CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

The Weaponisation of Diaspora Psychopathy

Image by Getty and Unsplash .

As Donald J. Trump, commander-in-chief of the American Empire and known associate of the child-sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein, continues to ravage communities and people across the world; this time by starting an utterly unnecessary and deeply unpopular war with Iran at the behest of Israel, the efforts to justify his latest act of barbarity – which has already upended the lives of millions in Iran, Lebanon, and beyond – have been handed over to those who, without fail, always find ways to rationalise the irrational: segments of the Iranian diaspora.

This is not new, nor is it unique to Iranians abroad. Whenever the US and its Western allies want to wage an imperialist war of aggression, neo-conservatives and liberal interventionists alike routinely parade the most extremist elements within diaspora communities from adversarial countries to justify their actions. From the United States’s enduring blockade against Cuba, which grows more cruel every day, to Trump’s illegal kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January, the communities most vocally championing these atrocities – and being centred by the media – have been the Cuban and Venezuelan diasporas in Miami. We are once again seeing the same playbook in action, now with the most radical Iranians based in Los Angeles and beyond.

Their voices, no matter how anti-intellectual or fringe, are plastered across the media and parroted endlessly, shaping and framing the US’s wars – in the case of Iran, Israel’s war – as humanitarian and just, rather than what they are: tyrannous, exploitative, and illegal. And their perspectives, rooted in privilege and often utterly psychotic, have been effective at confusing scores of people, clouding the judgments of many, including those who are well-intentioned but politically and historically illiterate. So, it is necessary to cut to the core of, and be wary of, one of empire’s enduring tactics to manufacture consent for its neo-colonial crimes: weaponising diaspora communities.

On March 1, shortly after the United States and Israel began carpet bombing Iran, the so-called Iranian journalist and activist Masih Alinejad went on CNN to gleefully celebrate the killing of hundreds of civilians in her country. A clip from that interview has since gone viral, in part because of its sheer lunacy. “This is a Berlin Wall moment. Let’s tear this wall down; then America will be safe without the Islamic Republic,” she exclaims, before swiftly following it up with: “I love America. I love Iran.” From the various reactions to this, perhaps the most astute observation was that of Jacobin writer Branko Marcetic, who wrote of the exchange: “This is a uniquely American type of immigrant you won’t find anywhere else: the person whose life’s work & entire reason for coming is having the US bomb their country.”

This interview is not isolated. All across the Western corporate media – from US-based channels like Fox and CNN, to those across the Atlantic, like Sky News and DW – analysis surrounding another illegal war, which will have unforeseen consequences that will reverberate in every corner of the world, has been handed over almost entirely to self-proclaimed Iranian activists, most of whom lack any political, military, or academic expertise, and all of whom passionately speak about how happy they are that the US bombing is........

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