When the left speaks the language of Empire against Iran

Amid a war of aggression waged by the United States and ‘Israel’ against Iran, a group of intellectuals identified with the left published in the British newspaper The Guardian a letter addressed to those it described as Iranian political prisoners.

Its signatories include respected figures such as Angela Davis, Judith Butler, Michael Löwy, Rashid Khalidi and Walden Bello. Their prestige, however, cannot place the document beyond criticism.

The letter portrays the Iranian people as trapped between ‘two blades of a pair of scissors’: the Islamic Republic on one side and the United States and ‘Israel’ on the other. This metaphor manufactures a false equivalence between the country under attack and the powers bombing it.

It equates a state defending its sovereignty with those responsible for an illegal war, decades of sanctions and sabotage, the assassinations of the Supreme Leader, military commanders and scientists, covert operations and attempts at regime change.

No government should be considered immune from criticism.

Yet there are historical moments when the choice of words, the intended audience and, above all, the timing of an accusation determine its political function.

When a country is under attack, repeating allegations used by the aggressor to legitimise war is neither neutrality nor intellectual independence. Objectively, it becomes ideological ammunition for the Empire.

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The events of the past two days brutally dismantle the notion of ‘two equivalent blades’.

The United States has launched new attacks on southern Iran, striking defensive systems and installations near the Strait of Hormuz.

One of the strikes hit a home in Kuhestak, in Sirik County, precisely as families were celebrating a wedding. According to initial figures released by the Iranian authorities, at least four people were killed, including children, and more than 50 were injured.

A wedding turned into a funeral makes clear who is bombing and who is being bombed. It shows who commands the aircraft, missiles and military power deployed to impose by force what the US and ‘Israel’ have failed to achieve politically or diplomatically.

While civilian bodies are pulled from the rubble, Western intellectuals offer the world a narrative in which the aggressor and its victim appear as morally equivalent parts of the same problem.

The letter does condemn the war and the sanctions, but it dilutes that condemnation by presenting the Islamic Republic as a threat comparable to the military machine attacking its territory.

In doing so, it disregards the conflict’s fundamental asymmetry and reproduces the old colonial formula: first demonise the government of the country selected as a target, then present sanctions, sabotage and bombing as instruments for the ‘liberation’ of its people.

It also deliberately erases Iran’s historic role in resisting imperialism and Zionism.

Since 1979, the Islamic Republic has paid an enormous price for supporting Palestine, rejecting normalisation with the occupation regime and sustaining forces that confront the colonial project in West Asia.

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Iran also severed relations with South Africa’s apartheid regime, supported liberation struggles and today participates in the movement to build a multipolar order alongside countries such as China and Russia and organisations including BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation.

To call this commitment, built over decades and paid for in blood, ‘hollow anti-imperialism’ is an affront to reality.

What is hollow is an anti-imperialism and anti-Zionism confined to academic manifestos, incapable of recognising the difference between those who resist and those who invade; between those subjected to blockades and those who impose them; between those defending their territory and those firing missiles at a wedding celebration.

The double standard of these ‘left-wing intellectuals’ lies not only in the letter’s content but also in its political timing.

Their accusations against Iran receive privileged space in the media of the same West that silences or downplays the crimes committed by the US and ‘Israel’.

Whatever the individual intentions of the signatories, the document strengthens the narrative that seeks to recast an imperialist war as a supposed campaign in defence of human rights.

This is not about demanding silence over Iran’s internal problems. It is about understanding that human rights cannot be instrumentalised to legitimise the destruction of sovereign countries.

The history of Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and Syria has already shown the outcome of this ‘humanitarian’ rhetoric: devastated societies, millions dead and states reduced to chaos.

In the face of imperialist aggression, there can be no moral equidistance between the missile and the house it strikes, between the bomber and the murdered child, or between the aggressor and the people who resist.

When parts of the left insist on this false symmetry, they cease to speak the language of emancipation and begin to speak, however disguised as criticism, the language of Empire.

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The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.