Open letter on Iranian prisoners draws criticism over its framing of war

Open letter on Iranian prisoners draws criticism over its framing of war

TEHRAN- An open letter signed by a group of Western academics, writers, activists and former and current political prisoners has drawn criticism from other scholars and anti-war activists, who argue that its focus on Iran’s domestic developments risks obscuring the central issue of the conflict: the foreign military assault on the country.

The letter, addressed to what it calls Iran’s “prisoners of conscience,” condemns executions, arbitrary arrests, torture, alleged sham trials and the targeting of ethnic minorities. It describes Iranian political prisoners as being caught “between two blades of a scissors” — one representing the Islamic Republic and the other the United States and Israel.

The signatories call on the Iranian authorities to end executions and release political prisoners, while also calling on Washington and Israel to end what they describe as their “barbaric wars and brutal sanctions.”

The list of signatories includes figures such as Angela Davis, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Judith Butler, Rashid Khalidi, Robin D. G. Kelley, Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Walden Bello, among others.
Yet the letter has prompted a broader debate over whether placing Iran’s political prisoners at the center of the discussion, while the country is under military attack, creates a misleading equivalence between domestic developments and an external war.

Critics question the letter’s political framing

One critic, writing under the name Carlos on X, described the letter as politically problematic despite believing that its signatories included people with long records of opposition to imperialism and political repression.

Noting the participation of figures including Davis, Abu-Jamal, Khalidi, Kelley, Gilmore and Butler, Carlos wrote that these were not people who could simply be dismissed; several had spent their lives in anti-imperialist and Black liberation movements.

But he argued that the letter nevertheless adopted 'a misleading framework.'

Its central metaphor, he wrote, was the image of the Islamic Republic on one side and US-Israeli imperialism on the other, with the Iranian people caught between them. According to Carlos, the framing “inserts a symmetry” between the two sides while failing to adequately distinguish between a state facing an external military attack and the domestic political system governing it.

Carlos also questioned the timing and potential political consequences of the letter. He argued that, regardless of what individual signatories intended, the text could function as part of a broader political narrative used to justify pressure on Iran.

He specifically criticized the letter for invoking allegations including sham trials, systematic torture and the targeting of minorities without providing detailed sourcing in the text. He argued that similar language has historically been used in campaigns preceding regime-change efforts.

His criticism was echoed, in a different form, by Ajamu Baraka, an international human-rights activist and political organizer. Baraka did not reject criticism of Iran itself. Instead, he distinguished between criticizing a government and taking a political position in the context of war.

“No one is above criticism,” Baraka wrote. “Comrades who signed that letter need to understand the difference between criticism & political positioning.”

He argued that the signatories had chosen a political position that, in his view, gave legitimacy to U.S. military violence against Iran.

The reaction from legal scholar Nina Farnia was also critical. Farnia shared material relating to the letter while defending her own position on the conflict. Her broader intervention questioned the decision by progressive voices in the United States and elsewhere to focus publicly on condemning Iran at a moment when, in her view, greater attention should be directed toward opposing the war and sanctions imposed by their own governments.

Historian and scholar Adnan A. Husain similarly questioned the political timing of the letter. In a post responding to the debate, he maintained that publishing an open letter focused on condemning Iran, while the United States and Israel were engaged in military and economic pressure against the country, risked shifting political attention away from opposition to the war.

Husain wrote that the Western left was moving toward public condemnation of Iran “just when” the United States was turning increasingly to economic pressure and political subversion. He argued that activists should instead organize against the war and sanctions imposed by their own government.

David Miller, Political sociologist, producer, and former professor at the University of Bristol said, all signed the disgraceful letter to the Guardian denouncing the Islamic Republic of Iran, the world’s leading anti-imperialist state.

Worse, they compare the Republic with the Zionist/US imperialist aggressor. What we (and they) should be doing is defending the Republic. The Islamic Republic of Iran is not only defending itself, the Palestinians, Lebanon, and the resistance movement. It’s also defending all of humanity and indeed civilization against the depredations of Jewish supremacist imperialism. This is an existential matter for the whole world.

Susan Abulhawa, Palestinian author and activist, has issued a sharp critique of mainstream framing that portrays the US-Israeli confrontation with Iran as a balanced conflict between two equal sides.

In a statement shared on her platform, Abulhawa argues that such framing ignores a "profound asymmetry of power." She describes Iran as a nation crippled by decades of sanctions, now fighting an "existential anti-imperial struggle," while facing a nuclear-armed U.S.-Israeli empire with unlimited military resources, surveillance, and near-total dominance over global political, legal, and information systems.

Abulhawa takes issue with minimizing language in a recent letter, which referred to "current, indiscriminate waves of US-Israeli military assaults." She says that this understates the scale of destruction, citing unprovoked attacks on a school that killed 180 children and teachers, the assassination of Iran's spiritual leader and much of its leadership, and strikes on civilian infrastructure including water systems, farmland, and power grids. She also highlights the downing of Iran Air Flight 655 by the U.S., which killed 290 civilians, and decades of assassinations of Iranian scientists and commanders—all of which went unanswered.

The activist also criticizes the letter for failing to contextualize Iranian arrests of detainees, arguing that while some imprisonments may be wrongful, others involve individuals who confessed to espionage for Mossad or terrorism, including a group that brutally murdered a young Quran reciter. She insists that any fair assessment must engage with Iran's legitimate security concerns.

Abulhawa concludes that the conflict is not a symmetrical confrontation but an anti-imperial struggle against overwhelming imperial force distinction, she says, is crucial for honest analysis.

Questions over the signatories’ motives and the letter’s focus

Without direct statements from each signatory, it would be difficult to establish that they all interpreted the letter in precisely the same way.

The criticism therefore raises a legitimate journalistic question rather than providing a definitive answer: what exactly did each signatory intend to endorse?

That question is particularly relevant because the letter was published during a period of military confrontation. The document gives substantial attention to Iran’s domestic political developments, while the external conflict appears largely as one half of a broader framework of “dual oppression.”

For critics, this framing risks placing the government of a country under attack and the states conducting military operations against it within a single conceptual structure, without sufficiently addressing the different forms of power and responsibility involved.

But the timing and framing matter. A government’s policy inside the country and another state’s decision to wage war against that country are separate questions. They can both be condemned, but they carry different legal, political, and moral implications. Treating them as interchangeable risks obscuring the question of responsibility for the conflict itself.

The debate over the letter therefore goes beyond Iran’s domestic politics. It raises a broader question for international intellectual and human-rights circles: how should activists respond when a country facing external military attack is also accused of serious internal repression?

What remains less clear is whether all those whose names appear beneath the letter share the same interpretation of that argument.

That uncertainty is itself significant. The prominence of the signatories may lend the letter considerable political weight, but a list of names cannot, by itself, establish a uniform political position. Determining what each individual intended to endorse would require direct confirmation from the signatories themselves.

Its critics, however, contend that the document’s framing places the aggressor and the state under attack within an overly symmetrical narrative and risks diverting attention from the central question of the war: who initiated the military action, what legal basis was claimed for it, and who bears responsibility for its consequences?

source: tehrantimes.com