A statement explaining the reasons diaspora Iranians plan to demonstrate against the presence of Ebrahim Raisi in the annual General Assembly meeting of the United Nations.

Raisi is An Enemy, not A Representative, Of The Iranian People

We are here to protest the presence of Iran’s Ebrahim Raisi as Iran’s president in the United Nations General Assembly. In 1988, Iran’s theocrats   decided to  execute over 4000 political prisoners. A tribunal that came to be known as Death Commission carried out the order. Bodies  of the victims were buried in mass graves and their families were kept in the dark.  Ebrahim Raisi was a member of this Commission. His presence in the General Assembly is an offense to the aspirations of the United Nations. We strongly object treating  him as a legitimate Iranian official. Another member of the Death Commission, Hamid Nouri, was tried in Sweden (under Universal Jurisdiction principle) and convicted to life imprisonment.

International human rights organizations have documented the massacre and characterized it as a crime against humanity. Yet, mass media in the United States has hardly exposed  this unprecedented massacre or the suffering of Iran’s prisoners of conscience over the past forty-three years.   Exposing Raisi’s criminal acts and the theocratic regime’s pathological violence against  individuals who resist their medieval dictates is more than revealing the sociopathic nature of a theocracy.  Rather, it should seek “to embody what Primo Levi defines as the “Duty of Memory.” That is to say, we need “to gain insight into the historical reality and portray the subtle details of the ‘policy of cruelty’ in the Islamic of Republic of Iran. In the words of Lynn Novick, co-director with Ken Burns of the documentary on the Vietnam War: “It is a shortcoming and self-humiliating to constantly say that they have lied [Iran’s theocrats or other war criminals]. What we really want to do is to show what has happened.”

The clerics who run the totalitarian theocracy in Iran represent the first ant Enlightenment regime in the modern world. They reject the ideas of  human rights, individual autonomy and democracy and  demand the citizens to follow duties and obligations dictated by the self- appointed “viceroys of God” on earth. Women, LGBTI people, and ethnic and religious minorities face entrenched discrimination and violence. The hostility of these characters to human freedom has certain absurdities in common with what Margaret Atwood describes in The Handmaid’s Tale.

Western countries unanimously condemned Iran’s ruling clerics in the terror attack on  Salman Rushdi. Such condemnation should include the regime’s use of terror against Iranian dissidents. For  99% of the victims of the regime’s terrorism in the past forty-three years have been dissident Iranians both inside and outside the country. Among them were distinguished writers and artists. Terrorism is an essential feature of Iran’s theocratic rulers who, like Stalinists and Nazis, use ends justify the means rational to commit their crimes.  Western progressive forces and individuals should not let their critical view of American foreign policy in the region prevent them from condemning the anti-Enlightenment barbarism of Iranian theocracy.