I write under circumstances which some might consider to be a distorted reality; as a Muslim Iranian-American while Israel bombs Iran, backed by the United States.
I comb through WhatsApp exchanges and scroll through Telegram images of residential areas, where the blood of civilians and the rubble of their homes stain the familiar square of Tajrish and the blocks of Valiasr Street.
Mohammed El-Kurd and Assal Rad’s commentary on media coverage of Palestine underscores how mainstream media consistently refuse to recognize Palestinian life. Their insights can be extended to also explain corporate media’s predictable erasure of Iranians (when killed by Israeli forces).
And there are many stories we could tell.
Just over the first weekend of attacks, my aunt, whose scheduled operation to treat her recently diagnosed cancer was postponed, followed by Israel’s bombing of a local hospital. My cousins’ toddlers experience diarrhea induced by fear at the sound and sight of explosions, with few options of places to escape to. Upon checking in on a professor of mine following Israeli strikes on a University’s faculty residence, she recounted the extrajudicial killing of her relatives, Ehsan Eshraqi and his nine-year-old daughter, Baran.
Yet despite the personal stories, I could foresee the logical outcome of these horrors, after years of impunity for U.S.-Israeli war crimes. This is a result of the occupation’s existence and the U.S. constantly backing atrocities under the guise of “self-defense” and colonial logic of “national security.”
Still, we find a noticeable refusal of many to recognize Israel’s aggressions for what they are: unprovoked assaults that begin on Palestinian life but seek to expand in order to sustain the ethno-supremacy of Zionism.
Iranians witnessing the decades-long occupation of Palestine could anticipate the Israeli attacks that began in Tehran on June 13, 2025. We have written and organized around the anti-Muslim animus, distracting propaganda and imperialist blueprints that are all used in an attempt to dominate our homeland, just as Zionism attempts in Palestine.
The ongoing U.S.-Israeli genocide in Palestine, coupled with war crimes in Lebanon, Yemen and Syria, has taught our communities that the occupation’s pillars of subjugation and expansion would not cease in Gaza.
If Israel can engineer the death toll of upwards of hundreds of thousands in Gaza, through Nazi-like mechanisms including genocide, scholasticide, infanticide and ecocide — while the so-called ‘international community’ sits idly by — it should come as no suprise when the Zionist regime will seek to expand its oppression through unprovoked attacks on Iranian civilians in their hospitals, media centers and homes.
If Israel can orphan generations of Palestinian children within a twenty-five-mile land strip, it can then separate Iranian girls and boys, too, from their mothers and fathers while they all sleep at 3:00 in the morning, which is when the first strikes on Iran occurred.
If politicians and commentators tolerate and excuse Israel for committing unlawful acts of cyber warfare via pager explosions, killing and injuring dozens of Lebanese noncombatants in broad daylight under what the mainstream media hails as “sophisticated” technological attacks, certainly Israel will follow by innovating deadly car bombs to detonate in popular Iranian streets.
This testifies to the only language an occupying force evokes: that of unprovoked violence, predicated on its fictions, coddled by the American empire.
But, this plight must be challenged. If we meet our collective responsibilities, particularly living in the American empire, to rally for an arms embargo and isolating the Zionist regime, we can disrupt the crippling status quo.
Until we recognize, as U.S. political prisoner Mahmoud Khalil alluded to, that imperialism transcends individual experience, none of us will be closer to freedom. Certainly, my head is occupied with my fellow Iranian community at present. But without an immediate arms embargo on Israel, it will not just be my direct loved ones in greater harm’s way. We must mobilize to break the cycle, the logic of Zionism, underwritten by the American empire.
Israel’s aggression on Iran is nothing short of its consistent, expansionist logic — which American hegemony enables perpetuates through government and media. The Nakba never ended, as Rabea Eghbariah writes. And the catastrophe will only grow if we do not take further steps to rally for the end of Zionist aggression, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea and from the Caspian Sea to the Persian Gulf.
So, we must take to the streets with our brethren and elders rooted in Palestinian liberation. Palestinian liberation from Zionism can bring the entire region, including Iran, closer to freedom. We resist despair, channeling our frustrations into organizing, from campuses with ties to the military-industrial complex to embassies providing political cover for Israel, to call for a complete severing of political, military and social support for Zionism and its manifestations.
What terrible, terrible damage the British and European empires have done to ancient civilizations in the Levant, West Asia, Africa, South America and Asia. The malevolent influence of the British, in particular, is profound and continues to this very day via their partners in war crime, Israeli-occupied America.
The jaw-dropping hypocrisy of Europeans lecturing others about human rights and the rule of law while they’re arming and directly assisting an ongoing genocide. The same supposedly Christian Europeans who killed six million Jews and then refused to accept Jewish survivors into their own countries, have the gall to call Iranians, Palestinians and others advocating for universal human rights, antisemitic! The same societies that lived for centuries in peace and harmony with their Jewish cousins, unlike the supposedly superior Europeans that carried out horrific acts against Jews, among many others.
How many more children must die or starve or be dismembered or orphaned or suffer from flesh-burning white phosphorus or be permanently traumatized before the ghouls running the Apartheid state’s lust for killing is satiated?
I hate to say it, but I hope Iran inflicts serious damage on Israel, including casualties. It’s the only language the Israelis understand.
And maybe, just maybe, if Israel starts looking like a loser, Trump will lose some of his enthusiasm for it. He despises losers.
How can anyone worry that Iran might develop a nuclear weapon when Israel has nuclear weapons even though Israel was founded by long planned genocide two years after the Nazi regime was defeated, when this genocide has never ended, and when Israel has evolved from mostly toxic conditions genocide to depraved mind depraved heart mass murder genocide?
The psychology of the State of Israel is the psychology of a psychopathic mass murdere.
A Turkish newspaper (Daily Sabah) published an Op‑Ed titled “Is Israel’s next target Türkiye?”
French outlet Monde diplomatique reported President Erdoğan warning that Israel could view Turkey as its next target —again, reflecting Turkish perspective, not a mainstream Israeli call.
The Neo-Con talking points that were regurgitated about decades-old Iranian nuclear research to Op-Eds in the Jpost written by the exiled son of the former Shah about his involvement in restoring “democracy” in Iran leave me wondering how civilization there managed without foreign armed intervention for so many thousands of years.
I don’t have any affection for Zionist or Islamic dictators, but oppose threats or use of armed force against their unarmed civilian populations. We can’t even cure our own problems half-way around the world in Marine-occupied territory right here in California, without massive violations of human rights at home. We’ve never won the hearts and minds of people by jailing, deporting, threatening or murdering them.
Certainly these words are true “So, we must take to the streets with our brethren and elders rooted in Palestinian liberation. Palestinian liberation from Zionism can bring the entire region, including Iran, closer to freedom. We resist despair, channeling our frustrations into organizing, from campuses with ties to the military-industrial complex to embassies providing political cover for Israel, to call for a complete severing of political, military and social support for Zionism and its manifestations.” But Zionism did not always exist. Capitalism is the root cause of world oppression and disorder. Here is a quote that gets to the source – “The hope is that these dynamic protests can build into an international working-class movement — a force that can not only free the Occupied Territories, but also hasten the end of the underlying capitalist system that values profits above all.” https://socialism.com/fs-article/israel-must-be-stopped/