March 11, 2026

The Unbearable Lightness of Whitewashing the Crimes Against Humanity of the Islamic Republic of Iran

topic:	Human Rights
tags:	#Iran, #Iran protests, #Iran Protest, #Ali Khamenei, #US-Israel war on Iran
located:	Iran
by:	Ithamar Handelman-Smith

In the bitter winter of 1975, in a Tehran dungeon, a promise was made when cellmate named Houshang Asadi took pity on a cold and frail Shia Muslim cleric named Ali Khamenei, offering him a sweater. Years later, Asadi recalled that a tearful, shivering Khamenei accepted the gift and said, ’Houshang, when Islam will come to power, not a single tear will be shed’. But when Khamenei did rise to power and became the country’s ruler, he not only forgot the promise he made to his cellmate but repaid him in exile.

Asadi, a communist dissident living today in exile in Paris, and Khamenei, a young cleric, were both political prisoners in Tehran's Moshtarek prison in 1974-1975, during the reign of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. 

In his 2010 memoir, Letters to My Torturer: Love, Revolution, and Imprisonment in Iran, Asadi provides a detailed, often intimate, account of their time together, priding himself on being ‘the only man in the world to have seen Ayatollah Khamenei’s private parts’ and reflecting on the transformation of his former cellmate from that weakling young prisoner to the ruthless Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Or, as he put it, ‘From a kind, poetry-loving cleric to savage dictator’.  

The Times article about Asadi’s memoir noted the deep irony that the same infamous prisons where Khamenei suffered, such as Evin and Ebrat (now a museum), became the sites of far more brutal repression under the Islamic regime he later led.

This historical anecdote provides a glimpse into the soul of Iran’s former Supreme Leader: he was not just a tyrant and mass murderer in charge of the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, but also just a morally bad and ungrateful person in his private life. 

Nevertheless, when big Western media outlets, from BBC to the New York Times, covered Khamenei’s death after an Israeli-US joint strike on his Tehran compound on 28 February, they painted a picture of the man as if he was a legitimate, albeit slightly controversial statesman and not one of the bloodiest mass murderers of the 21st century.  

This framing is also evident in The New York Times' description of how Khamenei 'trained and armed allied militias' to 'expand Iran’s influence', a phrase that downplays Tehran's network of proxy forces, including Hezbollah, Hamas and Houthis amongst others which are used to advance its regional ambitions while avoiding direct confrontation. By using these proxies, Iran has effectively engaged in indirect warfare within the ambiguous realm of international law, which traditionally recognises states as the primary participants in armed conflict.

Albeit absurd lamentations over Khamenei’s death were met with severe criticism, and, as Megyn Kelly phrased it on her show, ‘no normal person is crying he is dead,’ not many people have pointed out an even greater absurdity: as Iranians all over Iran and the diaspora celebrated the death of their oppressive tyrant, large parts of ‘progressive’ movement were marching the streets of London, New York and other major western cities in manifestation labelled “hands off Iran” protests.

As a reminder, this is the regime that continues to oppress the women of Iran and has done so for the past 48 years, who forces women to wear the Hijab or a full-body chador, who encourages underage marriage (legal age for marriage in Iran is 13) and who tortured, blinded and murdered thousands of women (amongst other minorities).

And so, while many Iranians, especially ethnic minorities, women and the LGBTQ+ community, were dancing in the streets, many Western ‘progressive’ activists marched to protest the war on this oppressive, misogynistic, racist, anti-western and antisemitic Islamist regime that took over Iran almost five decades ago and that Ayatollah Khamenei helped to shape into the monstrous dictatorship state it is today.

In the US, a ‘coalition’ of eight organisations initiated and sponsored large protests in several major cities. The loose network behind the protests condemned the strikes as an ‘imperialist war’ while speaking out for ‘the sovereignty of the Iranian people’. These organisations blamed the Trump Administration and Israel for throwing Iran and the Middle East ‘into chaos’, while avoiding mentioning the terrors of Khamenei’s regime.

Nothing paints a more vivid picture of this absurdist reality like the fact that the Western ‘progressive’ activists – many of whom are women or members of the LGBTQ+ community – choose to rush to support that theocratic regime that would oppress them if they were living in Iran. All this while brave Iranian women footballers refused to sing the Islamic Republic national anthem before their Asia Cup match against South Korea on 2 March – a gesture for which they may very well face repercussions from the Iranian regime (Five of them had already been granted asylum by the Australian government).

Rather than listening to the voices of those most affected by this oppressive regime, the so-called ‘progressive’ movement largely appears is far more interested in staging protests against any U.S. and Israeli military action. 

Within their ideological framework, opposition to the U.S. and Israel seems to take precedence over any genuine concern for human rights. As a result, a regime that embodies almost everything these movements claim to oppose is treated as a victim of ‘Western imperialism’ rather than the brutal authoritarian system that millions of Iranians have repeatedly risen up against, reducing their struggle for freedom to little more than a footnote in their own ideological battles.

To be clear, there is nothing wrong with critically questioning the motivations behind a war especially when led by populist leaders such as Trump and Netanyahu. However, if this is done under the banner of defending human rights, it would be far more credible if those speaking out now had a track record of doing so against the regime that has spent decades systematically oppressing, persecuting and murdering these very same minorities.

This contradiction was already evident during the protests that erupted across Iran after the death of the Kurdish woman Jina Mahsa Amini in 2022, who was murdered by Iran’s morality police after allegedly violating the country’s mandatory hijab law. In response, millions rallied under the Kurdish slogan ‘Jin, Jiyan, Azadî’ (‘Woman, Life, Freedom’), challenging the Islamic Republic’s repression of women and minorities. 

Support for the movement in the West came largely from Kurdish and Iranian diaspora communities and some human-rights organisations (including some feminist organisations), while many anti-imperialist activist groups remained muted. 

It does seem at times as if we are living in a dystopian, upside-down world. A self-described feminist anti-imperialism group joins forces with an Iranian American advocacy group to condemn Israel’s and the US’s strikes on Iran’s misogynistic regime, while lobbying for an end to US sanctions to end the economic ‘hardship’ Iran currently faces. George Orwell could not have invented such a story.