A parallel narrative circulates within the Iranian diaspora opposition that remains largely invisible to Western media and audiences. Certain opposition figures and channels, speaking in the name of “the Iranian people,” advance demands that even the hardest-line Western politicians will not state openly—constrained by legal, diplomatic, and domestic political costs. By doing so, they break political and moral taboos for Western decision-makers, shift the burden of public opinion onto Iranians themselves, and thereby supply external actors with cover for pursuing inhumane policies or committing war crimes.

One example occurred at the height of the COVID-19 crisis. Masih Alinejad, in an open letter to then-U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, called for sanctions not to be suspended—even though some human-rights groups and UN officials had urged temporary relief on humanitarian grounds. The significance lay less in the letter’s content alone than in the way it sought to legitimize such a stance against the Iranian population. Alinejad presented the demand not as the view of an exile opposition activist among other views, but as the expression of the will of “the Iranian people.” This gave Pompeo political cover to resist pressure from human-rights institutions and public opinion; by claiming that “the Iranian people themselves” opposed even temporary relief, the administration not only refused to suspend sanctions at the peak of the pandemic but imposed additional ones.

In another instance, before the outbreak of military hostilities, certain diaspora media outlets claimed that the Iranian government itself intended, in the event of war, to strike schools and hospitals with its own missiles and then pin the blame on the United States. On the first day of the war, after the bombing of the Shajareh Tayyebeh school in Minab, the same channels immediately presented the attack as confirmation of their earlier “warning” and assigned full responsibility to the Iranian government. This framing has meant that, to this day, parts of Iranian society—especially abroad, where people could have exerted significant pressure on the U.S. government over the atrocity—continue to circulate competing narratives, from “it was their own doing” to “missiles were hidden under the school,” thereby deflecting much of the pressure away from the United States.👇

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