Susan Abulhawa: Iran is the Last Bastion of True Anti-imperial Resistance, Owes no one an explanation

From [HERE] Palestinian-American writer and activist Susan Abulhawa says the Islamic Republic of Iran is “the last bastion of true anti-imperial resistance,” rejecting the open letter published in The Guardian critical of Iran.

In an interview with the Press TV website, Abulhawa denounced the letter and its signatories for creating false equivalences and downplaying the scale of the US-Israeli aggression against Iran.

The letter published in The Guardian on Thursday and signed by a group of noted intellectuals and activists has been widely criticized for placing Iran’s political prisoners, Israel’s detention of innocent Palestinians and the brutal US immigration detention system within a single framework of “carceral states,” while calling for opposition to both imperialism and what it describes as “hollow anti-imperialism.”

For Abulhawa, the letter’s framing fundamentally misrepresents the reality facing the Islamic Republic.

At the moment, she said, when the country is under sustained US-Israeli aggression, criticism of Iran’s domestic political system cannot be detached from the vastly unequal forces confronting the country or from decades of unilateral and illegal sanctions, “regime change” campaigns, covert operations, assassinations and other forms of Western and Israeli interventionist policies.

Abulhawa took particular issue with the letter’s description of Iranian political prisoners as being caught “between two blades of a scissors,” noting that the metaphor obscures a profound asymmetry between Iran and the powers waging war against it.

She also rejected a false equivalence between Iran’s prisons, Israel’s detention of Palestinians and the US immigration detention system, saying that the three involve fundamentally different political, legal and historical circumstances. [MORE]