The 13th century Persian poet Saadi Shirazi writes of human beings as “members of a whole”, of one essence and soul, and calls for sympathising with human pain:
If one member is afflicted with pain,
Other members uneasy will remain.
If you’ve no sympathy for human pain,
The name of human you cannot retain!
As imperialist bombs terrorise Iran’s already subjugated population, it is necessary for the foreign response to express its deep empathy with the people’s pain, and the tragic quagmires that wars can potentially produce. But it is equally important to empathise with the Iranian liberation struggle, without reducing it to one merely instigated by imperialism or subjecting it to the imperatives of global anti-imperialist resistance.
The American-Israeli war on Iran is already having devastating consequences. With nearly 2,000 dead, the progressive foreign response has, rightly, criticised the illegality of the war.
Yet, according to Iranian feminist and democracy activists, the progressive foreign response in the past has often privileged geopolitics and anti-American imperialism. This has come at the expense of a focus on the internal dictatorship and struggle for democracy in Iran. Some prominent global Left parties and groups, leaders and intellectuals have taken such a position. It is one which has grossly underemphasised Iranian suffering under a despotic Islamic clericalism.
Instead, what...
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