Mick Hartley

Helen Rumbelow, in the Times, interviews Masih Alinejad, Iran’s public enemy no. 1:

The Iranian regime wants her dead. Her distinctive hair is to them both a threat and a target. Having fought so long against the forced hijab, the physical symbol of savage political oppression, she has been urged by her FBI handlers to cover her hair to avoid being identified by assassins.

In 2021 the US Department of Justice announced they had thwarted a plot to kidnap Alinejad, removing her by boat from New York for probable execution back in Iran. The next year police arrested a man prowling near her home with an AK47 rifle and 100 rounds of ammunition. Last March two men, described as “Russian mobsters” by prosecutors, were convicted by a federal jury in New York of a “murder for hire” plot.

But she refuses to be intimidated:

“If I am honest with you, of course I am scared,” she says via video call. “I am scared of being shot in my head, in my chest. I’m scared of witnessing my own son being shot by the same killers. I’m scared every single night when I open the door. This is in my mind. But this is in the mind of millions of Iranians. Do they give up? No.

“When I see that Iranians face guns and bullets every day and they overcome their fear, I say to myself, who am I to let my fear run me?”…

She describes two brutal memories of Iran. One is when she saw a woman beaten by police, “her crime was just showing a bit of her hair”. By the time they had finished “her face was full of blood, and they had removed her entire hijab during the beating”. It was a moment of clarity. The point was not hair covering.

The second was when, aged 19, she was arrested at home for making antigovernment pamphlets. “Watching my mother begging and crying, ‘Please don’t take my daughter away,’ grabbing my hand, trying to save me. She was helpless.”

Ever since Alinejad has had to carry the guilt of the effect her actions have on her family, guilt weaponised by the regime. “They put my brother in prison for two years,” she says. “They brought my sister on TV to disown me publicly. They arrested 29 women of my campaign in only one day to put the guilt on my shoulders.”…

In the West she can find the differing reactions to Palestine and Iran frustrating. She has heard, with shock, some pro-Palestinian protesters in the West shout, “I am Hamas.”

“I want to know where are those people who were chanting ‘free Palestine’. Why don’t they chant ‘free Iran’ now? Because our story and our suffering doesn’t fit their narrative.” She is angered by apologists in the West who argue that the hijab was “a part of Iranian culture, but now they are witnessing Iranians burning hijabs in the streets”.

“In the West the left kept quiet because for years and years they were the ones trying to use the term ‘Islamophobia’ to silence critics,” she says. “When women of Iran burn the hijab, when men burn the mosques in Tehran, it is the rage of 47 years of Islamic oppression, of Islamist terrorism, of sharia law’s violence against people. A phobia is irrational. But for us our fear is rational.”

That kind of courage makes you embarrassed for the sad western apologists for the Iranian regime, and the Free Palestine crowd who’ve now chosen silence.