August 25, 2026

he Palaver Collective posted the following article on Instagram on Aug. 22, 2026, in response to  an “open letter” attacking the sovereignty of Iran that ran in the U.S. edition of The Guardian newspaper on August 20, 2026. The Palaver Collective is a New York-based, Pan-Africanist, Marxist-Leninist organization. Go to palavercollective.org for more information. 

Recently, members of the Black Liberation Movement (and others) signed on to a letter published in The Guardian to Iran’s “political prisoners,” in which they hold Iran to be an equal evil to United States imperialism and Zionism, which has committed genocide in Palestine. In this piece, they say, “[Iran] is a system that claims to counter imperial power while using its very logic of domination and systems of carcerality.”

The same U.S. imperialism and Zionism has bombed every continent on Earth, has maintained regional and global control through militarism, genocide, exploitation and dependency. No way can a global economic system that has led to the deaths of millions, the poverty of billions and the complete denial of sovereignty of every single person on Earth be compared to the politics of a single country’s carceral system.

This is a gross invalidation of the suffering of billions and, moreover, shows a gross misunderstanding and lack of understanding of what imperialism even is. Iran is a country under siege. The Arab-Iranian region is under siege from Zionism and U.S. imperialism and, at a moment of Iran’s decisive struggle against this imperialist terror, a letter like this is equating them to that evil. This, our comrades, is not only a mistake but an immense error against a sovereign state’s ability to defend itself.

In the letter, they say, “You face the Islamic Republic that, from its inception, enforced absolute social and political control based on an exclusionary ideology.” The current Islamic Republic came out of a mass revolt against the U.S. and Western-controlled Shah; this Shah, under Western-backed support, let his country’s oil and labor be extracted and stolen by imperialists.

As in every revolution, the masses had enough, and millions chose the current government to overthrow the imperialist one. The Islamic Republic, at its inception, was founded in response to imperialism; this is an undeniable truth.

The Black Liberation Movement for too long withstood the same scrutiny as [shown in] this letter. [By] calling the Black Panther Party “a band of terrorists, crooks and conspirators,” [those critics] tried to say Malcolm X was as racist as the white supremacists that lynched Black people, as well as calling MOVE “terrorists” for practicing self-determination.

To sign onto a letter like this is consenting to Zionist and American imperialism in the whole region. No internal contradictions in Iran will ever be changed if schools are getting bombed by foreign nations. We refuse to fall into the “both sides are bad” narrative that has always supported imperialist interests.

We learned from Venezuela, where many Western-aligned “leftists” accused Nicolás Maduro of being a dictator. A few months later Venezuela was invaded and now he and the First Combatant Cilia Flores sit in a Brooklyn jail while Venezuela is colonized, unable to practice its self-determination.

We see critique as a form of love and camaraderie and, in that same breath, we hold one demand: Publicly rescind your signature from the imperialist-sympathetic letter. We believe our comrades will make the right choice as they have before, and we have always admired your commitment to the struggle. Through struggle, there is always unity.

Free Mumia Abu-Jamal!