By Eoghan Harris
In recent months we have seen the strange spectacle of pro-monarchist Iranian diaspora groups holding demonstrations around the West in support of US and Israeli bombing of Iran. They are part of a billion dollar propaganda campaign by Israel.
Alongside this openly pro-imperialist position, there is another one which is equally problematic. In Ireland, groups such as People Before Profit have increasingly framed the situation through a “both sides are bad” lens, presenting it as a clash between two equally objectionable forces rather than an imperialist aggression on a sovereign state.
This could be seen at a recent demonstration outside the US Embassy in Dublin. People Before Profit platformed an Iranian speaker, Mansoureh Behkish, presented as a human rights defender whose message was that both sides were equally bad and the bombing should stop. During the protest she was confronted by pro-monarchist Iranians who openly support the US-Israeili war on aggression on Iran..
At first glance it appeared to be a clash between anti-war Iranians and pro-war monarchists. However if we look at the political background, it makes the picture more strange.
Behkish campaigns for justice for several members of her family who were killed during political upheavel of the 1980s. According to Behkish, her brother had been executed by the Shah before the 1979 revolution. She tragically lost other siblings following Islamic Republic’s confrontation with the armed opposition group MEK or (People’s Mojahedin of Iran).
The MEK were once a revolutionary organisation opposing the Shah and played a role in the 1979 revolution. But after coming into conflict with the new Iranian state, the organisation relocated to Iraq and formed an alliance with Saddam Hussein. The MEK then joined Saddam Hussein’s western backed Iraqi war of aggression on Iran.
From bases in Iraq, the MEK carried out armed operations against Iran while the country was under Saddam’s invasion. Saddam provided MEK with weapons, funding and protection, and it continued attacks against Iranian targets from Iraqi territory even after the war ended.
This 8 year war on Iran killed over half a million, and chemical attacks were used by US-backed Iraq against Iranians. While some of the MEKs greviences with the Islamic republic may have been legitimate initially, this collaboration destroyed MEK’s legitimacy and led it to be widely viewed as traitors, even by those Iranians who had once supported them. They also gained a reputation as a highly controlled, cult-like movement and was used by Saddam to help suppress opposition inside Iraq.
After the 2003 invasion of Iraq, American officials removed the organisation from terrorism lists and eventually relocated its members to Albania, where it established a large compound and began presenting itself internationally as a democratic opposition movement to Iran.
This is the same opposition group that Mike Pompeo, Mike Bolton and Rudi Giuliani are now openly promoting as the secular provisional government, and which collaborated with a criminal war of aggression upon their country and carried out terrorist attacks on civillians. People before profit are presenting their cause as a legitimate, despite the fact that they have lost all legitimacy long ago in Iran.
Today, what we are seeing on one side is monarchists openly calling for US and Israeli bombing in the false hope of restoring the Shah’s monarchy. On the other are figures presented as neutral human rights advocates, but whose political context is being weaponize to confuse and distort the truth.
The result is a deliberately confusing spectacle in which both positions, one openly pro-intervention and the other framed as humanitarian neutrality —are treated as opposing sides of the same debate, while the voices of Iranians in Iran are ignored by western media as is the principled anti-imperialist position to support them in their struggle.
How did we reach a point where diaspora groups can openly support the bombing of their own country, while organisations connected with Zionist interests are presented as credible human rights voices?
And why are the Western left helping construct a false equivalence between Yankee-Zionist aggression and the internal political conflicts of a country under existential threat?
This is a pattern we have seen before in Syria and Lybia. You do not have to be a champion of a certain ruling faction in a targeted country, to have solidarity with its people and support its leadership in times of national self defense from anti-imperialist struggle. This is basic internationalism, but unfortunately many of our esteemed academics in the west don’t understand this, or don’t want to.
And you don’t need a degree in human rights law, to realise that this human rights rhetoric, which only focuses on the internal politics of a country and ignores coups, sanctions, intelligence operations and wars of aggression, is nothing but a weapon of Zionist dominated US imperialism.
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