With thousands of protesters killed and the social fabric in tatters, I mourn the Iran I knew. Just months ago, a 12-day war with Israel left scores of Iranians dead and further weakened the country’s ailing economy. Where is the treasured past and the vibrant present, that Iran once celebrated?
Three weeks of protests in Iran over the collapse of the national currency has left the country reeling from hundreds of deaths, violence, destruction, and increasing polarization. In response, Iran's diaspora has exuded division and confusion.
Between 2009 and 2014, I worked as a reporter for Daneshmand, Iran’s longest-running popular science magazine, where I initiated an effort to foster dialogue between Iran and the world through journalism, resulting in nearly 30 interviews with Nobel Prize laureates. That initiative was cut short by political shifts that stripped the magazine of its relevance.
The banality of Donald Trump’s commercial hunt for a Nobel Peace Prize was self-evident since the day it was set in motion. It became more grotesque over time as he ramped up his violent immigration raids and military deployments across U.S. cities, terrorizing communities while lavishing praise on his peace credentials.
The unusual surge in the deportation of Iranian nationals by the Trump administration after he joined Israel's war on Iran provides empirical evidence that immigration enforcement is being weaponized to further the confrontational foreign policy agenda of the 47th president
Human nature isn't alien to mistrust of the other. Studies show that even children as young as 7-9 can internalize racial bias. Despite the intolerance personified by the MAGA movement, Zohran Mamdani's rise as New York City's mayoral frontrunner signals the continuity of the culture of tolerance in America
Ensnared in the fracas between Israel and Iran, Jordan is trying to regain its balancing act while staving off the security threats emanating from this simmering crisis, which the Trump administration has turned into a front for one of the “forever wars” he had campaigned on ending.
Once the Islamic Republic’s most combative face on the world stage, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad built a political persona based on anti-Israel vitriol that deepened Iran's isolation. Since Israel's June 13 attacks on Iran, the former president has kept an uncharacteristic silence, coming on the heels of an enigmatic trip he made to Hungary six days before the war.
For many Iranians, the country’s often coarse and brutal judiciary has come to epitomize the establishment's fundamental problems, and the arbitrary rulings and whimsical demeanor of the judges deciding political cases captures the breadth of this corruption.
Automatic assumptions about the aftermath of political change in Iran promise the vision of a country that's modernized, reformed, industrialized and globally connected overnight. But the diasporic crusaders of forcible change haven't clarified how this ideal will be fulfilled without any investment in civic education in a country long beset by isolation and sanctions.
