Western commentators are undermining courageous protests in Iran by lazily labelling them as 'foreign-backed', a damaging narrative that plays directly into the regime's hands, argues activist Shabnam Nasimi.
The Instant Dismissal of Courage
Shabnam Nasimi, writing on Wednesday 14 January 2026, expresses profound frustration with the reaction of many Western liberals and progressives to uprisings in Iran. She notes that instead of listening to protestors' demands, the immediate response is often to question who is 'behind' them. Conspiracy theories about 'Zionist-backed' or 'CIA' operations emerge swiftly, long before the names of the dead or detained are known.
This instinct, Nasimi argues, is the easiest way to delegitimise a movement without engaging with its substance. She describes a weariness born from watching people in the region fight for dignity, only to have their struggle co-opted and misinterpreted by Western voices who treat their lives as ideological footnotes.
A Pattern of Disregard from Afghanistan to Iran
Nasimi draws a direct parallel to her own experience as an Afghan woman speaking about the Taliban. She recalls being repeatedly interrupted at a Hay Festival panel in June 2022 by a fellow speaker from the Stop the War Coalition. While she detailed the human cost of the Taliban's return—women erased, girls barred from school, journalists targeted—he insisted the NATO withdrawal was essentially positive.
"I snapped and told him to shut up," Nasimi writes, highlighting the arrogance of a Western man dictating what Afghanistan 'needed'. She states this kind of commentary helps tyrants gain legitimacy by reframing local catastrophe as a distant ideological victory. She sees the same pattern now with Iran, where Western 'campism'—the simplistic view that the West is the only real oppressor—struggles to acknowledge an Islamic regime can also be tyrannical.
The False Binary and Selective Solidarity
A core insult, according to Nasimi, is the accusation that any demand for freedom must equate to supporting US military intervention. This creates a false binary for Iranians and Afghans: submit to domestic tyranny or invite Western armies. This logic, she states, polices their humanity and rests on a colonial assumption that people in the region cannot desire freedom on their own terms.
She identifies a stark hypocrisy. While many Western activists speak with moral clarity about Gaza—where the oppressor fits a familiar narrative—their outrage becomes conditional and solidarity selective when the oppressor is an Islamic regime harming its own people. Some even slide into defending regimes as 'anti-imperialist', as if this excuses prisons, executions, and the systemic humiliation of women.
Nasimi concludes with a powerful declaration: Iranian revolutions are not Western proxies. They are rooted in local grief, courage, and exhaustion, and represent an insistence on a life worth living. Dismissing protestors as foreign agents does tangible damage, isolating them and normalising the regime's narrative that repression is self-defence. The plea is simple: do not confiscate their struggle with reductive theories, and do not presume to tell them what they need.
