The Moral Cowardice Behind the Narrative on Iran

I’ve tried to keep this blog less political.

Not because politics doesn’t belong here, but because pretty much all platforms are already drowning in performance. People performing intelligence. Performing morality. Performing outrage. Repeating headlines like they’re original thoughts. Acting like reposting the safest version of the dominant narrative makes them informed.

But let’s be honest: everything is political.

And when the world feels like it’s on fire, when it feels like we’re being dragged closer and closer to another catastrophic World War, I’m not interested in pretending this is somehow too “off topic” for a newsletter.

It isn’t.

Because we do not get to build careers, post leadership advice, talk about resilience, humanity, values, and courage — and then suddenly go quiet when the world is being fed lies in real time.

If You Still Think Iran Is the Villain, You’ve Fallen for the Script

So yes, I’m writing about Iran.

And I’m writing about it here because I’m tired. Tired of the fake information. Tired of the lazy certainty. Tired of watching people absorb propaganda, dress it up as analysis, and then speak about an entire country as if they know what the hell they’re talking about.

And no, we’re not going to pretend the United States is some innocent bystander that just wandered into this mess.

We’re not going to pretend history began yesterday.

We’re not going to pretend Western violence becomes acceptable just because it is packaged in better English, cleaner suits, and more sophisticated PR.

We’re not going to pretend dead children matter only when the right governments are killing them.

Because that is part of what makes all of this so grotesque.

You want me to be neutral while children die? You want me to be measured while the same machinery that has justified devastation over and over again tells us who the villain is supposed to be this week?

No.

I’m not doing fake neutrality.

I’m not doing selective humanity.

And yes, I am absolutely Team Iran.

Not because I’m an expert. I’m not. Not because I think any government should be beyond criticism. Of course not. And not because I had a beautiful trip there and decided to romanticise a country from a distance.

That is not the point.

Why I’m Team Iran

I’m Team Iran because I know how propaganda works.

I’m Team Iran because I know who gets framed as dangerous and who gets excused while committing horrors in broad daylight.

I’m Team Iran because I am not going to sit here and pretend the United States and its Western allies are some neutral force for peace while bombing, destabilising, invading, funding destruction, and then rewriting the story afterwards.

I’m Team Iran because I am not going to pretend Israel is some innocent actor while entire populations are terrorised and mass violence gets justified through the same tired language of security, defence, and civilisation.

I’m Team Iran because victims keep getting rewritten as threats.

I’m Team Iran because we are expected to speak in euphemisms while children are blown apart and then erased again through careful language.

I’m Team Iran because around 170 children, were bombed to death at their school, and we are apparently still expected to debate tone.

I’m Team Iran because little girls the age of my son should not have to die for empire, for strategy, for alliances, for revenge, or for the political theatre of men who will never carry those losses in their bodies.

I’m Team Iran because families are being shattered while the rest of the world debates optics, wording, and “complexity.”

And no, I am not interested in the fake sophistication of people who suddenly become very careful with their words only when the victims are the “wrong” victims.

We are not talking about abstract geopolitics. We are talking about human beings. We are talking about children in a school. We are talking about lives that are treated as disposable because empire has always needed some people to be more grievable than others.

That is why I’m Team Iran.

Because I refuse the lie.

Because I refuse the framing.

Because I refuse to call the brutalised dangerous while the brutaliser gets called strategic.

Because I refuse to participate in the moral insanity of watching Western powers behave like terrorists and still get described as the adults in the room.

Anyone with a functioning brain cell should be questioning the script.

Anyone with a conscience should be asking who benefits from this narrative, who gets protected by it, and whose deaths are being normalised through it.

That is why I’m Team Iran.

Not because it is charming.

Not because it is beautiful.

Not because the people were kind to me, even though they were.

I’m Team Iran because it is being lied about, targeted, and dehumanised.

Because power is trying, once again, to make violence look reasonable.

And because I am not stupid enough to confuse propaganda with truth.

The Iran I experienced

My experience of Iran matters — but not because it made me sentimental.

It matters because it made propaganda harder to swallow.

I spent almost 2 months in Iran. I travelled through it, stayed with people, learned from people, listened, observed, and experienced a version of reality that looks nothing like the cartoon people are constantly sold.

Out of the 70-plus countries I’ve visited, Iran remains in my top three.

Ten years later, that still hasn’t changed.

And that is not because I had a cute tourist moment and decided to turn it into a personality trait. It’s because Iran gave me one of the most profound experiences of human warmth, dignity, generosity, and hospitality I have ever known.

The Iran I experienced was kind.

Not fake nice. Not transactional. Not performative.

Kind.

And if you travel a lot, you know how rare that is.

In many places, there is always something underneath the interaction. A hustle. A pressure. A calculation. Someone trying to get something from you. More money. More attention. More advantage. Even in beautiful places, that undercurrent exists.

In Iran, what struck me again and again was the absence of that.

I never felt people were trying to take advantage of me.

Let me repeat that, because it matters: I never felt people were trying to take advantage of me.

People were generous without performance. Hospitable without agenda. Curious without intrusion. Helpful without expecting a reward. There was a depth of care, intelligence, humour, and humanity that stayed with me long after I left.

And honestly? In terms of human experience, hospitality, and the quality of connection, it was better than pretty much anywhere else I’ve been in the world.

That experience did not make me support Iran because I found it beautiful.

It made me more certain that dehumanisation is deliberate.

Because once you have actually been somewhere, once you have actually met people, once you have actually felt the gap between the story you were sold and the reality in front of you, it becomes much harder to participate in the lie.

This is what bothers me

What bothers me is not just that people get Iran wrong.

It’s how confidently they get it wrong.

How easily they repeat what they’ve been told. How quickly they flatten an entire country into “danger,” “threat,” “enemy,” or “problem.” How comfortable they are dehumanising millions of people because the media package was persuasive enough.

And that is how this works.

You repeat a lie often enough and people stop seeing human beings. They stop seeing families, artists, children, students, elders, tenderness, humour, grief, beauty, contradiction, complexity. They just see a target.

That is how public consent gets manufactured.

That is how violence gets normalised.

That is how people who would call themselves educated, compassionate, and progressive end up parroting the logic of destruction.

And frankly, it should terrify us.

Because if people can be manipulated this easily about Iran, they can be manipulated this easily about almost anything.

Travel made it impossible for me to stay stupid

One of the greatest gifts of travel is that it ruins simplistic narratives.

It forces you to confront how much of what you think you know is borrowed. Inherited. Repeated. Unquestioned.

Iran did that for me in a huge way.

It reminded me that countries are not headlines. People are not governments. And media narratives are often less about truth than about power.

No, travel does not make you an expert.

But it does make it much harder to keep talking in clichés once you have actually experienced people’s humanity for yourself.

That is why this still matters to me ten years later.

Because the gap between what I was told Iran was and what I found there was enormous.

And once you’ve seen that gap, you can’t unsee it.

Final thought

So no, I’m not pretending neutrality.

I’m not pretending all narratives are equally honest.

I’m not pretending the people selling us fear are somehow the trustworthy ones.

And I’m definitely not pretending Iran deserves to be discussed as if it exists outside history, outside imperial violence, or outside the endless hypocrisy of global power.

I love Iran.

I am proud to say that.

And yes, I am Team Iran.

Because I remember the people.

Because I remember the kindness.

Because I remember the dignity.

Because I remember how it felt to be in a place so deeply misrepresented by those who benefit from keeping us ignorant.

And because I am well aware who the real terrorists are.

And because at some point, if you still have a conscience, you have to stop asking what sounds balanced and start asking what is true.

Peace & Justice,

Emma