In a column published on The Globe and Mail on March 11, with comments closed,  Kaveh Shahrooz, a Toronto-based fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute sought to delegitimize millions of Iranians, portraying their support for Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi as manipulated, artificial, or the product of shadowy influences. This framing does not analyze the opposition; it dismisses the very people risking imprisonment, torture, or worse to call for change. Across Iran and throughout the diaspora, these are citizens expressing genuine political convictions—voices that deserve recognition, not skepticism rooted in bias or convenience.

When commentators sitting comfortably in Western policy circles attempt to explain Iran’s opposition movement, they often reveal more about their own prejudices than about the reality inside Iran.

The latest example by Kaveh Shahrooz questioning the rise of support for Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi. His argument is not merely skepticism about one political figure. It is something far more troubling: a thinly veiled dismissal of the millions of Iranians who have chosen to rally around him.

According to Shahrooz, the growing support for Pahlavi is the product of AI-generated imagery, satellite television propaganda, populist sentiment, and shadowy influences. In other words, the Iranian people themselves cannot possibly be acting with agency or conviction.

Their voices must be manipulated, artificial, or irrational.

This is not analysis. It is contempt.

Across Iran, protesters have risked prison, torture, and execution while chanting the name of Reza Pahlavi. In cities large and small, in universities and marketplaces, the call for a national alternative to the current system has emerged organically from the population itself. These chants are not written by algorithms.

They are shouted by human beings who have endured decades of repression, economic collapse, and ideological rule.

To dismiss these voices as the product of propaganda is to repeat a familiar mistake: assuming that Iranians are incapable of forming political judgments for themselves.

For nearly half a century, the people of Iran have lived under a system that has suffocated civil liberties, crushed dissent, and driven one of the most educated populations in the region into exile. It should surprise no one that many Iranians now look toward a figure associated—fairly or unfairly—with national identity, state continuity, and a period of modernization before the revolution.

One does not need to agree with monarchism to recognize a simple fact: Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi has become a rallying point for a large segment of the Iranian population. His prominence did not emerge from a public-relations campaign. It emerged from a political vacuum created by decades of repression and the failure of many opposition groups to offer a credible alternative.

Shahrooz also warns of a supposed “cult of personality” forming around Pahlavi. Yet this accusation rings hollow when directed at a movement that repeatedly calls for a national referendum on the future political system of Iran. The central argument advanced by Pahlavi and many of his supporters is straightforward: allow the Iranian people themselves to decide whether they want a republic, a constitutional monarchy, or another democratic system.

That is not authoritarianism. That is democracy.

The real irony of Shahrooz’s argument is that it adopts the same paternalistic tone long used by authoritarian systems themselves. For decades, rulers in Tehran have claimed that protests are manipulated by foreign forces and that the public cannot be trusted to determine its own destiny. When Western commentators echo a similar logic—suggesting that the Iranian people are merely victims of propaganda—they reinforce the same dismissive narrative.

Iran’s future will not be determined in think-tank boardrooms or opinion pages in the West. It will be determined by the Iranian people.

Some Iranians support Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi. Others do not. That diversity of opinion is not a threat to democracy; it is the essence of it. But what cannot be tolerated is the attempt to delegitimize the voices of millions simply because they do not conform to the political preferences of a small circle of self-appointed gatekeepers.

After decades of tyranny, the people of Iran deserve something profoundly simple: the right to choose their own future without being lectured about their choices by those who neither share their risks nor bear the consequences.

The chants heard in Iran today are not the product of algorithms or propaganda.

They are the sound of a nation searching for its freedom.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)