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Press Freedom Defense Fund

Iranian Women Elected to Office in U.S. Reject Trump’s Iran War

Netanyahu and Trump have invoked the Woman, Life, Freedom movement to justify war. Politicians like Rep. Yassamin Ansari rejected the idea.

A group of Iranian American women in elected office and civic life released a letter Tuesday calling for an immediate end to the U.S.–Israeli war on Iran as the deadline for President Donald Trump’s macabre threat to kill “a whole civilization” loomed.

“We believe democracy cannot be delivered through missiles, and freedom cannot emerge from destruction and more death of innocent lives,” they said in the previously unreported letter.

The signers included Rep. Yassamin Ansari of Arizona, the first Iranian American Democrat elected to Congress.

Women have been at the forefront of demonstrations against the Iranian government in recent years, including the “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests of 2022 that were met with a deadly crackdown. The international protest movement was set off by the Iranian government’s killing of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini for allegedly failing to wear the mandatory headscarf properly.

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The Iranian government’s suppression of that protest and another anti-government protest wave earlier this year have been cited as justification for the war that Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched in February.

“Remember the great women march,” Trump said at an April 6 press conference at the Pentagon, going on to describe government snipers suppressing protests by shooting demonstrators. In a speech justifying last June’s Israeli-led war against Iran, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu invoked the Women, Life, Freedom movement by name in Farsi.

The Iranian American women who signed the letter, however, said that the war is only encouraging further........

© The Intercept