The fight to free Persia

Samira Taghavi writes:

Iran is bleeding again and as an Iranian New Zealander, I am severely worried by what is happening in my country of birth.

This piece is about why the Iranian situation demands international intervention — not silence, not hollow statements and certainly not ideological distortion. To my fellow New Zealanders, I plead: this is not a distant crisis belonging to someone else’s geography. It is a test of whether we believe human rights are universal, or merely afforded to some, only when convenient.

Iranian civilians are being shot dead in the streets and families are refused the bodies of their loved ones. The wounded are seized from hospitals and taken straight into detention, with prisons filling at speed. The internet and telephone system are deliberately shut down so the scale of the killing cannot be reported to the outside world.

It is hard to know how many have been killed. The low end estimates are 2,000 and the high end 20,000. Either way it is a massacre which the normal suspects have been silent on – no marches in the streets.

Yet much of Western liberal media has spent years looking away. In my view, this is because to report uprisings honestly requires answering one unavoidable question: why are people prepared to fight their state’s ideology, even to the death? That question demands naming the ideology upon which the state is built.

It is hard to imagine the bravery it takes to night after night turn up to protests, knowing that thousands have already been killed for doing so. They do it because they want to be free.

In much Western “progressive” discourse, Islam has been racialised and sanctified. It is no longer treated as a belief system or governing ideology, but as an identity category that must not be criticised. Dissent is reframed as intolerance. Doctrine is treated as skin colour. This is not moral sophistication; it is historical ignorance dressed up as virtue.

Spot on.

Within this framework, the Iranian people disappear. Our language, culture and history — Persian, not Arab; ancient, not colonial; specific, not interchangeable — are erased. We are talked over, flattened into stereotypes and ignored precisely because our rejection of the regime disrupts the narrative.

I’ve been lucky enough to visit Iran, and the people there are truly wonderful. My host commented that if you got rid of the regime, Iran would be the greatest country to live in.

I am therefore not surprised when members of the Green Party or similar ideological movements wear symbols they do not understand but present as moral virtue. One such symbol is the keffiyeh. I do not speak hyperbolically when I say I hate this garment. In Iran, it signals doctrinaire allegiance to the regime and hostility to the West and Israel. For many Iranians who lived under the Islamic Republic, it is not neutral cultural dress. It is associated with repression — with arrest, interrogation, torture and the destruction of lives

Will they listen? I doubt it.

I know what will follow this publication. The trolls will come — the self-appointed activists and keyboard revolutionaries. Let me spare them the effort. I lived under the regime for 24 years. I endured arrest, interrogation, punishment and violence designed to break the will. I did not learn oppression from social media. I survived it.

I did not know that Samria had been through that in Iran.

I know that determined action against this evil regime is the correct course. Like the vast majority of Iranian New Zealanders, I welcome Western action to free our brothers and sisters. Revolutions do not succeed on courage alone. Courage must be met with action.

I also hope there will be action to stop the killing of Iranians by their own government.

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