Little joy to be found among Iranian Americans over the war and Iran’s future: ‘I have righteous anger’

Original article by Hooman Majd

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When Israeli and American missiles first started falling on Tehran, and as news of the death of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, leaked out, Nasser, a sixtysomething Iranian American dad from Boston who regularly travels to Iran, briefly experienced something akin to optimism. He “felt a flash of hope”, he told me, “or maybe vengeance, when Khamenei and his circle were hit”.

It was a common sentiment among the millions of Iranians in the North American diaspora who have, for multiple reasons, come to reject the rule of the velayat-e-faqih, or the “guardianship of the Islamic jurist”, the Islamic Republic’s governing doctrine. Many Iranians inside and outside the country had just recently held Khamenei directly responsible for the horrific bloodshed during the mass protests in January. If the top leadership of the Islamic republic was decapitated, perhaps, many believed, Iran could forge a different future.

But now, after three weeks of all-out war on his homeland and with thousands of dead Iranians, damage to cultural heritage sites, and seeming randomness of missile attacks in cities, that hope has disappeared. “Now,” he tells me, “I feel sick about it.” (The Guardian is using pseudonyms for the people quoted in this story, who asked for anonymity because of possible retribution against family inside Iran.)

With America’s ever-changing stated objectives in Iran, the war it finally initiated after months of threats has elicited a range of emotions for Iranians in the diaspora, estimated today to number more than 4 million, with the majority in North America (followed by Europe and the UAE).

“As my thoughts settled,” Ali, an American-born fortysomething New Yorker told me, “I wanted to spit hot fire at the ne’er-do-well royalists cheering the destruction of a country I might now never get to visit even the vestiges of. I have anger, righteous anger.”

Nasser and Ali’s views are not necessarily representative of this entire population. There have been waves of emigration from Iran in the decades following the Islamic revolution – some emigrated recently; others can trace their heritage to Iran but have little connection to the land. The diaspora is, as such, by no means uniform or homogenous, and depending on when Iranians left their homeland and their social or financial status, they hold varying political views and ideas of what they would like to see Iran become. They are young and old, asylees filled with anger at the regime for their exile; they are either ambivalent politically or fully engaged; they are Iranians who sought a better life for themselves and their children. Many of those divisions can be found within the same families.

Friday was Nowruz, the Persian new year, which this year fell on Eid-al-Fitr, marking the end of Ramadan. But Iranians in the diaspora, whatever their politics, are in no mood for celebrating. The regime’s brutal response to widespread protests in January, resulting in the deaths of thousands of innocent protesters, shocked Iranians everywhere, and the violence since meted out by Israeli American bombs has further traumatized them, even those who might have initially supported military intervention.

Feelings are decidedly less mixed among those who actively seek the return of the American-backed monarchy toppled in 1979. In the absence of credible polling, it is impossible to know how many Iranians in the diaspora share this view, but they are certainly a vocal minority, and they don’t tend to express much anguish over the war or the resulting death toll. On social media, they champion former crown prince Reza Pahlavi, who has declared himself “uniquely positioned” to lead the country. (Tellingly, the only condolences he offered are for the families of the first Americans killed in the war – nothing to the families of Iranian victims.)

In a sign of the painful divisiveness within the diaspora community, an anti-regime and anti-Pahlavi activist was allegedly murdered in Canada recently. Two diehard monarchists who have not yet entered pleas were arrested in connection with the killing.

Then there are those who aren’t necessarily supporters of Pahlavi, or even a reinstated monarchy, but would take him over the current regime any day. I hear this view from people inside Iran, and after the 12-day war in July of last year, I heard it from a ninetysomething father of friends who lives between the US east coast, London and Tehran. “Why not Reza?” he said to me. “Khak bar sare-moun (“dirt on our heads”, or “shame on us”) for allowing our country to come to this.” When I suggested that Pahlavi’s support for Israel, a country that had just bombed and killed more than 1,000 Iranians, might be disqualifying for many Iranians inside Iran, he responded: “So what? What has this regime’s support of Russia or others done for us?”

Like many older Iranians whose families are settled in America, he and his wife hope to live to see Iran free of a regime that they believe has brought their country to ruin. They may have, like my own family, mixed feelings about the excesses of the Shah’s reign, but also memories of a proud and respected nation they still love.

‘What good can come of this?’

The first wave of Iranian emigrants to Europe and the US arrived either immediately before the Islamic revolution or soon thereafter. Subsequent waves were comprised of people escaping the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s and the possibility that their sons would be conscripted into an army that was losing thousands of soldiers a day; students electing to remain in the countries where they studied rather than return to uncertain economic opportunities back home; and people who had families abroad or who were keen to join flourishing communities of Iranians in places such as Los Angeles or Toronto. And, of course, there were many secular Iranians – mostly from urban Iran – who have always been a sizeable population and who over the years got tired of living in a theocratic state.

The diaspora is, as such, by no means uniform or homogenous, and members’ views on the Islamic Republic and the best course for the country tend to depend, at least somewhat, on when they left their homeland and their socioeconomic status.

That means that today, Iranians – at home or in the diaspora – can be monarchist (constitutional or authoritarian), socialist, republican, Islamist or Marxist – indeed, of every possible political stripe, ranging from the fascist right to the communist left. Iranians in southern California tend to be the most virulent in their anti-regime sentiments – this goes back to the early 1980s, which saw regular anti-regime demonstrations in front of the federal building on Wilshire Boulevard in LA. Canada, with lenient immigration policies in the late 90s and early aughts, is home to a growing Iranian diaspora that, over time, has become more outspoken in their denunciation of the Iranian regime. So today, some of the largest anti-Islamic regime demonstrations anywhere in the world happen in Toronto.

For many, opposition to the bombing comes not from any love for the Iranian regime, but from a generally anti-imperialist sentiment that took hold in Iran in the aftermath of the 1953 British American coup that overthrew the prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh. Donna Miles, an outspoken Iranian-Kiwi journalist active on X days into the war wrote: “Never forget that all this death and destruction is so the US can install a puppet leader in Iran and control its oil, just like they did in 1953.” Enough Iranians heard Donald Trump declare in the aftermath of the previous supreme leader’s death that he would have to approve the next leader, and have noted his general fondness for the oil and precious minerals of other countries – be they in Venezuela or Greenland – for some to conclude that the war is not about bringing democracy to the people.

But for many, the fear and dread doesn’t necessarily fit within a political framework, but stem simply from the horror of the destruction. “Looking forward, I’m despondent,” Ali said. “What good can come of this? An Iran liberated into its own ruin?”

Nasser echoed his fears. “Iran will be poorer, hungrier, and more frightened,” he said. “I do not expect a wave of protests soon. Who would dare? Even dissidents warn that bombing is not the same thing as liberation.”

That there are disparate voices that express complex and even conflicting feelings about what is happening to their country should not be surprising. For Iranians who have suffered under the yoke of a cruel regime, it is understandable that the first reaction to the deaths of the leaders of that regime would be satisfaction, if not outright joy. But that has given way as the war drags on, the civilian death toll climbs, and as it becomes apparent that there is no rhyme or reason as to how it’s being conducted.

So today, little actual joy can be found among Iranians in the diaspora, even those who continue to dismiss warnings about the human cost of the war and who believe it will all have been worth it. Some of them are joyless because they worry openly about the reality of regime collapse. Others cannot abide seeing cultural heritage sites being damaged, and others worry about infrastructure damage and destruction. Yet others worry about a “victory” that leaves the regime intact and more oppressive than before. Inside families and communities, the joyless are arguing among themselves.

Fred, a retired Jewish Iranian American businessman who left Iran in 1980 and now lives in Los Angeles, wrote to me on WhatsApp this week about his feelings on the war that Israel and America wage on his country of birth: “You know, I’m not political nor do I really know English (well), but sincerely, my heart burns for the innocent children and their mothers and fathers.”