When I was 12 years old, I watched Iran play the United States in the 1998 World Cup, Iran's first major international tournament since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. I remember my father, an Iran-Iraq War veteran and a strong supporter of the revolution, cheering. He kissed the Iranian flag where the "Allah" appeared at the center, shedding tears of joy.
"We beat the enemy," he said.
For him, the victory was a direct blow to imperialism after years of crippling sanctions. When the game ended and the players fell to the grass crying, President Mohammad Khatami's slogan, "Iran for all Iranians," spread across the country. The reform movement had won the parliamentary elections a year earlier, and a new era of social freedom felt as real as Hamid Estili's header to score in the 41st minute.
Before Iran and the U.S. took the field on June 21, 1998, the match had been hailed as the tournament's most political game. All eyes were on Iran's goalkeeper, Ahmadreza Abedzadeh, as he gave flowers and Persian souvenirs to the American captain, Thomas Dooley, in the televised pre-game salutations.
"What is he doing?" I asked my father.
"It's a sign of respect and friendship," he said, smiling proudly.
The gesture transformed the match's mood. As American defender Jeff Agoos later said, "We did more in 90 minutes than politicians did in 20 years," offering global audiences a different image of Iranians after years of anti-Iran propaganda.
Three years later, the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, changed everything.
Iranians in Tehran mobilized into the streets chanting "America, Tasliyat," or "condolences," while Iran's reformist government condemned the attacks. Despite these authentic gestures, America overlooked the Iranian people and their government's messages of support. Instead, it demonized and dehumanized Iranians in Western media.
Films including "300" (2006), "Argo" (2012), "Maryam" (2002) and "House of Sand and Fog" (2003) portrayed the Iranian civilization as savage and fanatical, depicting characters as violent zealots and contorting Iranian identity as unpleasant and threatening. I remember watching those films with my former classmates, sharing collective shock and disbelief at Hollywood's false portrayal of our lives.
As one classmate asked, "Why do these Americans think we're monsters?"
"My father says they want to prepare their people mentally for another invasion," I replied. "He says we're next, after Iraq."
After Sept. 11, President George W. Bush infamously labeled Iran as part of the "Axis of Evil," ignoring its condolences. Iran was no longer known for poetry, rugs or hospitality. No amount of support from Iran would shift the U.S. perspective.
The Green Movement demonstrated the strength and independence of Iranian civil society. Yet, following its failure in Iraq, the United States intensified sanctions, justifying them with the same rhetorical guise of national security used to manufacture consent for the Iraq War.
- Quote Credit
This development directly affected my family. When one relative became engaged to an Iranian American, they had to wait six years for a marriage visa because Washington suspended interviews for Iranians. "Thank God she's finally moving," my mother explained to me in 2006. "They were about to get divorced because of the long wait."
When I was 17, the United States invaded Iraq, falsely claiming it possessed weapons of mass destruction and promising democracy. This fueled my fear of war because it matched the same anti-Iran propaganda previously aimed at my country.
The 2003 invasion also coincided with Azar Nafisi's memoir, "Reading Lolita in Tehran," becoming a Western bestseller. By then, I was in my early twenties, studying English Literature in Tehran. After reading her book several times, I fell in love with Nafisi's fluid style and structure. It was a beautiful piece of creative nonfiction by an exiled writer, and back then, I ranked her alongside my favorite authors: James Baldwin, Audre Lorde and Susan Sontag.
Yet it was my post-revolution childhood that shifted that perspective over time. I started to realize how the book implicitly backed Western political goals under the guise of individual empowerment and humanitarian intervention. Critics argued that Nafisi offered an elitist view of Iran disconnected from the working class and tied closely to the Washington neoconservative movement. Many noted that she reduced Iranian women's struggles into a Western cliché, overlooking their genuine progress inside the country.
I found it telling that Nafisi only taught white, classic Western writers like James, Fitzgerald, Nabokov and Austen while ignoring radical Black or postcolonial thinkers like Toni Morrison or Baldwin. Her actions distanced her students from the broader global fight against imperialism.
Nafisi has denied that her book has political undercurrents. Her background, however, suggests these themes were always present. She drafted the book at the Foreign Policy Institute at Johns Hopkins University (SAIS), a major political hub where its dean and Nafisi's close friend, Paul Wolfowitz, subsequently served as the U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense. He was a chief architect of the Iraq War.
Some could easily and understandably dismiss the connection. Yet her alignment became clear in 2011 when she signed an open letter calling for President Barack Obama to join a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) bombing campaign in Libya. In this context, her memoir served to whitewash Western crimes, pushing the old, insulting idea that the "Global South" needed a white savior by framing Iranian women as helpless victims who could only find salvation in Western books and ideals.
The 2009 Green Movement directly challenged that one-sided Western narrative. After the rigged election between Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Mir Hossein Mousavi, millions of Iranians joined a yearlong, peaceful uprising. Iranian youth used YouTube and Facebook to speak out despite the government's crackdown.
I remember watching Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claim that if Iranians had freedom, they would "wear jeans, listen to Western music and have free elections." Shortly after, Iranian youth flooded social media with pictures of themselves wearing denim and headphones, mocking him: "Hey Netanyahu, we've been wearing jeans and blasting Western music for decades. Stay out of our movement."
The Green Movement demonstrated the strength and independence of Iranian civil society. Yet, following its failure in Iraq, the United States intensified sanctions, justifying them with the same rhetorical guise of national security used to manufacture consent for the Iraq War. The Iranian people were left without the internal means for change, punished far more than any Iranian government by these sanctions, which undermined hopes for the Green Movement or progressive women-led protests in Iran.
By the 2010s, "Reading Lolita in Tehran" had lost much influence in Washington. A new wave of exiled Iranian artists emerged who refused to sell their trauma to Western audiences. Instead, they challenged American imperialism.
Persis Karim's anthology, "A World Between and Tremors," revived the layered complexity and diverse range of Iranian voices after decades of U.S. media flattening Iranian identity. Likewise, acclaimed Iranian American writer Porochista Khakpour, in "Brown Album," showed the raw, messy side of "Brown America," where immigrants were made to feel invisible. She refused to act as a token spokesperson, exposing class struggles and tearing down the fake myth of "Tehrangeles." In her novel of the same title, Khakpour paved the way for younger diaspora writers to speak with vulnerability and honest anger.
This refusal to compromise extended to the cinema. Iranian American filmmaker Pirooz Kalayeh, in his film "My Room in Tehran Was Called America," rejected the Western gaze that all too often views our home like an abstract threat. Instead, his camera built multi-layered, subjective truths to capture the genuine complexity of our lives. In "Sometimes I Dream in Farsi," he reflects on the childhood trauma of American racism post-1979 hostage crisis, emphasizing the myths that falsely portrayed the West as a refuge for the Global South's people. In "The Human War," he links the aftermath of the Iraq invasion to the life of a poor, white American narrator, exposing imperialism's role in destroying lives both at home and abroad.
American and Israeli airstrikes shattered our universities, cultural sites and medical sector, even leveling the Pasteur Institute, which produced the cancer medications my mother needed. In those ruins, the myth of humanitarian intervention died.
- Quote Credit
After the failure of the Green Movement, many journalists and activists who fled Iran established Farsi-language media in the West. The Iranian government's systematic censorship led its people to lose their trust in the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB), which only promoted the voice of the Islamic Republic and its faithful supporters. Many Iranians began relying on these new outlets as their primary sources of information.
One of them was Manoto TV, a London-based, Farsi-speaking channel that promoted a false image of the Shah's Iran. It downplayed its poverty, illiteracy in rural areas, corruption and dependence on the West. Instead, it promoted a "Switzerland of the Middle East" narrative.
In 2014, while watching this channel, I turned the volume down and said to my father: "But look at what we have now. Only oppression, sanctions and poverty."
"The Shah's economic reforms forced rural families into the cities," he countered. "They ended up stranded on the margins with no jobs. Next time you watch that channel, remember Mehrjui's film "The Cycle."
"That was the reality: people selling their own blood just to buy food," he professed.
The following year, when I was 29, the United States and Iran reached the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), known as the "Iran nuclear deal." With it returned hope that Iran would reconnect with the world.
During the post-deal era, Iran International, another Farsi-speaking channel that operated in the West and offered Iranians a window to the free world, began broadcasting in London. Since its launch, it has failed to disclose its budget and funding sources. Later, it was revealed that the organization was Saudi-funded. Still, Iran International, which operated in the West, gave Iranians a window to the free world.
After Trump's 2018 withdrawal from the JCPOA, the U.S. maximized pressure on the country, encouraged by exiled Iranian opposition figures and groups like former Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi. They sought "regime change" while demanding Iran, and thus regular Iranians, be added to Trump's insidious Muslim Ban.
The failure of President Hassan Rouhani's neoliberal economic policies and persistent economic corruption within the country prompted dissatisfaction among Iranians, fostering massive protests in January 2018 and November 2020. Authorities responded with substantial and repressive force. Following the protests, Iran International became one of the most reliable sources for Iranians.
Iran International, since then, began building a narrative that painted "modern-day wars" as harmless, arguing that targeted strikes would ensure civilian safety. It coupled this deceptive line with broadcasts meant to whitewash Western crimes. All the while, Israeli officials, including Netanyahu, gave direct speeches to the people in Iran.
Another narrative that Iran International built was that the country's infrastructure belonged to the government, not the people. They argued that the state wasted national resources on its own corrupt agenda. External opposition utilized this organized propaganda to justify war, fostering attacks like the one on the B1 bridge in Karaj, west of Tehran, during the current U.S.-Israel war on Iran.
When I was 36, I witnessed the "Woman, Life, Freedom" movement in Tehran in 2022, a progressive and avant-garde political wave in its methods and tactics relative to the past. A female-led protest rooted in over a century of Iranian women's resistance, it showed the world the courage of Iranian women and the oppression they face. This movement challenged clichés about Iran, bringing renewed attention to the struggle against compulsory hijab, sparking new conversations.
Exiled opposition groups tried to claim these organic, female-led protests as their own. Iran International built a narrative that Iran's national soccer team did not represent all Iranians and belonged only to the government, deepening divisions among Iranians. Various groups boycotted the team during the 2022 World Cup, a call that I, as a supporter of the movement, strongly opposed.
As part of this push, the outlet transformed Nafisi's "Reading Lolita in Tehran" into a movie, directed by a former Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldier. Outlets like Iran International weaponized the text, co-opting Iran's organic civil rights struggle and repackaging it as a blueprint for Western-backed regime change.
This year, my second year of exile in America, I turned 40. For years, I could not understand why my father's generation overthrew the Shah for the same internal repression. Then, when I saw Reza Pahlavi — the exiled Crown Prince, living comfortably as a U.S. citizen and asking foreign powers to bomb his own homeland — the field shifted. Decades after our players handed white roses to the Americans, Pahlavi was on television playing for a completely different team.
I finally understood my father and the revolution.
The morning American bombs hit an elementary school in Minab, killing over 160 children, geopolitics became a brutal reality. American and Israeli airstrikes shattered our universities, cultural sites and medical sector, even leveling the Pasteur Institute, which produced the cancer medications my mother needed. In those ruins, the myth of humanitarian intervention died.
Iran never experienced direct colonization, making us historically naive. This war woke us up. The devastation in Gaza should have shown Iranians that to imperial powers, we are no different than the Palestinians, Lebanese, Iraqis, Afghans, Libyans, Yemenis or Syrians. In this imperial world and ideology, all are equally expendable.
This war also demonstrated that Iran extends beyond the Islamic Republic. Iran is its people.
In recent months, young women with and without hijabs have returned to the streets, proudly waving the Iranian flag marked with "Allah." They understand that democracy does not arrive through bombs or sanctions. It is built from the ground up through education, civil institutions and nonviolent movements, illustrating that the "Woman, Life, Freedom" movement did not end. It is moving forward with new, nationalistic support with the hope that the state's lighter touch on repressive laws like mandatory hijab reflects a government that the people and their demands can change.
While diaspora elites tie Iran's future to the West, the country is entering a new phase amid ongoing war and shattered negotiations. I believe Iran's new leadership must reconcile with its population, including those who are waving the official flag in the streets and those who once hoped for "help" from foreign powers. It must change, but it cannot change through Western bombs, sanctions and indifference to the well-being of our people.
As this year's World Cup games began, I called my mother just after the state had finally allowed the internet to return after its enforced three-month blackout. She told me that bombs had destroyed my uncle's house and damaged her apartment building. Then she changed the subject to Iran's national soccer team arriving in Mexico for the 2026 World Cup.
"Will you be supporting them like you used to?" she asked.
"Of course," I told her. "Even in exile."
As I said it, I remembered my father kissing the "Allah" on the flag and smiling through his tears.
The views and positions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of DAWN.
