A thoughtful critic argues that my essay commits a fundamental inversion by shifting moral scrutiny away from the conditions producing violence in Iran and toward diaspora Iranians who speak about that violence. The critique contends that diaspora members are not detached spectators but rather members of the same society with families and personal histories inside Iran, many forced into exile by political circumstances. When internal voices are constrained by communication restrictions and internet shutdowns, diaspora communities become essential conduits for information reaching international audiences—not symptoms of moral detachment but responses to enforced silence. The critic further argues that I collapse diverse diaspora perspectives into a monolithic caricature of “war advocacy,” stretching analytical concepts like “long-distance nationalism” beyond their scholarly purpose into sweeping moral indictments, and that I use humanitarian language to redirect suspicion toward those raising alarms while leaving the oppressive structures that produced the suffering “largely outside the frame.” Ultimately, the critique insists that diaspora Iranians constitute a transnational community working to ensure that when voices inside Iran are silenced, the world does not mistake that silence for consent. I trust this is a fair summary of the critique.
The critique deserves a serious response because it raises important questions about diaspora voice, moral standing, and the boundaries of legitimate critique. However, I believe it fundamentally misreads both the target and the evidence of my argument across the three pieces I have written over the past few days (1, 2 and 3; full text of comment by Mr Hakami Zanjani below 3). Here is my response.
On the Question of Inversion
You argue that I shift moral scrutiny “away from the conditions producing violence and toward the people who speak about that violence.” This characterisation would be accurate if my essays addressed all diaspora speech about Iran. They do not.
The target is precise and narrow: those who actively advocate for foreign military intervention as the solution to Iran’s crisis. This is not about “speaking about violence”—it is about calling for violence as policy. The distinction is not semantic. In “Trading in Pain: The Inside/Outside Iran Emotional Market,” I detailed how a specific segment of diaspora voices has constructed an economy of outrage where maximalist positions—particularly demands for military strikes—generate social capital, visibility, and political influence within echo chambers. These are not people merely “raising alarms about suffering.” They are prescribing bombs as the cure.
On Connection and Moral Standing
You write that diaspora Iranians “are not outsiders commenting on a foreign tragedy” but “members of the same society, with families, friends, and personal histories inside Iran.” This is absolutely true, and I have never disputed it. Connection to Iran, however, does not settle the moral question of what one advocates for Iran.
Consider the testimony I presented in “While You Celebrate: A Voice from the Fire.” Hasan Aghamiri—a man with an eight-year prison sentence for his opposition to the regime, a man who stayed when he could have left—described in searing detail the deaths of 168 schoolchildren, the pulverisation of second-graders, the pregnant women with nowhere to go, the cancer patients without medicine. His words were not directed at all diaspora Iranians. They were aimed at those who celebrate strikes, who cheer each bombing, who treat civilian deaths as acceptable collateral in a geopolitical fantasy.
Aghamiri himself has family. He has personal history. He has suffered under the regime. Yet his conclusion—”war is the most cowardly way to achieve freedom”—is precisely the voice that gets drowned out, vilified, and branded as “regime apologism” by the segment of the diaspora I critique. When you say diaspora voices “ensure that when voices inside the country are silenced, the world does not mistake that silence for consent,” I must ask: which voices? Because Aghamiri’s voice—urgent, anguished, anti-regime, and anti-war—is systematically silenced by parts of the diaspora, not amplified by them.
On Diversity and Caricature
You suggest I “collapse a wide range of political views into a single caricature of ‘war advocacy.’” Again, this would be fair criticism if I had claimed all diaspora Iranians hold uniform views. I have not. What I have documented is a specific pattern: advocates who explicitly call for military intervention, sanctions escalation, and “unconditional surrender” policies, and who treat any internal Iranian voice urging caution as treason.
This is not a straw man. These voices dominate certain media platforms, lobby foreign governments, and have material influence on policy debates. To say “Iranian diaspora communities hold diverse perspectives” is true but evasive. The question is not whether diversity exists—it obviously does—but whether a particular segment within that diversity is advocating irresponsibly for policies that will kill people they will never have to bury. My answer, grounded in the historical record of Iraq, Libya, and Syria, is yes.
On Academic Concepts and Moral Indictment
You argue that concepts like “long-distance nationalism” and “dislocative nationalism” are “analytical tools” being “stretched…beyond their original meaning” when used as “moral indictments.” I disagree. These concepts were developed precisely to explain how geographic and psychological distance from consequences enables forms of political engagement that would be untenable if one had to live with the results.
Benedict Anderson coined “long-distance nationalism” to describe how exiles can maintain intense political commitments to homelands while being insulated from the costs of their advocacy. Reza Zia-Ebrahimi’s “dislocative nationalism” explains how ideological frameworks can rhetorically remove a nation from its actual reality. These are not neutral descriptions—they carry implicit critique of the pathologies they identify. Using them to analyze diaspora war advocacy is not a stretch; it is their proper application.
On the Frame of Moral Suspicion
You write that my essay uses “humanitarian language…to redirect moral suspicion toward those who raise alarms about suffering while leaving the structures that produced that suffering largely outside the frame.” This is simply incorrect.
In “Trading in Pain,” I explicitly analyze the dual pressure Iranians face: authoritarianism from within and maximalist diaspora demands from without. The regime’s brutality is not “outside the frame”—it is the context that makes diaspora war advocacy so morally grotesque. To demand aerial bombardment of a population already suffering under dictatorship is not “raising alarms.” It is compounding tragedy with catastrophe.
The historical evidence is unambiguous. The Iraqi diaspora that lobbied for the 2003 invasion promised liberation and delivered a million dead, sectarian civil war, and ISIS. The Libyan National Transitional Council’s collaboration with NATO produced state collapse and slave markets. The Syrian opposition’s calls for intervention yielded half a million dead and the greatest refugee crisis of the century. These are not “alarms about suffering.” They are prescriptions for suffering, written by people who never paid the check.
On Silence and Speech
Finally, you argue that when internal voices are silenced by internet shutdowns, “diaspora communities often become one of the few ways through which information and testimonies can reach international audiences.” This is true and important. But there is a categorical difference between amplifying internal voices and substituting one’s own preferences for theirs.
When Hasan Aghamiri uses a VPN bought with money he doesn’t have to beg the diaspora to stop celebrating bombings, and when that plea is met with accusations of collaboration, we are not witnessing diaspora filling a silence. We are witnessing diaspora enforcing a silence—ensuring that only one narrative (pro-intervention) is deemed legitimate, while lived testimony from the ground is dismissed as “regime propaganda.”
That is not voice. It is ventriloquism.
The Line That Must Be Drawn
I want to be clear: I do not question the right of diaspora Iranians to speak about Iran. I do not deny their connection, their pain, or their stake in Iran’s future. What I critique—insistently, and without apology—is the specific advocacy for policies that will kill people these advocates will never have to face.
You write that “diaspora Iranians are not ‘speculators in suffering.’” Some are not. But those who call for military intervention while living thousands of miles from the blast radius, who brand internal dissent as treason, who treat Iraq’s ruins as irrelevant precedent, and who have constructed entire media ecosystems to monetize and amplify maximalist positions—they are exactly that. They speculate in futures contracts written in other people’s blood.
And when those people—like Hasan Aghamiri—beg them to stop, the least we owe them is to listen.
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