Against the false symmetry of the scissors

Editor’s note: Vijay Prashad issued this article on the International People’s Assembly website. It is in response to the open letter to “Iran’s political prisoners ‘between two blades of a scissors” published in The Guardian and signed by only a handful of Western academics and a former poliltical prisoner. Mumia Abu-Jamal’s signature appears although he recently articulated his real stance on the U.S. war against Iran that directly counters the open letter in The Guardian. On two paper plates, Mumia wrote:

My young friends, Iran is showing the world (especially the 3rd world) how to fight against the Empire. Their drones are rewriting the rules of war. And countries across the Global South are studying this phase of the war for that use! They remind me of Vietnam poor country that whipped the most powerful army on earth…
That’s where we are today.
Love… Mumia

Dear friends and colleagues,

The United States and Israel launched a war of aggression against Iran in February of this year. For six months, US missiles and bombs have fallen upon civilian and military targets inside the country. Hospitals, schools, energy facilities, and neighborhoods have been struck. The 168 schoolgirls killed in Minab have become the terrible symbol of this war. Iranians have been forced to live under the constant expectation of another attack, while Iranian families outside the country endure the peculiar agony of watching the destruction from afar. This follows on three years of Israeli genocide in Gaza, which has been carried out due to the relentless military support of the United States.

Iran did not begin this war. The United States and Israel did. Iran is resisting an armed attack upon its territory and its people. That elementary fact must determine the timing, language, and political responsibilities of anyone who writes about Iran at this moment.

It is in this context that I read your open letter to Iran’s political prisoners.

Among you are former political prisoners (such as Angela Davis) and a current political prisoner (Mumia Abu-Jamal). I have stood in agreement with many of you on most of the great questions of our time. Of course, there are elements of your letter with which I agree, but I feel that this letter at this time plays a politically damaging role. Just when the United States and Israel are on the back foot, this letter can provide the kind of political confusion that mystifies the actual political dynamic on the ground: Iran has the strategic advantage, having transformed the US-Israeli question (should Iran be allowed to have nuclear weapons) into an Iranian question (should Iran allow commerce through its territorial waters unimpeded). That provides the background of the Left’s moral clarity, the war of aggression that has failed and that has put Iran as well as its neighbors into a discussion about regional security rather than imperial security.

But this letter, from the Global North, provides the kind of ideological cover that the U.S. loves: if the U.S. has lost, then let all sides lose and let all sides be at fault.

The central image, two blades of a scissors, is evocative but erroneous. It suggests that one of the blades is the Islamic Republic and the other blade is the United States and Israel, with the Iranian people being cut by the two of them. The error of the scissors is not merely that its blades are unequal. It is that the image makes the aggressor and the attacked appear as parallel sources of the same danger, stripping away the history and hierarchy that connect them. U.S. imperialism is not simply one oppression alongside another. It is the force that has encircled Iran, devastated the region, armed Israel, imposed sanctions upon an entire population, and now brought war to Iranian territory. Your letter places the aggression and its target in the same moral frame.

The United States maintains over 900 hundred military installations outside its borders, imposes sanctions upon entire populations, finances and arms Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and has destroyed or destabilized country after country. Iran, whatever criticisms one might make of its political system, has never launched wars of aggression. The state born from the 1979 Revolution has not launched wars of conquest, but it has instead endured invasion from Iraq at the behest of the West, encirclement, sanctions, sabotage, assassinations, and now direct attack. The two blades are not equivalent. One is the blade of imperialist war. The other, whatever its internal contradictions, is the state and society being cut. 

Hollowness

The open letter argues that there is a “false binary of imperialism and hollow anti-imperialism.” I was interested in the use of the adjective “hollow.”

First, Iran’s actual defense of itself. The assassination of Commander Qasem Soleimani in Baghdad, Iraq in 2020 marked a decisive stage in the escalation that culminated in the February 2026 illegal attack on Iran. Soleimani was the architect of Iran’s forward strategy, namely, to build a defensive shield through pro-Iranian armed groups that would attack Israel and US military positions from Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Palestine, and other countries. From 2020, the US and Israel systematically went after that network by trying to destroy Hamas, Hezbollah, Ansar Allah, and end the use of Damascus as a base for many of these groups as well as Syria and Iraq as a logistical lifeline from Iran. Having weakened this shield, the US and Israel felt emboldened to attack Iran. But they did not calculate that Iran has built a mechanism to hit the US bases in the Gulf Arab states and that Iran would restrict access to the Strait of Hormuz.

The use of these mechanisms by Iran put it at a strategic advantage over the United States and Israel (the latter which has subsequently receded from the foreground of this war). Iran’s anti-imperialism has not been ‘hollow’ at all but has in fact enabled the Iranian people to protect their country from an imperialist take-over. This is a significant feat that is being celebrated across the formerly colonized world as one of the most consequential strategic reversals suffered by the United States since its defeat in Vietnam in 1975 (the withdrawals from Afghanistan and Iraq are of a different character than this strategic upper hand by Iran).

Second, in 1979, the Iranian revolutionaries chanted, Today Iran, tomorrow Palestine. Indeed, despite the crackdown on the Left within Iran in the immediate aftermath of the revolution and with the formation of the Islamic Republic, the commitment to Palestine remained firm. Iran has never even hinted at normalization with Israel and indeed has been forthright in its defense of the Palestinian cause. No other country in the region has been as committed to the Palestinian freedom movement, and none has paid so high a price for that commitment.

Why have the United States and Israel been obsessed with Iran since 1979? Not because of any question of democracy (Iran has an electoral political system, although one shaped by the Guardian Council and limitations on political participation – just as the democratic claims of the United States are constrained by oligarchic power, racial exclusion, and the domination of money). Not even because of any nuclear threat (the International Atomic Energy Agency has not established that Iran possesses an active nuclear-weapons program, while Iran’s leadership has repeatedly declared nuclear weapons religiously prohibited).

The reason they hate Iran is because it is defiant, and its defiance includes its position for the Palestinian cause.

One can have any view on Iran, of course, but to call its anti-imperialism ‘hollow’ at this moment is inaccurate.

The U.S. must retreat

The open letter closes with two demands: first that the Iranian state must “stop their inhumane practice of death and incarceration now.” Common opposition to the death penalty, which I share, does not place the United States and Iran in the same historical or political position, nor does it justify subordinating the immediate demand that the aggressor end its war to a general indictment of the country under attack. During this period of the US illegal war on Iran, the United States put nineteen people to death by lethal injection, but the letter says nothing about that (nor about the genocidal treatment of Palestinian prisoners in the Israeli versions of Guantanamo – such as Sde Teiman, about which Wesam Afifa has written so movingly; the only statement is to say that Iran uses “the same logic of domination” as Israel, which is a very strange formulation). One can oppose the death penalty. One can demand due process and humane treatment for prisoners. One can listen carefully to Iranian workers, women, minorities, and political activists. But internal criticism cannot be detached from the concrete conditions in which it is made.

The second demand of the open letter is that the U.S. and Israel “must end their barbaric wars and brutal sanctions that knowingly devastate our communities.” We are in total agreement here. But the letter is not addressed to the United States but to Iranian prisoners. That is another curiosity of its formulation. The signatories are mainly U.S. nationals. Why not write to their own government? The letter devotes most of its analytical energy to constructing a common carceral logic, while the demand directed against the imperialist aggressors is compressed into its final sentence. The formal condemnation of the war does not undo the political architecture of the letter, which gives parallel status to the US-Israel war of aggression and the Iranian prison system.

Frantz Fanon taught us that anti-colonial struggles do not unfold under conditions of their own choosing. States placed under permanent threat of invasion, sabotage and regime change develop profound internal contradictions, including security institutions that can turn coercion against their own people. You ask “global civil society and anti-imperialist activists and organisations” to “put pressure on the Islamic Republic by challenging its narrative.” That is, in sum, asking the people of the world to take a position that would weaken Iran now when it is standing tall against the war of aggression. There is a time to make a demand and there is a time to act in solidarity. This is the time of solidarity with Iran, and not a time to make a claim that advantages the aggressor imperialists.

Dear friends, neutrality or a third space does not exist in the midst of a war of aggression. Would we write such a letter to the Vietnamese government in Hanoi during the US war of aggression, or to the Cuban government which is now facing a terrible strangulation by the United States? Why direct this intervention against Iran at this moment? Why challenge Iran just when it has the United States and Israel on the back foot? Is it necessary to ask Iran to become perfect before you defend its right to survive?

At this hour, solidarity begins with a clear demand: the United States and Israel must end their illegal war, and they must retreat.

Featured photo: Iranians hold national flags and pictures of Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, during a rally in condemnation of foreign-linked riots, in the capital of Tehran on January 12, 2026. Credit: khamenei.ir.