In Defense of Tehran’s Political Prisoners
September 1, 2026— The August 20, 2026, Guardian, a British daily, published an open letter addressed To Iran’s political prisoners, trapped “between two blades of a scissors.” Signed by Angela Davis, Mumia Abu-Jamal, and other activists and academics, the letter extended solidarity to political prisoners facing repression by Iran’s theocratic regime, and, at the same time, expressed opposition to the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran. [The letter follows this article.]
The Open Letter stirred a fierce controversy. Many on the left slammed the authors as objectively aligning themselves with U.S. imperialism by criticizing the Iranian regime.
At least four of the letter’s initial signers—including Palestinian American scholar Rashid Khalidi—subsequently withdrew their signatures. While Khalidi pulled his support “quietly,” a couple of other academics cited a “false equivalency” the letter allegedly draws between Israel and the U.S., on one hand, and Iran’s government, on the other.
News analysis
One of the attacks on the Open Letter that has received attention came from Vijay Prashad, a historian and political commentator who is the executive director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and an editor of LeftWord Books.
“I feel that this letter at this time plays a politically damaging role,” Prashad wrote in an article published on August 24, 2026.
“The central image, two blades of a scissors,1 is evocative but erroneous,” Prashad continued. “It suggests that one of the blades is the Islamic Republic and the other blade is the United States and Israel, with the Iranian people being cut by the two of them. The error of the scissors is not merely that its blades are unequal. It is that the image makes the aggressor and the attacked appear as parallel sources of the same danger, stripping away the history and hierarchy that connect them. U.S. imperialism is not simply one oppression alongside another. It is the force that has encircled Iran, devastated the region, armed Israel, imposed sanctions upon an entire population, and now brought war to Iranian territory. [The Open] letter places the aggression and its target in the same moral frame.”
In an essay published on Substack, also on August 24, Farah Mokhtareizadeh, an Iranian American scholar, responded to the attacks on the Open Letter by Prashad and others.
“The dispute is not over whether U.S. imperialism is more powerful than the Islamic Republic,” Mokhtareizadeh wrote. “Everyone involved agrees that it is. The dispute is over whether Iranians resisting their own state remain political subjects while that imperial war is underway. A prisoner need not demonstrate that two powers are equivalent before both can form part of her political reality. A Kurdish labor organizer can grasp the global asymmetry between Iran and the U.S. while knowing exactly who controls the lock on her cell. An Iranian socialist can defend the country against imperial assault without handing political representation of Iranian workers to the Islamic Republic. An Iranian woman can oppose Zionism without suspending her struggle against gendered state coercion, and a Baloch activist does not become neutral because neither Washington nor Tehran exhausts his political aspirations.2 Asymmetry does not require singularity.”
In this debate, World-Outlook stands on the side of the Open Letter in defense of Iranian prisoners.
One could argue that a more direct statement of unconditional opposition to the imperialist war on Iran by the U.S. and Israeli governments would have made the Open Letter stronger. The letter does state, however, that “the U.S. and Israel must end their barbaric wars and brutal sanctions that knowingly devastate our communities.”
Criticism of the Open Letter, on the other hand, has led to inaccurate arguments or outright political adaptation to Iran’s clerical regime.
Lessons from 1937 Sino-Japanese war
For example, in recent Facebook posts, political activist Andy Singh Bains reported favorably the withdrawal of several of the initial signers from the Open Letter. To support his position, Singh Bains quoted a 1937 letter on the Sino-Japanese war by Russian revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky to Mexican artist Diego Rivera.
“We do not and never have put all wars on the same plane,” Trotsky wrote in that letter. “Marx and Engels supported the revolutionary struggle of the Irish against Great Britain, of the Poles against the tsar, even though in these two nationalist wars the leaders were, for the most part, members of the bourgeoisie and even at times of the feudal aristocracy….
“[Bolshevik leader V.I.] Lenin wrote hundreds of pages demonstrating the primary necessity of distinguishing between imperialist nations and the colonial and semicolonial nations which comprise the great majority of humanity. To speak of ‘revolutionary defeatism’ in general, without distinguishing between exploiter and exploited countries, is to make a miserable caricature of Bolshevism and to put that caricature at the service of the imperialists.”
Singh Bains, however, cited Trotsky selectively and thus inaccurately. In the preceding paragraph of his 1937 letter, Trotsky stated:
“I said that the duty of all the workers’ organizations of China was to participate actively and in the front lines of the present war against Japan, without abandoning, for a single moment, their own program and independent activity.”
Trotsky was referring to the war between the Republic of China, ruled by Chiang Kai-shek’s bourgeois nationalist regime at the time, and the Japanese empire. It began as a major military conflict with the 1931 Japanese invasion of Manchuria and escalated into a full-scale war in 1937.
Trotsky continued:
“Japan’s struggle is imperialist and reactionary. China’s struggle is emancipatory and progressive.
“But Chiang Kai-shek? We need have no illusions about Chiang Kai-shek, his party, or the whole ruling class of China, just as Marx and Engels had no illusions about the ruling classes of Ireland and Poland. Chiang Kai-shek is the executioner of the Chinese workers and peasants. But today he is forced, despite himself, to struggle against Japan for the remainder of the independence of China. Tomorrow he may again betray. It is possible. It is probable. It is even inevitable. But today he is struggling. Only cowards, scoundrels, or complete imbeciles can refuse to participate in that struggle.”
The Iranian prisoners referred to in the Open Letter are not supporting the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran and the signers of the Open Letter state their opposition to this imperialist assault.
Their position is not equivalent to the one Trotsky argued against in 1937. Today those of us who express support for the prisoners in Iran do not say that who wins in Washington’s war against Iran does not matter. For the Iranian people, defense of their sovereignty is critical to their self-determination and to the fight to end the repression that has resulted in the jailing—and worse—of those the Open Letter addresses.
Moreover, in supporting China against Japan, Trotsky did not prettify the reactionary Chinese leadership in the way many leftists now gloss over the brutality of the Iranian theocracy.
Trotsky said clearly, “Chiang Kai-shek is the executioner of the Chinese workers and peasants.” The same is true of today’s Iranian government.
Revolution and counter-revolution in Iran
In its March 7 editorial, “End the Bombing of Iran; No Blood for Oil!,” World-Outlook stated: “The massive bombing of Iran unleashed by the U.S. and Israeli governments on February 28, 2026, has thrust the Middle East into a regional war.… This is an imperialist war, shaking the Mideast and threatening world peace. It has set back prospects for the Iranian people to eventually rid themselves of the oppressive regime in Tehran.”
Calling for an immediate end to the war and a rapid U.S. military withdrawal from the Middle East, the editorial explained:
“To the dismay of U.S. imperialism, Iran’s oil reserves have been out of its reach since Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was deposed by a revolutionary upsurge of Iranian workers and peasants, as well as students and other youth, in 1979. From that moment, under then U.S. president Jimmy Carter, Iran has been a thorn in Washington’s side.
“During the first years of the Iranian revolution, working people made significant gains. The shoras—democratically elected workers’ councils—pressed for workers’ control of production in the factories; peasants seized landed estates and demanded agrarian reform; women fought for and secured new political and economic rights.
“‘One thing was lacking in Iran, however, that prevented working people from completing their victory by taking power into their own hands. There was no revolutionary party, composed in its majority of workers and peasants, experienced in the struggles of the oppressed and exploited, and enjoying the respect of the masses,’ as [noted in] “Revolution and Counter-revolution in Iran: Origins of Clerical Regime3”:
“‘This allowed the bourgeois forces organized around Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to [eventually] establish a stable capitalist regime.’
“In the fall of 1980, the Iraqi army invaded Iranian territory with the backing of Washington and its allies, who had been thwarted by the outcome of the Iranian revolution a-year-and-a-half earlier. The Khomeini regime’s conduct during that war, which ground on for nearly eight years, played a major role in the eventual overthrow of the Iranian revolution.
“‘By 1988, when the war with Iraq ended,’ the article referenced above explained, ‘the clerics running Tehran had consolidated a theocratic regime on the corpse of the 1979 revolution. They have ruled dictatorially ever since.’
“For decades, the regime of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei—who succeeded Khomeini after his death in 1989—has been marked by authoritarianism and repression. It set back the Iranian workers movement, already debilitated during the decade of the Iran-Iraq war, and kept it in check by repeatedly jailing and killing thousands of opponents.
“Another feature of the clerics’ rule has been their vociferous antisemitism, fanning the flames of Jew-hatred in the Middle East with both rhetoric and material aid to bourgeois nationalist forces—such as Hamas or Hezbollah—that claimed to represent or support the Palestinian people’s struggle for self-determination but instead set it back. This hatred of Jews is one of the excuses the U.S. and Israeli governments have consistently used as justification for their actions against Iran.”
Tehran’s “pro-Palestinian” posturing
This brings us to another point.
In his criticism of the Open Letter, Prashad claimed that “despite the crackdown on the Left within Iran in the immediate aftermath of the revolution and with the formation of the Islamic Republic, the commitment to Palestine remained firm.… No other country in the region has been as committed to the Palestinian freedom movement, and none has paid so high a price for that commitment.”
That “commitment,” however, has been nothing but grandstanding by Iran’s clerical regime.
The Iranian government had been supplying its allies in Gaza—Hamas and Islamic Jihad—with arms and technical know-how for years prior to the gruesome October 7, 2023, Hamas-led assault on Israel. Tehran applauded that attack while saying it played no role in organizing it.
“Iran’s assessment posits that the sole effective avenue for resisting the occupation by the Zionist regime is through armed resistance,” Amir Saeid Iravani, the country’s UN ambassador, told the media in 2024. While he did not address reports in the New York Times and other big-business media at the time that Tehran was trying to smuggle weapons to the same groups in the West Bank, Iravani stated: “Palestinian resistance forces possess the capability to manufacture and procure the necessary armaments for their cause.”
As World-Outlook pointed out in the column “On the Character of the October 7 Attack by Hamas,” “Facing the violence of oppression and military occupation, the oppressed have the right to defend themselves. But the methods used to fight for freedom need to serve the strategic goals of the struggle. If not, they become a political liability and a self-inflicted obstacle on the road to liberation.”
Defending the right of an oppressed people to make use of armed struggle is not the same thing as advocating taking up arms “as the sole effective avenue” at all times to fight for liberation.
What is needed today is a strategy explained clearly decades ago by Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s former president who led the decades-long struggle to overthrow the racist apartheid regime in that country.
“Victory in the national liberation struggle,” Mandela explained, “is dependent upon the active and conscious participation of the masses of the oppressed people, determining their own destiny through struggle.”
The Palestinian people have shown they can carry out such a strategy. They did so during the First Intifada.4
The course of Iran’s regime, and of Hamas and Hezbollah, are the opposite of that.
Hamas has made it clear its strategy includes suicide bombings and other attacks “that target Israeli civilians coupled with mass martyrdom that sacrifices the lives of thousands of Palestinians—ultimately tens-of-thousands or more—who have not chosen this course or volunteered to give up their lives for it,” World-Outlook explained.
Such armed actions, which relegate most Palestinians to the status of helpless bystanders, were tested on October 7, 2023, with catastrophic results for the Palestinian people.
The ruins of Gaza, the more than 73,000 Palestinians killed there by Israel’s genocidal response, and an emboldened ultra-right now firmly entrenched in the Israeli government and working with armed settlers to carry out ethnic cleansing in the West Bank speak volumes to that.
This is a result of the Iranian clerical regime’s “support” for the Palestinian struggle.
Iran’s “axis of resistance” had nothing to do with the Palestinian cause
Khalidi is one Palestinian leader who has made a similar point.
In a December 2024 interview on the Bad Hasbara podcast, Khalidi debunked the myth that Iran’s “axis of resistance”5 had anything to do with Palestinian national aspirations.
“There was an axis,” Khalidi said. “It was essentially created by Iran as a deterrent to protect the Iranian regime.… That was what their alliance with Syria was for, that was what their support for Hezbollah was for, that was what their support for Hamas was for, and that’s why Iran supported Assad and the so-called Houthis in Yemen. Each of those actors had a degree of independence, they weren’t Iranian clones or controlled by Iran, but Iran supported them, massively, at a huge cost,” he explained.
The $30 billion Tehran lent the now deposed Syrian dictator had the same purpose, Khalidi said, adding that Assad’s tyranny was “the worst regime in the Middle East.” The Iranian people would love to get it back, “but they’ll never see that money,” he commented.
Tehran did this to advance “the interests of the regime in Iran,” Khalidi insisted.
“They created deterrents to protect Iran against American hostility and hostility of other regimes in the Middle East. And that had no connection, in my view, no connection to a Palestinian national interest,” he continued. “It wasn’t designed, the so-called axis of resistance, to help liberate Palestine or to help the Lebanese liberate the bits of South Lebanon that Israel controls along the Mount Herman frontier with Lebanon…. It has nothing to do with the Palestinians.”
During that podcast, Khalidi noted that this was one of his criticisms of the Hamas leadership in Gaza. “They sincerely believed that these countries, and actors such as Hezbollah, would abandon their own self-interest and do what Hamas’ military leadership wanted and launch a big war,” he said.
Khalidi insisted that Palestinian resistance is not contingent upon support from Tehran, nor will it be deterred by Israeli aggression. “Occupation will breed resistance whether Iran exists as a superpower or not,” he said. “The Palestinians seem weaker, but they weren’t strong because of Iran; if they were strong at all, it’s because they stay steadfast on their land, it’s because they resist non-violently and violently, and it’s because they will not tolerate occupation in the long run.”
As to the prospects of the Palestinian movement, Khalidi emphasized the importance of working with Israelis to secure a common future. “You’re not going to eliminate them, you’re not going to expel them; they have no place else to go, they’re staying there,” he said, referring to Jewish people in Israel. “You have to figure out how you’re going to live with them, and that has to color how you deal with them.”
These remarks shed more light on the point that Tehran’s pro-Palestinian rhetoric has been a form of grandstanding. It has been part of the regime’s efforts to prop up its own influence among Iranians—and others—who sympathize with the Palestinian quest for national self-determination.
Despite these attempts to bolster its image, confidence in the government by working people and others has plummeted across Iran over the last decade. Periodic explosions of opposition to economic austerity, social repression, and compulsory military service to provide human fodder for the Iranian regime’s reach across the Mideast have been clear signs of this.
Popular unrest has included an uprising in 2017-18, a wave of mass protests in 2022-236, and the most recent mass demonstrations that began on December 28, 2025, initially sparked by staggering inflation, particularly in food and fuel. All were met with brutal repression by the clerical regime. Thousands have been killed, many more have been imprisoned, and at least dozens of political prisoners have been already executed.
Even though the Iranian government has been able to mobilize tens-of-thousands of supporters in cities across the country in recent months, patriotically shouting—and for good reason—“Death to America,” its character has not changed. Tehran has continued to repress and jail political opponents while fighting the imperialist war.
Defending the Iranian political prisoners today in no way contradicts unconditional opposition to Washington’s imperialist assault on Iran. To the contrary.
—World Outlook.com, September 1, 2026
1 On June 24, 2025, the day after Israel bombed Evin Prison in Iran, the Iranian labor activist and former political prisoner Keyvan Mohtadi wrote about the people still held inside. His wife, labor organizer Anisha Asadollahi, was among them. Mohtadi titled the piece Political Prisoners Between the Two Blades of the Scissors.
2 The Kurds and Baloch are two of several ethnic and religious minorities in Iran that face systemic discrimination, economic marginalization, and severe political repression.
3 “Revolution and Counter-revolution in Iran: Origins of Clerical Regime”
4 On December 8, 1987, an Israeli army truck in Gaza struck two vehicles carrying Palestinian workers, killing four. Protest demonstrations and strikes began the next day and quickly spread from Gaza to the West Bank, and then to the rest of Israeli-held Palestine. That was the beginning of the first intifada—a mainly nonviolent and unarmed popular uprising involving hundreds-of-thousands of Palestinian youth and working people demanding democratic rights and self-determination. It involved mass protests during which Palestinians confronted savage attacks by the Israeli military simply by throwing stones. ‘The intifada was a spontaneous, bottom-up campaign of resistance, born of an accumulation of frustration and initially with no connection to the formal Palestinian political leadership,’ said Rashid Khalidi about that magnificent revolt, which lasted for more than eight years, in his book The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine. “The First Intifada was an outstanding example of popular resistance and can be considered the first unmitigated victory for the Palestinians in the long colonial war that began in 1917.”
5 The “axis of resistance” is a network of proxy armies and political formations across the Mideast that Iran’s clerical regime helps finance and direct. They include Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, pro-Iranian militias in Iraq and Syria, as well as Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza and, to a lesser extent, in the West Bank. Prior to the Iranian revolution, U.S. support for the shah’s brutal regime, and Washington’s role in overthrowing the government of the reformer Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953, led to deep-going hatred of the U.S. government among the Iranian people. The theocracy’s counterrevolution against the Iranian workers and peasants has tried to falsely cloak itself with that anti-imperialist sentiment and exploit it. It is a common theme in its so-called axis of resistance.
6 The Women, Life, Freedom movement was a protest movement launched in Iran in September 2022 after the death of Mahsa Amini, a young Kurdish woman who was arrested by the morality police for not wearing her hijab properly.