The New York Times building in New York City. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

In her debut essay as a contributing opinion writer at The New York Times, Azadeh Moaveni argues that Iran’s defiance has won it the admiration of the “non-Western world” (“How Tehran Won the World,” June 15).

“The West” is a term that obscures more than it explains, but the Iranian-American journalist presumably means countries that do not belong to the free world and are not liberal democracies.

Since free nations of the East, such as Japan and Taiwan, are not among Iran’s new admirers, freedom is apparently the dividing line. Moaveni, however, is either unable or unwilling to acknowledge that the fact that only illiberals love Iran is a moral victory for America and Israel, whose capital she misidentifies as Tel Aviv.

Moaveni puts Iran at the epicenter of the anti-colonial and anti-imperial Third World. Her column begins with the anti-historical myth of Mohammad Mossaddegh, the Iranian prime minister in the 1950s. She claims:

Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi never recovered the legitimacy he lost by cooperating with America, and doubts about his true independence coalesced into the 1979 revolution. After that, the tension between the new Islamic Republic and America turned to violent enmity.

She provides no evidence for this assertion. As the Latin dictum states: “Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur” meaning, “what is freely asserted, is freely dismissed.”

This is a sophist’s attempt to appeal to the biases of her American audience, for whom America looms large, by portraying the events of 1953 as the original sin in the relationship between the United States and Iran. Moaveni’s account denies any agency to the Iranian people and their leaders, whose choices over the next quarter century determined the direction of Iran and its relations with the free world, culminating in the Islamic Revolution of 1979.

Moaveni creates a moral dichotomy between “the Western world” and anti-colonial powers, arguing that Iran had “an iconoclastic” role in the anti-colonial movement under Mossaddegh and today under the Islamists.

“Even countries that do not at all admire the Iranian regime’s treatment of its own people, or its conduct in the region, are experiencing a ‘Je suis Iran’ moment,” she avers, listing China, India, Pakistan, Cuba, Malaysia, and Turkey. None of these countries is a liberal democracy.

Out of the bunch, “partly free” India, where Muslim citizens routinely face persecution, scores the highest on Freedom House’s democracy index. China, for its part, is conducting a genocide against its Muslim population. Given these circumstances, Moaveni’s claim that Iran’s new admirers oppose the treatment of the Iranian people becomes dubious. To the contrary, China is providing Iran with the technology to oppress Iranians.

For argument’s sake, let’s accept Moaveni’s assertions that the events of 1953 marked the original sin of the relationship and that Iran is now the leader of the resistance to the free world, which she calls the West. Then what?

Whatever the United States did in 1953 does not justify Iran’s killing of roughly 700 American service-members through its proxies and satellites across the region. It also does not justify Iran’s two decades-long support for Hamas, which frequently bombarded Israeli civilians.

Moaveni’s argument that Mossaddegh’s ousting is the root of Iran’s “resistance” foreign policy explains enmity toward America, not Israel. Only in the darkest Internet corners of conspiracy theorizing can one find Mossad’s hands playing a role in Mossaddegh’s deposal.

Moaveni’s theory also does not explain Iran’s provision of military equipment to Russia to attack Ukraine. Notably, even the darkest corners of the web do not blame Ukrainian intelligence services for overthrowing Mossaddegh.

Perhaps Moaveni does not touch on any of Iran’s countless aggressions because even she cannot justify them, so she decides that it is best not to remind readers of the list.

Ironically, if we accept her argument that Iran is the new symbol of the resistance to American hegemony, then it follows that the survival of American power rests on crushing the Islamic Republic, a conclusion she certainly wishes to avoid.

This irony is perhaps lost on the author. The Islamic Republic seeks to be a great power, is hostile to American interests, and aspires to lead an anti-American global movement, which some sympathetic journalists find inspiring. Moaveni’s account is a heroic attempt at valorizing the tyrants of the Iranian people and tormentors of Middle Easterners, but even she cannot deny who the butchers of Tehran really are, and what kinds of friends they seek.

Shay Khatiri is an immigrant from Iran and a media researcher at CAMERA, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis, where this article also appeared.