“Inside Iran’s opposition.”

The fake and the authentic.

After the downing of Ukraine Air 752. Tehran, 2020. (Fars Media, cc by 4.0/ Wikimedia Commons.)

We publish today the second part of Muhammad Sahimi’s extraordinary essay on Iran’s opposition. 

Professor Sahimi’s penetrating insight into “the fake opposition” and its opposite, the Islamic Republic’s genuine activists in the cause of a more democratic Iran, is rare on the way to nonexistent for English-speaking readers—this reflecting an effective blackout of news on these topics among American media. We are honored, for this reason, to publish Professor Sahimi’s work. It is nonpareil. 

In Part 1 of this essay, Professor Sahimi analyzed efforts to find an Iranian version of Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi opportunist, or Juan Guaidó, the preposterous clown the Trump administration attempted to pass off as Venezuela’s rightful president until the endeavor became too silly to continue. 

In Part 2, Professor Sahimi, long a prominent presence in the Iranian diaspora, investigates the poseurs, puppets, and pretenders who populate the Iranian community in exile, and proceeds to tell us of the many authentic oppositionists—“brave,” as he calls them—who are active inside Iran today. 

We have long considered Iran the most democratic nation in the Middle East, possessed of a superbly sophisticated culture but burdened with a flawed constitution in urgent need of revision. This is our statement of the case, and we do not assign this view to Professor Sahimi. But his essay for us most certainly confirms our view. 

Part 1 of Professor Sahimi’s essay can be read here.

Part 2 of this essay exceeds Gmail’s space limitation. To read the whole, please simply click on the headline to go to the website.

— P. L.  

Muhammad Sahimi

14 APRIL—Two developments helped advance the new “Iran Disinfo Project.” One was the deep anger that the Iranian people felt after the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, the IGRC, shot down Ukraine International Airlines flight 752, taking off from Tehran on 8 January 2020 and killing the 176 people onboard. There were extensive but short-term demonstrations against the government, particularly by university students, many of whom had friends who lost their lives in that tragedy. The second development was the murder of Mahsa Amini. 

Out of the tragedy of the shooting down of Ukrainian airliner emerged another possible Chalabi– or Guaidó-like candidate. He is Hamed Esmaeilion, an Iranian–Canadian author and dentist, whose wife and young daughter were killed when Ukrainian airliner was shot down by Iran’s military. Before this tragedy, Esmaeilion was not a political activist, but he is now being promoted as a key figure in the opposition. 

Having lost my own 23–year-old brother in 1981 and my 28–year-old cousin in 1985, both university students and both executed by the regime in Tehran, and numerous friends from my childhood and university years in Iran who were executed in 1988 by the regime; having seen my 16–year-old brother thrown in jail twice and threatened with execution, and having lost my parents over the depression and illnesses that they suffered after murder of my brother, I have great sympathy for Esmaeilion and the plight of his loved ones, his quest for shedding light on what actually happened that led to the tragic downing of the passenger aircraft, and for holding accountable all those who were responsible.

But Esmaeilion has called for expelling Iranian diplomats from the G–7 countries, continuing the sanctions regime, and banning civilian flights to and from Iran, effectively making Iran a no-flight zone, all reminiscent of what happened to Libya before the so-called humanitarian intervention of NATO in 2011, which has destroyed the country and partitioned it into several zones controlled by warlords. In addition, like Alinejad, Esmaeilion has called on the European Union to declare the IRGC a terrorist organization. These assertions cannot be endorsed. They amount to calls for collective punishment, which is prohibited under the Geneva Conventions.  

Esmaeilion has been supported, directly and indirectly, by the Israeli lobby, which raises many troubling questions.