By By equating the bombers with the bombed, the appeal signed by Angela Davis and Judith Butler lends moral cover to western imperialism – and its backers are already deserting it
In an open letter published last week in the Guardian, addressed to “fellow activists, students, thinkers, workers, artists, and other prisoners of conscience held behind the walls of all detention centers across Iran”, a group of renowned academics and activists resorted to the nauseating cliche of bothsidesism over the devastating war waged against Iran by two nuclear powers.
One of the aggressors is still engaged in a genocide in Palestine and land theft in Syria and Lebanon, while the other is ruled by a corrupt psychopath.
In prose replete with platitudinous tropes, all outdated and jaundiced, betraying an egregious ignorance of what exactly has happened, they denounce both the ruling government in Iran and the illegal Israeli-US war waged against a sovereign nation.
The document is obscene.
The ruling Islamic Republic in Iran does indeed have a sustained record of decades of university purges, mass executions of political prisoners and uninterrupted brutish repression of civil rights movements.
Some of these signatories’ own Iranian friends and colleagues have spent a lifetime documenting such facts and written volume after volume on them – so much so that they cannot set foot in their own homeland. Yet the moment the first Israeli and American bombs were dropped on Iran, first in June 2025 and then on a massive carpet-bombing scale in February 2026, everything changed.
The long and sinuous history of Iranian anti-colonial struggle has come alive for the entire nation, and for the whole world to see.
Where have these signatories been over the last year?
No bothsidesism
The signatories write to defend Iranian political prisoners, knowing well that Israel bombed the most notorious Iranian prison, Evin in Tehran, during its June assault on the Iranian capital.
That fact should have given them pause. It did not.
Of course, the cruelty of the Iranian government’s carceral system and its persecution of dissidents are well known. There was a bloodbath in the 1980s during the Iran-Iraq war. An entire cemetery near Tehran, Khavaran, is dedicated to these murderous acts.
Any such barbaric behaviour, wherever it occurs, must stop immediately – all the way up to the Israeli dungeons where Palestinian inmates have testified to being raped, including by dogs.
Iran’s political prisoners themselves write from prison to denounce the savage Israeli-US attack on their homeland. Did the distinguished signatories to this letter bother to learn this? I understand that not a single one of these signatories can read Persian sources. Yet in plain English, Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, a former political prisoner, has spoken openly against this war. Did they care to listen to his arguments?
There is no bothsidesism here. You are either on the side of the genocidal mass-murdering bombers, or on the side of those being bombed.
The Achilles’ heel of the letter is its malignant central metaphor: a pair of scissors in which an entire nation is presumed caught like a lifeless piece of paper – robbed of its historic agency, helpless at the mercy of two complementary forms of violence, one its own and one from outside.
If that were true, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump would be right: Iranians would need Israeli and American bombers to liberate them.
By resorting to a fatalistic metaphor that strips Iranians of moral agency and political intelligence, the signatories have effectively co-signed the Israeli-American “humanitarian intervention” that promises to free Iranians from their rulers by bombing them back to the stone age.
“White men are saving brown women from brown men,” as the postcolonial theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak once put it. Is there anything more treacherous than an exclusive club of western academics into which no dogs or Iranians are allowed?
U.S. President Donald Trump points his finger towards Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as they shake hands during a press conference after meeting at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, U.S., December 29, 2025.
The letter unravels
Who drafted this revolting letter? By what authority?
The answers are already emerging. The prominent historian of Black radicalism Robin DG Kelley has withdrawn his signature, saying the circumstances in which signatures were gathered “were a bit shady” and that “what appeared in print wasn’t exactly what I’d initially seen”.
“My name is no longer on the letter and shouldn’t have been in the first place,” the Sudanese anthropologist Nisrin Elamin has written, saying she does not agree with its content, with the process through which her name was added or with “the equivalency it draws between Israel and Iran”, which she calls “harmful and totally false”. Mumia Abu-Jamal, listed among the signatories, appears never to have authorised the use of his name. “Who signed for Mumia?” asks Vijay Prashad, who reports that the former Black Panther and radio journalist wrote from his prison cell, on two paper plates, that Iran is “showing the world (especially the 3rd world) how to fight against the Empire”. Prashad himself has answered the letter in a withering rebuttal, writing that its scissors metaphor “makes the aggressor and the attacked appear as parallel sources of the same danger”.
Other names that appeared among the signatories on the day of publication – including those of my colleagues Rashid Khalidi and Nadia Abu El-Haj – have since disappeared from the letter without explanation.
A key question remains, which only those behind the letter can answer: who plotted and drafted it, who decided against approaching a single Iranian academic, and who duped the others into signing?
Whoever they were, they appear frightened by the vast global sympathy Iran has won in the course of this war, and determined to discredit it.
As I write, Iranians – the ruling and the ruled, including the political prisoners – are collectively defending their homeland against a vicious combination of Israeli genocidal colonialism and American dysfunctional imperialism.
Millions of Iranians have put aside their political differences – and there are plenty – to come together in defence of a homeland consistently threatened with nuclear annihilation.
The paradox
I detest the very idea of an “Islamic Republic”, and countless people like me have paid for it by forfeiting the joy of ever visiting our own homeland.
But if I still have a homeland, where I was born and raised, where my parents and brothers are buried, and if I can claim to teach something called “Iranian studies”, it is precisely because that very misbegotten Islamic Republic has protected the territorial integrity of my country and the life and dignity of the more than 90 million souls who inhabit it.
Israel has had a singular objective of turning Iran into another Syria, Lebanon or Libya, and breaking it into pieces. The very jailers who have suffocated the prospects of civil liberties in Iran are now the ones defending it against Israel and Trump.
Can the organisers of this letter digest, stomach and live with that paradox? Can its supporters get up in the morning, an ocean away from the bombs, see their names under this disgusting document and feel good about themselves? Has any one of these signatories seen the jubilation of Arabs and Muslims – Palestinians in Gaza in particular, and the Lebanese in Lebanon – at the sight of one Muslim country daring to stand up to Israel, while the rest serve as military bases for US and Israeli warmongering?
Those who knowingly signed this letter are astoundingly out of touch with the masses of millions of Arabs, Muslims and the wretched of the earth, in the global north and south, who are utterly delighted by the simple fact that Iranians as a nation – not the Islamic Republic – are putting up a valiant resistance to Netanyahu and Trump.
Historic shifts are taking place in Sunni-Shia relations. Has anyone behind this letter watched and understood the wealth of evidence coming out of Arab and Muslim lands?
What about the tens of millions of Iranians and Iraqis who poured into their streets for the funeral of Ali Khamenei? Do they not know there are political prisoners in Iran, or do they not care about their own people?
Did the peoples of the region need to wait for a letter published in the West to tell them about the enduring paradoxes of their own homelands? What kind of “revolutionaries” are so terribly divorced from these facts?
Epistemic shift
For the letter’s drafters and defenders, the idea of homeland evidently means very little.
Whatever the faults of the Islamic Republic, right now it has arisen to defend a nation of 93 million people threatened with obliteration and the erasure of its civilisation.
Trump and his treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, have just announced sanctions that Bessent promises will “collapse” the ruling regime.
This is genocidal. These sanctions target the Iranian people, not a government that has survived them for almost half a century.
Political imprisonment and capital punishment in Iran must stop immediately, as they must in China, Saudi Arabia and Israel – and in the US, which cages more of its own people than any other country on earth.
Yet the letter equates a civilizational threat against an entire nation, with declared genocidal intent, to a regime that, with all its calamitous faults, has stood up to two vicious nuclear powers threatening the very existence of a people.
Does that make any sense?
Portraits of children killed in the strike on Shajarah Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab, Iran.
A man amid debris in a room in Evin prison’s hospital after Israeli air strikes in Tehran on July 1 2025.
