ACTIVISM

Masih Alinejad

Journalist

“The current protests in Iran sound the death knell of the Islamic Republic,” wrote the Iranian dissident, Masih Alinejad, in the October 2022 edition of Foreign Affairs. First arrested by the Iranian regime as a young activist in 1994, Alinejad has spent the last decade in the US and Europe, writing and speaking on behalf of democracy and human rights. A busy year saw Alinejad in the headlines after New York City police arrested an armed man outside her Brooklyn home who intended, FBI agents told her, “to kill you.” Unbowed, Alinejad has continued to press the case that the historic protests rocking her homeland mark a revolution, rather than a call for mere reforms. At a Nov. 2022 meeting in Paris with French President Emmanuel Macron, she impressed upon him that “what is happening in Iran is a revolution. France can be the first country to officially recognize this revolution.” (Photo: Wikimedia / Creative Commons License)