nations into pieces.
2- You who understand that Iran has to defend its independence against the genocidal violence of Israel and America. You who know that even if an independent Iran had 100% free elections, Israel and America would still feel driven to bomb Iran’s independence to smithereens.
Allying yourself with Israel and America is suicide
First, let us talk to you, the readers who imagine that Israel – the Genocide State – is somehow your ally against the high cost of living.
We want to say clearly that no peaceful demonstrator should ever be harmed. Not in Minneapolis and not in Iran. The police should very publicly limit their role to cooperating with demonstrators for purposes of traffic control and the quick isolation of anyone who uses violence.
We cannot forget how important peaceful demonstrations have been to halting foreign domination over Iran, ever since 1891, and to asserting the people’s rights against governments. These demonstrations are not just something to be tolerated; they are a necessity for the nation’s development.
These are your predecessors in the Iran of 1951. Look how they fought for democracy and people’s rule before the US coup of 1953:
Let us also not ignore how Israel and America have bragged about Israeli intervention in Iran’s anticorruption demonstrations, making something clean and honest into a training ground for Israel’s paramilitary gunmen. They can never be your allies; they will massacre the people and drown the nation in civil wars if given the chance. They have proven this.
You just saw Israel murder over a thousand Iranians in the streets of Iran.
You are still watching Israel bomb and starve a whole population of Palestinians while you wolf down popcorn in front of your TV.
After seeing so much blood, if you are still welcoming Israel – today’s Hitler – into the streets of Iran, as your machine-gun-toting ally, then you are really shooting yourself in the head. And yes, we know how bad it was in those streets during the past month. Just don’t invite the Hitler twins (Israel and America) onto those streets with the illusion that they will treat you more nicely than they are treating Gaza. They won’t.
We say that today, in the year 2026, but Dr. Hossein Fatemi already said it in 1950.
Follow Dr. Hossein Fatemi – not Netanyahu, Trump, and SAVAK
Dr. Fatemi was the intellectual powerhouse behind the nationalization of Iran’s oil. He was also the editor of Bakhtar-e-Emruz and the future Foreign Minister under Prime Minister Mossadegh.
He wrote strongly against recognizing Israel in 1950. He was horrified that Israel mass-murdered the Palestinian people and turned the survivors into refugees. He saw those refugees in Lebanon and he wrote about them.
Dr. Fatemi shunned Israel for the same reason he drove the nationalization of Iran’s oil – to protect the “hungry and shoeless”. That was also why the Shah murdered Fatemi after taking power in a US-British coup d’état.
As soon as Dr. Mossadegh made Iran independent by nationalizing its oil, Britain started working to obliterate that independence, using murder and sanctions to starve the nation onto its knees. Soon the United States joined that effort. Later, after the 28th Mordad coup d’état, Israel joined America in overseeing SAVAK and its torture of Iran.
Do you see that neither America nor Israel want to nurture democracy in Iran? They want only to demolish Iran’s independence, even if Iran had a perfect democracy. That has been clear every minute of every day since the 28th Mordad, and it is true today.
Israel and America; endless civil wars for Iran
We are talking to you, if you long to install the same Shah’s son into power, and if you look to Israel – the racist assassin state – as your ally.
By now, you should know that Israel and America would cut Iran into pieces and arm those pieces against each other if you allowed that to happen. You already know how happy Israel would be to turn those pieces into some version of Gaza, and how happy America would be to finance that bloodbath.
You must know all of that because you are watching Israel and America turn formerly independent nations of the Middle East and Africa into a series of bloodbaths, civil wars, and mass starvation experiments -- not only Gaza, Libya, Syria, Lebanon, and Sudan. They want your blood too.
When Israel and America pretended to weep about human rights in Libya, Syria, and Sudan, they engulfed those nations in civil wars, and in civil wars within civil wars. You see the results today.
Earlier, during the Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan administrations, you can find similarly bloody examples from Angola, Mozambique, and Afghanistan. Their civil wars were fueled by America and Israel, causing millions to die over several generations.
There is another reason you should never identify yourself with Israel: because the world now views Israel with revulsion for its genocide on Gaza. Israel is even more hated today than Apartheid South Africa was before it swirled down the toilet bowl of history. Israel is going the same way, so don’t follow Israel down that way.
In these circumstances, wouldn’t it be suicidal for Iran to surrender its defense of Iranian land, to abandon Palestine, to abandon Lebanon, to welcome Israeli and American executioners onto Iranian soil, and to welcome back the torturers of SAVAK? If you want to vote for that surrender, then consider this:
Israel and America oversaw and trained SAVAK while it was torturing your family under the Shah, while it was breaking the back of Iranian democracy and lobotomizing the nation.
After the Iranian people finally overthrew the Shah’s dictatorship in 1979, America and Israel unleashed war, economic sanctions, trade sanctions, and technology sanctions on Iran. That war and those sanctions never really ended.
As a result, maybe you don’t believe a word the government says. You may be sick and tired of permanent emergency rule. You may throw this article in the trash because you are so profoundly alienated from even talking about it. If the government says the sun is shining, you might say no, it’s midnight.
US ‘freedom of the press’ doesn’t stop it from committing massacres
So, we are talking to you, the ones who already threw this article away.
Let us not go overboard and idealize the US news media. That media uncritically quotes US government officials making statements of murderous racism against whole populations in the Middle East, West Asia, Africa, and Latin America. We remember Senators John McCain and Hillary Clinton threatening to bomb Iran, with no serious opposition by the US news media. When Trump bombs Iran and then sends an armada of war ships to Iran, he is only following in their footsteps, and the US news media is still not seriously opposing him.
We see that the US news media has collaborated with every US and Israeli massacre. That helped the US government to get Lumumba killed in the Congo and to bomb the Congolese people under Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson. That also helped the United States to kill millions of Vietnamese, to kill millions more in Iraq and Afghanistan, and to devastate Latin America and Indonesia with military coups. The US news media accepted all those bloodbaths as normal and reduced them to minor background noise in the life of the nation.
Also, let’s not go overboard and idealize US elections either. Candidates face serious obstacles before they can appear on any US election ballot. They rely on mountains of cash from rich donors to promote their campaigns for office.
US Presidents are elected, but don’t idealize the result, because every one of them, from George Washington to Donald Trump, was guilty of things like genocide, slavery, brutal wars, coups, and just plain murder. No election and no newspaper could stop those atrocities because the United States was built on those atrocities and it still is. When the US government approved laws to protect minorities or provide social services, that only happened after large public mobilizations and protests, most famously the Black freedom movement.
We, the authors, are both very big on freedom of speech. We want more of it. However, we can see that the US government has laughingly disregarded “free speech” to kidnap and jail student advocates for Palestinian rights and has placed them into deportation proceedings. This has devastated a formerly loud, in-your-face campus protest movement against Israel’s genocide on Gaza.
We ourselves take full advantage of what free speech still exists at our City Council meetings in Michigan, but when we demand resolutions against Israel, we are usually – not always – ignored by the local news media. This is because objecting to genocide is regarded as weird by the US media, or as bad manners.
Trump not dropping “freedom of speech” on your head rather dropping bombs
Although we are both big on free speech, America’s “free speech” is no reason to invite Trump in to bomb your cities. He is not dropping free speech onto Iran. He is dropping bombs.
Read some history and you will see that the US government launched violent coups against democratically elected governments in Syria and Iran, during the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, and against the Iraqi government during the Kennedy administration. Those coups were not launched for any kind of “human rights” purpose.
If you are unhappy with Syria and Iran today, then remember how grievously the US crippled their development with those coups.
In short, don’t look to America and its cosmetic level of “free speech” to save you. Look to yourself, to 92 million educated Iranians.
Israel and the US are not coming to save you but to kill you. They are bragging about the Israeli spies sent into Iranian demonstrations over the past month and they are still threatening to bomb Iran, using any excuse that pops into their head. We hope you recognize that you will have no control over such bloodthirsty “allies” once you open your doors to them.
You who understand that Iran must be defended, and that crooks don’t help with that
The corruption which outrages the people of Iran is mere kid’s stuff compared to the stupendous corruption which is celebrated daily as “business success” in the United States.
In contrast to Iran, in the United States grabbing a nation’s wealth for yourself is not called corruption. It is called “making a killing” and is widely admired in the realm of US politics and business. In the United States, spending many trillions of dollars to destroy Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan, and to enrich arms manufacturers, is regarded as an absolutely normal use of the nation’s wealth, whereas providing food subsidies to the poor is called “wasteful government spending”.
So, our discussion of corruption should be understood in that context.
First, we don’t need to remind you that Israeli gunmen just shot their way into peaceful demonstrations, torching hundreds of Iranian buses, ambulances, and buildings with extreme military efficiency, turning peaceful protests into mass death emergencies.
Secondly, in such emergencies, people expect the government to be nicer to its people.
After all, the people enabled Iran to win the twelve-day war last year.
In today’s Wild West conditions, with Trump and Netanyahu throwing bombs like deranged gorillas, you want your government officials focused on your defense and welfare.
Iranians are smart enough to be trusted with the vote, and not to ally themselves with proven genocidal killers like Israel and America. They are a highly literate population loaded with engineers, physicians, educators, and architects. They can build anything.
If the Iranian people don’t view their government as legitimate, then the invaders will easily break into the nation, and this time they will burn a lot more than ambulances, buses and buildings. The invaders have already perfected the business of civil war and they will introduce it into Iran if the population stops caring about what happens to the nation.
The purpose of really free elections is not to please the US government. Don’t expect that. Remember that the United States and its puppets overthrew Dr. Mossadegh and killed Dr. Fatemi, whose government was democratically elected and was loved by the people.
No, the only purpose of government should be to empower the people – especially the hungry and downtrodden – so they can protect themselves from external invaders and so they can pour their nation’s resources into everything that the people need. The people will love and respect any Majlis which pushes ahead with a massive public housing program that offers everyone the choice of good cheap homes. Unfortunately, the public treasury will also have to spend a fortune to keep Iran well-defended until the genocidal state of Israel is abolished like Apartheid South Africa was abolished. Surely any honestly elected Majlis will vote for all that, and the people will approve.
It’s a shame that protest marches – a great and necessary Iranian tradition – have been poisoned by Israeli paramilitaries shooting their way into those marches.
If we were voting now in Iran, we would vote for those who have learned from Dr. Fatemi. We would vote to protect the hungry and the downtrodden and building public housing on a much larger scale.
**The authors are Blaine Coleman and Dr. Mozhgan Savabieasfahani.
They both have argued for resolutions against US military aid to Israel for over 22 years in meetings of the Ann Arbor, Michigan City Council.
Dr. Savabieasfahani is also a widely published scientist, focusing largely on birth defects caused by US wars and weapons of war in the Middle East. Her work has been featured prominently across the Iranian and global news media.