At an anti-war demonstration in downtown Toronto on Saturday, Iranian-Canadians spoke out against the American-Israeli bombing campaign against their home country, and their fellow Iranians who support it.
“The news that I’ve seen today of the girls’ school being bombed and 80 children being brutally murdered has really instilled fear and worry in me,” said Amirhossein Azizafshari, referring to the U.S.-Israeli air strike on a girls’ school on Saturday.
Azizafshari has family members in Iran and is an organizer with the Palestinian Youth Movement.
The strike was initially reported to have killed 80 children, but on Sunday, the reported death toll rose to 148.
“And it just goes to show that they don’t have the good of the Iranian people in mind. This war is a war of power, a war of resource and land grab, and it is nothing about democracy.”
Shayan, an Iranian Torontonian who described himself as anti-imperialist, said he opposes the bombings “even if I do disagree with some social policies in Iran.”
“It’s very against my beliefs that we should be bombed by outside forces,” said Shayan.
He believes the U.S. and Israel intend to “weaken Iran, just to split it along ethnic lines, religious lines, political lines, and just to take over the national resources.”
The U.S. has a history of meddling in Iran, especially when it comes to the country’s oil resources. Iran holds about 13 per cent of the world’s oil reserves, the third-highest after Venezuela and Saudi Arabia.
In the 1950s, the U.S. and United Kingdom pushed a coup that overthrew Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, and restored the absolute rule of shah Reza Pahlavi.
At the time, Mosaddegh had been moving to nationalize the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, which is now BP.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent actions in Venezuela lay bare his intentions, Azizafshari said.
After the Americans kidnapped Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, “they immediately seized the oil apparatus and took control of it, and the line of democracy was immediately vanished.”
“The same thing will happen in Iran, eventually. Under the veneer of democracy and under the veneer of caring for the people of Iran, they will come into our country and use this aggression as a way of taking whatever resources they can and turning Iran into a failed state in order to gain their goals within the region.”
The Iranian-Canadians at the anti-war demonstration also took issue with the views of another group of Iranian-Canadians who celebrated the bombings at a large gathering in Richmond Hill, Ont.
Azizafshari said that group of people had “literally rewritten history in their own heads,” forgetting the impact of American sanctions on the current conditions inside Iran.
He said this group has been influenced by players like the Voice of America or VOA, an American government funded news agency that publishes news in Farsi.
Shayan said: “I think a lot of Iranians think it can’t get any worse than what we have, and it genuinely can get so much worse,” he said, noting that his Iraqi friends believe Iranians “have it so good now” compared to their country, which was invaded by the U.S. in a war that killed at least 210,000 civilians and created millions of refugees.
“I don’t 100 per cent agree with them, but they’re just saying, it can get so much worse by foreign imperialist nations getting involved.”
The Iranian-Canadians interviewed by The Maple also took issue with Prime Minister Mark Carney’s support for the bombing campaign, which he characterized as being intended to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.
In his speech at Davos in January, Azizafshari pointed out, Carney’s words were widely interpreted as calling for middle powers to work together instead of allowing hegemonic powers like the U.S. to simply impose their own agenda.
“Obviously, he doesn’t care about that, and he is still firmly attached to the world order that the United States and Israel has set into place,” Azizafshari said.
Iranian state media confirmed yesterday that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed in a strike on his office.
