Saeed Azimi, Staff writer - IRAN DAILY
“To immigrate is to become an outsider for good, and I had come to terms with it,” she said. But now, she feels like an outsider to her community of peers as well, explaining, “I have to keep many things to myself these days,” and not without good reason.
Maryam had been vocal in trying to normalize relations between her motherland and Canada. She was one of the Iranian diaspora sympathizing with the Ukrainian P-752 flight victims, even posting about it on her Instagram page. Nevertheless, she started to drift apart with the minority of the Iranian diaspora in Canada when they started campaigning to boycott foreign flights to Iran.
“I don’t want the routes to Iran to be blocked,” she told me.
I asked her why she has made her Instagram account private.
“Trolls!” she said, without elaborating.
In the past month, social media trolls targeted anyone keeping mum on the recent unrest in Iran, actively trying to intensify sanctions on Tehran. The “zombie attacks” spared no one, even long-time, non-political social media users who used the platforms for running their small-scale businesses. In one instance, a female entrepreneur making handmade dolls publicly asked why she should cease her operations to appease “strike demanding” atmosphere while “almost everyone else, the skyscraper-builders, the restaurants, the beauty parlor operators are doing their jobs.” Her tweet received a fair share of harassment.
The social media hype of regime-changers seems to have already mesmerized them into believing they have a good degree of actual political influence. Over the past days, for example, a secluded Iranian-American has started a petition to oust Robert Malley, the United States’ special envoy for Iran, who also acts as the chief negotiator for the revival of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which would provide Iran with some sanctions relief.
“In his most recent tweet on October 22, Robert Malley minimized the Iran protest movement by portraying it as merely a quest by Iranians to have the government in Tehran ‘respect their human rights and dignity,’ ignoring their call for change,” said the petition started by one of the many self-proclaimed leaders in absentia of the movement, an Iranian-American who ironically receives fund from governmental organizations in the U.S.
It further added, “Iranians, young and old, men and women, rich and poor are joined together in their protests to replace the Islamic Republic.” This is quite a bold claim on behalf of a nation of over 80 million people, and a misleading one, for that matter.
The physical distance of the diaspora from their motherland in several ways plays into their misperceptions about the country, and, consequently, their misrepresentations of it. For one thing, many in the Iranian diaspora may primarily be concerned with their own political gains rather than the interests of the Iranian nation. Moreover, being away from Iran for a long time, they get their news from unreliable sources, who are experts in spreading misinformation, leading to a serious knowledge gap about Iran and its common people which tends to translate into misrepresentations of the country and its people.
But there is a more fundamental issue at play: Did the most vocal subsection of the Iranian diaspora actually receive a power of attorney from Iranians to represent them in the West?
The answer is an emphatic “No”. For one thing, over the past 43 years, Iranians have demonstrated their loyalty to the Islamic Republic time and again, through demonstrations to celebrate the triumph of the Islamic Revolution to attending the burial ceremony of the late general Qassem Soleimani, an anti-terrorism hero who fought to disperse ISIS, which turned out to be one of the biggest shows of support for any establishment.
“Suffice it to say that certain people living in the West tend to self-anoint themselves as leaders of the Iranian people in times like this. These claims are advanced by credulous media figures and Washington politicians who wish to advance the claims of these people for their own purposes. In 2009, members of Congress were praising the MEK as the leaders of the Iranian ‘revolution,’” Ali Ahmadi, analyst at Gulf State Analytics told me.
These people are useful to Washington but that should not be confused with them having actual power, he said, adding, “That being said, the Republicans will certainly oppose Malley as they have all along and the more hawkish Democrats may want a shift in strategy in the likely scenario where they now see regime change as a more plausible option than in the past. The JCPOA will likely come back into the spotlight after the U.S. midterm elections and Malley’s job is certainly on the line.”
As Ahmadi pointed out, the influence of such newly emerged, live-in-cyberspace-only movements on the U.S. foreign policy apparatus is something close to zero. There is more bark than bite – except, perhaps, in increasing the pressure on Iranians themselves. The irony hits the sky when they are awarded medals for their “courage,” when they are actually operating from a safe distance, trying to encourage common Iranians on the ground to do the work required for them to take the helm.
The recent round of protests indeed commanded some media coverage, especially in terms of world renowned celebrities gravitating toward a movement whose banner is marked with women. But, in fact, the movement failed to secure its place on top of the world news. The world is too messy for that to happen.
“These protests are not getting necessarily the front line covers that I expected, compared to what they could have received otherwise, because of the Ukraine conflict, and even because of tensions with China and Taiwan and other geopolitical issues, not to mention the domestic political issues that the U.S. has a month away from the midterm elections,” Eric Lob, associate professor at the Department of Politics and International Relations at Florida International University told Iran Daily.
In this regard, Gholamhossein Karbaschi, one of the leading figures of Iran’s reformist movement and a vocal critic of the Iranian government believes that he has not given any sort of representation to anyone outside of Iran to express his demands.
After the protests that sparked after the death of Mahsa Amini in Iran, there have been campaigns claiming that they are following the demands of all Iranian people. Among these campaigns are the ones requesting the expulsion of Iranian ambassadors from European countries in order to intensify sanctions on Tehran.
Karbaschi told Iran Daily that such campaigns have many axes to grind.
“Whenever the internal conditions become critical, the countries that have different opinions with Iran regarding foreign policy try to use the internal tensions for their own purposes and interests,” he noted.
He then went on to say that the hands operating behind the scenes also use the so-called protesters and their demands as a pretext for furthering different agendas.
According to him, Iran’s isolation and more sanctions will create more economic problems for the people, who such campaigns claim to represent. For example, a person suffering from a rare disease may need to go abroad for treatment, but foreign embassies decline to grant them a visa. In a nutshell, the sanctions harm the people more than the government.
Asked if he has ever given representation to anyone abroad to pursue his demands, Karbaschi, who is the managing director of the Ham Mihan newspaper, said, “I express any demands I have here and in my newspaper, and I have not given representation to anyone abroad to create a campaign on my behalf.”
The spokesman of the National Security and Foreign Policy Committee of the Iranian Parliament also had some interesting insights in this regard.
The MP said that the Iranian people have the opportunity to raise their demands inside the country through domestic institutions and the media.
Mahmoud Abbaszadeh Meshkini said that in Iran, the way to raise demands and even protest is not blocked and people have both the Parliament and the media with different political and intellectual tendencies to express their demands.
According to the legislator, the campaigns formed abroad claiming to represent the Iranian people are aimed at fanning the flames of violence and weakening Iran, in addition to the fact that it’s far from clear if their alleged demands are consistent with the wishes and priorities of the Iranian people.
“For example, now Iranians have suffered a lot from the sanctions on medicines. Are they the voice of the Iranian people against these sanctions?” the MP asked.
“People have the right to protest and some of their protests during the past month have been right on the spot. But the path to correct some wrongdoings is also open in Iran. By the way, these anti-Iranian campaigns, which seek to impose more sanctions on Iran, reject the opportunity to correct things in a peaceful atmosphere,” Meshkini added.
He then continued by saying that the Iranian diaspora, even those who are against the Islamic Republic of Iran, can express their demands or launch any campaign. However, these campaigns should be made on their own behalf without construing themselves as representatives of all Iranians.
If Iranian people have any objections, they can raise them within the internal mechanisms in Iran, he said, likening the situation to members of a family who solve their problems within the family.
“Creating violence and raising obstacles for the country’s progress and weakening the political system is not the Iranian people’s will as they know very well that the weakening of the political system will be a devastating blow to the country’s territorial integrity,” he concluded.
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