At the solidarity rally with the protests in Iran in front of the Federal Chancellery on 26.11.2022 
 

Dear friends,

For the past two months, incredible images of courage and determination, manifested in the slogan "Zan, Zendegi, Azadi" - "Woman, Life, Freedom" have reached us and gone around the world.

The admirable and touching scenes of nationwide struggle in Iran represent the overcoming, or at least relativising, of the regional and social divisions that the Islamic Republic has cultivated and deepened over decades among the people of Iran in order to secure its rule. Against its system of ethno-religious hatred, large sections of the population of the rest of Iran identify with the fate of Mahsa Amini, the Kurdish woman murdered by the regime.

Moreover, the current protests bridge the gap between the general discontent over political repression, social misery and foreign policy adventures of the Islamic Republic and the particular oppression of women under the regime of gender apartheid.

However, in order to effectively make our own contribution to the victory of the freedom and subversion movement in Iran, we must also target the enemy: the Islamic Republic and its Western accomplices and lobbyists.

The question is what kind of regime we are dealing with and what are the ideological sources of its barbarism, which is limitless in both senses of the word. This regime is not a classic authoritarian rule that is content to dominate Iran.

Anti-Semitism has rarely come into focus in recent years when the Iranian regime has been discussed in Germany and Europe.

A minimal start would be made in understanding the role of anti-Semitism if one at least thought about why the so-called Arab rebellion of 2011 ended so much bloodier in Syria of all places than in other Arab states. One would quickly come to the conclusion that Assad, unlike the other dictators toppled in the Arab rebellion, could not resign out of personal choice, even if he wanted to. He could not make a retreat in shame like Mubarak and Ben Ali in 2011, because he was never accountable to Syrian society, but to the "axis of resistance" - the alliance with the Islamic Republic and Hezbollah for the destruction of Israel. And this axis does not accept withdrawal in the name of personal or national reasons.

"The way to Jerusalem is through Najaf and Kerbala" was the slogan of the Iranian Islamists already during the war against Iraq in the 1980s. Israel has fortunately been able to defend itself against the attacks from Tehran up to now - but on the "road to Jerusalem" today lie the societies of Iraq, Yemen, Syria and Lebanon, devastated by the "axis of resistance". This connection has been brought to consciousness in the region today, however mediated.

Thanks to the internet, the slogan "Woman, Life, Freedom" connects people throughout the Middle East - where the Islamic Republic is now considered the greatest threat and godfather of terror and extremism among non-Islamists - with the fate of the demonstrators in Iran.

The protest movement is receiving solidarity and congratulations from women from Afghanistan, celebrities from Turkey, activists from Syria and Iraq. They see the liberation of the people of Iran as the basis for their own liberation from regimes or militias directly or indirectly linked to the Islamic Republic's apparatus of violence.

The second pillar of the mullahs' regime is gender apartheid in the name of Sharia.

In it, women are not simply objects of individual patriarchal rule. Her religious significance, made clear by the headscarf, places her at the centre of the God-state's self-legitimisation and makes any deviation from the dress code of the guardians of virtue a state crime. The "immorally" dressed woman thus becomes the internal enemy, the complement of the external declaration of enemies against Israel and the USA.

Through the morality police, the entire society is controlled.

This is the reason why there can be no separate women's movement in Iran today. The women fighting for their freedom are the vanguard of the overthrow movement against the Islamic Republic. Revolutionary Guard boss Hossein Salami has described the forced veil as the Islamists' "trench" against their enemies.

This double declaration of enemies is the content of the Tehran regime's totalitarian "nothing" - "hitch". Khomeini used this "nothing" in 1979 on the plane to Tehran to answer the question of what he felt on returning to Iran. Especially in Germany, one should know the content and the global danger of the nihilism of an anti-Semitic regime. Instead, many places remain silent or even warn that things could only get really bad AFTER the fall of the Islamic Republic.

The apologists of the Iranian terror regime also act as if in the trenches. They warn of "the Iranian diaspora", fume about alleged hate campaigns by exiled Iranians against German Iran experts, who are of course presented as sober experts and honest brokers, as usual. The "Jerusalem Post" and Saudi media are identified as masterminds of the uprising in Iran and that already sounds a lot like Khamenei.

It is a ping-pong game between the left and the right of the established media spectrum. It ranges from post-colonial anti-Zionists, to bourgeois supposed realpolitikers or the so-called Islam critics of the AfD.

In the agitation of all these regime apologetics, the exiled Iranians sometimes appear like the real terrorists, not the regime whose long arm still threatens them with assassinations in Western countries.

The latest attack comes from Claudia Roth's long-time collaborator Ali Mahdjoubi. He has accused the Iranian opposition activist in exile Masih Alinejad of being neither a credible democrat nor a feminist, of having a "dirty mouth" and of being a "product" of the Islamist regime in Iran.

Against this background, I would like to quote what we already said three years ago on the occasion of the November 2019 regime massacre and the silence in Germany about it:

"The people of Iran are demanding maximum pressure on the rulers of the Islamic Republic. It is our task, today and in the future, to exert maximum pressure on politics and the media in Germany to finally end the decades of cooperation with the Iranian terror regime."

I agree with the most important demands of the previous speakers:

• The Revolutionary Guards must be put on the terror list immediately; this demand will not tolerate any delay. If necessary, German policy can act unilaterally here, just as Canada has already done.
• Institutions under the control of the Islamic Republic, such as the embassy, consulates and the "Islamic Centre Hamburg", must be closed.
• The dialogue with the regime must be broken off and replaced by a dialogue with representatives of free Iran.

Zan, Zendegi, Asadi - Woman, Life, Freedom!

Down with the Islamic Republic!

Solidarity with the freedom movement in Iran!