TEHRAN – An open letter published by The Guardian on August 20 has drawn criticism for placing Iran and the U.S. and Israel which launched a war against the Islamic Republic within what critics describe as a morally misleading framework.

The letter, addressed to Iranian political prisoners and signed by a number of prominent international academics and activists, portrays them as caught “between two blades of a scissors,” equating domestic repression with the external military and economic assault on Iran.

While the letter formally condemns U.S. and Israeli attacks as well as sanctions, its framing has been criticized for obscuring the fundamental distinction between aggressors waging war and a country defending its sovereignty.An open letter published by The Guardian on August 20 has drawn criticism for placing Iran and the U.S. and Israel which launched a war against the Islamic Republic within what critics describe as a morally misleading framework.

The letter, addressed to Iranian political prisoners and signed by a number of prominent international academics and activists, portrays them as caught “between two blades of a scissors,” equating domestic repression with the external military and economic assault on Iran. While the letter formally condemns U.S. and Israeli attacks as well as sanctions, its framing has been criticized for obscuring the fundamental distinction between aggressors waging war and a country defending its sovereignty.

An appeal circulated by the International Peoples' Assembly, written by Indian historian and commentator Vijay Prashad, takes the opposite position. It argues for a clearer stance of solidarity with Iran, saying that criticism of internal conditions cannot be pulled apart from the fact that the country is currently under sustained military attack.

Prashad opens by setting that context. For six months, he writes, Iranian civilian and military sites have come under fire, with hospitals, schools, energy facilities and residential neighborhoods among the targets hit. Iran did not begin this war, he states plainly, and he argues that fact has to shape how anyone writing about the country today thinks about their own political responsibility.

His sharpest objection is to the scissors image itself. The trouble isn't just that the two blades are unequal in strength, he says. It's that the metaphor puts the aggressor and the country being attacked on the same moral footing, stripping out the history and hierarchy between them.

"The error of the scissors," he writes, "is not merely that its blades are unequal. It is that the image makes the aggressor and the attacked appear as parallel sources of the same danger." From there he traces how U.S. power has imposed sanctions, backed Israel, and now brought direct war to Iranian territory, while Iran has spent decades absorbing invasion, sanctions, sabotage and assassinations.

He isn't arguing Iran should be off limits for criticism. He says outright that people can oppose the death penalty, demand due process, call for humane treatment of prisoners, and listen to workers, women, minorities and political activists. His point is narrower than that: such criticism can't be lifted out of the conditions under which it's being made.

He also raises a pointed question about the Guardian letter's signatories, many of them based in the United States, and why they chose to direct their appeal mainly at Iran rather than at their own governments. The letter does call on the U.S. and Israel to end their wars and sanctions, but that demand only shows up in the closing lines, after most of the letter's energy has already gone into building an equivalence between Iran's prison system and the war being waged against the country.

For Prashad and the International Peoples' Assembly, the priority right now is resisting any narrative that treats the aggression as ordinary, especially one that ends up weakening the country under attack at the exact moment it's defending itself. He argues that calling Iran's anti-imperialism "hollow" doesn't hold up while the country is under direct military pressure and fighting to hold onto its independence.

Drawing on the history of anti-colonial movements, he notes that societies living under constant threat of invasion, sabotage and regime change tend to develop real internal contradictions. But those contradictions, he insists, shouldn't be used to erase the line between the side attacking and the side being attacked.

He closes on a simple note. "At this hour," he writes, "solidarity begins with a clear demand: the United States and Israel must end their illegal war, and they must retreat."

https://ipa-aip.org/2026/08/22/against-the-false-symmetry-of-the-scissors-an-open-letter-while-iran-resists-an-illegal-war-of-aggression/