Editorial: The war in Iran is nuanced and should be treated as such

By the Smoke Signal Editorial Board

As US-Israeli airstrikes rained down on Tehran on February 28, two simultaneous, distinct yet rational reactions surfaced: grief over Iranian casualties from concerned Americans, and immense relief and hope for freedom from the Iranians. In an act that held the potential to end a decades-long, cruel regime in Iran, the US killed the former cleric and supreme leader of Iran Ayatollah Ali Khanmenei.

In the days following, a black-and-white narrative proliferated on social media and news outlets across America. Firsthand accounts mourning the deaths of children killed in bombing — a grief valid and necessary in its own right — expected Iranian civilians to mourn the same way. The implication was clear: Iranians should be grieving just as loudly as they were about these civilian deaths — but this only serves to further the weaponization of grief in propagating narratives, erasing the decades of grief that the people of Iran had already been enduring. 

What news stories failed to cover is that under Khamenei’s theocratic rule, women faced arrest and physical brutality for improperly wearing the hijab — a reality made globally visible in 2022 when 22-year-old Mahsa Amini died in police custody after being detained for wearing her headscarf “incorrectly.” In addition to this, the UN documented widespread arbitrary detention, torture, and executions of protestors in the crackdown that followed, with over 500 people killed and 15,000 arrested during the uprising. By insisting that Iranians mourn alongside Americans without acknowledging the history that preceded the bombing, certain sections of public discourse can reduce an entire population to props in a Westernized emotional narrative. Celebrating the death of an oppressive leader is not correlated with supporting Trump; people can be anti-Khameini and anti-Trump because politics is not black and white. Relief and grief are not opposite, and a person can mourn civilian death and simultaneously feel the freedom from decades of oppression. To demand that they perform sorrow for a regime that imprisoned them is not empathy, but rather ignorance.

For decades, western media has sensationalized the Middle East and Iran through coverage of conflict, threat, and instability, adding to global Islamophobia and generalized narratives. A 2019 study published in the International Journal of Communication found that US media coverage of Muslim majority countries skews overwhelmingly negative, with terrorism and political violence accounting for the majority of stories. Social media, following the same trend, facilitated fearmongering and misinformation about the war and upcoming bombings. Hundreds of accounts flooded X, TikTok, and Instagram with clickbait-esque posts such as “List of American cities that will be bombed in the next week” and “What you need to prepare before we’re attacked in 8 days” — stripping Iran’s most threatening official statements of context, perpetuating a narrative of constant conflict in the Middle East and driving undertones of Islamophobia through misinformation and bad reporting. 

Biased discourse encourages political extremism from all angles, oversimplifying concepts to headlines and getting rid of the ambiguities of politics. In this case, it pushes Americans to only see Iran as a nuclear threat or a hostage crisis — not a country where brave young adults risked their lives to chant protests, where women burned their hijabs on rooftops, where millions marched in the streets demanding freedom. In this way, public discourse reduces Iran from a nuanced country and population to simplified and biased American news headlines and media narratives. The war in Iran, and other traumatic events, are not pawns in Western political media wars, but rather real, drastic, and complex.

The people of Iran are not a monolith any more than Americans are. Their struggle should not be weaponized and manipulated to push Western agendas. Their celebration should not be considered homage to the Trump administration, and their grief should not be considered an act against him. They are the students who were detained for protesting and the parents who bailed them out. They are the Iranian-Americans who celebrated in Westwood and were accused of celebrating death. They are civilians who passed away in the bombing. They are all of these things and more simultaneously, and they deserve the full extent of that complexity.