Suzanne Harrington: Anyone justifying Iran civilian casualties will have blood on their hands

Irish Examiner

22-06-2025

My friend Philippa is desperately worried about her relatives.
Aunts, uncles, cousins, grandchildren who live in affluent neighbourhoods in Tehran — areas an out-of-control Netanyahu is now bombing because it's where Iran's political leaders live.
One of her aunts is 92 and lives alone. Mossad has been detonating car bombs around the city — a classic terrorist tactic, leaving civilians duly terrified.
Already there are petrol and food shortages. The internet was down — she's been unable to contact family members.
Trump's call to 'evacuate Tehran' is, says cultural historian Dr Nahid Siamdoust, 'extremely disconcerting'.
She wonders where its 15 million inhabitants are supposed to go. Or how to get there. Or what to do then.
Meanwhile, Israel is doing its usual trick of bombing hospitals while presenting to the world as a victim.
Israel has also been bombing Iran's media HQ, which is located in a built-up residential area — the equivalent of dropping bombs on Donnybrook, Dublin 4.
And yes, Iran's official media has long been a propaganda tool for a brutal, repressive regime which most ordinary Iranians fear and loathe, but how can this justify bombing civilians? It can't.
Nothing can, ever, anywhere, for any reason. You'd think we'd know this by now.
REFORMS STOPPED FOR OIL
Until August 19, 1953, Iran was a progressive democracy. This was the country my friend Philippa's dad grew up in, under a democratically elected leader, a country undergoing social reforms and nationalising its oil reserves.
The West didn't like this, and so to protect Western oil interests, it instigated a CIA- and M16-backed coup to install a Western-controlled dictator, the Shah.
In 1979, the Islamic Revolution happened, and Philippa's dad, like many other Iranians who could, got out. Since then, Iran has been viewed as a rogue state with nuclear weapons, led by mad mullahs.
This madness is starkly portrayed in The Seed of the Sacred Fig, the 2024 film by exiled director Mohammad Rasoulof, sentenced in his absence to flogging and jail by the Iranian state.
The film, set in contemporary Tehran, details the daily claustrophobia and paranoid double-think of living inside a woman-hating theocracy.
In 2022, Iranian police grabbed a 22-year-old, Mahsa Amini, off the street and murdered her in a police van, sparking the Women Life Freedom protests.
Mad mullahs abound. Not a place you'd go on your holidays.
Actually, says my friend Philippa, if you did go to Iran on your holiday, you'd be overwhelmed by ordinary people's hospitality, by their warmth and generous welcome.
An Irish cyclist, Simon Jones, recently cycled through Iran, posting a love letter to its people on Instagram: 'To the country I was warned about most, but wish I didn't have to leave so soon.'
How 'on the news we just see the scary men', not 'the real you'.
Ordinary Iranians have been enduring the scary men for decades, both homegrown and foreign. They do their best to get on with it.
'The US and UK have been terrorising [Iran] for as long as any of us have been alive,' writes economic anthropologist Dr Jason Hickel.
'An Israel-Western regime change operation against Iran would lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths. We have seen this play out before, several times in past decades. Anyone who tries to justify this madness will have blood on their hands.'
Don't. Bomb. Civilians.