"There is no bothsides-ism here. You are either on the side of the genocidal mass-murdering bombers, or on the side of those being bombed.”
In an open letter published last week in the Guardian, addressed to “fellow activists, students, thinkers, workers, artists, and other prisoners of conscience held behind the walls of all detention centers across Iran”, a group of renowned academics and activists resorted to the nauseating cliche of bothsidesism over the devastating war waged against Iran by two nuclear powers.
One of the aggressors is still engaged in a genocide in Palestine and land theft in Syria and Lebanon, while the other is ruled by a corrupt psychopath.
In prose replete with platitudinous tropes, all outdated and jaundiced, betraying an egregious ignorance of what exactly has happened, they denounce both the ruling government in Iran and the illegal Israeli-US war waged against a sovereign nation.
The document is obscene.
Its Achilles’ heel is its malignant central metaphor: a pair of scissors in which an entire nation is presumed caught like a lifeless piece of paper — robbed of its historic agency, helpless at the mercy of two complementary forms of violence, one its own and one from outside.
If that were true, Netanyahu and Trump (Trump - Latest news, videos and opinion | Middle East Eye) would be right: Iranians would need Israeli and American bombers to liberate them.
By resorting to a fatalistic metaphor that strips Iranians of moral agency and political intelligence, the signatories have effectively co-signed the Israeli-American “humanitarian intervention” that promises to free Iranians from their rulers by bombing them back to the stone age.
“White men are saving brown women from brown men,” as the postcolonial theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak once put it. Is there anything more treacherous than an exclusive club of western academics into which no dogs or Iranians are allowed?