US President Joe Biden told a crowd of his supporters that he would “free Iran”, a claim that the White house was quick to backtrack on. Yet, despite Washington’s denialism, is a regime change war against Iran on the US agenda?
Since the death in custody of Mahsa Amini in September, after she was detained by Iran’s morality police, protests, riots, and armed attacks have shaken Iran. Whilst the protests and riots have largely stopped at this point, despite Western media claims to the contrary, armed attacks and extremist insurgents have come center stage in a destabilizing effort against Iran.
The current dominant media narrative about Iran’s civil unrest, crafted together in the West, is that a “backwards” and “barbaric” Islamic regime is facing an organic overwhelmingly non-violent women-led revolution, after the beating to death of the young Mahsa Amini. So the narrative goes, the savage Islamists must be stopped and it is going to happen through the action of women taking off their hijabs in Tehran and burning them. No matter what the costs, the brave Iranian people are revolting, as one unified body, against the regime that is responsible for mismanaging the economy and causing the collapse of the nation’s GDP. It is on the West to tweet for freedom and condemn Tehran, because this will help destroy the Islamist deep-State that has no popular support and rules only by its overwhelming brutality and shutting of the internet to stop the women-led revolution.
It’s quite an inspiring narrative, yet, it has many holes (and outright fabrications) and is plagued with neocolonialist, Islamophobic, Western-supremacist undertones. To begin with, the pro-government rallies held across Iran, throughout the period of unrest, show not only large female support for their government, but popular support in the millions against the idea of Western-backed regime change. The initial protests came from minority communities in Iran, like the Kurds and, more importantly to the cause, the irreligious segment of Iran’s middle-class. The working class masses of Iran have not partaken in demonstrations and/or riots in any significant numbers, seeing the current movement as hypocritical in a way, due to the same irreligious middle class ignoring their protests that took place in 2019.
The hashtags and calls from Iranians in the West, along with US, Israeli, Saudi, British, French, and German citizens to support the supposed women-led revolution, are more insistent on fostering this supposed feminist revolution than Iranian women in Iran themselves. In this toxic online space, there is no place for Iranian women to voice opposition and critical Muslim voices are shouted down for supposedly supporting a violent and repressive government.
Millions of dollars have been poured into ad campaigns, that appear on popular social media networks, such as “Women of Israel stand with Irani women“, an ad campaign that is directly supported by the Israeli ministry of foreign affairs. US media, along with the United States Government, has also consistently voiced its “solidarity” with Iranian women, as has happened throughout the West, with even social media influencers condemning the Iranian government and standing in solidarity with Iranian women. Then we have the influential Iran International channel, which airs in both English and Farsi, which has produced countless false claims about Iranian women being killed by Iran’s police forces, in addition to encouraging violence against the Iranian authorities. Iran International, which is one of the most prominent backers of the civil unrest, is advocating around the clock for women’s rights in Iran, yet is financially backed by the government of Saudi Arabia.
Terrorist attacks are now rampant inside Iran, including shootings at Mosques. Rioters have also been caught on film burning members of the Basij (voluntary paramilitary force) and police officers alive, stabbing them, slashing their throats, in addition to stoning them to death. Whilst not all of these events can be directly tied together, nor can we attribute these actions to those who are vocal against Iran’s morality police and hijab mandates, we can definitely see that the Western backers of the so-called women-led revolution are indirectly — although sometimes directly — encouraging such action. The death toll on either side is truly difficult to determine at this point, with claims ranging from 50 deaths, numbering into the hundreds, depending upon who you chose to believe.
What is certain is that this movement is not a revolution, nor is it led by women, nor can it even claim to represent the majority of Iranian women. There is simply no evidence that the vast majority of Iranian women support this movement. Characterizing the civil unrest as an organic revolution is also completely incorrect. Not only have many of the actions of the movement been aided or directly coordinated from the West, and/or Western-funded NGO’s, the movement has no leadership or set list of demands. This suggests that the backing from Saudi Arabia, Israel, and NATO member States, comes as an attempt, not to change the regime in Tehran, but rather to stir civil unrest and pre-occupy the Iranian security apparatus.
Countless broadcast media reports and social media videos have been released, characterizing the economic downfall of Iran and the collapse of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP), as being down to government mismanagement, thus turning the Iranian masses against them. This is an unequivocally false claim, as the Maximum Pressure sanctions that have been imposed upon the Islamic Republic, since former US President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew from the Iran Nuclear Deal, have been the primary factor in causing such economic devastation, and in fact are designed to do exactly that. In addition to this, a number of natural catastrophes have also hit Iran in recent years, only compounding existing problems. Anyone that leaves out the effects of Western sanctions, is either severely misled, ill-educated on the topic, and/or is an anti-Iran propagandist.
Then we have the element of Western superiority and demonization of Islam, which is rife throughout the movement. Burning the hijab, the Quran, and insulting Islamic traditions is not revolutionary, it’s a statement against the Islamic faith and Iranian cultural norms. Contrary to snapshots of Iranian women on beaches, wearing bikinis, from the era of the Western-backed dictator, known as the Shah, the majority of Iranian women did not dress in this way prior to the Islamic Revolution of 1979. The affluent beneficiaries of the Shah’s autocratic and repressive rule, may have dressed in skin-tight clothes and spent their days in luxurious settings, however, the majority of Iranians lived in poverty and in traditional communities. The Islamic clerical class also existed under the Shah too, except they were forced to either support the dictator, remain silent on political matters, or face imprisonment and death. The US Government even created American-only settler communities inside Iran that were given all the luxuries they desired, which were situated next to Iranians who lived in slums.
The Shah’s so-called “White Revolution” carried many of the same trends that we see in todays “#IranRevolution2022”, in that it also sought to “modernize” and “Westernize” Iran. Shah Pahlavi was a proponent of re-engineering Iran to rob it of many cultural and religious norms, holding up the banner of “women’s rights” as one of its cornerstones of opening itself up to the West. Indeed, today we see the same thing with Saudi Arabia; the population is allowed limited freedoms to replicate the West, like celebrating Halloween, whilst in the background the regime executes more political dissidents from the Qatifi Gulf area. When the West speaks of women’s rights for those living under the rule of enemy states, it is nothing more than a political tool, one with which to assert Western supremacy in a neocolonial fashion and to undermine nations ruled by their own people.
The US Government understands that it cannot win a conventional war against Iran, shy of dropping nuclear bombs on the entirety of the country and wiping out most of the earth from the fallout of such munitions. Instead, the West seeks to agitate, to attack, and degrade the ability of the Iranian Government to provide the basic services of a functioning State. They depend upon propaganda, the Iranian irreligious bourgeoisie, NGO’s and contract militias to destabilize the country., They hope that this, in addition to the tightening of sanctions, will cause the Iranian Government to collapse. At best you can call the current unrest a failed color revolution, but it is not for the sake of Iranian women’s rights and will only give Tehran reason to delegitimize future struggles that may emerge organically. It is counterproductive to live in an illusion and believe that what is happening is for the betterment of the average Iranian, when you have all of Iran’s enemies, that are actively killing and starving the Iranian people, on your side.
