Anti-U.S. mural on a building in Tehran, Iran, says ‘Down with the USA’ (via REUTERS)
The Anti-Imperialist Scholars Collective (AISC) wrote this response to the open letter To Iran's political prisoners, 'trapped between two blades of a scissors' which appeared in The Guardian.
The Anti-Imperialist Scholars Collective (AISC) strongly condemns “To Iran’s political prisoners, trapped ‘between two blades of a scissors’,” the open letter published on 20 August 2026 in The Guardian and signed by Western academics and cultural workers in the imperialist core.
The letter distorts history, obfuscates the current geopolitical conjuncture, and provides ideological cover for the intensification of the ongoing war against Iran.[1] Similar to accusations against the Palestinian resistance that equate the zionist genocide to resistance-to-genocide, the letter creates a false and dangerous equivalence between the defensive actions of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the aggressions of the United States and Israel, the most powerful and genocidal imperialist forces in world history.
The letter names multiple historical events without analysis, context, or citations. The absence of Iran’s resistance to the century-long genocide of the Palestinian people is deeply troubling. Additionally, the letter does not address the past century of imperialist intervention, during which Europe, the United States and most recently, Israel, have undermined Iranian and Arab sovereignty through coup attempts, kinetic wars, mercenaries, information warfare, sanctions, economic violence, and sabotage. Instead of addressing this execrable record, the authors offer a vague reference to “the anniversary of the 1988 mass executions in Iran” and a deracinated acknowledgement of the 1953 US-backed coup.
As US imperialism accelerates and the resistance against it strengthens, the battle of ideas continues to intensify. This is the time when the responsibility of the anti-imperialist intellectual is to be rigorous and vigilant. We therefore find it necessary to name the stakes and clarify the distortions and obfuscations in the Guardian letter. The claims must be challenged and the motivations for its publication unearthed, especially because ,as of the writing of this response, the letter’s authors remain obscured, the social media page that originally posted the letter is erased, while imperialist war drums continue apace. What follows is AISC’s initial response to this alarming, pro-imperialist document.
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In 1988, almost a decade after the Iranian people overthrew the brutal, Mossad-trained and US-backed Pahlavi monarchy, the Islamic Republic of Iran was at war with a US-backed Iraq, which invaded Iran in 1980 at the behest of the US. The US objective was to balkanize Iran, topple the Islamic Republic, and retake control of the state and its resources. By 1988, it is estimated that over a million Iranians and Iraqis had been killed in the war; actual figures are likely far higher.
In the last land battle of the Iran-Iraq War, the Mujahideen-e Khalq (MEK) – well-documented as funded and trained by the US and Israel — conducted a joint and ultimately failed operation with Iraqi armed forces to invade Iran through the west.[2] Iran won the war shortly after, though at great cost since much of the country had been bombarded and destroyed by the far more powerful and well-armed imperialist forces. The 1988 executions obliquely referred to in the open letter largely targeted those mercenaries from the MEK who participated in the US and Iraqi operations to topple the Islamic Republic and balkanize Iran, as is widely accepted in English and Persian sources from and about that period.[3]
Neither the US nor Israel have ever given up on destroying Iran, in no small part because of the anti-zionism of the Islamic Republic and its defense of Palestine. In January 2026, the streets of Iran were once again terrorized by US and Israeli mercenaries who burned police officers and civilians alive, literally dismembering them in frenzied attacks on city streets in Tehran. And like the 1980s, the Iranian people defeated the US-backed mercenaries again.[4]
As Iran’s defensive operations over the last half century and the Axis of Resistance’s war against genocide have proven, resistance is dialectical. It is in part through the Iran-Iraq War that Iran learned how to defend itself and its sovereignty against US imperialism. Its clarity regarding the US use of proxy forces and mercenaries, its commitment to endogenous scientific development, and its economic self-reliance emerged through the experience of the Iran-Iraq War.
Likewise, the courage and wisdom of the Iranian people to hold the streets against mercenaries during this year’s Ramadan War and after, were partially forged through their experience suffering the violence of MEK mercenaries during that same war; and again in the January 2026 urban warfare campaign led by Mossad and CIA-backed mercenaries. By concealing this historical context, The Guardian letter reveals itself to be a form of academic counterinsurgency. It sows confusion about the nature of counterinsurgent wars and the stakes of anti-imperialist struggle today. To that end, the letter’s call to release the mercenaries who dismembered and set Iranians ablaze in January 2026 is likewise a veiled attempt to destabilize Iran yet again.
It is against this backdrop, and during the month of Black August, a commemoration of the radical and anti-imperialist prison movement in the United States, that these western academics signed onto this letter.[5] They chose to sign only months after the US deliberately targeted a school in the southern province of Minab, killing over 165 children and staff. They chose to sign after the US bombed hospitals, pharmaceutical clinics, bridges, food and water storage facilities and other critical infrastructure across Iran. And they released the letter on the day that the US announced "crushing economic warfare" against Iran.
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The actions of the signatories reflect a carelessness that is troubling, especially as the peoples of West Asia wage a monumental resistance against a US-sponsored, livestreamed genocide. Many of the signatories to the letter proclaim support for Palestine in academic papers, on zoom talks, and on conference panels–only to then condemn the only country in the world that actively and materially supports the Palestinian resistance, irrespective of political ideology or faction.
After tremendous backlash, these award-winning scholars and activists obfuscated the provenance and previous content of the letter, by claiming they did not do the reading, or did not read carefully, or were tricked and confused by the process through which this letter was created and their signatures acquired.
We are dismayed that the signatories still refuse to name the authors of this treacherous statement and how their signatures were acquired, despite claiming to have been hoodwinked by them.
More than this, it was nothing short of reckless that our academic colleagues, many of whom are well versed in the histories of imperialist academic counter-insurgency, would so easily fall prey to such flagrant psyops.
We remain confused about the inclusion of US-political prisoner Mumia Abu Jamal when he has consistently proclaimed his support for Iran’s anti-imperialism, which he calls a model the peoples of the world watch and from which they learn. The letter’s authors instrumentalize his name and rich history as political cover for their own empty claims regarding Iran.
Furthermore, the saga underscores that “abolition” as a framework of analysis and struggle is suited for a settler colonial, capitalist racist, imperialist context, not for national liberation movements and states under the boot of US imperialism. We reject the Eurocentric tendency to universalize provincial US categories and frameworks.
During this time of spectacular genocidal violence at the hands of the United States and its zionist and European proxies, the Anti-Imperialist Scholars Collective strives to wage the battle of ideas from within the belly of the beast, maintaining a focus on US imperialism as the primary contradiction. Our role is to provide a structural and historical analysis of imperialism, not to abet it through duplicitous, performative, and conflicting solidarities. The Guardian letter highlights the insidious focus of the Western left on “secondary contradictions” at the expense of the primary contradiction, a dynamic that reinforces imperialism and reproduces its many violent manifestations. No amount of nuance incorporated into an “alternative letter” can help this fundamentally flawed political position escape imperialist recuperation.[6]
The Anti-Imperialist Scholars Collective believes it is our duty to approach the material conditions and objective reality of the current conjuncture with the clarity, urgency, and intellectual rigor that this historical moment requires. The future of humanity requires no less. We expect the same of the intellectuals who signed this letter. If they are incapable, we remind them that silence is always an option.
[1] It manufactures consent for overthrowing the Iranian government to impose US-zionist prescriptions on the region, the stated goal of the decapitation strikes that launched the 12-Day War of June 2025 and the Ramadan War of 2026. See our Red Paper “The Multiple Fronts of Iranian Anti-Imperialism” for in-depth analysis of the current conjuncture and its historical roots. https://www.anti-imperialists.com/red-papers/aisc-red-paper-no-2-the-multiple-fronts-of-iranian-anti-imperialism/
[2] See “Our Men in Iran” by Seymour Hersh at https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/our-men-in-iran . In 2012, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published an article in the New Yorker entitled “Our Men in Iran.” This article exposed US support for the MEK, which extended beyond material support and included extended, US-based training. The article emphasized the role of both the United States and the Mossad.
[3] Muhammad Sahimi, “Media Watch” at https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tehranbureau/2012/04/media-watch-report-mko-members-trained-by-us-special-ops-command.html
[4] See our Red Paper “The Multiple Fronts of Iranian Anti-Imperialism” for discussion of the Ramadan War. https://www.anti-imperialists.com/red-papers/aisc-red-paper-no-2-the-multiple-fronts-of-iranian-anti-imperialism/
[5] On the anti-imperialism of the U.S. prison movement see George Jackson, Blood in My Eye, p. 134 “The U.S. has established itself as the mortal enemy of all people’s government, all scientific-socialist mobilization of consciousness everywhere on the globe, all anti-imperialist activity on earth. The history of this country in the last fifty years and more, the very nature of all its fundamental elements, and its economic, social, political and military mobilization distinguish it as the prototype of the international fascist counterrevolution.”
[6] Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, “An (Alternative) Open Letter to Iran’s Political Prisoners at https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/47613/An-Alternative-Open-Letter-to-Iran%E2%80%99s-Political-Prisoners
The Anti-Imperialist Scholars Collective is a group of scholars committed to challenging US-led imperialism and supporting liberation movements of the Global Majority through critical knowledge production and international solidarity. https://www.anti-imperialists.com/
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