[News] Response to the open letter that was published in today’s Guardian by signatories such as Mumia Abu Jamal, Angela Davis

[Anti-Imperialist News]

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@kouros <https://substack.com/@kouros>

This is my response to the open letter that was published in today’s
Guardian by signatories such as Mumia Abu Jamal, Angela Davis, Judith
Butler, Keeanga Yamahtta Taylor, Hosam el-Hamalawy, Sinan Antoon, and many
more. Please share, tag, comment, etc:

It has been a harrowing year for Iranians. Starting from the outbreak of
internecine violence in January to the Israeli-American direct attacks on
civilian and military targets inside the country starting in March
continuing intermittently to today. For those of us Iranian-Americans
living outside of Iran but who retain families & friends, alongside parts
of our heart and psyche inside, watching the spiraling violence has been a
roller coaster ride. But although we have weathered the foreseeable
corporate media support and justification of the war, we have had the extra
burden of creating spaces where we retain our sanity vis a vis our
expatriate friends, cousins and parents who have bought into the war and
actively or passively support the Israeli-American bombing of their native
land.

This division inside the Iranian-American community has made the building
of clear anti-war coalitions very difficult in a time when American
politics is already in huge flux. Six months after the start of the war,
there still is no visible anti-war current on a national scale. At a time
where there is popular American opposition to this war, there is nothing
remotely similar to the coalition building and organizing against the Iraq
and Afghanistan wars of the post-9/11 period. The amplification of pro-war
Iranians in American media has been a major factor in diluting anti-war
voices, much like the way pro-war Iraqi were amplified by the media before
the 2003 US invasion, but the political confusion enveloping this war goes
beyond our dinner tables and social media posts that then get amplified on
mainstream media.

This situation is part of a larger stagnation.The political confusion that
makes the situation “too complicated” is also enveloping the layer of
progressive-minded Iranian-American intellectuals who have also been a part
of the political obstacles to building a clear anti-war coalition and
politics in the US. The majority of Iranian-American academics,
intellectuals, and thought leaders -- except a very small minority – have
been waddling in a confused and counter-productive “double condemnation” of
both the Israeli-American war on Iran alongside the Islamic Republic
itself. I have generally ignored this phenomenon and put my energies in
building the anti-war politics that is necessary to stop this latest
iteration of America’s forever wars. But today, we are confronted with an
open letter (theguardian.com/comment…
<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ng-interactive/2026/aug/20/iran-political-prisoners>)
signed by many significant AMERICAN intellectuals, academics and thought
leaders continuing this line of “double condemnation” and so it seems like
the dysfunction of the Iranian-American community’s division and confusion
over our role in the current moment goes deeper than just our community and
is endemic to the politics of stuckness that is America today. I write to
ask: why are prominent figures expanding from contemporary abolitionists
like Angela Davis, Mumia Abu Jamal, Ruthie Gilmore, Robin Kelly,
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor; radical intellectuals such as Bernardine Dohrn,
Bill Ayers, Judith Butler, and Arab-American academics such as Rashid
Khalidi, Nisrin Elamin, and Nadia Abu El-Haj and many more, putting their
names on a misconceived letter of “double condemnation” at a time when they
should be fighting against a war that their government has started on a new
set of victims that stand in the way of its material and geo-political
interests? It is a lack of understanding of positionality and timing.
Perhaps if the bombs weren’t going down, we could make political parallels
between American and Iranian state violence. But now that our national
resources are being focused to kill and destroy another people in an open
war, why are these signatories qualifying their opposition?

I am looking to see if these same intellectuals signed a similar letter
condemning the Iraqi regime as they opposed the American invasion before
the 2003 invasion, or if they have signed a similar letter condemning the
Cuban government’s jailing of over 1200 political prisoners today as they
condemn America’s strangling of that nation today. Or even, for the more
historically-minded signatories, if any of them would have seen fit to
double condemn the Viet Cong’s violence as they were fighting against
American violence of the Vietnam war. If anyone can show me such letters
with such signatures, please forward me. But it seems like these
contemporary American abolitionists, radical intellectuals, and
Arab-American academics have bought into the dysfunction of “double
condemnation” politics when it comes to Iran. This is a huge mistake that
needs to be corrected immediately.

The greatest offence in this letter that the signatories need to reconsider
is the constant questioning and belittling of Iranian anti-imperialism. As
missiles continue to devastate Iran, the Iranian people and Iranian
civilian infrastructure, Iran has been able to successfully score
significant damage on American war machine and its Israeli proxy. Please
believe your eyes: Iran is thwarting American military aggression. Contrary
to what this misconceived letter says, the open anti-imperialism that we
hear from Iranian officials today is not “hollow.” It is the ongoing
repercussions of a revolution that brought in a political system that was
tasked to fight American imperialism in 1979. The one thing that I remember
from being a 10-year-old and absorbing the debates around me by my family
of communists, socialists, liberals, and the lone voice of Islamist Marxist
cousin is that our revolution will free Iran of Western imperialism’s grip
on the region as a step towards liberating the other major grip of Western
imperialism in Palestine. “Today Iran, tomorrow Palestine” is a slogan that
I grew up with amongst a family of secular revolutionaries. This is the
legacy that has held the post-revolutionary political system in Iran
accountable and pushes it to fight the forces of imperialism in the region
up to today. This is not dismissible and insignificant- especially
considering the fact that no other force has been able to challenge the
extreme violence of America and its proxy in Palestine for the past three
years.

There is a third-campism in this stance that seems misplaced. The
third-camp stance might have made sense when mid-20th century radicals were
trying to stay unaffiliated with the injustices of either the US or the
Soviet Union during the Cold War, but that’s not the debate here. Far more
insidiously, this letter, in order to justify its condemnation of the
Iranian state, buys into the hysteria of Iranian “pursuit of regional
dominance.” Iran is fighting a highly asymmetric war successfully. It has
been getting ready for such a confrontation since the 1979 Revolution which
produced a state that has been consciously learning the lessons of Vietnam
more than the imperialist machinations of the Soviet Union.

I want to encourage the signatories, especially those who are linking the
struggle for abolition of the carceral regime in the US to that of Iran, to
ask a different question than what has led them to sign this letter. One
can not deny Iranian state violence. But this should not cause a new
positionality for anti-imperialist politics. We need to see this as a
question that has lingered amongst American radicals ever since the Haitian
revolution: how do we understand and deal with the internal violence that
ensues from successful anti-imperialist revolutions? From Haiti to Vietnam
to Cuba to Iran, there is a historical question to be asked: why do
successful opposition to western liberal capitalism produce illiberal
political systems? And what is our role as Americans in relating to them?

I think in all these historical examples in which Iran is the latest
iteration, imperialism severely punishes systematic resistance and stifles
political and social development in these oppositional countries to make an
example out of them. Our role is to withdraw America as the overriding
factor in destabilizing these countries that have resisted it - from Haiti
to Iran. Today’s American war on Iran comes at a time when the decline in
American empire alongside the historical lessons learned by the Iranian
revolution from its revolutionary predecessors has produced a successful
asymmetrical warfare. And the empire now seems to be contemplating nuclear
weapons to silence this resistance.

Our role as Americans is to put together forces to oppose our nation’s
increasing violence towards the rest of the world. This letter signed by
significant political actors in the US is an obstacle to building that
opposition.
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