by Adeyinka Makinde
Iran supports the Palestinian cause. They also supported left wing liberation movements in South Africa and Central America. Israel was at the same time supporting Apartheid South Africa and training right-wing death squads in Central America.
The Iranian Constitution has a clause making it mandatory to set aside funding for liberation movements. This is something not understood by the West and most Westerners who absorb all the conflated anti-Islamic propaganda of the Western Mainstream Media.
The accusation that Iran is the greatest spopnsor of global terror is absolutely laughable. Most terrorist acts committed by militant Muslim groups are done by Sunni organisations such as al-Qaeda and ISIS. Iran’s Shia ally -not proxy- in Lebanon, Hezbollah exists simply because of Zionist Israel’s coveting of Lebanese territory up to the River Litani.
The West cannot digest the fact that far from introducing a regressive and unenlightened culture as they believe all Islamic societies do, Iran has maintained a scientific culture alongside the culture of poetry and philosophy. The educational qualifications of many of their political leaders attests to this. The late Ali Larijani for instance was a scholar who wrote three books on Immanuel Kant’s philosophy including one which focused on the mathematical method in Kantian philosophy.
Iran’s contemporary achievements in science can be ascertained from the amount of patents registered by its citizens, the contributions of its academic community to journals on physics, and of course from its ballistic missile and drone-making programmes.
Iran has a multi-layered moral base which is distorted in the West as a simplistic medieval hardline attitude against females and gays. They have no idea that Iranian women undertake almost the full gamut of occupations from taxi drivers to university professors. They do not all wear hijab and are not forced to. Their literacy rate is far in excess of the time of the Shah when rural illiteracy was widespread.
The West refuses to believe that Iran has for decades declined to make a nuclear bomb just as it refused to retaliate against Iraq’s use of chemical weapons against Iranian soldiers and civilian populations. Both decisions, fatuas respectively by Ayatollah Khomeini and Ayatollah Khamenei, were based on the view that usage of both in war is un-Islamic.
Iran may be a theocratic state, but it has layers of democratic institutions and decision-making processes which cannot rationally have it pigeonholed as a despotic state ruled by a dictatorial cleric.
Belately, Iran is now been acknowledged in Western media as a “civilizational state” because of the resilience of its leadership and its population in the face of a criminal war of aggression launched on it by the United States at the behest of the State of Israel and its lobby.
It’s people -including many who are not supporters of the Islamic form of government- have rallied to their leaders as they have seen scores of innocent civilians been killed by American and Israeli bombs in deliberate attacks on non-military infrastructure.
This rallying around the flag in the face of an external aggressor is not a new phenomenon. But the resilience of the Iranian population who have staged rallied at squares, thoroughfares and bridges in defiance of American and Israeli bombing ought to inform Western audiences about a national psyche that is infused not only with a pride in being Persian but also from being a Shia nation for hundreds years.
The resultant synthesis of Iranian culture and Shia Islam has imbued the country’s people with the spirit of martyrdoom for the cause of honour and liberation.
They after all are the “children of Imam Husayn”, the grandson of Islam’s Prophet, who sacrificed himself and his followers at the Battle of Karbala against an unjust ruler.
(c) Adeyinka Makinde (2026).
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