In his Jan. 20 Wall Street Journal op-ed, “Iran’s Government Defends Its Crackdown,” Iranian Foreign Minister Sayed Abbas Araghchi advanced a familiar regime narrative in which domestic dissent is recast as a security threat to justify brutal repression.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, October 26, 2024. (credit: Khamenei.ir, CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons)
It is a narrative specifically concocted to appeal to Western audiences, and one frequently employed against Iranian women’s rights activists.
In 2022, Iranian authorities crushed the Women, Life, Freedom protests with internet blackouts, arrests, and violence. Pro-regime media labeled feminist, Kurdish, and other activists as “terrorists” to justify repression.
In Feb. 2025, labor and women’s rights activist Sharifeh Mohammadi, part of a non-violent labor union network, was sentenced to death for “armed rebellion.” A month earlier, Pakhshan Azizi’s death sentence was upheld on identical charges. Azizi’s work reportedly consisted of aiding refugees and victims of ISIS.
This pattern stretches back decades. In 2007, two Kurdish women’s rights activists Hana Abdi and Ronak Safarzadeh were accused of “terrorist” activity and membership in the militant group PJAK. But there was no evidence of their membership in the group.
Araghchi believes he can court Western audiences as his government condemns to death those striving for freedoms like those in the West. Readers must not prove him right.