War on Iran: Left-wing luminaries behind Guardian letter have lost the plot

War on Iran: Left-wing luminaries behind Guardian letter have lost the plot Submitted by Hamid Dabashi on Tue, 08/25/2026 - 06:27 By equating the bombers with the bombed, the appeal signed by Angela Davis and Judith Butler lends moral cover to western imperialism - and its backers are already deserting it A man amid debris in a room in Evin prison's hospital after Israeli air strikes in Tehran on 1 July 2025 (AFP) On In an open letter published last week in the Guardian, addressed to "fellow activists, students, thinkers, workers, artists, and other prisoners of conscience held behind the walls of all detention centers across Iran", a group of renowned academics and activists resorted to the nauseating cliche of bothsidesism over the devastating war waged against Iran by two nuclear powers. One of the aggressors is still engaged in a genocide in Palestine and land theft in Syria and Lebanon , while the other is ruled by a corrupt psychopath. In prose replete with platitudinous tropes, all outdated and jaundiced, betraying an egregious ignorance of what exactly has happened, they denounce both the ruling government in Iran and the illegal Israeli- US war waged against a sovereign nation.